Widespread opposition to a US attack on Iraq is all the more remarkable because it is based on a very partial, distorted picture. The full extent of US devastation of Iraq in 1991 has never been adequately portrayed in the mainstream media. As we prepare for another military assault on Iraq, we might reflect on the true nature and consequences of the previous Gulf War. Above all, since the question of media bias was prominent in 1991, the treatment of these issues by our democratic "free press" deserves particular scrutiny.
Most people are shocked to learn a fact that has been insufficiently newsworthy to report, namely, that the direct Iraqi death toll in 1991 was around 350,000 people, about half of these civilians. This staggering figure is to be contrasted with zero US combat fatalities. This was no war as previously understood. The euphoric US "victory" celebrations at the time are to be seen as delight over what former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark characterized as "merciless slaughter of tens of thousands" by over 100,000 bombing sorties which targeted and devastated the civilian infrastructure including power, sewage and water supply. This destruction, constituting a war crime, was described by UN officials as "near-apocalyptic", and is to be contrasted with our response to more favoured dictators. Indonesia's 1975 near-genocide in East Timor was on a vastly greater scale than Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, but did not result in a US-led military attack and years of brutal sanctions. Instead, Indonesia was rewarded by lucrative business contracts, arms sales, military cooperation, warm diplomatic relations and reverence for Soeharto as a great leader.
Dutiful media repetition of White House denunciations of Saddam's crimes have consistently failed to mention a relevant fact - namely, US complicity through enthusiastic support for Saddam when he gassed his Kurds. Above all, amid outrage about Saddam's crimes, there has been no mention of the tribunal held in 1992 by Ramsey Clark, in which President George Bush snr., Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and Dick Cheney were found guilty of nineteen Nuremberg-style war crimes and crimes against humanity for which we hanged German officials after World War II. This media indifference to our own crimes is evident in the recent detached reporting (Sun Herald Jan 25) of plans to devastate Baghdad by missile assault on the civilian infrastructure including water and electricity supplies which were also targeted in 1991. Quite apart from the illegality of a pre-emptive military strike, such actions are explicitly prohibited as war crimes according to the Nuremburg Charter and Geneva Conventions, even in a legally justified war.
We saw the same bland reporting of US intentions in 1998 to bomb Iraq 'back to the Stone Age'. The detachment, indeed obscene levity, of media coverage (SMH Nov 21, 1998) displays a callous indifference to human suffering we cause on a vast scale. Aside from war crimes, then as now, there was no media concern about the astonishingly disproportionate US response to the supposed provocation. In 1998, instead of being praised for narrowly averting a military attack anticipated to cost 10,000 innocent lives, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was portrayed as having lost credibility for "dealing with a dictator". Ironically, it was claimed that Annan's "total inability to encourage people like Saddam Hussein to have the slightest regard for [the ideals and principles of the UN] ... remains a blight on his leadership" (SMH Nov 17, 1998). By contrast, the US record of duplicity, provocation and abuse of the UN does not elicit the same condemnation.
>From mainstream media it would be difficult to learn that, despite a ceasefire agreement between US and Iraq on February 28, 1991, American and British warplanes had, by 1999, flown more than 6,000 sorties, dropped around 2,000 bombs and hit more than 450 targets in Iraq. The war on Iraq has already become the longest sustained US air operation since the Vietnam War. In February 2001, US and UK warplanes bombed radar and command centres around Baghdad on the grounds that air defences pose an unacceptable risk to their pilots. In recent months such attacks on Iraqi defence capability has escalated in preparation for a full-scale attack. In the light of such continuing military assaults, even George Orwell would be impressed by George Bush's claims that we must now inflict all-out war on Iraq to secure the "peace". Similar Orwellian Newspeak about "appeasing" Saddam and the need to "defend" ourselves preemptively would be amusing if it were not so serious.
Uncritical acceptance of official US rhetoric has discouraged asking an obvious question posed by Ramsey Clark: "What conceivable threat can a rational mind find from a crippled and bleeding Iraq that couldn't defend itself against U.S. technology even when fully armed?" (1994, p.xix). Since 1991 the media have portrayed Saddam Hussein as repeatedly humiliating the US and scoring yet another victory. However, the media have shown little interest in conveying the toll of that war or the human cost of the sanctions, since this might make it difficult to see Saddam's "victory" and the threat allegedly posed by Iraq. In the decade since the "war", estimates of deaths due to sanctions vary around one million - mainly children dying from malnutrition and preventable illnesses due to destroyed water, sanitation and electricity supplies. However, as thousands of Iraqis continue to die, Saddam has been portrayed as "still calling the shots" (SMH 11 Nov, 1998), echoing a standard theme. When even Richard Butler has expressed reservations about the sanctions, we see media commentators (Australian, May 8 2002) treat the catastrophic death toll with ridicule and sarcastic humour . In the light of such facts, the perennial debate about media bias takes on a different hue. The true test of democratic principles is a willingness to uphold them when doing so permits the free expression of opposing points of view. During the 1991 Gulf War, Prime Minister Hawke dramatically failed this test when he attempted to intimidate the ABC and its expert academic commentators who dared to express dissent from government policy. The issue would have been transparently clear in the former Soviet Union if the Kremlin had reacted the same way to criticism in Pravda. Hawke subsequently admitted (The Australian, January 24, 1996) to wanting dissident commentators labelled in order to identify them as somehow lacking the requisite independence and impartiality. However, he had no comparable concern to label commentators such as Gerard Henderson as "right wing" or "conservative" or perhaps even "privately funded lobbyist", presumably on the grounds that they must be regarded as neutral.
