Bill's Comment Page

The ‘Fog of War’ and honesty, or the lack of it, in war reporting

Last Sunday’s BBC television programme ‘War Spin’ by reporter John Kampfner has attracted a lot of attention from bloggers. A large part of the programme focussed on the events surrounding the rescue of US Pfc Jessica Lynch, who had been captured early in the war and was finally found, thankfully alive and relatively unscathed (physically – who can say what the longer-term emotional effects of captivity will be), in a hospital in an-Nasiriyah.

Speaking for myself, I have no special knowledge of what really happened, but I think that some of the questions raised by Kampfner are interesting, if only to try and understand how the reporting of the war was ‘managed’ on all sides – the Iraqi, of course, but it would be naïve to think [in my ever so humble opinion] that our own side, the US and British, did not indulge in judicious news-management, too. And quite right, say I – it is an integral part of war strategy to ensure that news is presented in a way that helps the war effort of the side issuing the news. I would be amazed, and very upset, if our [the US and British] side had not done this. I am not one of those who think that war reporting should be absolutely open and ‘impartial’ – specially where total openness might place our [US and British] military personnel in danger. 24-hour news reporting is all very well, but only up to a point. For example, the recent ‘revelation’ that CNN in Baghdad, prior to the war, had soft-pedalled reporting of certain aspects of what they knew was occurring in Iraq, for fear of placing some of their local employees in danger from the ‘goons’ of the former Iraqi regime, was no revelation to me. Having lived in some countries that could by no stretch of the imagination be characterised as democracies, of the far-right and the far-left variety, I have some inkling of the powerlessness in the face of absolute state power that citizens of such countries experience – as a foreigner I was to a large extent ‘insulated’ from the capricious nature of state power there, but I knew well that unthinking comments from me might have serious repercussions for our local employees. So CNN’s discretion in Iraq (albeit paradoxical in a news reporting organisation, a paradox which I as a banker was thankfully spared) is very understandable to me, indeed it sounds like common sense.

Some bloggers, though, appear to see things very differently – one of the wonderful features of the internet is the wide variety of viewpoints expressed. It is healthy, speaking personally, to be exposed to so many different interpretations of events – again, some bloggers seem to see things VERY differently.

Now, back to this BBC programme about the events surrounding the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

Andrew Sullivan opines that “John Kampfner's Jessica Lynch scoop falls to pieces”, citing in evidence a CNN interview, by their Leon Harris with Kampfner – the CNN article bears the title “BBC correspondent defends Lynch documentary”. Naturally, Sullivan provides no quotation from said interview in support of his contention, because there is none. I think the CNN interview is very fair; whatever Harris thinks of Kampfner’s contention that the rescue was somehow staged as a way of boosting US domestic morale when it seemed as if the war might not be proceeding entirely smoothly.

For his part, Glenn Reynolds (‘Instapundit’) says Kampener is “Backing away from the Jessica Lynch story”. Again, he provides no quotation from said interview (to which he links in’evidence’) in support of his contention. Because there is no such statement or implied statement, from Kampfner, for him to quote.

Pejman Yousefzadeh links to a Glenn Reynolds (‘Instapundit’) posting in which the latter poses the question, pretty sensible actually [in my humble opinion, that is]: “Would American special forces, getting to a "command center" just after its commanders were hustled out, really show up firing blanks?”

On the face of it, I would be surprised too, but simply to pose the question (as does Reynolds) is not in and of itself evidence that it did not happen just like that, if one accepts that it is theoretically possible that Kampfner is not a liar and has not simply ‘made up’ his story.

‘Instapundit’ then links to a posting by someone called Toby Blyth (of whom I have never heard before, no doubt an omission which reflects my own ‘insularity’, but if so I want to learn from my ‘betters’) which contains the following amazing, and outrageous, paragraph:

“I am sure that had the BBC been on the ground in Germany in May 1945 it would have found plenty of Germans to 'prove' that the US was spinning tales of Nazi atrocities to justify unilateral intervention in WWII (funnily enough I think the French and Russians were appeasing even then, and 9 million Britons signed an anti-war petition in 1938 - plus ca change, mon ami, plus ca change) ...This anti-US hysteria is getting pathological.”

Now I readily accept that there are some people, of both left- and right-leaning tendencies in the UK, who might fairly be described as “anti-US”, but I really don’t see how that has any relevance to the outrageous, and unsubstantiated (and unsubstantiatable), contention in the first part of the paragraph, about the reactions of those US and British military personnel and official reporters who made the appalling discoveries they did when they came upon the horrors within various of the Nazi concentration camps toward the end of WWII. It is this kind of mindless concatenation of unrelated events in a vain effort to bolster a viewpoint that makes me very wary of the devotion to objective ‘truth’ of some bloggers.

Speaking as a British person, there are many aspects of the lead-up to the 1939-45 conflict which are in retrospect shameful for British, French AND Americans. Luckily we had one man, awkward and cussed individual that he was, in the person of Churchill, who showed what had to be done, however painful. Would the US have come into that war had not their Pacific base at Pearl Harbour have been attacked by Japan? This is one of the great conundrums of that period to which there is no definite answer. Would the UK have survived alone for longer than it did (from the fall of France until the entry of the US into the war), without that intervention? Another of the great imponderables, but very possibly not, in my view. Without Pearl Harbour, and after the UK had been defeated, would the US have mounted its own action against Germany and/or Japan, or would it have reached an ‘accommodation’ with them – who can say? Would, in these circumstances, the Nazi atrocities have been uncovered, or would they simply have become a part of [a largely unknown] history? Inflammatory and poorly-argued paragraphs, such as that written by Toby Blyth, don’t impress me one little bit, and the fact that some other bloggers that I had thought knew better should refer to such remarks favourably does make me re-evaluate the credence I should place in their future postings.

To come back to Iraq, I strongly supported the action to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and I am glad I live in one of the countries which brought this about. But this does NOT mean that I have any intention of abandoning an attempt to understand the background to some of the events during the recent action and I think Kampfner’s report, including the remarks in the programme by various of the US and British government and military personnel who contributed, will help in due course to contribute to a balanced interpretation of what really did happen. The attempt by some, including the bloggers I refer to above, to close down the discussion is one that has to be resisted - even if I agree with them as to the basic rightness of the actions we [the US and UK and a few others] took in Iraq and may have to take elsewhere in the future (e.g. North Korea) for our and the world's long-term security.