Page 15 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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FOREWORD
In the ramp-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, ghosts of
Saddam’s brutal rule began to appear with great regularity in the
American media. Among other references to Saddam’s history of vio-
lence and repression, President George W. Bush and others in his
administration invoked the March 1988 gassing of Kurds in the town
of Halabja: “What we’re telling our friends is that Saddam Hussein is
a man who is willing to gas his own people, willing to use weapons of
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mass destruction again Iraq citizens.” Estimates of casualties in the
Kurdish town of Halabja range from several hundred to 7,000 people.
It was, indeed, a barbaric act.
But what George W. Bush and others in his administration failed to
mention was that, at the time, his father, George H. W. Bush, as both
vice president and president, ignored Saddam’s use of chemical
weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and even helped convince the
Senate to drop plans to cut off all aid to Iraq in response to the gassing
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of Kurds in Halabja. Instead, the son invoked the ghosts of the
father’s inactions.
Emotion, death, honor, revenge, revulsion, anger, disgust: these
are all the messy emotions of war and, at times, foreign policymaking.
Babak Bahador does a brilliant job describing how and when ghosts
of the dead call leaders into action and in the process give pause to
political counselors.
While a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics,
and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, I wrote an
essay that I hoped would offer a clearer way of thinking about the
possible effects of dramatic and emotional media coverage on foreign
policy decision-making—particularly those involving the use of force.
To that point, too much of the scholarly and public debate concerning
media effects on foreign policy decision-making and policy processes
was disjointed and conceptually vague. Some, particularly political
leaders, took the position that there were clear and strong effects,
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while others argued just as forcefully that there were none. It went
back and forth, but with little headway. In reviewing these arguments,
I was struck by their lack of conceptual coherence. Rather than having
a dialog about the same phenomenon, observers were carrying on
serial monologs about several loose categories of effects, all somehow
tied together by global real-time media. I wanted to sort this out.
I proposed a two-dimensional matrix of media effects: on one
dimension was a typology of potential media effects; on the other was
an array of politico-military policy options. Richard Haass inspired the
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policy matrix. Haass outlined a linear escalation of military inter-
ventions, beginning with the almost wholly benign interventions in