Censure et propagande dans la guerre du Golfe
Le 7 octobre 1993, The Independent Institute présentait une conférence de John R. MacArthur, éditeur du magazine Harper's et auteur d'un excellent livre sur la propagande durant la Guerre du Golfe, sans doute le meilleur du domaine : Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.
MacArthur est l'homme qui révéla le montage de relations publiques qui, en septembre 1990, constitua un formidable argument pour faire basculer les USA dans la guerre : l'affaire du massacre des bébés koweitiens dans les hôpitaux, du fait de soldats irakiens. C'était un montage complet, >interprété< par la fille de l'ambassadeur du Koweit à Washington. La >révélation< de ces soi-disant horreurs irakiennes (précisément cette affaires des >bébés koweitiens<) fut l'élément déterminant du vote favorable à la guerre d'un certain nombre de sénateurs américains, et, qui plus est, l'élément mathématique décisif qui emporta la décision (6 sénateurs admirent avoir décidé de voter pour la guerre à partir de cette affaire et le vote fut acquis par une majorité de 5).
On comprend l'intérêt de diffuser ce document, à l'heure où une deuxième >Guerre du Golfe< menace et où la propagande est devenue un facteur fondamental, voire le facteur fondamental de la guerre.
La conférence de MacArthur est précédée d'une présentation de David Theroux président de l'Independent Institute et suivie d'une séance de questions-réponses.
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Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War
How Government Can Mold Public Opinion
Question: Who really supports the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour? Who pays for it?
MacArthur: AT&T is the principal underwriter, along with PBS. I don't think the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour is any worse than CNN or any other news organization. What McNeil-Lehrer is and what most news organizations are these days are basically passive institutions. Walter Karp's great insight, that it is not an ideological conspiracy by the media or by reporters to keep you in the dark, it is a passive reaction, a sort of folding inward in the face of political power.
The way the game is played in Washington and New York is if the White House says or the congressional leadership says, ''This is news,'' it becomes news. . Remember Bush decided that Somalia was news because he was in a bad mood about the likelihood of losing and he wanted to send a Christmas card to the American people. So, it became news. Government sets the news agenda, not Robin McNeil and Jim Lehrer and not AT&T and not PBS. I am not unloading on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, they are no worse than anybody else.
Question: If the questions are not being asked, then isn't the information never going to get out to the public?
MacArthur: As I said, the reward system is such that you don't get rewarded for asking those questions. You get punished, you get criticized, you get insulted. You start asking and McNeil-Lehrer specializes in putting institutional government spokesman on and newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post or news organizations like McNeil-Lehrer are very dependent on their relationships with government. They need guests for their shows; they need leaks to make it look like they are reporting the news and so on and so forth.
If Robin McNeil suddenly gets mean and asks that question, the White House or whoever sent the spokesman is going to say. ''We are not going to send him next time, Robin. We are not going to invite you to the Christmas party and we are not going to invite you to dinner with the Under-Secretary of State and you are going to get frozen out, if you do that too often.
I believe that the power of corporations is exaggerated in this country. I really do go against all of my left-wing friends and colleagues on this one. The real power in this country is with elected politicians and bureaucrats. And it is not bribery or influence from AT&T, it is the government that sets the news agenda. It is a reward system and unless you have owners, and there is really no alternative to private enterprise in the media, it is up to the owners to set a tone for the reporters where they are rewarded for asking the tough questions. The media today are not.
Question: Aren't corporations really responsible for electing politicians and hence the policies and misinformation that results?
MacArthur: No, I think it is a misconception that corporations bribe politicians. What happens is politicians shake down corporations. It is a shakedown operation ,and it is too easy, and we get into trouble when we say this because it is tempting to say that politics is ruled by money. No, the country is ruled by politicians and they shake down whomever they can shake down for money to advance their causes and maintain control. Look, you have got to read Walter Karp, we are going to publish Indispensable Enemies. You've got to read it. Harper's is going to reissue it. You should all buy a copy.