Most revealing, the regular charges of ABC bias rest on a certain implicit, though highly questionable, assumption - namely, that the media only show bias when they deviate from prevailing orthodoxy. The possibility is never seriously entertained that there is, in fact, a systematic, invisible bias in the other direction. Thus, during the 1991 Gulf crisis, a formal complaint was lodged against the ABC's "unbalanced" presentation of the opinions of Noam Chomsky of MIT. The irony in this situation is that it is precisely the presentation of such alternative views which constitute balance not bias. It is significant that recently Chomsky has been regularly denounced and dismissed by columnists as typical of the loony left, though readers might wonder why, in view of the fact that his actual opinions have rarely been permitted to appear in the press.
These examples reveal deep totalitarian attitudes of our leaders and commentators. It is telling that a former chairperson of the ABC, Dame Leonie Kramer explicitly sees the independent broadcaster as a vehicle for generating public obedience. Of course, the requisite servility of the ABC is portrayed as "a responsibility to support parliamentary democracy" (Telegraph-Mirror Feb 6, 1991), but Dame Leonie conceives this to be subservience to government policy - a quite different matter. She suggests that employees of the ABC who depart too far from the government view "defy their obligations" and reveal a "disturbing" attitude which "displays an ignorance of our political system". However, media employees in totalitarian regimes are also presumably under an obligation to support government policies and, therefore, it is Dame Leonie who fails to understand the essence of "our political system". On her view, any dissent becomes an act of sedition or treason. Indeed, Sam Lipski (Bulletin, March 5 1991) argued that, while British troops were sacrificing their lives doing their patriotic duty to "the cause of freedom and of upholding the rule of law", BBC executives were acting as "the vehicle for enemy propaganda".
As our troops leave to participate in George Bush's criminal war, we see such sentiments invoked again. Moral support for our troops is exploited as blackmail to silence public criticism, whereas it could equally take the form of encouraging refusal to serve in an illegal conflict. Contrary to the flag-waving exhortations to acquiescence, as American Senator Fullbright remarked during the Vietnam war, it is dissent which is the truest expression of patriotism. Similarly, in his famous essay 'On Liberty' in 1859, the philosopher John Stuart Mill warned against the "tyranny of the majority" which may be "more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since ... it leaves fewer means of escape ... enslaving the soul itself". Citing Socrates and Christ who were put to death for challenging the authority of the State, Mill notes that those responsible for such "dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity" were not bad men, but on the contrary, "men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people."
Media treatment of Iraq since 1991, like elite opinion, has illustrated the fact that bias does not generally take the form of outright lies, but is rather a matter of how much attention is devoted certain topics, the tone of the coverage, and the range of opinion expressed. For example, in 1991 headlines across two pages screamed "STAKES RISE IN TERROR WAR", - referring not to historically unprecedented US violence at that time, but to empty speculation about how Iraqis might conceivably have attempted to place bombs on aircraft (Telegraph-Mirror Feb 4, 1991). As the United States was making up to 2,000 bombing sorties into Iraq every day, it was Israel's minor damage from scuds which was selectively described as "a poignant climax to a week of death, destruction and trauma", "horror", "nightmarish drama" and "what could yet become the most historically significant acts of aggression in our lifetime" (The Australian, Jan 26 1991). The lesson to be learned from over a quarter million Iraqi civilian casualties according to White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater (Feb 16, 1991) was that it is the Iraqis who do not value the sanctity of human life as the Americans do! To prove the point, with the Iraqi military already destroyed and following several Iraqi attempts to negotiate, the US demonstrated its value for the sanctity of human life by the final carnage of fleeing Iraqi soldiers. Sam Lipski recommended that this atrocity and war crime should have been censored, and wrote in all seriousness of "the far greater civilian casualities and suffering inflicted in cold blood by Saddam Hussein in Kuwait". There was no complaint of bias concerning these commentaries.
In totalitarian regimes the public understands censorship of the press and
is appropriately skeptical. However, in our society, since there is no
central censorship, we imagine that there is no ideological bias either.
Dr. Peter Slezak Program in Cognitive Science. School of History & Philosophy of Science. University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052, AUSTRALIA Tel: (+61 2) 9385-2422 Fax: (+61 2) 9385-8003 email: p.slezak@unsw.edu.au Web Page: http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/sts/peter_slezak.html Chair, Joint Conference: International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS) Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (ASCS) Web Site: http://www.cogsci.unsw.edu.au