A JOURNEY UNCHALLENGED -
ANDREW MARR INTERVIEWS TONY BLAIR
Media Lens, Sept 17, 2010
http://www.medialens.org/
Andrew Marr must have seemed the natural choice to BBC executives
looking for an interviewer to grill Tony Blair on his new
autobiography, A Journey (The Andrew Marr Show, BBC 1, September 1,
2010. See here for a rough transcript.
After all, Blair has become the most reviled British politician of
modern times largely thanks to violent policies that Marr openly
celebrated.
On April 9, 2003, as Baghdad superficially fell to the illegal US-UK
invasion, Marr lauded Blair’s great triumph on the main BBC evening
news:
“Frankly, the main mood [in Downing Street] is of unbridled relief.
I’ve been watching ministers wander around with smiles like split
watermelons.”
Marr delivered this news with his own watermelon smile. He continued:
“Well, I think this does one thing - it draws a line under what,
before the war, had been a period of... well, a faint air of
pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all
these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr
Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and
beyond aren’t going to thank him - because they’re only human - for
being right when they’ve been wrong. And he knows that there might be
trouble ahead, as I said. But I think this is very, very important for
him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He
confronted many critics.
“I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony
Blair that he’s somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion,
or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said
that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that
in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those
points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely
ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he
stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a
result.” (Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)
Two years earlier, as Blair bombed Serbia, Marr wrote:
"I am constantly impressed, but also mildly alarmed, by his [Blair's]
utter lack of cynicism." (Marr, 'Hail to the chief. Sorry, Bill, but
this time we're talking about Tony', The Observer, May 16, 1999)
Marr even supported Blair‘s crazed call for a ground invasion:
“I want to put the Macbeth option: which is that we’re so steeped in
blood we should go further. If we really believe Milosevic is this
bad, dangerous and destabilising figure we must ratchet this up much
further. We should now be saying that we intend to put in ground
troops.” (Marr, ‘Do we give war a chance?’, The Observer, April 18,
1999)
In 2005, the former BBC reporter and producer, Tim Luckhurst, no
radical, wrote in the Daily Mail:
“Andrew Marr has dismayed licence-payers with apologias for New Labour
in general and Tony Blair in particular.” (Luckhurst, ‘As John
Humphrys announces his retirement. The giant the BBC hasn't got the
guts to replace,’ Daily Mail, May 3, 2005)
Who better than Marr, then, to interview Blair in 2010? David
Aaronovitch, perhaps?
In 2007, when the BBC was looking for someone to interview Blair for
its series, The Blair Years, management eyes fell on The Times
commentator. “This is troubling,” Peter Oborne wrote in the Daily
Mail, “for over the past ten years Aaronovitch has never... ceased to
extend a helping hand to Tony Blair...” (Oborne, ‘Forget the Queen
fiasco, it's the BBC's love affair with the Blairs that's so
disquieting,’ Daily Mail, July 14, 2007)
Like Marr, Aaronovitch had strongly backed Blair’s attack on Serbia,
also supporting Blair’s call for a ground war. After two million
people marched against the looming Iraq war in London on February 15,
2003, Aaronovitch asked them:
“Finally, what are you going to do when you are told - as one day you
will be - that while you were demonstrating against an allied
invasion, and being applauded by friends and Iraqi officials, many of
the people of Iraq were hoping, hope against hope, that no one was
listening to you?” (Aaronovitch, ‘Dear marcher, please answer a few
questions,’ The Guardian, February 18, 2003)
So why does the BBC, a public service broadcaster, habitually turn to
journalists who have previously declared their firm support for
Blair’s militant Christian policies to interview Blair about those
policies? The answer is that no-one outside the BBC has the remotest
idea - there is flat-zero openness on this kind of choice; it is
deemed none of the public’s business.
Certainly, the choice can have nothing to do with perceived public
preference - it seems undeniable that a huge majority of people would
love to see Blair’s feet held to the fire. But this never happens.
Perhaps, of course, Blair might refuse to appear if this seemed a
likely outcome. But then he should be denied the opportunity to peddle
his book and his advocacy of Permanent War. The sense in reality, of
course, is of elite media managers protecting their elite political
friends.