Question: With regards to Bob Simon, while Rather was crying crocodile tears about CBS not joining the nations and saying how terrible it was that everybody was kowtowing to Bush, I don't exactly know if it happened when he said the photographs were available, but Simon drove out past the American lines to find the enemy. I believe that it took him eight hours. That story was covered prominently, his capture and such. And in that respect, weren't the journalists there responsible for not bringing up the point that it took eight hours to find the enemy, rather than the fact that he was captured by the Iraqi ''baby-killers''?
MacArthur: That is a very astute point because I limit my comments about Bob Simon by saying, ''Hurray for Bob Simon.'' He is one of the only reporters who tried to break away from the pool system and the censorship system to go out and do some independent reporting, and he paid for it.
What is also terrible is that his colleagues—while they did publicize his capture—and didn't ask the question that you are asking, because it is true. I interviewed Simon. He went to the border and there was nobody there except the Saudi border guard all by himself and he asked, ''Have you seen any Iraqis?'' and the guard said, ''No. I haven't seen anybody, you want to go look?'' I mean it is all sand, there is no fence. So they say. ''What the hell,'' and they drove into the desert looking for Iraqis. In the distance they see one jeep with three Iraqis in it and they have got guns and they arrest them. But he doesn't see anything along the border anywhere that suggests an invading army is encamped.
Another insidious thing that happened is that any reporters who tried to play ball with the government, they tried to get favors in exchange for operating with the government and the military were critical of Simon for not behaving like a good Boy Scout. Simon cheated. That is another thing I urge reporters to do is to buy and cheat in the name of truth. You know he would put on combat fatigues and he and his cameramen impersonated soldiers, which got them past checkpoints and got them out into the field. A lot of reporters said, ''Oh, that is terrible; they cheated.'' It is another world than the one that I came up in and I am only 37 years-old. Things have really changed.
Question: Is it possible that the reason the press really didn't cover the Gulf War adequately is because the feeling of the country at the time is that we didn't want another Vietnam, we wanted to feel good about this war, we wanted to win this war?
MacArthur: Yes. Once the war had begun, up to that point people were deeply ambivalent. Remember it was 50-50 after an enormous, expensive an very sophisticated public relations campaign. The country was still pretty much divided on sanctions versus war on January 11 when the Senate debate began. It was still pretty much divided in the polls. And it was a tribute to our confoundedly peaceful instincts that Casper Goodwood is complaining about that in the face of this onslaught, half the people were still skeptical about the war option. Does that answer your question?
Question: Do you know where the $11 million that was raised rather quickly for the advertising of the Hill & Knowlton public relations budget came from?
MacArthur: It was all Kuwaiti government money. Citizens for a Free Kuwait was a complete fraud. I counted the amount of money. I believe American citizens contributed about $312, some poor gullible souls. The Kuwaiti government contributed about $11 million. It was all fake.
Question: Why didn't the Kuwaiti Army or defenses put up a battle when they were invaded?
MacArthur: I am not an expert on Kuwaiti culture. I tried to learn as much about the Kuwaitis as I could but they are not noted as fighters. They are noted as pearl divers and that is how they built their fortune in the eighteenth century. One of the great ironies of Kuwaiti history is that in the mid-1930s, when Iraq was ruled by a nationalist king who wanted the British out, the Kuwaitis begged for a merger with Iraq, which the British could not permit because of their divide-and-rule policy. Suddenly the king of Iraq died in a car accident and there were actually pro-union riots in Kuwait, but then oil was discovered and the Kuwaitis discovered they didn't need Iraq. I think the Kuwaitis have a real claim to sovereignty in a sense that it is fashionable and cynical to say, ''Well, all these borders were drawn by the British in a tent,'' but there is a sort of Kuwaiti organism that exists from the 18th century onward. There is a culture. All the people, all the imported labor, doesn't get to participate in Kuwaiti society in equal terms. The Palestinians, the Filipino domestic workers who get brutalized and raped and beaten up and so on and so forth. None of those people get to participate. But there is a Kuwaiti culture, and it is not noted for its military valor.
