[Media-watch] Falludah - Screams will not be heard -

[Sigi D]

Dear Media Watch Friends
this is a wonderful article from Madeleine Bunting in
the Guardian. It's about what will be done in our name
to people in Falludah and propaganda language being
used in the media.
All the best
Sigi

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1345991,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1345991,00.html
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Screams will not be heard 

This is an information age, but it will be months
before we learn the truth about the assault on Falluja


Madeleine Bunting
Monday November 8, 2004
The Guardian 

With fitting irony, one of the camps used by the US
marines waiting for the assault on Falluja was
formerly a Ba'ath party retreat occasionally used by
Saddam Hussein's sons. Dreamland, as it was known, has
an island in the middle of an artificial lake fringed
by palms.

Now the camp's dream-like unreality is distorting
every news report filed on the preparations for the
onslaught on Falluja. We don't know, and won't know,
anything about what happens in the next few days
except for what the US military authorities choose to
let us know. It's long since been too dangerous for
journalists to move around unless they are embedded
with the US forces. There is almost no contact left
with civilians still in Falluja, the only information
is from those who have left.

This is how the fantasy runs: a city the size of
Brighton is now only ever referred to as a "militants'
stronghold" or "insurgents' redoubt". The city is
being "softened up" with precision attacks from the
air. Pacifying Falluja has become the key to
stabilising the country ahead of the January
elections. The "final assault" is imminent, in which
the foreigners who have infiltrated the almost
deserted Iraqi city with their extremist Islam will be
"cleared", "rooted out" or "crushed". Or, as one
marine put it: "We will win the hearts and minds of
Falluja by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing
that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy."

These are the questionable assumptions and
make-believe which are now all that the embedded
journalists with the US forces know to report. Every
night, the tone gets a little more breathless and
excited as the propaganda operation to gear the troops
up for battle coopts the reporters into its collective
psychology.

There's a repulsive asymmetry of war here: not the
much remarked upon asymmetry of the few thousand
insurgents holed up in Falluja vastly outnumbered by
the US, but the asymmetry of information. In an age of
instant communication, we will have to wait months, if
not years, to hear of what happens inside Falluja in
the next few days. The media representation of this
war will be from a distance: shots of the city skyline
illuminated by the flashes of bomb blasts, the dull
crump of explosions. What will be left to our
imagination is the terror of children crouching behind
mud walls; the agony of those crushed under falling
masonry; the frantic efforts to save lives in
makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and
few supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the
blanks, drawing on the reporting of past wars
inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and Grozny.

The silence from Falluja marks a new and agonising
departure in the shape of 21st-century war. The
horrifying shift in the last century was how,
increasingly, war was waged against civilians: their
proportion of the death toll rose from 50% to 90%. It
prompted the development of a form of war-reporting,
exemplified by Bosnia, which was not about the
technology and hardware, but about human suffering,
and which fuelled public outrage. No longer. The
reporting of Falluja has lapsed back into the military
machismo of an earlier age. This war against the
defenceless will go unreported.

The reality is that a city can never be adequately
described as a "militants' stronghold". It's a label
designed to stiffen the heart of a soldier, but it is
blinding us, the democracies that have inflicted this
war, to the consequences of our actions. Falluja is
still home to thousands of civilians. The numbers who
have fled the prospective assault vary, but there
could be 100,000 or more still in their homes.
Typically, as in any war, those who don't get out of
the way are a mixture of the most vulnerable - the
elderly, the poor, the sick; the unlucky, who left it
too late to get away; and the insanely brave, such as
medical staff.

Nor does it seem possible that reporters still use the
terms "softening up" or "precision" bombing. They
achieve neither softening nor precision, as Falluja
well knew long before George W Bush arrived in the
White House. In the first Gulf war, an RAF
laser-guided bomb intended for the city's bridge went
astray and landed in a crowded market, killing up to
150. Last year, the killing of 15 civilians shortly
after the US arrived in the city ensured that Falluja
became a case study in how to win a war but lose the
occupation. A catalogue of catastrophic blunders has
transformed a relatively calm city with a strongly
pro-US mayor into a battleground.

One last piece of fantasy is that there is unlikely to
be anything "final" about this assault. Already
military analysts acknowledge that a US victory in
Falluja could have little effect on the spreading
incidence of violence across Iraq. What the insurgents
have already shown is that they are highly
decentralised, and yet the quick copying of terrorist
techniques indicates some degree of cooperation. Hopes
of a peace seem remote; the future looks set for a
chronic, intermittent civil war. By the time the
bulldozers have ploughed their way through the centre
of Falluja, attention could have shifted to another
"final assault" on another "militant stronghold", as
another city of homes, shops and children's
playgrounds morphs into a battleground.

The recent comment of one Falluja resident is
strikingly poignant: "Why," she asked wearily, "don't
they go and fight in a desert away from houses and
people?" Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured
a remarkable historical inversion. Once the city had
been the place of safety to retreat to in a time of
war, the place of civilisation against the barbarian
wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment
turned the city into a target, a place of terror.

What is so disturbing is that much of the violence
meted out to cities in the past 60-odd years has
rarely had a strategic purpose - for example, the
infamous bombing of Dresden. Nor is it effective in
undermining morale or motivation; while the violence
destroys physical and economic capital, it usually
generates social capital - for example, the Blitz
spirit or the solidarity of New Yorkers in the wake of
9/11 - and in Chechnya served only to establish a
precarious peace in a destroyed Grozny and fuel a
desperate, violent resistance.

Assaults on cities serve symbolic purposes: they are
set showpieces to demonstrate resolve and inculcate
fear. To that end, large numbers of casualties are
required: they are not an accidental byproduct but the
aim. That was the thinking behind 9/11, and Falluja
risks becoming a horrible mirror-image of that
atrocity. Only by the shores of that dusty lake in
Dreamland would it be possible to believe that the
ruination of this city will do anything to enhance the
legitimacy of the US occupation and of the Iraqi
government it appointed. 




	
	
		
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