War in Iraq, if it comes, will raise huge military, economic and political questions. It will also put the latest military developments to the test, including those new weapons of attention that to a significant degree win or lose modern wars through the manipulation of public opinion at home and abroad.
The media with its collective, widespread and competing information systems has always been important in forming opinion in democracies. Taken together, it constructs pre-formed perceptions of complex events for an audience that cannot witness with their own eyes.
Even if we participated ourselves, we would not be able to comprehensively understand the complexities of war. In the past, wars could happen far away between mercenary armies, having only a delayed impact on people at home. Today, we live in a world where wars are waged in real time, even though access to news is more tightly controlled than the delayed reports from the front ever were.
Combatants, of course, try to manipulate the media in such a way that information favourable to them dominates the public discourse. Non-democratic governments may censor such reports. But democratic ones employ subtler tactics to win the hearts and minds of the public. In the case of war, it is generally accepted that the enemys information and communication structures are to be destroyed as quickly as possible to impede military command structures and ensure medial sovereignty in enemy territory.
Just as decisive is the way that the reporting from your own side is controlled. Above all, images of military action, these days beamed via satellite in real time with minimal effort, need to be handled skilfully to ensure a successful war. In a democracy, this must be done without being seen to resort to outright censorship, denying journalists access to the front, or allowing them this access only post festum.
Live from the front
At the time of writing, it seems that the Pentagon wants to implement a radically different strategy. In the first Gulf war and the Afghanistan war, access to the front was simply restricted. Now, reporters, photographers and cameramen, amongst them even some from foreign media outlets such as al-Jazeera, will be allowed to accompany combat units to the front. But journalists will not be allowed to broadcast live. They will have to get their reports authorised by the Pentagon. There are rules in place on what and how to report.
Of the 500 journalists who have applied to be included with the first batch, about 200 have so far been trained for deployment. When the war begins, they will be assigned to certain units. They will not be allowed to carry weapons or receive clothing from the military, but gas masks will be provided.
It is quite likely that access to the front will be restricted if unfavourable broadcasts elude Pentagon censorship, if the fighting is not going as planned, or if there is too much dirty war going on. Once that happens war correspondents, ever eager to grow their audience by enabling them to get as close as possible to the spectacle of war, will only be allowed into dangerous areas once the worst is over, and possible tell-tale signs of collateral damage have been removed.
To be on the safe side, the Joint Forces Command draws up Pentagon official reports under their own supervision. Military reporters of the Joint Tactical Information Cells providing these Pentagon-Correct reports, PC reports as it were, have technology such as video telephones at their disposal, allowing them to feed quasi-instant images and information to the media at home. If there is nothing else, especially no other pictures, the media will resort to such ready-made information, even if competitors run it too. Military action will in fact rely massively on the work of Special Forces conducting covert operations. So, by implication, a kind of media ban is already in place. We should therefore not expect any real change from the Pentagons latest deal with the media.
Real-time war is rather more likely to issue from satellite and video telephones or other satellite connections that cannot be controlled by the Pentagon, like CNN granted access by Saddam Hussein in 1991, as a propaganda weapon. The Pentagon would have to effectively sever connections between Iraq and the rest of the world to make sure this did not happen again. This may well be another reason for the deployment of e-bombs, much talked about lately as a new kind of wunderwaffe. During the war in Afghanistan, a precision bomb incidentally hit the Kabul office of al-Jazeera. As well as airing unwelcome statements from bin Laden and Mullah Omar, it was the only TV channel that had images to broadcast from Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
Are embedded journalists human shields?
Employing human shields is not a military strategy. It is murder. It is in breach of laws for armed conflicts and a crime against humanity, and it will be treated as such. Anyone following his [Saddam Husseins] orders to employ human shields will be severely punished. [re-translated from German]
(US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld on 19 February 2003)
For their own protection, and for the sake of independent reporting, journalists embedded into active army units at the front are supposed to remain civilians. In doing so, they also serve the soldiers whom they accompany as human shields, whether this was the original intention or not. If they actually hindered the units through their presence, that presence would be in breach of the Geneva Convention in an identical way to those human shields who voluntarily enter Iraq, positioning themselves in places chosen by the regime:
The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objects from attacks or to shield, favor or impede military operations.
(Article 51 of the Geneva Convention, which relates to occupied territories)
In the first Gulf war after the occupation of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein held people from western countries captive for months in places of strategic importance, releasing them just before the start of hostilities. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accuses Saddam Hussein of having used prisoners as human shields, while the latter accuses the US of having bombed the Amiriya shelter when (allegedly) only civilians used it. 400 people were killed in this raid.