The Chicago Doctrine - Rationalising The Bloodbath
Not only did Marr not seriously challenge Blair, he challenged common
sense by dredging up a bogus justification for Blair’s actions. Marr
said of Kosovo and Sierra Leone:
"After those two interventions you made what in retrospect seems a
+very+ significant speech in Chicago in 1999, where you developed a
new doctrine about dictatorships."
In fact Blair spoke in Chicago on April 22, 1999, in the middle of the
bombing of Serbia (between March 24 and June 10, 1999). The speech was
a typically audacious attempt to suggest that deep principle underlay
what was actually cynical realpolitik. John Norris, director of
communications during the war for US deputy Secretary of State Strobe
Talbott, commented, “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader
trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar
Albanians - that best explains NATO’s war”. (Norris, Collision Course:
NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, Praeger, 2005, p.xiii)
Marr implied that the so-called ‘Chicago Doctrine’ was rooted in
lessons learned by Blair +after+ his two interventions thus far, and
that these lessons informed his subsequent decision to attack Iraq.
Between the lines, we were to read: ’Iraq’s WMDs were never really the
point from the perspective of the Chicago Doctrine.’ Blair clearly
knew exactly what Marr had in mind and was quick to accept the
emphasis:
"I also think that there can be circumstances in which it is
legitimate to intervene even in another country's affairs where the
oppression of the people is so cruel and where you can't simply say
well, unless our national interest is directly threatened in a very
specific way we're not going to have anything to do with it.”
Marr then reinforced the point: "So you can topple tyrants +because+
they're tyrants, not because they immediately threaten other people."
Even a cursory glance at Blair’s Chicago speech reveals that Marr was
bending over backwards to find the speech “+very+ significant” in this
way. In the speech, Blair said that, in judging the case for military
intervention, “we need to bear in mind five major considerations”. The
fifth of these involved asking: “do we have national interests
involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded
the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference
that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.”
In other words, the conflict +was+ of “national interest” - it +did+
“threaten other people”.
Marr’s claim on the significance of the Chicago speech is bogus for
more obvious reasons. George Bush could not have been clearer in
2002-2003 when he said: "The world needs him [Saddam Hussein] to
answer a single question: Has the Iraqi regime fully and
unconditionally disarmed, as required by Resolution 1441, or has it
not?" (Source)
The "single question" concerned the supposed threat posed by Iraq, not
the nature of its government.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s Press Secretary, said, “we have high confidence
that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was
about and it is about." (Source)
The Independent’s Andreas Whittam Smith wrote in May 2003:
"There was no ambiguity about the reasons for fighting. The only text
which matters is the motion the Prime Minister put down in the House
of Commons on 18 March, just before hostilities began. It asked
members of Parliament to support the decision of Her Majesty's
Government 'that the United Kingdom should use all means necessary to
ensure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction'.
"There was nothing else in the motion other than citations of various
United Nations Security Council resolutions. Regime change was not a
British war aim." (Whittam Smith, 'If the weapons are not found, Blair
must quit,' The Independent, May 19, 2003)
The Intelligence Lie - And The Real Death Toll
In his interview with Marr, Blair said:
“And I've always apologised for the fact that the intelligence was
wrong. What I can't apologise for, however, is the decision we took.
Which we took, incidentally, based on intelligence, at the time. So
all I'm saying to you is, you know - this has been gone over many,
many times. The intelligence picture was clear. We acted on it.”
Marr must have known that Blair would once again offer the defence
that “the intelligence was wrong”, and yet it was a lie that he failed
to challenge. But why? Carne Ross, a key Foreign Office diplomat
responsible for monitoring UN arms inspections in Iraq, had given
testimony to the Iraq Inquiry just six weeks earlier that left Blair’s
lie utterly exposed. Ross said:
“It remains my view that the internal government assessment of Iraq’s
capabilities was intentionally and substantially exaggerated in public
government documents during 2002 and 2003. Throughout my posting in
New York, it was the UK and US assessment that while there were many
unanswered questions about Iraq’s WMD stocks and capabilities, we did
not believe that these amounted to a substantial threat. At no point
did we have any firm evidence, from intelligence sources or otherwise,
of significant weapons holdings...
