BOOK EXCERPT
The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case, the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition has been hardcore jihadi fighters.
Whatever the real issues at stake, the interventions have been presented by politicians as primarily humanitarian, in support of popular forces against dictators and police states. Despite apparent military successes, in none of these cases have the local opposition and their backers succeeded in consolidating power or establishing stable states.
But there is another similarity that connects the four conflicts: More than most armed struggles, they have all been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television and radio journalists played a central role.
In every war, there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns, the outside world has been left with misconceptions even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.
In 2001, reports of the Afghan war gave the impression that the Taliban had been beaten decisively, even though there had been very little fighting. In 2003, there was a belief in the West that Saddam Hussein’s forces had been crushed when in fact the Iraqi army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home.
In Libya in 2011, the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, who was mostly brought down by NATO air strikes. In Syria in 2011 and 2012, foreign leaders and journalists repeatedly and vainly predicted the imminent defeat of Bashar al-Assad. These misperceptions explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune.
New recruits on the march in an ISIS video
The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001, I was able to drive, nervously but safely, from Kabul to Kandahar. But when I tried to make the same journey in 2011, I could go no farther south on the main road than the last police station on the outskirts of Kabul.
In Tripoli two years ago, hotels were filled to capacity with journalists covering Gadhafi’s fall and the triumph of the rebel militias. But state authority still hasn’t been restored there. In the summer of 2013, Libya almost stopped exporting oil because the main ports on the Mediterranean had been seized as a result of a mutiny among militiamen. The prime minister, Ali Zeidan, threatened to bomb “from the air and the sea” the oil tankers the militiamen were using to sell oil on the black market. Soon Zeidan himself was forced to flee the country.
Libya’s descent into anarchy was scarcely covered by the international media. They had long since moved on to Syria, and more recently to Egypt. Iraq, home a few years ago to so many foreign news bureaus, has also dropped off the media map, although up to a thousand Iraqis are killed each month, mostly as a result of the bombing of civilian targets. When it rained for a few days in Baghdad in January, the sewer system, supposedly restored at a cost of $7 billion, couldn’t cope: Some streets were knee-deep in dirty water and sewage.
In Syria, many opposition fighters who had fought heroically to defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves.
It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term “war reporter,” though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat.
Irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-and-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but only that it requires interpretation.
Destroyed Iraqi tank, 2003 (photo: US Army)
In 2003, television showed columns of Iraqi tanks smashed and on fire after US air strikes on the main highway north of Baghdad. If it hadn’t been for the desert background, viewers could have been watching pictures of the defeated German army in Normandy in 1944. But I climbed into some of the tanks and could see that they had been abandoned long before they were hit. This mattered because it showed that the Iraqi army wasn’t prepared to fight and die for Saddam.
It also pointed to the likely future of the allied occupation. Iraqi soldiers, who didn’t see themselves as having been defeated, expected to keep their jobs in post-Saddam Iraq, and were enraged when the Americans dissolved their army. Well-trained officers flooded into the resistance, with devastating consequences for the occupying forces: A year later, the Americans controlled only islands of territory in Iraq.
In one respect, war reporting is easier than other types of journalism: The melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to a camera with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him knows his report will feature prominently in any newscast. “If it bleeds, it leads” is an old American media adage. The drama of battle inevitably dominates the news, but is oversimplified if only part of what is happening is disclosed.
These oversimplifications were especially stark and deceptive in Afghanistan and Iraq, when they dovetailed with political propaganda that demonized first the Taliban and later Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate. They helped cast the conflict in black and white, as a struggle between good and evil, something that was particularly easy in the US amidst the hysterical atmosphere following 9/11. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition in these countries were simply ignored.
By 2011, the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to journalists in Baghdad and Kabul, if not necessarily to their editors in London and New York. But by then, the reporting of the wars in Libya and Syria was demonstrating a different, though equally potent, form of naïveté.
A version of the spirit of 1968 prevailed: Antagonisms that predated the Arab Spring were suddenly said to be obsolete; a brave new world was being created at hectic speed. Commentators optimistically suggested that, in the age of satellite television and the Internet, traditional forms of repression—censorship, imprisonment, torture, and execution—could no longer secure a police state’s power; they might even be counterproductive. State control of information and communication had been subverted by blogs and mobile phones; YouTube provided the means to expose, in the most graphic and immediate way, the crimes and violence of security forces.
In March 2011, mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds marginally in favor of the opposition, but not enough to prevent counterrevolution, as the military coup in Egypt on July 3, 2013, underscored. The initial success of street demonstrations led to overconfidence and excessive reliance on spontaneous action; the need for leadership, organization, unity and policies that amounted to more than a vague humanitarian agenda all went by the wayside.
History, including the histories of their own countries, had little to teach this generation of radicals and would-be revolutionaries. They drew no lessons from what had happened when Nasser seized power in Egypt in 1952, and didn’t ask whether the Arab uprisings of 2011 might have parallels with the European revolutions of 1848, easy victories that were swiftly reversed.
Many members of the intelligentsia in Libya and Syria seemed to live and think within the echo chamber of the Internet. Few expressed practical ideas about the way forward. Conviction that a toxic government is the root of all evil is the public position of most oppositions, but it is dangerous to trust one’s own propaganda.
The Iraqi opposition genuinely believed that Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic problems stemmed from Saddam, and that once he was gone, all would be well. The opposition in Libya and Syria believed that the regimes of Gadhafi and Assad were so demonstrably bad that it was counterrevolutionary to question whether what came after them would be better.
Foreign reporters have by and large shared these opinions. I recall mentioning some of the failings of the Libyan militiamen to a Western journalist: “Just remember who the good guys are,” she replied reprovingly.
Good guys they may have been, but there was something troubling about the ease with which oppositionists provided media-friendly locations, whether in Tahrir Square or at the frontlines in Libya. Protesters in Benghazi would hold up placards written in perfect English, which they often could not read themselves, for the benefit of television viewers.
At Ajdabiya, two hours’ drive along the main coast road south of Benghazi, foreign journalists often outnumbered opposition fighters, and cameramen had to maneuver their correspondents so the predominance of the press wasn’t evident to their audience. The main danger there was being run over by a pickup truck fitted with a heavy machine gun: The drivers often panicked when a shell exploded in the distance.
The Libyan militiamen were effective when they were fighting for their own cities and towns, but without an air umbrella they wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks. Media focus on colorful skirmishes diverted attention from the central fact that Gadhafi was overthrown by military intervention on the part of the US, Britain and France.
There is nothing surprising about all this. Public appearances by Western leaders with smiling children or cheering soldiers are invariably contrived to show them in a sympathetic light. Why shouldn’t Arab rebels have the same public relations skills?
Patrick Cockburn is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, and previously wrote for the Financial Times. This piece is excerpted from his book The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising, available from OR Books.
