Sanitizing the Gulf War

In the latter part of 1990 we watched intently as the war in the Gulf began. For the first time in history cameras and reporters were reporting from the front lines. Throughout the war we watched the bombs exploding live on television, but it only looked as if someone had just set off Fourth of July fireworks. Was it really supposed to look like this? The media only gave us a glimpse of what the war was like and reported the rest. They talked about the mass casualties and all of the lives that were lost, but the media only reported what they wanted us to know. Susan Sontag (2003) said in regards to war, “The feeling that something had to be done about the war in Bosnia was built from the attentions of journalists —‘the CNN effect’ as it was sometimes called” (p. 104). People have intensified their feelings about the Gulf War based on the media exposure on what was supposed to be live from the front lines. According to John Taylor, (1998) “Allied soldiers wore night-vision goggles to see tanks in the dark, and mirrored driving goggles for protection from the sun. They looked like cyborgs in their amazing machines, or kitted out to survive early-modern weapons like gas or chemicals. Even civilians ‘Under fire’ in Israel appeared to be well protected from gas attacks in their protective suits and masks. What the cyborg myth obscured was the faultiness of the masks, even leading to some deaths through misuse: the instructions were in Arabic”(p.174).

John Taylor said that “from the perspective of the coalition forces, led by the United States and backed by UN resolutions against Iraq, not only was the Gulf War of 1991 brief, but no armies were lost, and very few allied combatants died. The numbers were small enough to publicize, though they vary a little, depending on whether the counting begins with the arrival of troops in Saudia Arabia in August 1990 and so includes accidental deaths or is limited to the period of fighting in 1991″(p.160). John Taylor also wrote that “According to the historian Philip Taylor, writing in 1992, and the journalist David Fairhall, writing in 1996, there were 266 American dead (105 before the war began); forty-seven British dead (the single largest group being killed by US ‘friendly’ fire); two French dead; one Italian dead; twenty-nine Saudis dead; nine Egyptians dead; six UAE dead. Some Israeli civilians were killed by Iraqi missile attacks, though the total number of coalition dead was small compared with estimates of enemy dead, which remain high but vague. The coalition never attempted to count the number of Iraqis killed, as war propaganda determined that they were not the main target”(p.160).

John Taylor mentioned that “when General Schwarzkopf, leader of the UN alliance, was asked about Iraqi casualties, he replied, ‘we are not in the business of killing’. General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said that he was not ‘terribly interested in’ the number of Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed. When the US National Resource Defense Council used the Freedom of Information Act to wring an estimate of the number of Iraqi casualties from the Defense Intelligence Agency, it estimated the Iraqi dead to be ‘in the range of one hundred thousand’. But that number had a grotesque statistical margin of error of 50 percent or higher, which implies a ‘low’ estimate of fifty thousand. Official US government estimates have ranged even lower: ten to thirty thousand; the French guessed that the death toll was two hundred thousand; in early March 1991, before he realized that silence on the matter was more important that disclosure, General Schwarzkopf said, ‘we must have killed 100,000. Such moments of candour turned out to be rare, and the increasing refusal to be clear about military deaths implies that the number of Iraqi soldiers to be killed had ceased to be central and had become beside the point or even theoretical”(p.160). It seems as though that the statistics on number of casualties were distorted to the extent that it was made to look as if more American soldiers were killed than were Iraqis. As if to say that we suffered more in this war at the hands of the Iraqis than they did.

Jean Baudrillard (1991) says “We are all hostages of media intoxication, induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters” (p. 25). In his book “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” Baudrillard (1991) explores the idea that the gulf war was just a promotion to get support for the war, he says “Any more than 10,000 tons of bombs per day is sufficient to make it a war” (p. 61). To me he is saying that it would take a lot more ammunition to make a war than what was used.

The media was trying to make us believe that a war was being waged than was actually going on. In Paul Patton’s introduction to Baudrillard’s (1991) book, Patton relates the gulf war to that of “A war played out on a simulator complete with lifelike images” (p. 4). I will admit that a person can take short clips from raw footage and insert them into a documentary within a news reel and make them out to be footage from the war that is actually supposed to be going on. The people watching wouldn’t right away even know where the footage came from and would assume that it was raw footage from the front lines of the battlefield. According to a video entitled “Toxic Sludge is good for You,” by Author John Stauber (2002), “newsroom managers are under tremendous pressure to produce more for less and the Public Relations industry takes advantage of this vulnerability.” This production within the newsroom is what is ordered by propagandists to sanitize what is really happening behind the scenes.