“In all the policy documents I reviewed in preparation for this
testimony, there is no mention prior to 9/11 of any increase in the
threat assessment for Iraq. Instead, these documents discuss the
difficulty in maintaining support for sanctions in the absence of
clear evidence of WMD violations by Iraq...” (http://
www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/
Ross talked of a “process of deliberate public exaggeration”:
“This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion
and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those
participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in
blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading
statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in
their totality, lies.”
In the interview, Marr commented: "100,000 plus people certainly died”
as a result of the war, “some people say more”.
Indeed “some people” do say “more” - the world's leading medical
journal, The Lancet, for example, publishing a top group of
epidemiologists, led by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Like virtually the entire media, Marr prefers to cite a figure offered
by the website, Iraq Body Count (IBC), described as “a very misleading
exercise” even by the head of a major Western news bureau in Baghdad,
one of IBC’s key sources (Email forwarded to Media Lens, October 25,
2006).
Marr ought to be aware of a recent study by Professor Brian Rappert of
the University of Exeter, which details how the UK government worked
to discredit the Lancet studies. A ‘Restricted’ letter from a
ministry’s Chief Economist dated 8 November 2004 closed with:
“It might also be possible, as Gerald Russell has suggested, to try
and validate the study’s preinvasion estimate of mortality by checking
it against unpublished MoH health figures. But there is (a) no
certainty at this stage that this kind of work would invalidate the
Lancet findings, or (b) any guarantee that if it does produce a
difference answer, that the rejection of the Lancet findings would be
conclusive.”
Rappert comments:
“This quote suggests, again, that deliberations were geared in a
particular direction – towards finding grounds for rejecting the
Lancet study, without any evidence of countervailing efforts by
government officials to produce or endorse alternative other studies
or data. At numerous other occasions in the exchanges released it
could be argued that officials were not undertaking a neutral attempt
to understand the impact of violence in Iraq on the civilian
population. Rather – and in the absence of evidence and research of
their own – they adopted the attitude of opponents of one particular
study. While they did not wish to override the more nuanced
evaluations of technical advisors, the general thrust of inter-
ministry deliberations reads as seeking to find as many grounds
possible for dismissal of the study’s findings as possible.”
The media swallowed the government smear campaign with gusto - the
Lancet studies have been consigned to oblivion in most media
reporting. Thus, the Guardian last month preferred to cite IBC, “which
is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian
deaths”.
From the BBC to the New York Times, from the Guardian to Channel 4
News, the figure of choice is that offered by Iraq Body Count of
around 100,000 civilian deaths by violence. Sometimes this figure is
interpreted as total Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, sometimes as
total Iraqi civilian deaths, sometimes as total Iraqi deaths by
violence. Almost +never+ do journalists make clear that it is an
extremely limited count of deaths recorded by media in a country that
is obviously much too dangerous for journalists to be able to work
effectively. Why do we say ‘obviously’?
The Most Lethal War For Journalists
A recent report from Reporters Without Borders (RWB) comments:
“The second U.S. war with Iraq [2003 onwards] has been the most lethal
for journalists since World War II. To date, the number of journalists
and media contributors killed in the country since the conflict broke
out on 20 March 2003 stands at 230. That is more than those killed
during the entire Vietnam War or the civil war in Algeria.
“Iraq has also been the world’s biggest market for hostages. Over 93
media professionals were abducted in those seven years, at least 42 of
whom were later executed. Moreover, 14 are still missing.”
A study of deaths in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996 by Patrick Ball et al
at the University of California, Berkeley (1999) found that numbers of
murders reported by the media +decreased+ as violence increased. Ball
explained that “the press stopped reporting the violence beginning in
September 1980. Perhaps not coincidentally, the database lists seven
murders of journalists in July and August of that year”. (Patrick
Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer, ‘State Violence in
Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection’, 1999;
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/
Ironically, then, as a theatre of war becomes more lethal to
civilians, including journalists, media reports of civilian deaths can
give the impression of a falling death toll. RWB comments further on
the aftermath of the 2003 invasion:
“From day one, the new government proved to be extremely distrustful
of the media, going so far as to prohibit Al-Jazeera from operating in
the country, after accusing the TV news network of ‘inciting violence
and sedition.’ The Qatari network still does not have an office in
Iraq and is operating via on-site correspondents.
