TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020491/0204990.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.7 KB | 155 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 16

The Fog Of War


As Saddam forces battered POWs to lie on Iraqi TV and the allies
struggle to control the flood of news, the world is left
unsure of exactly what is happening

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Stanley W. Cloud/Washington and
James Wilde/Amman


    Where was the truth? What had been blasted?

    The Iraqis said the allied bombs had demolished a factory
in Baghdad devoted to making formula for infants. A helpful
sign in the ruins identified the place in Arabic and English:
BABY MILK FACTORY.

    It was one of Saddam Hussein's holograms projected for the
world audience, and it caught a flavor of the war -- the
shameless and the sinister commingled, a little sham of baby's
milk spilled in the Mother of Battles.

    The scene also contained a spooky suggestion of the stakes
involved, the bracketing of infants and apocalypse. The
Americans said the plant they destroyed had manufactured
weapons of biological warfare. Someone was lying.

    "The first casualty when war comes is truth," said Senator
Hiram Johnson in 1917. But that is too simple a metaphor for
what is happening in the first war of the age of global
information. Truth and elaborate lies, hard fact and
hallucination, have become central motifs in the gulf. A war
of words and images has taken up a life of its own, parallel
to the one in the sand.

    A strange metaphysic has gone to work. The truth, as if in
honor of the war's complexity and its world audience, has
transformed itself into a sort of edgy master of disguises. It
bursts forth in a thousand moral costumes. It gesticulates
insanely, and exhales wild rhetoric, yet possesses nonetheless
a true if dangerous life of its own. It plays elaborate lights
across the desert.

    In Egypt the wildest rumors have credence partly because few
trust the state-run media. President Hosni Mubarak found it
necessary to show himself in public to prove he had not been
assassinated by pro-Iraqi zealots. A Turkish official said the
government was withholding information about military plans in
order to ensure its citizens' "peace of mind."

    Each side had its own style of working the theme. Allied
POWs were paraded in front of Iraqi television cameras. The
men, bruised, dazed, possibly drugged, performed a charade that
was the moral equivalent of the milk factory, yet there were
numerous Arabs who said, "This is Bush's shame. His own pilots
condemn the war."

    In Saddam's world, falsehood was often propelled by fear,
and sometimes worked in subtle ways. Saddam's aides sometimes
withhold critical information about the war from him because
they are afraid of telling him the truth.

    Napoleon once remarked, "The ancients had a great advantage
over us in that their armies are not trailed by a second army
of pen pushers." The armies in the gulf are trailed by pen
pushers, camera lenses, microphones, satellites, the eyes of
the world.

    The Pentagon and the Bush Administration have come close to
achieving their goal of forcing journalists -- and the public
-- to rely solely on the information supplied by briefers or
gathered in pool interviews in the field. Doing away with
independent reporting has been the Pentagon's goal ever since
Vietnam. The military has set up a system of media pools to
cover the initial stages of the operation, controlling
reporters' movements and their access to sources. The system
works brilliantly from the Pentagon's point of view, but it has
subverted the coverage of the war and given it a dismal, canned
quality.

    In the midst of all the spectacle, items of honest truth
have died of manipulation and censorship. The drama in the gulf
commands eerie and unprecedented high-tech global attention,
and yet the volume of real information about the conduct of the
war is small. The public does not know how effective the allied
strikes against Iraq have been, for example, or how heavy the
civilian casualties may have been. Clausewitz's "fog of war"
-- a phrase endlessly repeated these days -- has become a
bright electrical cloud of unknowing.

    Still, as White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater
acknowledged, "We have a tightrope to walk" -- between
unrealistic public expectations of victory in a matter of days
and an anxious skepticism about whether the U.S. is going to
win at all. Says a senior White House official: "People see a
few films of a missile striking a building where it's
completely precise, and they say, `If it's going so well, why
isn't the war over?'" Another senior official says, "In this
video-game war, we have been so successful so far that people
may really be shocked if Saddam gets off an Exocet and sinks
one of our ships or pulls some other big surprise." The
parallel universes of the enemies -- that of the alliance and
that of Saddam Hussein -- have their own elaborate reality and
logic. Each makes some sense on its own terms, each is
performing its role in collision with the other before the eyes
of the world. Each is persuasive to itself and alien to the
other. One side's truth is the other's falsehood. A headline in
Al-Rai, Jordan's largest-circulation daily, stated last week,
WE [Arabs] FIGHT WITH THE SWORD OF GOD. THE U.S. FIGHTS WITH
THE SWORD OF SATAN.

    The Arabic language, with its splendors, can create a
sometimes dangerous political world. A Palestinian academic in
the West Bank city of Nablus says, "The absence of democracy
and freedom of expression leads the Arab to escape reality on
the horse of rhetoric." Words create and manipulate truth.

    Saddam Hussein's armies last week seemed to be enacting a
travesty of the Arab motif of veiling and concealment. In the
Arab world, women often veil themselves not because they are
punished or shamed but because women, who produce life, must
be protected, as a plant in the desert might be. Houses turn
inward, the living quarters hidden. The true treasures are
concealed. Saddam similarly appeared -- or wished to appear --
to be masking his strength, hiding it in bunkers in the sand.

    In war, the world goes into chaotic motion, becomes a verb
and not a collection of nouns. Reality blurs. Generals and
Presidents need a clear eye for the truth. But the home front
and the troops in the line are sustained less by truth than by
emotion (propaganda, fang baring, plumage display) and their
own myth. Saddam Hussein knows this and makes a fairly gaudy
display of mystique. The leaders of the coalition arrayed
against Saddam have their idealism and materialism in uneasy
alignment, pretty much without illusions. The trouble is that
they do not always trust their own people with the truth.