John Taylor (1998) says, “the BBC’s former war correspondent Martin Bell, complained that censorship for reasons of ‘good taste’ prevented him from reporting the reality of war in Bosnia. He was forbidden to show bodies, or even blood, for fear of breaking the guidelines then in place. Bell wrote, ‘in our anxiety not to offend and upset people, we were not only sanitizing war but even prettifying it, as if it were an acceptable way of settling disputes, and its victims never bled to death but rather expired gracefully out of sight. How tactful of them I thought. But war is real and war is terrible. War is a bad taste business.”(p. 75)

In the introduction to Baudrillard’s book “The Gulf War did not Take Place”, Patton explains “Technological simulacra neither displace nor deter the violent reality of war, they have become an integral part of its operational procedures. Virtual environments are now incorporated into operational warplanes, filtering the real scene and presenting aircrew with a more readable world”(p.4). This can blur the lines of virtual reality and actuality, making the media much more capable of inventing news stories that really didn’t exist.

John Taylor (1998) says in his book “Body Horror”, “The publicity about super-added hero fighters kept up morale on the home front, suggesting that troops-going-forward would soon be troops-coming-home. Most publicity avoided humans and showed how superior machines would overcome inferior ones. By ‘wasting’ the enemy’s weapons, radar sites and computerized control centers with ‘clean’ technology the coalition intended to use its own well honed rhetoric to convince its publics that war was no longer horrible. ‘History is what hurts’, writes Frederic Jameson, but the techno-war in the Gulf didn’t appear to hurt many people, and they were mostly people no one knew who were considered not to matter. The imagery of the techno-war emerged as unpeopled, as functional ‘instruments without accountability in a contrivance of information – abstract, quantitative, unassailable, and completely alterable” (p.175).

Susan Sontag (1977) talks about Diane Arbus’ photographs she says, “To discover (through photographing) that life is ‘really a melodrama,’ to understand the camera as a weapon of aggression, implies there will be casualties” (p. 39). This means, there are significant effects on the public or anyone who takes in the visual meaning of any war photography. When the media shows film clips within their news stories of things that didn’t happen in the war taking place then they risk having an individual psychologically affected.

I think Susan Sontag (2003) is relevant to the historical continuity of staging war she says “not surprisingly, many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much-shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures form the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photograph he was to call ‘The valley of the Shadow of Death,’ the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture-the one that is always reproduced-he oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road itself” (pp. 53-54). This type of photography also gives an impersonal relationship toward war, distancing the public from personal responsibility.

John Taylor (1998) goes on to add “Removing horror from the popular, historical understanding of killing (or dying) for one’s country is one effect of recent war management, made easier by the ‘virtual’ nature of warfare practiced by highly developed nations organized and led by the United States. In his critique of ‘virtual’ war Baudrillard does not maintain, as Christopher Norris suggests, that there is no ‘operative difference between truth and falsehood’. However, Baudrillard’s three essays of 1991 clearly give the impression that he thinks the war will not take place, that it really was not taking place, and finally that it ‘did not take place’. He is insisting not that nothing happened but that the coalition so carefully planned the war as a mediated event that its editing preceded its happening. Planning the mediation of the war went hand in hand with laying out the military strategy needed to retake the territory.”

Although the pictures may have been fabricated to a certain degree of superficiality, we can get an idea of what war is like in the eyes of reporters and cameramen and women who have been there. For they have witnessed firsthand what the ammunition of our enemies can do to the human body, it has no remorse for the strong or weak or whether we are young or old. Pictures of war can be taken to warn us of coming destruction. Pictures of war can also remind us of the beauty within ourselves and life around us compared to the atrocities of war.

