People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East

by Joris Luyendijk

  I’d spoken to another fellow journalist during the briefing given by the American army at the Sheraton hotel. “Have you just got here?” he’d asked me. “You’d better hurry up. The farmers in the North are the story. They can work their fields for the last time tomorrow, because after that the American army will be there. I’ve got names and numbers.”

  I nodded thankfully and, despite my five years’ experience, I was still astonished that something so inane could be the story. But the explanation was simple: The Anglo-American media machine was dominating the news stream and, within that, the story was the build-up of American troops. When were they going to strike? The evacuation of the farmers was a good illustration of this—one that you could easily get a shot of in the constant competition for space amongst newspaper journalists.

  It had all been shown before. A sophisticated media campaign lays down an image—rice and flowers—and it becomes hard to shift afterwards. Just think how impossible an honest Q&A session would sound:

  Our correspondent is in Kuwait. Do the Kuwaitis think that America will succeed in bringing democracy?

  Many Kuwaitis do not believe this to be America’s plan.

  But there are pro-American Kuwaitis, aren’t there?

  They are against it as well, because they don’t trust America.

  What percentage of the population thinks this way?

  Umm ... I’m not sure. It might be just the people I’ve spoken to. It is a dictatorship, you see.

  That was our correspondent. We’re going directly to Washington for a long-awaited speech by President Bush on America’s historic mission to spread freedom. But, before that, a report on the farmers in northern Kuwait who worked their land for the last time yesterday as a consequence of the build-up of American troops.

  That was why the army spokesmen in the Sheraton was so relaxed. He had us all chained up, and he knew it.

  Chapter 14

  “There’s Money in the Flag”

  I was going to quit my job after the fall of Baghdad, so once the American troops entered Iraq I knew that my final weeks on the ground had arrived. It would be a revealing time, but in the beginning I saw only the repetition of familiar patterns. Was the fighting being done by “Zionist crusaders,” “American and British invading troops?” or by “allies?” Were their opponents the “Iraqi national resistance” or “Saddam loyalists?” Were we seeing a “heavy bombardment of densely populated cities” or “Operation Shock and Awe,” a name that Sony claimed for a new computer game while the war was still being fought.

  Each camp had its own terminology, and played the good guy in its own version of events. Fox News reported accusations of Iraqi cooperation with Al-Qaida as fact, and reasoned accordingly: How, then, could Europeans be against the elimination of the man behind September 11? Of course, they hate America! Hezbollah TV did the same with the accusation that Israel’s Mossad had committed the attack: How, then, could Americans blame Iraq? Of course, they hate Islam!

  I followed the war from the capital city of an important Arab country—the place where I’d started out five years earlier, Umm iddunya, the mother of the world, Cairo. Behind the scenes, the Egyptian government was helping the Americans where it could, but what was going on among the population? This was a blank spot, but because of the war there was now so much extra space in the newspaper that we could show the contours of those blank spots. I began a newspaper column, “The Arab Street.” I walked through the city and struck up conversations with ordinary Egyptians, doing the previously mentioned vox pops. On television, these could never be more than quick flashes: “It’s against Islam ... very bad”—if the people dared speak at all. An article offered more room, and you could present the speakers anonymously:

  Of course it is God’s punishment. Allah is almighty, so everything that happens is His will. The recent earthquake in Turkey cannot be separated from the manner in which Turkey has renounced Islam; and I hardly have to explain AIDS, do I? The Imam said it, too, just now. The American invasion is punishment for our lack of piety. Everybody is concerned with money and a house, a mobile telephone ... We have just prayed for a fast end to it, that the Americans lose quickly and leave. Egypt has big responsibilities, because it is the cradle of civilization.14

  If the Americans were real Christians they wouldn’t do this. Why are they interfering? Each people has its own system and its own leader. We love Mubarak, and Mubarak loves us. During the First Gulf War I worked in Iraq as a patissier. After the bombardments, Saddam would come out onto the street. People could touch him, and it was obvious that everybody loved him and that he loved the people.15

  America is the strongest country in the world because it consists of fifty states, but the second-strongest army in the world is Iraq’s and they are up against that now. This is why Germany is against the war; they realize that they will be next. Bush has said that God made him president in order to deliver the world from Islam. That Bush ... I read recently that Israeli soldiers laid bets on pregnant Palestinian women—will it be a boy or a girl? Then they’d cut the woman open to see who was right. They also undress women and drive them around Israel in metal cages. I get so angry when I hear things like that. How could you do such a thing?16

  Politics is for politicians. I’m just an ordinary civil servant, and in the evening I drive a taxi. The war? To be honest, I don’t follow it that much. I get home at midnight and I have to be up at six. At that point I don’t feel like poring over the news. It’s terrible, people say. An attack on Islam. I hope it’s over quickly.17

  Did you know that Israel is going to blow up the Al-Aqsa mosque once Baghdad falls? That was the headline of my Al-Usbu newspaper yesterday. Nearly all of Clinton’s and Bush’s advisors are Jewish. Some of them openly, others in secret. Secret Jews, like Saddam. He invaded Kuwait so that Americans could put down troops in the Gulf, close to the oil and the holy sites. They weaken Islam because Jews know that they can’t do much against a strong Islam.18

  I wrote it all down, and the NRC’s inbox filled up: Your correspondent is making Arabs look ridiculous. It proved again that you have to have had this kind of conversation yourself—then you know that people say this kind of thing without hesitation and more in a tone of resignation than anger. They only get angry when you start contradicting them.

