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  Written 4:10 pm Feb 22, 1991 by mideastdesk in cdp:mideast.forum 

   Beat the Devil 

   THE PRESS AND THE 'JUST WAR'
   by Alexander Cockburn 
   from The Nation, 2/18 


  In Iraq's case the concept of bombing as an essentially wholesome liaison 
between morality and Western technological prowess goes back to 1919, when 
the Royal Air Force asked Winston Churchill for permission to use chemical 
weapons "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." Churchill, then in 
the War Office, rejected timid naysayers. "I do not understand this 
squeamishness about the use of gas," he wrote. " I am strongly in favour of 
using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [among whom he counted 
Bolsheviks, gas being used in the war of intervention].... It is not 
necessary to use only the most deadly gasses; gasses can be used which would 
cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would 
leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected." Chemical 
weapons, Churchill concluded, represent "the application of Western science 
to modern warfare.... We cannot in any circumstance acquiesce in the 
non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy 
termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier." Journalism 
annuls history, never more so than in war, where it promotes a depthless 
present, most tragicomically in television "coverage," the reportersQactors 
in factQ having mostly as little relationship to reality as the ~reek chorus 
in the Agamemnon debating among themselves what Clytemnestra is up to ("Is 
that a noise I hear?") as she hacks the King to death.  

  Febrile discussion of the minutiae of war coverageQhow much censorship in 
Riyadh, how much lying in the Pentagon briefing roomQitself acts as a form 
of censorship, for it too avoids history.  

  From Churchill's view that gas bombs might, if properly applied, be merely 
"inconvenient" to their targets, it is but a short jump to today's hearty 
applause for Tomahawks and laser-guided bombs as they descend upon Iraq, 
overture to tomorrow's calls for understanding and approval when it becomes 
necessary to use nuclear weapons to overwhelm Iraqi intransigence. The U.S. 
is already talking about using "nonlethal" riot gas, as a humanitarian 
measure.  

  "This is, in part, a didactic war," the columnist George Will announced as 
American bombers commenced the task of reverting Iraq's economy to the 
nineteenth century. In Will's view, the crime of Iraq ("a brittle, 
over-reaching tinpot country") lay in "transgressing values most clearly 
enunciated by the United States, the symbol of modern political values and 
cultural modernity"; and "the hope" is that the war will "pry parts of 
Arabia into participation in the modernity that is capable of such 
technological prowess and moral purpose. Both that prowess and that purpose 
derive from freedom.... The mighty U.S. sword guarantees the pre-eminence of 
the American pen." Similarly transported by claims of unerring accuracy in 
the West's bombardments, Clifford Longley wrote in The Times of London, 
"Developments in the technology of war alter the morality of war.  

  The latest British and American weapons used in the Gulf seem to have new 
properties both militarily and morally. War is at last becoming more 'user 
friendly.' " The British press repays study, since it relates robustly what 
is often tactfully elided on the other side of the Atlantic by the 
inheritors of the white man's burden. In The Daily Telegraph John Keegan, 
military historian and "defense editor," ruminated comfortably that "this is 
the strangest part of this strange war. Never before has a population lived 
in something close to immunity from enemy attack while everything that makes 
everyday life tolerable is destroyed about its ears." 

  Of course the bombs and missiles were striking civilians and the "culture" 
Bush presumes to spare, but by this time the West's press, eased by the 
thought of "accuracy" and "precision," was ceasing to take much of an 
interest in what exactly the West's commanders might be coming to consider a 
military asset. In the end everything is a military asset, and so the 
"degrading" and "denial" of water (pumping stations, irrigation, etc.), 
cultivation, roads, bus terminals and other "strategic assets" begins.  