This reminds me of the passage written by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), “Among single antiwar images, the huge photograph that Jeff Wall made in 1992 titled ‘Dead Troops Talk’ seems to me exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power. The antitheses of a document, the picture, a Cibachrome transparency seven and a half feet high and more than thirteen feet wide and mounted on a light box, shows figures posed in a landscape, a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist’s studio. Wall, who is Canadian, was never in Afghanistan. The ambush is a made-up event in a savage war that had been much in the news. Wall set as his task the imagining of war’s horror as in nineteenth-century history painting and other forms of history-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—just before the invention of the camera—such as tableaux vivants, wax displays, dioramas, and panoramas, which made the past, especially the immediate past, seem astonishingly, disturbingly real” (p. 123-124). This is as a person might see the Gulf war as he/she lies awake in the horrific nightmare of events that overcome the soldiers. Events that also become all too real to innocent bystanders being enravaged by the war torn cities and towns of missile strikes and machine-gun fire.

According to John Taylor (1998), “The censors did not simply dupe the home front and betray the soldiers. Instead, photography, along with language, was used to support what Mary Douglas called ‘cherished classifications’ or beliefs that were widely held by civilians and soldiers alike. The press scarcely departed from repeating the classifications which separate ‘clean’ from ‘dirty’, or wholesome from defiled. The war as the press represented it hardly ever forced readers to focus on dirt, since ‘our strongest mental habit’ rejects discordant or abject materials. Far from overthrowing ‘cherished classifications,’ the function of photography was to establish them against whatever actual conditions prevailed.”(p. 188)

Upon research for the sanitizing of the Gulf War, I found information that would lead me to documents produced by Military Intelligence which by some circumstances would prove the involvement of the government in the sanitizing of the Gulf War by way of the media and press associations. I found that these documents were either destroyed or were just deleted from internet files pertaining to Government documentation of the Sanitizing of the Gulf War. The internet files that pertain to the sanitizing of the gulf by way of government files still have available links to go to but just bring up blank pages. According to the small amount of information found on “DTIC.Mil, anonymous written (7.10.2008) by an unknown member of the Maxwell Air Force Base community “…during the Persian Gulf War, the United States out…member nations. Still, the UN must rely entirely on the information provided…analyze information. While the United States presently…It may require “sanitizing” information produced….” Although this may not prove the sanitizing of all information collected during the Gulf War it does in some way prove that the idea was brought up for sanitizing information within the government community on the Gulf War.

During the media coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf, the headlines of the stories as reported on the television always had headlines to catch the eye of the interested. Every once in a while the daily story contained something that would cause a true American to lose their confidence in the defense and United States Intelligence Agency. Doug Kellner of UCLA wrote an essay about the corruption within the managing of the war in the Persian Gulf, “The Gulf war was the first war played out on TV with the whole world watching it unfold, often live. Never before had so many people watched so much news. The nation had rarely, if ever, been so involved in a single story.”

Doug Kellner of UCLA also wrote in his essay “There was discussion of the vicissitudes of the war throughout the TV day and there had probably never been so much concentrated TV coverage of a specific event week after week for the duration of the war. And never had the nation been exposed to and fallen prey to so much disinformation and propaganda. For the rest of the Gulf war, both the Bush Administration and the military vilified Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis whenever possible while presenting their own actions, however brutal, in a positive light so that few negative images appeared of U.S. military actions.”

The H. W. Bush administration hired a Public Relations firm, Hill & Knowlton to manipulate what was to become the war of all wars. Hill & Knowlton were also the same ones who manipulated the tobacco company fiasco and the sanitizing of the war in Uganda. In my mind this was to show the world what the administration could do if provoked and to make the public think they are doing what Bush said he was going to do, and that was to go after the ones, being Sadam Hussein, who brought injustice upon the American people.

John Taylor (1998) says “In keeping with this need to pander to ingrained Western prejudice, the media were ready to accept brutal atrocity stories if they came from a sufficiently authoritative source” (p.168). We expect a certain amount of horrific tales of the things that happen during a war. Taylor also says “Many such stories about murder were designed by the American public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, which planted them in government agencies, where they became available to the media. Hill and Knowlton were engaged by a Kuwaiti government group to help demonize the Iraqis”(p.168).