  It was a strange routine. During the daytime I had the conversations for “The Arab Street,” and in the evenings I watched television. It resembled the beginning of my correspondent’s job when Iraq was being bombed during Operation Desert Fox and I was summarizing press releases from my hotel room in Amman. I didn’t have to do that anymore, because I’d stopped doing radio and television, and the NRC only asked for background.

  So I had time to watch television, and gradually something occurred to me—not what was said and shown on the Western channels, but precisely what was not said and shown. In the run-up to the invasion, the authoritative Anglosphere media had adopted the perspective of the American PR machine, and this continued during the war. The embedded journalists who’d been assigned to the front by the army spokesman in the Kuwait Sheraton provided images of soldiers ducking away from enemy fire, crawling under walls, and reaching a position from where they could eliminate the enemy. The Iraqi enemy remained faceless, whereas you did get to see the fear, tension, or relief on the faces of the Americans. It was like a video game—game over for the newly beaten division of the Republican Guard, and America through to the next level, with a new army division.

  It was the good guy/bad guy Hollywood approach, and nearly all the analyzes coincided with the one that Central Command had sent from Qatar: The conquest of the port city Umm Qasr had top priority—not for military reasons, but to “get humanitarian goods to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible.” Fighting inside the city should be prevented, not because America’s technological advantage would be largely lost and many of their own would perish, but because “street fighting would result in many civilian casualtie
s.” At the end of the day, it was about the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people; reporters and army spokesmen chimed this tune in chorus, implying that the war was a good thing, and that we just needed to explain this to the people of Iraq.

  Every last crumb that was dropped from the Central Command podium was hoovered up. CNN called it “Be the first to know”—news as a competition. “We’ve just had confirmation from CentCom that Umm Qasr is now in the hands of American commandos. Back to you, Jim.” In the 1991 Gulf War, the same thing happened, only at that time there weren’t any Arabic broadcasters with their own correspondents refuting American statements. Now you could zap from Jim to Al-Jazeera, where they were in the middle of a live telephone conversation with the Iraqi commander in Umm Qasr.

  “We now have confirmation.” Did the CNN and BBC journalists believe that themselves? Surely they were aware that the army’s task was not to deliver reliable information, but to neutralize the enemy with minimal losses? And if you have to lie to achieve this ... All’s fair in love and war.

  Beside all those American press conferences, wouldn’t it have been an idea to remind people how the media had been deceived twelve years earlier? Iraq had trampled Kuwait underfoot, and the White House was intent on a military expedition; but, according to opinion polls, the majority of the American populace were against it—until a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl testified in front of the Congress that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers taking babies from their incubators and letting them die on the floor, so that the incubators could go directly to Baghdad. The witness statement was shown on television, and support for the liberation of Kuwait shot up. Long after, it came out that this “nurse” was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, and that she’d been pushed forward by the communications consultancy Hill & Knowlton. Just like it only became known years later that the American flags with which the Kuwaitis “spontaneously” welcomed their liberators had been provided by the communications consultancy The Rendon Group.

  Why, in the middle of this flood of PR from CentCom, was the Western media not open about the way it had been manipulated in the past? For a while, I considered the fly-on-the-wall theory—the tendency that journalists have to believe that they are just observing without being influenced. But that was not the only thing that was off-screen on Western channels.

  Western correspondents and presenters often referred to Iraq’s instability; after all, the country is made up of three population groups with little in common—Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center, and Shiites in the south. There was rarely any explanation after those five sentences as to how that had come about. Until the end of World War I, the areas had been independent provinces of a Turkish colonial empire; then they were captured by Great Britain and added to Iraq. It was like grouping Poles, northern Germans, and northern Dutch people together, and telling them they were now a new country. It was a recipe for instability, which was Britain’s intention: An unstable Iraq would remain dependent on British aid and protection, and would do what London wanted. As the former American foreign minister Henry Kissinger put it in his classic work Diplomacy: “The borders of the Middle East had been drawn by foreign, largely European, powers at the end of the First World War in order to facilitate their domination of the area.” That was why so many borders in the Arab world were straight lines—Western governments had drawn them using a ruler on a map, and they certainly didn’t have the local populations’ interests at heart.