“Iraqi journalists soon had to face numerous restrictions and
prohibitions enforced by the latest ruling authorities....
“In 2006, Nuri al-Maliki’s government regularly threatened to shut
down certain newspapers after accusing them of incitement to violence.
Television networks were also pointed out as being responsible for
stirring up ethnic and religious passions. They were prohibited from
broadcasting segments that showed blood or murder scenes. On 5
November 2006, the Minister of the Interior decided to close down the
Sunni television networks Al-Zawra and Salah-Eddin for having
broadcast footage of demonstrators waving pictures of former dictator
Saddam Hussein and protesting against his capital sentence. Both
stations are still closed down.”
Professor Rappert notes “that the Secretariat of the 2006 Geneva
Declaration on Armed Violence and Development (an instrument which the
UK sits on the coordinating group of) estimates that “between three
and 15 times as many people die indirectly for every person that dies
violently.” (Rappert, Ibid.) In 2007, Les Roberts told us that an ORB
poll revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since the
2003 invasion seemed "very much to align" with the 2004 and 2006
Lancet studies he had co-authored. (See our media alert)
And why, anyway, is it important to focus on civilian deaths by
violence? The key question for international law is how many civilians
have died as a result of illegal American and British actions, as a
result of the collapse of social infrastructure - health systems,
sewage systems, water supplies, electricity supplies, and so on -
caused by the US-UK invasion. IBC focuses only on direct deaths of
civilians by violence as reported by the media (and, in recent years,
other sources like morgues).
The absurdity is such that the New York Times felt able to report last
month:
"Caracas, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they
lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.
"In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there
were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq
Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed
above 16,000."
We asked Ziad Obermeyer, a public health researcher at the Institute
for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, for his
opinion on the New York Times comparison:
“Government statistics on deaths in Venezuela are quite accurate, at
least according to a recent UN report (Mathers et al, Bulletin of the
World Health Organization 83:3, 2005), making the number of 16,000
murders quite plausible. Media reports in Iraq, on the other hand, are
widely recognized as an absolute minimum, with most other estimates
several times higher. Comparing data from such different sources is
unlikely to yield any clear insights into the true magnitude of
differences.” (Email to Media Lens, September 1, 2010)
In his interview with Blair, Marr expressed views that shared, rather
than challenged, Blair’s view of the world. He referred to Blair
"successfully intervening in Kosovo and, later, Sierra Leone". The war
in Afghanistan, Marr argued, was "another war, another piece of nation-
building..." So that war, and by implication the Iraq war they had
just discussed (hence “another”) was “a piece of nation-building”,
rather than a war crime.
Blair said Britain should threaten Iran militarily "if they continue
to develop nuclear weapons." Marr failed to remind Blair that there is
currently no credible evidence that Iran is developing nuclear
weapons. Marr asked: “Are you actually saying that we should threaten
them militarily if they are determined to develop nuclear weapons?”
Blair said: “If necessarily militarily... I think there is no
alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons and
they need to get that message loud and clear.”
It really doesn’t matter why Blair is promoting Perpetual War. It
could be that he believes he has been chosen by the Creator to fight
Evil. More likely, he is a Machiavellian driven to do whatever
furthers his political and financial interests - a cynic who gambled
and lost on the Iraq war.
We believe that, in a different society - one in which vested
interests did not benefit from the promotion of illusions and violence
- Blair would be exposed so brutally, so often, by the media that he
would quickly become an object of ridicule and disappear from sight.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and
respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge
you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Andrew Marr
Email: andre...@bbc.co.uk
Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news
Email: HelenBoaden...@bbc.co.
http://www.medialens.org/
likely outcome. But then he should be denied the opportunity to peddle
his book and his advocacy of Permanent War. The sense in reality, of
course, is of elite media managers protecting their elite political
friends.