Question: Do you remember the piece that appeared in The New York Post about Bush being a war hero and the tailgunner flying in formation and the story was apparently that the tailgunner saw no puff of smoke. Bush jettisoned the two guys in the tail, and let them go down in flames.
MacArthur: I am inclined to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on that one because I think I would have done the same thing, probably, but who knows? The interesting thing about that story though, is that as you say, only one installment ran. It was supposed to be a six-part series. They killed the last five parts. The main witness who was in the plane behind Bush's and who was the main source for the story, the White House got to. It is sort of known in the business that the White House got to him. We don't know how they got to him, but he said in an interview a few months later that he was contacted by the White House and now his version of what happened is different, period. I think that the strafing story is a really interesting story, not a definitive story but it is one that we should have known about.
Question: You spoke about the symbiotic relationship between the government and the media, would you speak a little more about proposal solutions that you would endorse?
MacArthur: Well, as I said, since freedom of the press is really guaranteed only to those who own one, there is no clear solution other than self-education. I mean, my book sold 12,000 copies and you can read it. It is not a mass market best-seller. I did get on to ''60 Minutes'' with the Nayirah story, which reached 30 million people, but that is a fluke. I mean, not to take anything away from my reporting skills, but the timing was right and ''60 Minutes'' jumped on it when they saw it on the op-ed page of The New York Times. The op-ed editor of the Times, Mike Levitas is a real news-man. He came up in the 1950s when journalists were called reporters and they didn't take on airs and so-on. And so he said, ''Hey, that is a great story. Let's do it. Let's play it up.'' But that doesn't happen very often.
There is one solution which Liebling suggested, which is the endowed newspaper or the endowed magazine and interestingly enough, The St. Petersburg Times is such a newspaper. It is owned by a foundation. It is allowed to operate for profit for the benefit of the Nelson Poyntner Foundation because Poyntner was an unusual guy who wanted to make sure that his way of doing business would continue into the future. So the editor of The St. Petersburg Times—his name is Andy Barnes—could on his own steam, show up in the Washington bureau one day, on the day the reporter who broke the satellite photograph story was looking for authorization to pay $3,000 for one more photograph to complete the puzzle from the Soviet agency, and she said, ''Hey, Andy, can I have the money to buy it? I have got an interesting story,'' and Andy said, ''Sure, you can do it.'' Now I do have to tell you that getting money out of an editor at a modern newspaper is like pulling teeth—especially if it is connected with a controversial story like this that could get the paper into trouble. It just doesn't happen like that anymore. But Barnes, because he has got independence written into Poyntner's will, runs the paper. So he can do whatever the hell he wants. Similarly, Harper's Magazine is owned by a foundation, and I can do anything I want. I don't have to answer to stock holders, etc., etc. I have to answer to my board, but my board generally agrees with what I am doing and what Lewis Lapham is doing.
Question: Aside from The St. Petersburg Times, were there any other bright lights news organizations in the Gulf War?
MacArthur: Yes, there are individual stories like the Bob Simon story that is a bright light. You know, I have a footnote at the back of the book: A story of four free-lancers who tried to do something different. One of them is a local guy by the name of Jonathan Franklin who got hired as an assistant, as a temporary mortician at Dover Air Force Base. He took classes to learn how to be a mortician so that he could be hired at Dover. So that he could find out if the body count the Pentagon was giving us matched the number of bodies coming into Dover. Jonathan Franklin has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a few alternative papers. Jonathan Franklin is the only reporter that I know who saw an American corpse in the Gulf War. It is sort of a stunt, but don't you think that it is a pretty good one? I mean I applaud that kind of initiative.