  Despite Churchill's urgings that the R.A.F. use mustard gas, technological 
problems prevented such deliveries, but by 1920 the British Army was using 
gas shells in Iraq "with excellent moral effect." High explosives 
("conventional weapons") were used when villages did not pay their taxes. 
The R.A.F. then began dropping bombs with delayed-action fuses (as is now 
being done on Iraqi runways). Since village children were already playing 
with dud bombs, one senior officer protested that the result would be 
"blowing a lot of children to pieces." What would be called in today's press 
briefings "collateral damage" (dead and mutilated children) did occur 
because the R.A.F. dropped these bombs to stop tribesmen from working their 
fields after dark (our friend "strategic assets" again).  

  Prominent among the R.A.F. officers thus engaged was Arthur Harris, who 
later directed the British bomber offensive against Germany in World War II, 
most notoriously against Dresden. (Churchill, by the way, was eager to 
gas-bomb German cities.) In the London Sunday Times last week, just as the 
hosannas to "smart weapons" and the just war were rising to their peak, a 
man called Williams wrote in from Nottingham to comment on the Dresden 
bombing. He said he'd been a navigator in the attack: "We were told it was 
to be a 'panic' raid, that the market-place would be full of refugees 
streaming in from the east, and that our aiming point would be the market 
square. We had no choice. We bombed as instructed and killed, I would 
estimate, nearly 100,000 people (we will never know), mainly women and 
children. I was horrified when we learned later what we had done and even 
more horrified when we were later filmed at a mock propaganda briefing when 
the original briefing instructions were reversed; but I cannot say more, as 
I would be in trouble under the official secrets act. We were told the raid 
would 'put the fear of God up Jerry' and that it would shorten the war. It 
didn't." 

  Back in 1923 one of the R.A.F.'s men, Air Commodore Lionel Charlton, 
resigned his position as senior staff officer in Iraq after he visited a 
hospital in Diwaniya and saw victims of the bombing. Twenty-two years later 
navigator Williams reacted to the explicit instruction to bomb a marketplace 
full of refugees with the thought, as he now recalls it, that "we had no 
choice." Today, no one except the recipients of their lethal cargoes 
conceives of a culpable linkage between the man pressing the bomb-release 
button or the missile trigger and the consequential victims.  

  The 'Unavoidable' War 

  The war is "just," Bush declared to Congress, and he had been preceded to 
this moral eminence by the doyen of liberal commentators, Anthony Lewis, 
who, after nine days of bombing, reassured his readers, "It is a just war." 
Set in the depthless present, amid fake-perspective murals of a bogus past, 
journalism in times of war is mostly moral persuasion of the citizenry that 
the war is fought by decent people for honorable objectives. The claim that 
war against Iraq is just followed from the premise that it was 
"unavoidable," which in turn followed from the claim that neither had Saddam 
Hussein shown the slightest flexibility in heeding the calls of the United 
Nations, nor were economic sanctions showing signs of being successful in 
forcing him to do so.  

  With virtually no exception the press in both the United States and 
Britain omitted all report, let alone critical discussion, of Iraq's 
negotiating positions, as publicly proclaimed on August 12, as communicated 
to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later that month, and as 
relayed to the White House through Yugoslav emissaries in the Non-Aligned 
Movement in late December. As regards the August 12 negotiating position 
setting forth the link between Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and other 
occupations and territorial disputes in the region, The Financial Times 
declared in an editorial that it was not without substance. The American 
press, in a few instances, merely sketched its terms in inconspicuous 
stories. The December overture was reported only by Knut Royce in Newsday, 
who had in August disclosed another negotiating offer relayed to the White 
House. Although the three known positions varied in detail, they were 
similar in overall thrust: regional linkage in the form of a conference on 
security and territorial disputes in the Middle East; mutual withdrawal of 
Iraqi troops from Kuwait and of the U.S.-led forces from Saudi Arabia; 
negotiated removal of weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological, 
nuclear-from the region.  

