Michael Guerrin's account in Le Monde of his time in Iraq is the kind of reporting unlikely to penetrate the U.S. media bubble. "American soldiers had seized the opportunity to tear up portraits of Saddam Hussein on the main street. They were doing this right in front of the local inhabitants, whose elation quickly vanished. The soldiers obviously didn't imagine that it was up to the Iraqis to be doing this, or that it was humiliating for them. These were the same soldiers who would topple down Saddam's statue in Baghdad three weeks later."
From the start, the media in America covered the war against Iraq on the assumption that indeed this was a war about "liberation," and the result has been eager acceptance of any evidence, however shaky, that seems to support this claim.
Case in point: a central prophecy of the Bush administration was that crowds would greet "coalition" troops as they entered Iraqi towns. At first, those predictions failed to materialize. Thus the iconic toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad was immediately seized upon by the administration and media. Here, at last, was the evidence that Iraqis wanted us to bomb them in order to free their country from the Butcher of Baghdad. It was immediately hailed as a "historic moment" by Ari Fleischer and compared by Donald Rumsfeld to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In reality, it was little more than a staged media event. A wide-angle photo, attributed to Reuters and available on the Not In Our Names Web site shows a large plaza with roads blocked off by the U.S. military and a U.S. vehicle pulling the statue over.
Without exception the major media outlets endorsed this deceptive narrative. The media's treatment of the story has ensured that it will be one of the most lasting images of the war; the innocent victims of Bush's political agenda will remain invisible.
Initial signs of U.S. plans for a post-war Iraq are hardly promising either. Protests erupted after news surfaced that America had appointed a former Ba'ath party member and brigadier general in Hussein's army as interim chief of Basra. Donald Rumsfeld meanwhile denies that U.S. plans for four military bases are permanent, noting coyly that with the establishment of a "friendly" government in Iraq, such a presence would not be necessary.
Few in the media have asked whether by a "friendly" government Rumsfeld means one like those in Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, major U.S. allies in the region with notorious track records for suppression of democracy. But as the British Guardian reports, purges "will be limited to Baghdad's top leadership," presumably for show. Saddam Hussein's government by and large will remain intact.
And the dead? Frankly, the administration doesn't care about them: the Pentagon quickly vetoed a Senate proposal to provide some measure of restitution for the victims and their families by saying that it had no plans to count civilian casualties. There are far more important beneficiaries (Halliburton) for Bush's war bill.
