Gulf War censorship - 1 February 1991

At one time during the Second World War, when things were going very badly for Britain, Prime Minister Churchill was strongly denounced in the House, most of all, for seeming to ignore the widespread criticism of his conduct of the war. He was told at one point that if he thought he was being made the butt of a few enemies, he should just consult the opinion polls. A new institution – which, after some trial and error in the mid-'30s had become the barometer of public opinion that people turned to. Churchill answered this particular charge in the House.

It was September 1941. The war had been going for two years. France had long surrendered. Hitler was at the Channel ports. Britain was the lone, main adversary, except in the east where Hitler had gone into Russia. Churchill said, "Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature. I see it said, that leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture."

This response was greeted with laughter and applause. There were many men there who, like Churchill, were men of strong opinions, who did not like these new-fangled and, by now, well established, opinion polls. Because the polls had embarrassing habit of contradicting what you believed most people felt. And they still do. But nowadays no politician, especially one in power, dare ignore the polls. Indeed, every political party has its own pollster, so that if one of the opinion doctors on the outside forgets to feel your pulse and take your temperature once a week, you have your own man who'll attend to it right after breakfast.

The modern problem with polls has not been solved by any contemporary democratic leader I can think of, except, perhaps, Mrs Thatcher. Which is, should you act on your own convictions or on the evidence of the polls? In other words, do you give people what they think they ought to have, or what you know they'd like?

This morning, from the many polls that come at us, I saw one which says that, because of the war, 30% of Americans are missing sleep at nights or feeling anxious when they go to bed. Now the poll says, that while popular support for the president and the war is very high, at 77%, it has dropped four percentage points, and are you likely to go on supporting the war if it lasts several months? The leading question if ever there was one. But the answer seems to be from most people a resounding No.

It was Napoleon, I think, who said the morale of an army was three times more important than its "matériels", the weapons. To an American president today, and I'm sure Mr Bush and Mr Baker and General Schwarzkopf and General Powell are more aware of it than anybody, what matters most, after the morale of the army, is the morale of the people. The steadiness of public support for the war. There are two reasons, related I think, why this is truer than ever it's been during an American war. Vietnam. The president has said several times, "this is not going to be Vietnam". A very simple, but ambiguous phrase, which will be interpreted different ways by different people. From the comments of a whole troup of Congressmen, I gather that they take it as a firm promise of as short a war as possible, not the high-tech quickie it appeared to be during the first few days, but not a war getting denser and more indecisive down the years.

"This is not going to be Vietnam", however, can mean something to the military, for instance, it can mean, and has been quoted as meaning, "this time we're not going to let correspondents roam where they please and shove cameras and microphones up against embittered men in fox holes". The Pentagon believes that the lack of a firm, front-line censorship in Vietnam, the first war in which it was not imposed, contributed to the rising wave of protests at home, to what was eventually a tidal wave that washed Lyndon Johnson out of the White House and settled only when the United States was ready, in a word, to capitulate. How could this happen? How could random despatches about search- and-destroy missions, about bombed out villages, have such an immense effect on students and radicals all across the United States? The answer, I'm sure, is that Vietnam was the first televised war.

During the First World War, there were despatches about the general appearance of a field, a valley, covered with the dead. The enemy dead. Not until the war was over was there a powerful, angry literature about the enormity of the slaughter. And the grief. At the time we didn't see it. During Vietnam, we saw villages on fire, terrified old women, bleeding children, strafings from the air. We heard and saw, and this is the general's point, too much from our own men who were bitter, disaffected, blasphemous about the war, and being there.

The official fear that the same thing could happen again this time was, strangely, not mentioned during our six-week wait for the United Nations' ultimatum to expire. Or during the first week of the war. I'm perhaps morbidly aware of this because I brought it up on the eve of the war, and I have to say it's been an anxiety filed away at the back of my mind, for many years. Two years before the Vietnamese war was over, I did a whole talk imagining the Battle of the Somme in 1916 being put on television. One or two of our own television correspondents reporting it on the spot. And with no more censorship than they suffered in Vietnam. I won't go over the grisly story, except to say that it's inconceivable to me that with television the warring peoples of Europe, in particular the British and the Germans, would have stood it for a week. We're talking about a battle in which the British losses were between 50 and 60,000 in one day. When the battle was over, just over a quarter of a million men dead or wounded. Of course we had no idea of this scale of slaughter or the gruesome manner of it until the war was over.

Well, the conclusion of that whole talk, done over 20 years ago, was: "We, home in England, were never in touch, nor was Field Marshal Haig, with the feelings of the 100,000 men moving up into the graves of the 238,000. It raises the profound question of whether any nation, not under a dictatorship, can ever again fight a war with a steady spirit. And this, I believe, is something new under the sun."

That's a bleak thought. The stress is meant to fall on "with a steady spirit". Can the people's morale hold for very long under the emotional barrage of television? That's what concerns me now. The men and women who are fighting this war were in their cradles or shooting toy pistols when Vietnam ended. The regular army officers who served in Vietnam are either dead or they're colonels. And the colonels are generals. The young who served in Korea are now in their late 50s or early 60s. Most Americans have no memory of Korea. All my colleagues who as correspondents covered what I call the war, that is the Second World War are dead. No. All except two. What I'm saying is, that to most Americans, this is their first war. Of course none of them has the remotest memory of war fought on this, the home ground, unless there's a veteran around of, well, he'd have to be at least 145.

So this means that the very serious issue of battlefront censorship and the related issues of how best can a war be fairly reported, how much have the people a right to know beyond the demands of not imperilling one's own troops? These issues have come up now for the first time. And, since the dawn of the permissive age, which I take it came over the horizon in the early '60s, I don't think we need a poll to tell us that a sizeable majority of Americans believes it has a right to know everything about the way the war's going, the good and the bad, the awful, the worst, and that censorship should be concerned only with revealing nothing that might endanger or own forces or, otherwise, help the enemy.

I doubt that too many people have thought that through. How about pictures of bombers or tanks, clogged with sand, helping the enemy? What is the argument of the correspondents who already complain that the Pentagon and the field commanders are already exercising unduly rigid censorship? These lively protests have come out in several military press conferences and are gaining force in television and newspaper commentary.

Mainly, the complaint is that correspondents cannot go off in search of their own story. That all field stories are written by a chosen pool of correspondents and, as before, must be vetted by field headquarters. All pictures we see are clearly marked as approved by US military/British military and the very vivid pictures we get out of Iraq by Iraqi censors. They are mostly horrendous pictures of bombed out rows of small houses. Saddam Hussein had the wit, having expelled all other allied correspondents, to invite the correspondent and the crew from Atlanta, from CNN, the station the whole world watches, to stay and be his guests and show to us what he pleases. Mr Hussein may think that by so doing, he's very cunningly assisting the effort of debauching American morale but Mr Arnett, CNN's Vietnam veteran is no dupe. By showing us only what Saddam wants us to see, we immediately see in our mind's eye, everything he doesn't want us to see, including the destruction, after 20,000 missions, of any Iraqi military target whatsoever.

Whether what is not seen will occur also to the millions of Arab viewers is another question. A poll of the Arab nations, at the moment, on our side, would be interesting.

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