  At no point did those offers make the slightest impact on public 
discussion of the pros and cons of going to war, even though it was widely 
acknowledged that war would be a bloody and costly affair. The effortless 
victory of the Bush Administration and its British lieutenant in preparing 
the ground for a "just war" was confirmed by the contemptuous welcome given 
the French initiative of January 14 and 15. No matter that the French 
proffered it for the most cynical of motives, or that Iraq by that time was, 
with some reason given the Geneva encounter between Aziz and Baker, hostile 
to such overtures. The French proposal merely stated that Iraq should 
withdraw from Kuwait, adding the language of a codicil appended to a 
resolution adopted by the U.N. Security Council in December. That codicil, 
whose language the United States had not permitted in the resolution itself, 
declared the need for a regional conference at an appropriate time. Such was 
the infamous French initiative greeted with derision by politicians and 
commentators alike. Among the innumerable lies in Bush's State of the Union 
Address, none was more egregious than his assertion that he had "tried every 
diplomatic avenue to avoid war." He even invoked the efforts of Algerian 
President Bendjedid, though it was the U.S. that pressured Saudi Arabia to 
refuse to see him, thus sinking his initiative.  

  There has been much talk about the "world community" and its unity against 
Mesopotamian evil; far less about the near total isolation of those 
countries wholeheartedly for war, "a tiny minority in the world," as The 
Financial Times frankly conceded on January 19. Instead of any useful report 
on this isolation, the press embarked in earnest on the publication of war 
scenarios, designed to soften up public opinion for mass murder. Many of 
those, including exuberant prophecies of a three-day conflict, were 
overweening and sarcastic about the fiber of the Iraqi fighting man. The 
Observer's correspondent Colin Smith reported from Saudi Arabia on January 
13 that "a few weeks ago, a middle-ranking British officer, who will be in 
the thick of the fighting if war comes, confided to me that he thought their 
main problem would be accepting the surrender of thousands of Iraqi 
prisoners.... 'What we're going to have to do is give them a boiled sweet 
and tell them to head south.' " 

  While opinion-formers and retired military officers expounded their 
theories with relish, men of God were asked to give the just war the luster 
of ecclesiastical sanction. In the United States most prominent church folk 
denounced the impending war, with predictable exceptions such as Bernard 
Cardinal Law, whose outlook can be gauged from his enthusiastic support for 
the proposed canonization of Queen Isabella of Spain, founder of the 
Inquisition, scourge of Islam and Jewry, patroness of Christopher Columbus. 
In Britain the prelates were more accommodating. The Archbishop of 
Canterbury, Robert Runcie, commended the just war to his congregation, 
assuring it that the "harsh reality of human history is that the use of 
force has been caused as much by human virtues ... as it has been by ... 
wickedness." 

  National history conditions moral posture. The Catholic Primate of All 
Ireland, Dr. Cahal Daly, declared that the principle of the "just war" is 
not applicable, that "we begin to talk of 'surgical strikes' and we forget 
about the gore and the grime and the mangled bodies on the ground." The Pope 
similarly expressed his opposition to war.  

  The only major Western newspaper I know of that took a clear moral 
position against war was the Dublin Sunday Tribune-Ireland's only serious 
Sunday paper-and if its terms of reference and citation seem a trifle 
unusual we should realize therefrom how degraded conventional editorial 
discussion has come to be, weighing the pros and cons of mass killing in the 
"national interest" with the same aplomb as Churchill. In its January 20 
edition, the Tribune began by quoting the letter of an Irish woman 
describing the accidental death, falling while doing acrobatics on a bridge 
outside Dublin, of her daughter, and then said: 

  'That same morning [as Julie died] hundreds, maybe thousands ... of 
mothers or fathers in Iraq were heartbroken because their ... Julies had 
been killed, not through some action of their own but by bombs dropped from 
the air by Allied forces. This is the reality of this war in the Gulf. It is 
inflicting the most terrible physical and emotional pain on people who are 
entirely innocent.... It is no use saying that these people are not the 
intended victims. The fact is that the nature of the bombing that is now 
undertaken quite clearly has as a foreseeable consequence the infliction of 
terrible harm on people who are entirely innocent. (The Catholic doctrine of 
double effect, whereby an action is all right if the intention is not 
improper even though the clearly foreseeable consequence may be absolutely 
improper, is an unfortunate piece of Augustinian sophistry which has 
corrupted moral debate.) ... The contention that war was unavoidable is an 
abuse of language as well as of sensibility. War was absolutely avoidable by 
the Allies choosing simply not to inflict war.... The Allied forces ... have 
tried hard to assure the world that "everything possible is being done to 
avoid civilian casualties." Again, this does violence to language. Clearly 
everything possible is not being done to avoid civilian casualties, for 
"everything possible" would include the avoidance of the bombing of Baghdad 
for instance.' 