A British freelancer who had been in the British Army, put on his old regimental uniform and commandeered a Bradley fighting vehicle, by pulling rank on the Americans who were running it. He drove off and he got the best footage anybody got of the armored battle during the Gulf War.
An Englishman living in Toronto, Paul Roberts, went in on camelback from Jordan into Iraq and risked his life to come out with a really, really good story which appeared in Saturday Night, a Canadian magazine.
These guys are few and far between, and they are not celebrated. They are not famous for what they did. The most egregious surrender that occurred during the Gulf War in terms of symbolism and so-on, and I suppose in substance, was that the four big dailies, the big national dailies like the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, all pulled their correspondents from Baghdad.
Peter Arnett stayed; of course, he is a bright light. But the big four papers ordered their people out. The Los Angeles Times guy fought to stay in and finally was reduced to saying to his boss, his former editor, ''I have to stay because my wife, Lucia Anuziatta has to stay for her paper, La Republica.'' The Los Angeles Times foreign editor said no.
Question: When and more importantly, why did this transition start to happen? Was it USA Today, was it CNN?
MacArthur: Mark Hertsgaard wrote a book called On Bended Knee which is about the transition between more or less combative reporting and suck-up journalism. What I think happened—and you have got to remember that The Washington Post was all by itself. And we don't know who Deep Throat was first of all. We don't know if Deep Throat was a high government official who made Watergate safe for The Washington Post until we know who Deep Throat was. The jury is out on how brave and independent the The Washington Post really was. Nonetheless they did the right thing and they pursued the story and we should all be grateful for it but you have got to think back to 1972 when Woodward and Bernstein were breaking their stories. Nobody was following up.
I worked at The Washington Star in 1978, that was only six years later, and the reporters used to joke about how it was their job to knock down the Watergate stories that Woodward and Bernstein were publishing. Nobody was following up. There was the famous story of CBS, where Walter Cronkite was going to do a special on Watergate. Paley, the owner personally intervened and cut it down, cut it in half, for the election when it would have done some good.
Remember, it wasn't that great; it was better in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then I think what happens is you have a collective sort of retrenchment because journalism executives and owners are essentially conservative people and there is still a lot of guilt around about bringing Nixon down. Very strange psychology. Fifteen years later, Nixon gives a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Publishers and is given a standing ovation. Okay?
Question: At the end of the war, we saw General Schwarzkopf kind of unveiling the entire strategy of the troops, and what area we occupied and how we moved in. I was just wondering, was that necessary?
MacArthur: His famous briefing at the end where he says Saddam Hussein is a jerk and not a soldier or whatever? Yes, I believe some of it is true, but some of it is not true. Everything was graphics and logos and the stage-managing was all very carefully thought out. Yes, the final part of that press conference is part of that campaign to make it look like he is a brilliant strategist and did everything right and that he is a great war-leader. Not everybody agrees that Schwarzkopf is tactically brilliant. If you read the after-action reports of the Air Force, the Navy and the Army, they all claim credit for having won the Gulf War without any help with the other service branches. The Air Force's is the most interesting report because they say, and I think they are probably right, that the war was over in the first ten minutes. The great irony is because they knocked out Hussein's command-and-control center. He was blind after the first 15 minutes; electronically blind after 15 minutes. The way that the Air Force knew that they had won the war was that Peter Arnett went dark on CNN. They had knocked out his wire; they cheered in the Situation Room in Washington when Arnett went dark because they knew that everything was over. Everything after that initial bombing campaign is just slaughter—just out and out slaughter with the Iraqis just taking it. Whether the allies came in this way or that is irrelevant, I believe.
Question: What do you say to the journalism students and how do you spark enough harassability and meanness into them?
MacArthur: You have got to fortify them with a sense that at the end of their careers, at the end of their lives, they are going to feel a lot better about themselves if they try to tell the truth than if they only made a million dollars, or that they got invited to the White House for dinner five times.