The Chicago Doctrine - Rationalising The Bloodbath
Not only did Marr not seriously challenge Blair, he challenged common
sense by dredging up a bogus justification for Blair’s actions. Marr
said of Kosovo and Sierra Leone:
"After those two interventions you made what in retrospect seems a
+very+ significant speech in Chicago in 1999, where you developed a
new doctrine about dictatorships."
In fact Blair spoke in Chicago on April 22, 1999, in the middle of the
bombing of Serbia (between March 24 and June 10, 1999). The speech was
a typically audacious attempt to suggest that deep principle underlay
what was actually cynical realpolitik. John Norris, director of
communications during the war for US deputy Secretary of State Strobe
Talbott, commented, “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader
trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar
Albanians - that best explains NATO’s war”. (Norris, Collision Course:
NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, Praeger, 2005, p.xiii)
Marr implied that the so-called ‘Chicago Doctrine’ was rooted in
lessons learned by Blair +after+ his two interventions thus far, and
that these lessons informed his subsequent decision to attack Iraq.
Between the lines, we were to read: ’Iraq’s WMDs were never really the
point from the perspective of the Chicago Doctrine.’ Blair clearly
knew exactly what Marr had in mind and was quick to accept the
emphasis:
"I also think that there can be circumstances in which it is
legitimate to intervene even in another country's affairs where the
oppression of the people is so cruel and where you can't simply say
well, unless our national interest is directly threatened in a very
specific way we're not going to have anything to do with it.”
Marr then reinforced the point: "So you can topple tyrants +because+
they're tyrants, not because they immediately threaten other people."
Even a cursory glance at Blair’s Chicago speech reveals that Marr was
bending over backwards to find the speech “+very+ significant” in this
way. In the speech, Blair said that, in judging the case for military
intervention, “we need to bear in mind five major considerations”. The
fifth of these involved asking: “do we have national interests
involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded
the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference
that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.”
In other words, the conflict +was+ of “national interest” - it +did+
“threaten other people”.
Marr’s claim on the significance of the Chicago speech is bogus for
more obvious reasons. George Bush could not have been clearer in
2002-2003 when he said: "The world needs him [Saddam Hussein] to
answer a single question: Has the Iraqi regime fully and
unconditionally disarmed, as required by Resolution 1441, or has it
not?" (Source)
The "single question" concerned the supposed threat posed by Iraq, not
the nature of its government.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s Press Secretary, said, “we have high confidence
that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was
about and it is about." (Source)
The Independent’s Andreas Whittam Smith wrote in May 2003:
"There was no ambiguity about the reasons for fighting. The only text
which matters is the motion the Prime Minister put down in the House
of Commons on 18 March, just before hostilities began. It asked
members of Parliament to support the decision of Her Majesty's
Government 'that the United Kingdom should use all means necessary to
ensure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction'.
"There was nothing else in the motion other than citations of various
United Nations Security Council resolutions. Regime change was not a
British war aim." (Whittam Smith, 'If the weapons are not found, Blair
must quit,' The Independent, May 19, 2003)
The Intelligence Lie - And The Real Death Toll
In his interview with Marr, Blair said:
“And I've always apologised for the fact that the intelligence was
wrong. What I can't apologise for, however, is the decision we took.
Which we took, incidentally, based on intelligence, at the time. So
all I'm saying to you is, you know - this has been gone over many,
many times. The intelligence picture was clear. We acted on it.”
Marr must have known that Blair would once again offer the defence
that “the intelligence was wrong”, and yet it was a lie that he failed
to challenge. But why? Carne Ross, a key Foreign Office diplomat
responsible for monitoring UN arms inspections in Iraq, had given
testimony to the Iraq Inquiry just six weeks earlier that left Blair’s
lie utterly exposed. Ross said:
“It remains my view that the internal government assessment of Iraq’s
capabilities was intentionally and substantially exaggerated in public
government documents during 2002 and 2003. Throughout my posting in
New York, it was the UK and US assessment that while there were many
unanswered questions about Iraq’s WMD stocks and capabilities, we did
not believe that these amounted to a substantial threat. At no point
did we have any firm evidence, from intelligence sources or otherwise,
of significant weapons holdings...