Doug Kellner said that “The Big Lie that was repeated daily throughout the war maintained that the U.S-led multinational coalition bombing campaign was precise and was avoiding civilian casualties. This lie was promoted by both the Bush administration and the U.S. military.” Kellner also wrote in his essay that “General Schwarzkopf, in a January 27 briefing, insisted that the coalition forces ‘are absolutely doing more than we ever have’ to avoid casualties and that he claimed that ‘I think no nation in the history of warfare’ has done more to use their technology to minimize civilian casualties and to avoid hitting cultural or religious targets. George Bush echoed this in a February 5 press conference, claiming: ‘We are doing everything possible and with great success to minimize collateral damage…. I’d like to say that we are going to extraordinary, and I would venture to say, unprecedented length, to avoid damage to civilians and holy places’.” Although the war in the Persian Gulf killed so many, it seemed to do little to curb the appetite of those willing to do whatever they could to flex their muscles of aggression and prove our strength to foreign nations. But is it right to corrupt the media and defile the public in order to use public relations practices to get the point across.

John Taylor wrote (1998) in “Body Horror”, that “atrocity stories are crucial in the build-up to war or in its continuation. Because enough people believed Saddam Hussein was the same as Hitler, the coalition felt morally justified in bombing the Iraqis and spreading lies about his activities. Hill and Knowlton’s secret campaign succeeded in persuading leading Americans that Iraqi soldiers had killed Kuwaiti infants. Faced with this outrage, Americans did not baulk when their government bombed Iraq and destroyed the entire urban sanitation network. This action, combined with economic sanctions preventing repair of the infrastructure and lack of medicine led directly (according to post-war UN figures) to the death of some 170,000 Iraqi infants within a year, and of 567,000 by 1995. The moral, financial and political motivations of the international community were uninterested in Iraqi children or infants yet to be born. Instead, the authorities either used or were driven by such atrocity stories. Consequently, public opinion was so incensed by news that described the murder of innocent babies, women, and other civilians that it allowed the authorities to kill and frighten enemy civilians in disproportion and for long periods of time, without any sense of irony or shame”(p. 169). Are we, as a people so caught up in our daily lives that the effects of war don’t keep us from taking action and fighting for the rights of infants and helpless innocents. The moral fiber of the world seems to be crumbling down around us with no regard to human dignity and life. Sanitizing the Gulf War was not only about making light of the atrocities that portrayed in the media, its also about the horrible things that we as a people did to each other and using all of the resources that we have at our disposal just to ‘get even’. Is this what the world has come to, we are now using technological advances just to see if we can prove a point to the enemy. Maybe we need to sanitize who we are as a people and do something about what is happening here at home in our own back yard.

Why are we so compelled to look at shocking photographs and wonder in disbelief how someone could mutilate a body so horrifically. This war seemed to be a war of conscience in some respect I mean, look how the government tried to cover up the mass number of bodies that lay on the battlefront. It’s as if we were a young child being protected from all that may destroy our innocence.

Bibliography

1) Kellner, Doug, (date unknown). “TV Goes to War”. Essay: “The Persian Gulf TV

War”. University of California, Los Angeles. Retrieved: (09, December 2009)

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/gulfwarch6.pdf

2) Paul Patton, introduction. Jean Baudrillard (1991) “The Gulf War did not Take Place.”

Indiana University Press.

3) Sontag, Susan (2003) “Regarding the Pain of Others.” Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. New York.

4) Sontag, Susan (1977) “On Photography.” Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. New

York.

5) Stauber, John (Author), Robb, Margo., (Producer). (2002). “Toxic Sludge is Good For You.”

[Educational Film]. United States: Media Education Foundation (MEF). Retrieved

December 4, 2009, from

http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=119#filmmaker-about

6) Taylor, John (1998) “Body Horror.” New York University Press. Washington Square, New York.

7) Anonymous. (2008 July 10). Unknown title. Retrieved (December 9, 2009) from source.

(email of original article: )

Found at link:

http://www.dtic.mil/srch/search?q=sanitizing+the+Gulf+war&c=u5&c=c1&c=u3&c=d8&c=d7&c=m0&c=d3&c=t3&c=w0&c=a0&c=c0&c=u2&c=t1&c=r0&c=u8&c=u6&c=e3&c=b0&c=n0&c=u0&c=d4&c=da&c=u1&c=d6&c=j1&c=s0&c=u7&submit=Search&template=/dtic/search/results-template.html&s=1&anyall=all&site=dod&enableLemmatization=yes&n=10&sum=yes&hl=y&searchview=d4&pg=1&sort=


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *