They call themselves the ”awkward squad” and their questions to the generals running the war in Iraq are starting to divide the sceptical press from their more loyal United States colleagues.
The front row of the briefing hall at the Central Command headquarters in the deserts of Qatar is largely reserved for the US TV networks. But frequently the toughest questioning has come from rows further back where there are the less accepting British, Arab and Chinese press.
After the US took its heaviest losses in battle for years last Sunday, an Abu Dhabi TV reporter asked General Tommy Franks, the US commander: ”Are you practising a strategy of lies and deception or have you just have been trapped by the Iraqi army?”
When TV showed the first US prisoners of war Geoff Meade, the Sky News correspondent in Qatar, asked a US general how he would answer those in the Muslim world who ”may hail the first capture of American servicemen and women”.
A few minutes later a US journalist — Michael Wolff of New York magazine — took a different approach. He asked the general if he considered al-Jazeera as ”hostile media” for broadcasting the footage in the first place.
The milder style favoured by some of the US correspondents is reflected by a question posed by a presenter with the US network CBS, who asked at Franks’s first briefing last Saturday: ”The campaign so far has gone with breathtaking speed. Has it surprised you, or is it going more or less as you expected?”
The apparent divide across the Atlantic may signal the greater support for the war in Iraq among the American public and the often more deferential nature of their journalists. Correspondents corralled into a warehouse at the US Central Command camp outside Doha have frequently found themselves frustrated at the lack of information on offer.
Every second Franks spends in the public eye is a painstakingly choreographed Hollywood moment. The US general’s backdrop is a stylised R1,9-million set, built around thick, tubular grey struts that hold up five large plasma display screens. A large US Central Command seal above the central podium delivers an unequivocal message of authority: an eagle sits on a stars and stripes shield with its wings outstretched to envelop a map of the Middle East and Arab world. It is a powerful scene carefully modelled by George Allison, a Hollywood art director who has designed sets for both Michael Douglas and George WBush.
Planning for the media coverage of this war has been as intricately mapped out as the invasion itself. Both the US and British governments have promised that for this conflict they will give unprecedented access to the fight on the ground. But nothing has been left to chance and access to the smallest hint of information is tightly controlled.
Senior government spin doctors have been flown into Qatar from Washington and London to oversee the project. The White House sent Jim Wilkinson, a rarely seen civilian adviser for the US generals. Downing Street sent Simon Wren, a former Ministry of Defence press officer.
However, despite the money and staff invested in the information operation, the picture of the war is rarely clear. Franks talks in broad terms and reveals little. ”Our forces are continuing to move; they’re moving in ways and to places that we believe are just exactly right, in accordance with a plan that is flexible,” was his impenetrable analysis of the war so far on Monday. His words are short on specific details: what the military likes to call ”granularity”.
The few detailed assertions of battlefield victories have proved embarrassingly overambitious. Last Saturday Central Command announced that the small Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, on the Kuwaiti border, had been secured. The next morning live TV footage from a reporter embedded with the military showed heavy fighting in the town that continued for two more days.
Again last Saturday the British chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, announced the surrender of the commander of Iraq’s 51st Division, which was holding Basra.
Reports have now suggested the man who surrendered was a junior officer masquerading as his commander in the hope of better treatment. Basra has since developed into one of the most serious focal points of Iraqi resistance and one that took British forces many more days to overcome.
Further north, in the town of Nassiriya, US marines claimed at the weekend that two vital bridges across the Euphrates had been secured. They may have been briefly secured but soon fell again. At least nine US marines have died fighting in the city.
Is this tendentious spin or the difficulties of assessing combat gains in the fog of war? ”This is not a video game where everything is clear and neat and tidy,” said Lieutenant Colonel Ronnie McCourt, who teaches communication studies at Sandhurst Military Academy.
Often for simple practical reasons reports from the battlefield, particularly during firefights, do not always reflect the overall situation on the ground, he says. News of British casualties is delayed to allow families to be informed first. ”The reason you have got disconnects is to do with imperfect knowledge. It is not deliberate,” said McCourt.
”I will tell you the truth and the absolute truth but for the reasons I have given it may not be the complete and utter picture.”
The 900 journalists embedded with the US and British military have offered an unprecedented window on the campaign. The Pentagon must have cheered when it saw the first shaky videophone pictures of US tanks racing unopposed through the Iraqi desert in the first hours of the ground invasion. Footage since then has appeared to challenge broad official statements from London, Washington and Qatar.
As the streetfighting intensifies around towns like Basra and Nassiriya, where most troops have been killed, the TV pictures and written accounts of gritty street battles may come back to haunt the Pentagon and undermine the image of rapidly advancing victory that the generals want to portray. — Â