Saddam Hussein or the Bogie Man - 25 January 1991

An American bomber pilot interviewed in the desert about what he did with himself when he got back from a mission looked a touch mockingly at the reporter and said, get yourself and your plane into shape for the next one.

And after that? Oh, he said, sleep, eat, play cards, talk about the coming Super Bowl, the Cup Final of the American football season. Then he added as an almost obvious afterthought, you'd go crazy if you spent all your time thinking about it. It being the war.

It didn't take long for the television network to get an inkling that that was the way their viewers were beginning to feel. For President Bush's first talk to the nation after 48 hours of warfare there was a calculated audience of 61 millions, which is the biggest audience ever recorded in this country for any television programme. And for the first four or five days, as I noticed last time, the three commercial networks were content to lose, each of them, over $2 million a day in advertising revenue because they cancelled so many regular entertainment programmes and kept up a more or less continuous coverage of the war.

Well, it was not just the urge towards sanity which made them by the first weekend begin to restore entertainment, it was the well demonstrated fact that the competition from a single source was too much for all three Ð including the public network, all four of them. The cable station CNN cable news in Atlanta, is now seen and heard in103 countries and since it devotes itself to 24-hour news and has a staff of a 123 men and women in the Middle East alone and it was seen to be using in clockwork succession, it was the station that people around the world turned to, who wanted to stay up to the minute with the hard news of the war Ð the latest sorties, the bombings in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the latest Patriot interception Ð as well as all the briefings, whether in Riyadh or at the Pentagon in Washington. Not to mention the latest view of the war from the point of view of Saddam Hussein himself and the Iraqis, a privilege which Saddam allowed only CNN to enjoy since he'd ordered all other allied correspondents out of the country.

There came a day this week when the number one soldier at GHQ himself, General Collin Powell, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said, spontaneously in answer to a question, "Well, that's according to what Bernie Shaw tells me". Bernard Shaw no relation is the chief anchor man was in Baghdad, now in Amman, of CNN and General Powell was confessing what Saddam Hussein has declared and President Bush has slipped into confessing that the station they never turn off, the source of their last minute news is Mr Turner's CNN.

This being so, we have the unique situation in a war that all of us, not only the alliance and the Iraqis but all the onlooking nations are getting the same news in the moment of its being reported. All that's left to differ about is interpretation. So it's a little harder this time for either side to launch its own weird and dramatic propaganda. I looked through a book I have which put together cartoons, posters, flaming editorials published in Britain, and the same sort of thing published in Germany during the four years of the First World War. It's frightening stuff to look back on, the stereotypes each side developed both of the enemy, generals and the politicians, were closer to animals than humans and what they were up to by way of bayoneting children and assaulting women and bombing hospitals and the like, was ferociously crude.

This week we had a tentative example, a little home-made effort at what in the two world wars was an industry on both sides, namely, the reporting of acts of war directed according to one side against a legitimate military target, directed according to the other side against innocent women and children. In this case, it was in our version a successful bombing raid on a biological warfare factory. The Iraqis leaving us to deduce that it was a brutality typical of our side, the Iraqis said it was a factory that manufactured babies food formulas. In the First War no allied correspondent obviously was allowed to go and watch allied corpses being melted down into soap, and in the Second War we heard as gospel but again, had no means of checking the frightful rumour that the Nazis were making lampshades out of the skins of concentration camp victims. But the other day we heard from CNNs senior war correspondent, a veteran of Vietnam who was taken to the bombed factory by the Iraqis and shown around. Obviously the Iraqis keep him there to give their view of things and whatever he says is passed by their censors. He's useful to us if only as a daily text we try to interpret between the lines. All he could say about the biological or babies formula factory was that he went freely about the labs and was shown vats or containers of whatever of what his host said was powdered milk.

Well, everyone will have seen that report. What we don't see is what the Iraqis are putting out to the Arab world. We are told that after all the allied bombing Baghdad anyway is left with no power and precious little television if any. But Saddam is known to have taped pep talks, condemnations of uncle Satan and the rest and then flown them out to Jordan and transmitted them from there. And some of the allied correspondents in Saudi Arabia have detailed some of it to us. It's bloodthirsty stuff all right, but also there are calmer arguments, interpretations of the origins of the war and allied, especially American motives that will have to be met and answered when the war is over.

I recall a piece a 20-minute feature on the Columbia Broadcasting Systems' Sunday programme 60 Minutes. It came out I should say about a month or more after the invasion of Kuwait. It was an interview with a dozen or so young Iraqi women, educated women, all university students or teachers. They were all convinced, in fact, they thought the American interviewer was naive not to know, that the United States had contrived the invasion of Kuwait, that it was a first step in the American aim of colonising the countries of the Middle East. Well, as the man said, if you believe that you'll believe anything. The mind, our minds, groan at the wild thought that anyone in the United States would want to take on attacking and annexing any country big or tiny of that historic and historically beleaguered region.

Well, now perhaps after two weeks it would be helpful to review, to trace the effect on the people of the United States of all this reporting and this surcease from reporting. As I say, the progress of the war what we can take to be the hard facts are the same for all of us. But it may be worth reporting how the ups and downs have seemed to Americans. You can compare your own responses.

First then, for three days and nights there was the sense of being in a totally new kind of war, one thousand, two thousand bombing raids, more than in a month or more of the Second World War. And hardly a popgun response. This first phase was interpreted a little too hastily here, as proof that Saddam Hussein had never expected the United States to fight, and was stunned by the first impact of a high-technology war. Within days it became clear that he does not stun easily. We had no sooner announced that we had immobilised his air power than he starts firing of the Soviet Scud missiles, he attacks Israel. We are ourselves now slightly stunned. We say, yes, we have taken out all his fixed missile sites, but tracking down the moving vehicles that carry Scuds is going to be trickier. And just when we're feeling a little down over the estimate that he might have another 80 or 100 Scuds, there arrives on the scene the first hero of the war, the great interceptor, the Patriot. Then the Patriot missed and a residential suburb in Israel was badly hit.

Then the field marshal, bluff, shrewd commander in chief General Schwarzkopf says, "No, we have not established air superiority". Then we hear that Saddam may have been preparing for this war for eight years, that his crack air force is safe in huge underground shelters, which even Hitler didn't think of. Gradually our experts and pundits begin to say with no enthusiasm at all, that the war would not be over until some of those half million men in the desert had moved over the border and engaged Saddam's armies in a land war.

This is the prospect that has haunted and depressed Americans more than anything. It's been the ever present bogeyman since it seemed that Saddam would flout the United Nations' demands and there would be a war. And it was quickly met and pacified by General Powell who announced in midweek that the next aim was to bomb and isolate Saddam's armies and kill them before any allied troops would move in, in force. This was just about the shrewdest bit of comfort General Powell could have given us. For the fear that started with academics and pundits, was spreading down to the general population at the end of the second week. The fear that in time, after all the Star Wars magic, the war would come down to the immemorial horror of hand-to-hand combat. To the usual nightmare of the Battle of the Somme.

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