  'At Peace With Himself' 

  With the first missile that he unleashed upon Iraq the American President 
placed himself in moral symmetry with his Iraqi opposite number. Saddam 
Hussein declared that U.N. resolutions and international commitments pledged 
across the space of many years on the matter of the territories seized and 
occupied by Israel had been futile, and that force of arms had been his only 
recourse.  George Bush, permitting himself a shorter span for his patience 
to expire (it seems clear enough that he resolved upon war at least as early 
as last September and probably by the first week in August), declared the 
same. To achieve an exact equivalence Saddam Hussein would have to be 
equipped with "smart," and therefore moral, weapons such as those discharged 
upon Iraq with heavy loss of life, rather than the Scuds, which by the end 
of the first week of the war had done far less damage than is wrought by 
Israeli troops in a busy day on the West Bank.  

  One could read with sympathy accounts by Israelis of the horror of sitting 
in sealed rooms wearing gas masks while Palestinians cheered. But few 
journalists and no Israelis quoted gave a thought for Palestinians closeted 
in their homes day after day under rigorous curfew, tear-gassed, tortured in 
prisons, their homes demolished by bulldozers with far greater efficiency 
and no public uproar. Since the intifada began, according to the excellent 
Palestine Human Rights Information Center, some 900 Palestinians have died, 
88 from gassing;1,726 homes have been destroyed.* 

  No such moral symmetries and asymmetries have disturbed the joy of 
prominent Western commentators. Jim Hoagland, who has rapidly established 
himself as one of the silliest and most pompous columnists in the 
English-speaking world, announced to the readers of The Washington Post: 

  'War is establishing an American credibility in the Middle East that 
diplomacy alone failed to achieve. A week of war has established a position 
of American even-handedness and involvement absent from two decades of the 
"peace process." ... There could be no clearer sign that Desert Storm is 
proceeding well.' 

  Meanwhile, the State Department was issuing travel advisories for U.S.  
citizens to avoid more or less every acre of the Muslim world; and, in a 
coup de main virtually unparalleled in the history of military and 
diplomatic endeavor, an American President was uniting the populations of 
North Africa, the Levant, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Malaysia and 
the Philippines in execration of his country's actions.  

  In Baghdad itself, the bombing speedily united the populace behind a 
President many had loathed. My brother Patrick, in the al-Rashid Hotel, 
noticed the change after the firstdays of bombardment. "Perhaps," he later 
wrote in The Independent, "Iraq in 1991 will see a repeat of the bombing 
campaigns against Britain in 1940-1, Germany in 1942-5, Vietnam in 1964-75 
and Lebanon in 1982-4. In each case air power appeared attractive as a way 
to maximise leverage on the enemy while minimising one's own casualties. 
There is no doubt that being bombed is frightening, but it is a threat so 
general in its application that it creates more enemies than it intimidates. 
On Wednesday, many Iraqis would openly say that going into Kuwait was 
Saddam's business, not theirs. By the weekend it was almost impossible to 
meet anybody who did not feel that Iraq would, and should fight." 

  A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those 
waging it, none more than the illusion of the Christian leaders of the West 
that the enemy is only Saddam Hussein, that all his troops are, so to speak, 
chained to their machine guns as were-in the legend of World War I 
propagandists-the Germans in their trenches. In the plans of the Western 
commanders and the articles by their courtiers in the press there is an 
emptiness where there should be people; there are no Iraqis or Kurds or 
Turkomans, which is why it will- should the need emerge-be no great moral 
agony to drop a weapon of mass destruction on them, thus far outstripping 
Saddam Hussein in threat and deed.  