  “Anti-Western feelings” in the Middle East received a lot of airplay in reports in the Western media. You might think that a couple of minutes of historical explanation would have been in order to understand this—for example, about Iran. Iran had a democratic government in the 1950s but, when prime minister Mossadeq decided to nationalize the oil industry, the CIA put the Shah on the throne in a coup d“etat. The shah rebuilt the country into a pro-Western dictatorship with a ubiquitous and merciless secret service and awe-inspiring corruption—a mirror of some current Arab regimes. The anger around this discharged itself in the “anti-Western Islamic Revolution.” To put down the Islamic Revolution, Western governments armed Saddam with poison gas, amongst other things, during the Iran—Iraq war. But they also secretly gave weapons to Iran, in exchange for which Iran released Western hostages in Lebanon—the Iran Contra scandal. Henry Kissinger again: “Too bad they both can’t lose.” A million people died.

  And then came Osama Bin Laden. How many Western viewers knew that, for years, people like him had been trained and armed by the CIA? This could be explained in a few words, too: In 1979, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan to help the collapsing communist regime. In response, the CIA, together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, set up the mujahideen (the jihad warriors). They fought a guerrilla war against the Russians, which the mujahideen—amongst whose members was Osama Bin Laden—won, after which some went to fight against the Egyptian regime, while others got involved in the Algerian civil war. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden offered to chase him out with his warriors, but the Gulf States preferred to call in America’s assistance. Bin Laden saw this as definitive proof that the regimes were only out for self-preservation, even if it meant calling in the Western powers that had caused the problems in the Islamic world in the first place. Bin Laden shifted his goals, which led to the 9/11 attacks, which formed the justification for the invasion of Iraq ... and the circle was complete.

  You might think that this kind of background material would be part of the equation for Western viewers. There was air time enough, and if thousands of dollars a day could be spent on sending a reporter in Baghdad to summarize the reports from the news agencies, there had to be a budget for documentaries or other short features which explained the role that Western governments had played in the Middle East in recent decades. Why was this so rarely mentioned on Western stations as the bombs rained down on Baghdad?

  There was more than this left untold on mainstream Western news bulletins. While Arabic stations showed the human consequences of the bombardment every hour, the Western ones did something else. Every evening, the graphics departments conjured up a sort of Risk board of the region, complete with maps, aircraft, boats, tanks, little figures, arrows, and yellow and red stars. In the repeated clips or CNN promos, you’d see fighter jets landing on aircraft carriers, the pilot giving the thumbs up: Yep, got rid of the bombs. Computer animations showed how the stealth bomber could dodge the radar. Look how clever we are, the films said. We can make a rocket that can seek out a toilet seat after a six-hundred-kilometers flight, left down the stairs, and boom.

  There were no computer animations showing what happened after the boom—how a cluster bomb threw out 140 mines, each strong enough to destroy a tank. A few never go off, and so you get unexploded mines left around in places where children play. Nor was there any computer mapping of what happens to a human body when a new-generation bomb vacuum-implodes the surroundings.

  Your correspondent sat in a hotel room shaking his fist at the television. After a couple of evenings like this, he wrote the following piece:

  I experienced a bombardment myself, and I think of it often these days. It was in Gaza, and in terms of range and duration it was nothing compared to what the people of Baghdad, Mosul, and Tikrit have suffered over the past six days. However, there are some parallels. You always hear about civilian casualties and wounded, and if the body count doesn’t get too high, it’s a “clean” war. What nonsense.

  If you are somewhere where bombs are being dropped, what you feel more than anything is powerlessness. Your life is in the hands of someone behind a control panel or in a cockpit. He can make a decision that will leave you dead or handicapped. In Gaza, I felt such nauseating fear that I immediately had to plaster another emotion on top. The Palestinians around me seemed to be doing that, too, and together we put on a stage show. Oh, there goes another bomb, ho ho. We’d have been capable of dancing for the cameras like you see Iraqis doing on their national television right no
w. “Defiant Iraqis after last night’s bombing,” CNN sometimes subtitles such images. “Iraqis unbroken after last night’s bombing.”

  It’s rubbish. Palestinian aid workers in Gaza talked about an explosive increase in domestic violence, spontaneous miscarriages, and heart attacks. Babies’ first words were not baba or mama, but “bomb,” “martyr,” and “airplane.” Drawings of fighter jets, bullets, and blood, from children who want to join the army when they grow up instead of becoming footballers or actors, and who don’t play tag but instead play soldiers and undertakers. In the words of a local psychologist, “They shout Allahu akbar for the cameras, but at night they wet their beds.” Parents no longer dare to make love because they’re afraid an attack will begin and they’ll have to run quickly to their children. One Gaza father recounted how his eight-year-old would secretly get dressed again before going to sleep so she could run straight to the shelter during a bombing.

  The hysterical phone calls once the network is back up—did everyone make it? Is the family business still standing? Has it been plundered? Insurance policies don’t pay out for war damage, and most people don’t even have insurance. When the bombs are falling you can’t go outside. This also includes ambulances and fire engines, so if you fall down the stairs or have some other kind of accident you have to wait for the all-clear. This makes parents even more nervous, because when bombs are going off children run all over the place. They hide in the bathroom or try to sprint down the street. Naturally they ask when it’s going to stop.