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http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/printing/9B900CCA6C31F8A4CA256CF30003C3BD<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#AD9400"><B>March 26, 2003</B></FONT> <BR>
<FONT SIZE="5">FEATURES</FONT> <BR>
<FONT SIZE="6"><B>INVISIBLE SOLDIERS</B></FONT> <BR>
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<FONT SIZE="5"><B>Australians are the forgotten troops of the war in Iraq. As Tony Wright explains, a look at any TV screen will show plenty of Americans and Brits but no diggers. <BR>
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Australians are watching the new Gulf War on television and they are seeing astonishing pictures. Here is a new wave of missiles blowing Saddam Hussein's chain of palaces and defence-related buildings all to hell; here are lines of tanks hurtling across the desert; here are fighter planes blasting off the decks of an aircraft carrier. <BR>
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As this is written, a British journalist is on Sky Television, bunkered down with US marines involved in a vicious firefight, and he is interviewing a marine who is gasping for breath and aiming his rifle over the parapet. Within minutes of a US soldier rolling grenades into a tent in Kuwait at the weekend, wounding 13 of his own commanders and killing one, CNN was screening pictures and an American reporter was giving a description of the scene. <BR>
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But where are the pictures of Aust-ralian soldiers, sailors and air crews? There aren't any, apart from the occasional vision provided by defence public relations. No interviews, either, and certainly not within any field of battle. <BR>
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Instead, Australian audiences must rely largely on "briefings" a more accurate word could hardly have been chosen by military spokesmen in Canberra and Qatar. They give heavily filtered versions of what Australia's defence forces are doing during this war, almost entirely bereft of detail. <BR>
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At time of writing, Australians knew that small groups of the Special Air Service soldiers were somewhere deep inside Iraq, carrying out their trademark "long-range reconnaissance and surveillance" missions. One team had discovered what appeared to be a missile site and had destroyed it. The SAS had fought and overwhelmed an Iraqi force somewhere and had treated the Iraqis who were fortunate enough to be no more than wounded. <BR>
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We discovered that a boarding party from HMAS Kanimbla had intercepted Iraqis intent on dropping mines into the Gulf and had taken prisoners. HMAS Anzac was providing artillery cover for British troops landing on Iraqi soil. Royal Australian Navy clearance diving teams were due to set out to remove and disarm mines in the Kha-ab-allah waterway. RAAF FA-18 Hornet fighter jets had been involved in strike operations and provided cover for air-to-air refuellers and spy planes, and a Hornet had pulled out of an attack on some target somewhere because the pilot wasn't convinced the conditions of the sortie were precisely what they were supposed to be. <BR>
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These are, by any measure, extraordinary efforts by Australians, despite the lack of any real detail. But if you watch international TV, you would imagine the only forces operating in the Gulf are British and American. <BR>
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Two Australian reporters Ian McPhedran from News Ltd and Paul McGeough from the Fairfax organisation have been courageous enough to remain in Baghdad, sending reports by satellite phone. ABC-TV decided to go it alone in northern Iraq. The Australian freelance cameraman employed by them for that task, Paul Moran, died instantly when a terrorist car bomb exploded beside him. ABC reporter Eric Campbell was wounded but survived. <BR>
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Virtually all other Australian reporters in the Gulf are in Qatar or Kuwait, distant from the action and separated from Australia's forces, milling about and relying on irregular "briefings" from the brass. In Gulf War I, there were Australian reporters aboard Australian warships. But not this time. No first-hand description of the navy's efforts is possible. No Hornet pilot has been interviewed. The commandoes of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, the long-range PC3 Orion air crews and those on Hercules transport planes and Chinook helicopters, not to mention the hundreds of support personnel, are all but invisible. <BR>
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Yet more than 500 reporters have been "embedded" with the US forces. These reporters travel with military units within Iraq, and can report and film directly from the heat of battle. Precisely two Australians managed to get themselves embedded Lindsay Murdoch from Fairfax and Geoff Thompson from the ABC. But they are not with Australian units. The Australian Defence Force, heavily leant upon by the Howard government, decided it would be "impractical" to embed Australian journalists, whatever that is supposed to mean. No one expected to accompany or interview the secretive SAS, but no reasonable explanation has been provided for keeping the media and thus the public far from all the other elements of Australia's contribution. This is a designed fog of war. <BR>
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