  When public rhetoric (the intention had always been there) of the Western 
coalition shifted from eviction of Iraq from Kuwait to the demolition of 
Iraq as a modern society and the trial and execution of its leader, there 
was no great uproar (except throughout the entire Arab and Muslim world, 
where the clamor was urgent enough to compel the United States to backtrack, 
even-in consort with the Soviet Union-to hint at linkage). From his 
dignified eminence as ex officio State Department official, Thomas Friedman 
of The New York Times wrote calmly that "historians may question whether it 
was ever right for the Bush Administration to make the 'liberation of 
Kuwait' a prime war aim instead of focusing exclusively on dismantling 
Iraq's offensive capabilities [i.e., bombing the country into the Middle 
Ages], which, after all, were the real threat to stability in the gulf and 
therefore the real threat to U.S.  interests." 

  So much for the just war. Christendom is back where it started in 1919, 
calculating the "moral effect" of high explosives and gas shells on the 
wogs.  The parallels are so exact as to be haunting, as can be learned from 
David Omissi's absorbing history, A ir Power and Colonial Control 
(Manchester University Press, 1990). Churchill, desperate to revive his own 
political fortunes, was eager to secure British domination of the 
Mesopotamian oilfields. The nascent Royal Air Force was anxious to prove its 
worth and thus secure a larger slice of the arms budget from the army and 
navy. The British government, fearful of impending economic depression, 
wanted colonial control on the cheap, in terms of both cash and lives. In 
Omissi's words, "The reduction of the garrison, the elevation of Faisal [the 
British puppet installed in Baghdad as King of Iraq], the payment of 
subsidies to Arab leaders and the purchase of French acquiescence were all 
aspects of a single strategy of indirect rule intended to reduce the costs 
of imperialism in Iraq. Its ultimate success depended on air control." And 
thus the tribesmen, Kurds and Arabs, began to receive the bombs; thus too 
was Iraq saved for the British oilmen and tax collectors from renewed 
Ottoman appetites.  

  "Words," John Donne wrote in a letter, "are our subtillest and delicatest 
outward creatures, being composed of thoughts and breath." So let us close 
with the words of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, from The Sunday Telegraph for 
January 20; 

  'In is beginning to look as if Saddam Hussein has given the West a chance 
once again to establish its unchallengeable preeminence in a manner 
impregnable at once to mral obloquy and military resistance. Not only will 
our arms have prevailed in a most spectacular fashion. So also wil our 
ideas. Nothing is ever forever. Sooner or later the Third World will throw 
up other challenges. But if the gulf war ends as it has begun, there can be 
no doubt who are the masters now -- at any rate for another generation.We 
have the laser beams and they have not. And the we who matter are not the 
Germans or the Japanese or the Russians but the Americans. Happy days are 
here again. Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive; but to be an old 
reactionary is very heaven.' 

  As he was leaving Baghdad on the twelve-hour drive to the Jordanian 
border, my brother passed the central post office, half demolished by bombs. 
Its destruction had been held up as an example of the rpecision of the 
West's militrary technology. Looking at it from the point of view of an 
Iraqi, or an Arab, or a person in the Third World, my brother told me later, 
while he preparted to return ot Baghdad on January 29 with a small group of 
journalists, that he was reminded of the general post office in Dublin, 
bombarded with great precision by tghe British in 1916 as they suppressed 
the Easter rising. to the British it was just another post office...Thus had 
th West given Saddam Hussein his just war.  

  *The P H.R l.C.'s finances have been a casualty of war and recession. To 
keep its fieldworkers in the occupied territories and to continue its work 
here the organization needs your help. Send contributions to 4753 North 
Broadway, Suite 930, Chicago IL 60640 or call (312) 271- 4492.  


  Alexander Cockburn; Beat the Devil - The Press and the 'Just War'; The 
Nation magazine/The Nation Co., Inc., (c) 1991 

  The Nation, $44 per year (47 issues), 72 Fifth Avenue, Box P49, New York, 
NY 10011 

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