Donald Rumsfeld has used this incident to demonstrate how evil and inhumane Saddam Husseins regime is, and that human life means nothing to him. But in the process, Mr Rumsfeld draws on international law that could easily be interpreted to show the Pentagon is on the wrong side of the law as regards embedded journalists:
International law clearly defines civilians and combatants. The principle that civilians should be protected is at the core of international law concerning armed conflict. It is the distinction between combatants and innocent civilians, which is directly being attacked by terrorism and practices such as the use of human shields. Saddam Hussein doesnt make that distinction. [Donald Rumsfeld, 19 Febuary 2003, re-translated from German]
Saddam Hussein is also accused of building mosques next to military installations, of using schools, hospitals, orphanages and cultural treasures to protect armed forces and putting innocent men, women and children at risk [re-translated from German]. To put it cynically, Rumsfeld seems to be asking any state which is about to be bombed by the United States to separate out its military from its civilian targets in order to save the attacker from embarrassment.
But it is not only in Iraq that military installations are placed in cities. The US would probably do the same, threatened by air raids in the US and an attacker who controls the airspace. In essence, which is more criminal a weak enemy who places army bases and soldiers in civilian areas or an aggressor bombing these positions in the full knowledge that the attacks will endanger civilian lives?
See Baghdad and die
Just as reporting live from war zones became possible because of new technologies, the phenomenon of voluntary human shields is a direct result of the medias globalisation. The movement gathers momentum on the web, gaining in impact not only by being reported in other media, but also because its members can reach a global audience themselves.
The American Gulf War veteran Ken OKeefe, one of the masterminds behind the war protestors new strategy, is confident that the governments of our world are concerned because they know that while they will get away with blowing up Arab people and Muslims, there will be a lot of angry people if they do the same to their own people, when families back home lose a loved one. But the strategy of human shields can only work under certain conditions: if they actually attract attention and become a media event; and if, as is the case with Iraq, they do not appear to be exploited by Saddam Husseins regime. Therefore it is essential that human shields come from abroad, making it more difficult to suspect them of being strong-armed into it, or bought off by the regime.
We decide where we go, stresses Ken OKeefe accordingly, not Saddam Hussein. We are here to support the Iraqi people, not the Iraqi government. And we will remain here as long as it is necessary to prevent this criminal war.
Nonetheless, voluntary human shields are not entirely independent from the Iraqi government. They are exploited by the Iraqi regime in the same way as journalists are by the Pentagon. Indeed, the whole phenomenon might turn out to be only a spectacle that ends as soon as the real war begins. Recently, the first foreign human shields moved in to protect sewage works in Baghdad. This is a primarily civilian facility, although it must also serve the military and the regime: as so often dual-use.
Kenneth Roth, director of the Human Rights Watch said:
If Iraq uses people as human shields, that is a war crime...But Secretary Rumsfeld told only half the story yesterday. If the United States attacks targets that are shielded by civilians without demonstrating an overwhelming military necessity to do so, that would be a war crime, too.
If they remain small in numbers, the new strategy of the peace activists risking their lives to act as attention-seeking weapons will certainly evaporate. If they swell their numbers to hundreds or thousands of people resisting the bombing raids, a war that is waged against evil and at least has to appear clean and precise under the scrutiny of a critical global audience could become impossible. The difference is not in the number of possible casualties, but in the fact that war protestors are risking their lives to avert bombing, without defending the extant regime. This is about the protection of civilians and nothing else.
The Pentagon is understandably trying to deter hundreds planning to go to Iraq as human shields. General Richard Myers for example said that it would breach the law if civilians were intentionally put in danger to protect possible military targets i.e. the targets of the U.S. army. This would even be the case if these people voluntarily made themselves available to this end. The ultimate question is, who is responsible? Is it the Iraqi regime that is in breach of the law by admitting, or not evicting, foreigners intent on acting as human shields? Is it the aggressors who bomb targets where voluntary human shields (and civilians in general) are known to be present? Might it be the activists themselves, whose suicide mission to stop the bombing impedes and denies the aggressors rights?
However the human beings who have gone to Iraq as shields act, however the movement develops in the future, these pioneers have conquered new territory in a world dominated by the global media. By adopting and up-ending the concept of suicide bombers they have become more than weapons of attention veritable landmines of attention urgently reframing the fundamental question of war or peace. By positioning themselves right in the middle of the combatants, they have made it impossible to confine ones accusations to the enemy who has committed war crimes, while excusing collateral damage as accidental. Perhaps these human shields will inspire civil society to raise its voice, quite differently from the usual symbolic protest, to tackle at last those fundamental vested interests which sooner or later, spell war.
Translated from the original German by Julian Kramer.