“In all the policy documents I reviewed in preparation for this
testimony, there is no mention prior to 9/11 of any increase in the
threat assessment for Iraq. Instead, these documents discuss the
difficulty in maintaining support for sanctions in the absence of
clear evidence of WMD violations by Iraq...” (http://
www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/
Ross talked of a “process of deliberate public exaggeration”:
“This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion
and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those
participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in
blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading
statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in
their totality, lies.”
In the interview, Marr commented: "100,000 plus people certainly died”
as a result of the war, “some people say more”.
Indeed “some people” do say “more” - the world's leading medical
journal, The Lancet, for example, publishing a top group of
epidemiologists, led by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Like virtually the entire media, Marr prefers to cite a figure offered
by the website, Iraq Body Count (IBC), described as “a very misleading
exercise” even by the head of a major Western news bureau in Baghdad,
one of IBC’s key sources (Email forwarded to Media Lens, October 25,
2006).
Marr ought to be aware of a recent study by Professor Brian Rappert of
the University of Exeter, which details how the UK government worked
to discredit the Lancet studies. A ‘Restricted’ letter from a
ministry’s Chief Economist dated 8 November 2004 closed with:
“It might also be possible, as Gerald Russell has suggested, to try
and validate the study’s preinvasion estimate of mortality by checking
it against unpublished MoH health figures. But there is (a) no
certainty at this stage that this kind of work would invalidate the
Lancet findings, or (b) any guarantee that if it does produce a
difference answer, that the rejection of the Lancet findings would be
conclusive.”
Rappert comments:
“This quote suggests, again, that deliberations were geared in a
particular direction – towards finding grounds for rejecting the
Lancet study, without any evidence of countervailing efforts by
government officials to produce or endorse alternative other studies
or data. At numerous other occasions in the exchanges released it
could be argued that officials were not undertaking a neutral attempt
to understand the impact of violence in Iraq on the civilian
population. Rather – and in the absence of evidence and research of
their own – they adopted the attitude of opponents of one particular
study. While they did not wish to override the more nuanced
evaluations of technical advisors, the general thrust of inter-
ministry deliberations reads as seeking to find as many grounds
possible for dismissal of the study’s findings as possible.”
The media swallowed the government smear campaign with gusto - the
Lancet studies have been consigned to oblivion in most media
reporting. Thus, the Guardian last month preferred to cite IBC, “which
is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian
deaths”.
From the BBC to the New York Times, from the Guardian to Channel 4
News, the figure of choice is that offered by Iraq Body Count of
around 100,000 civilian deaths by violence. Sometimes this figure is
interpreted as total Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, sometimes as
total Iraqi civilian deaths, sometimes as total Iraqi deaths by
violence. Almost +never+ do journalists make clear that it is an
extremely limited count of deaths recorded by media in a country that
is obviously much too dangerous for journalists to be able to work
effectively. Why do we say ‘obviously’?
The Most Lethal War For Journalists
A recent report from Reporters Without Borders (RWB) comments:
“The second U.S. war with Iraq [2003 onwards] has been the most lethal
for journalists since World War II. To date, the number of journalists
and media contributors killed in the country since the conflict broke
out on 20 March 2003 stands at 230. That is more than those killed
during the entire Vietnam War or the civil war in Algeria.
“Iraq has also been the world’s biggest market for hostages. Over 93
media professionals were abducted in those seven years, at least 42 of
whom were later executed. Moreover, 14 are still missing.”
A study of deaths in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996 by Patrick Ball et al
at the University of California, Berkeley (1999) found that numbers of
murders reported by the media +decreased+ as violence increased. Ball
explained that “the press stopped reporting the violence beginning in
September 1980. Perhaps not coincidentally, the database lists seven
murders of journalists in July and August of that year”. (Patrick
Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer, ‘State Violence in
Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection’, 1999;
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/
Ironically, then, as a theatre of war becomes more lethal to
civilians, including journalists, media reports of civilian deaths can
give the impression of a falling death toll. RWB comments further on
the aftermath of the 2003 invasion:
“From day one, the new government proved to be extremely distrustful
of the media, going so far as to prohibit Al-Jazeera from operating in
the country, after accusing the TV news network of ‘inciting violence
and sedition.’ The Qatari network still does not have an office in
Iraq and is operating via on-site correspondents.
