Page 233 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

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 1990–1, 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 psychologically, 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 unpredictable 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 Iraq was the
enemy, explanations were required before a military solution to
the invasion of Kuwait could be pursued with confidence. As John
Macarthur puts it in his study of US media management during the
conflict, ‘on August 2, when Hussein grabbed Kuwait, he stepped
beyond the imaginings of the practitioners of real-politik. Suddenly
more was required than manipulation by leak. Convincing
Americans to fight a war to liberate a tiny Arab sheikdom ruled
by a family oligarchy would require the demonisation of Hussein

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