Page 221 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

chosen to challenge the strategic interests of the US and its allies by
threatening Arab oil reserves.
While many questioned the allies’ motivations for going to war
with Iraq, once it had begun there were few in the West prepared to
take Hussein’s side. Iraq was not Vietnam, or Nicaragua, a fact
reflected in the media’s enthusiastic adoption of the allies’ perspective
on events. As Bruce Cummings observes of media coverage: ‘the Gulf
War sequence reversed Vietnam: whereas television served [US] state
policy in the first phase of the war and questioned it in the second
(after Tet), Gulf coverage interrogated the war in the months before
Desert Storm, and served the state once the storm broke’ (1992,
p.103).
There was, in short, an exceptionally high degree of consensus
around the legitimacy of allied war aims, shared even by those who
criticised the sanitisation and voluntary censorship of coverage
exhibited by the main media. To an extent not seen since the Second
World War, operation Desert Storm was viewed as a ‘just’ war.
The allies’ carefully controlled account of the conflict was not
entirely unchallenged, however. Earlier we noted that throughout
the conflict there were Western journalists present in the Iraqi
capital, Baghdad. CNN’s Peter Arnett, in particular, provided
information which, if not hostile to the allies’ cause, frequently
contradicted the public relations emanating from Riyadh. When,
for example, US bombs destroyed an air-raid shelter in Baghdad,
killing hundreds of civilians and shattering the concept of a ‘clean’
war, CNN and other Western television organisations were present
to film the aftermath, disseminating images of death and destruction
to the global audience. Hussein’s administration of course welcomed
such coverage, and tolerated the presence of Western journalists in
Baghdad in the belief that they could, by their focus on civilian
casualties, cause greater damage to the allies’ military effort than
to Iraq’s. Fortunately for the Iraqis (if not for Hussein) civilian
casualties were low, given the ferocity of the allies’ bombing, and
the effort to have Iraq portrayed as the wronged party was
unsuccessful. Eventually, most of the Western journalists were
expelled from the country, with the exception of CNN and a handful
of other organisations.
Hussein also used Western media to pursue a more ‘pro-active’
public relations campaign. Before hostilities began Hussein was filmed
greeting the foreigners who had been trapped in Kuwait by his
invasion. Most notoriously, he attempted to use British children to
portray himself as a kindly ‘Uncle Saddam’ figure, but succeeded

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