“Iraqi journalists soon had to face numerous restrictions and
prohibitions enforced by the latest ruling authorities....
“In 2006, Nuri al-Maliki’s government regularly threatened to shut
down certain newspapers after accusing them of incitement to violence.
Television networks were also pointed out as being responsible for
stirring up ethnic and religious passions. They were prohibited from
broadcasting segments that showed blood or murder scenes. On 5
November 2006, the Minister of the Interior decided to close down the
Sunni television networks Al-Zawra and Salah-Eddin for having
broadcast footage of demonstrators waving pictures of former dictator
Saddam Hussein and protesting against his capital sentence. Both
stations are still closed down.”
Professor Rappert notes “that the Secretariat of the 2006 Geneva
Declaration on Armed Violence and Development (an instrument which the
UK sits on the coordinating group of) estimates that “between three
and 15 times as many people die indirectly for every person that dies
violently.” (Rappert, Ibid.) In 2007, Les Roberts told us that an ORB
poll revealing that 1.2 million Iraqis had been murdered since the
2003 invasion seemed "very much to align" with the 2004 and 2006
Lancet studies he had co-authored. (See our media alert)
And why, anyway, is it important to focus on civilian deaths by
violence? The key question for international law is how many civilians
have died as a result of illegal American and British actions, as a
result of the collapse of social infrastructure - health systems,
sewage systems, water supplies, electricity supplies, and so on -
caused by the US-UK invasion. IBC focuses only on direct deaths of
civilians by violence as reported by the media (and, in recent years,
other sources like morgues).
The absurdity is such that the New York Times felt able to report last
month:
"Caracas, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they
lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.
"In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there
were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq
Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed
above 16,000."
We asked Ziad Obermeyer, a public health researcher at the Institute
for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, for his
opinion on the New York Times comparison:
“Government statistics on deaths in Venezuela are quite accurate, at
least according to a recent UN report (Mathers et al, Bulletin of the
World Health Organization 83:3, 2005), making the number of 16,000
murders quite plausible. Media reports in Iraq, on the other hand, are
widely recognized as an absolute minimum, with most other estimates
several times higher. Comparing data from such different sources is
unlikely to yield any clear insights into the true magnitude of
differences.” (Email to Media Lens, September 1, 2010)
In his interview with Blair, Marr expressed views that shared, rather
than challenged, Blair’s view of the world. He referred to Blair
"successfully intervening in Kosovo and, later, Sierra Leone". The war
in Afghanistan, Marr argued, was "another war, another piece of nation-
building..." So that war, and by implication the Iraq war they had
just discussed (hence “another”) was “a piece of nation-building”,
rather than a war crime.
Blair said Britain should threaten Iran militarily "if they continue
to develop nuclear weapons." Marr failed to remind Blair that there is
currently no credible evidence that Iran is developing nuclear
weapons. Marr asked: “Are you actually saying that we should threaten
them militarily if they are determined to develop nuclear weapons?”
Blair said: “If necessarily militarily... I think there is no
alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons and
they need to get that message loud and clear.”
It really doesn’t matter why Blair is promoting Perpetual War. It
could be that he believes he has been chosen by the Creator to fight
Evil. More likely, he is a Machiavellian driven to do whatever
furthers his political and financial interests - a cynic who gambled
and lost on the Iraq war.
We believe that, in a different society - one in which vested
interests did not benefit from the promotion of illusions and violence
- Blair would be exposed so brutally, so often, by the media that he
would quickly become an object of ridicule and disappear from sight.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and
respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge
you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Andrew Marr
Email: andre...@bbc.co.uk
Helen Boaden, the BBC's director of news
Email: HelenBoaden...@bbc.co.
http://www.medialens.org/
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