Page 216 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 195

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
the war zone, seeing and reporting what they liked. Consequently, George
Bush’s first military crisis as President, the invasion of Panama, was
characterised by the same approach to information management.
When US troops entered Panama in search of the fugitive dictator Manuel
Noriega, they too were free of the constraining influence of the independent
media. Martha Gellhorn’s account of the events in Panama reveals the extent
of civilian casualties in the effort to apprehend Noriega and suggests that
many of them were unnecessary (1990). At the time, American and inter-
national public opinion was simply not told of these facts, being encouraged
to believe that the operation had been relatively bloodless. When the true
nature of the invasion began to emerge, media and public attention had
moved on to other matters.
Like the Falklands War for Britain, the invasions of Grenada and Panama
were, from the US military’s point of view, relatively minor conflicts.
Although important events in shaping the fortunes of domestic political
actors (hence the attention devoted by the authorities to media management)
they were in no sense wars of national survival. The Gulf War of 1990–91,
on the other hand, while still far short of ‘total war’, was a major conflict,
involving several countries, hundreds of thousands of troops and some of the
largest military manoeuvres in history. Its pursuit and outcome were matters
of intense international concern, with consequences for the global economy
and the delicate balance of power in the Middle East. The decline and
changed ideological nature of the Soviet Union meant that the Gulf conflict
was unlikely ever to have become a ‘world war’ as that term is commonly
understood, but there is no doubt that it represented an extremely dangerous
moment for the Middle East, and the international community as a whole.
The major protagonists in the conflict – the US, Britain, Iraq, and
Kuwait – all pursued vigorous media management campaigns. For Britain
and the US, military public relations policy was strongly influenced by the
experiences of the smaller 1980s conflicts discussed above. This resulted in
a policy of minimising journalistic access to the fighting, while maximising
official control of those images which did emerge.
The objectives of the policy were, first, military, in so far as ‘the news
media can be a useful tool, or even a weapon, in prosecuting a war psycho-
logically, so that the operators don’t have to use their more severe weapons’
(Arthur Humphries, quoted in Macarthur, 1992, p. 145). They were also
political, in that the populations of the countries in the anti-Iraq alliance
had to be convinced of the justness of the coming conflict, with its unpre-
dictable and potentially enormous consequences. This task was of course
complicated by the fact that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been the friend of
the West for most of the 1980s, and had been in receipt of sophisticated
military equipment from Britain, France and other countries in the pursuit
of its war with Iran. Now that Iraq was the enemy, explanations were
required before a military solution to the invasion of Kuwait could be

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