The 'Real World' War

By Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters. Posted April 2, 2003.

Don't pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang. Bombs over Baghdad! Yeah! Ha ha yeah! Don't even bang unless you plan to hit something. Bombs over Baghdad!
-- OutKast, "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)"

What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we are seeing is slices of the war in Iraq.
-- Donald Rumsfeld, March 21, 2003

There is no toilet paper in Iraq. I ate with my hands. It was disgusting. I knew war sucked before I entered it.
-- Jeff Zaun, POW in Iraq 1991 (AP, March 21, 2003)

Death and information: the realities of war.
-- Peter Jennings (ABC News World News Tonight, March 22, 2003)

Now into its second week, Donald Rumsfeld's unprecedented "effects-based campaign" is increasingly complex. The initial idea premised on selective and spectacular targeting; rather than bomb everything in sight (also known as "overwhelming force" and deployed by Colin Powell in Gulf War I), the sequel is designed to "shock and awe." So far, the United States has yet to deploy the MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) that you know someone is dying to drop on the very man who 12 years ago coined that very same "mother of all" usage.

As days pass, however, Operation Iraqi Freedom is less a dazzling U.S. military experiment and more an arduous ordeal. At least this is what it looks like on TV, where shifts in tone and sensation are measured in minutes, even seconds. How quickly the sand storms turn the TV screen orange, and incredibly the bombs light up Baghdad's night-time skyline.

Indeed, on March 19, the first night of the war, Ari Fleischer made a dramatic entrance and exit in about 20 seconds: "The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun. The President will address the nation at 10:15." Reporters scrambled to have their pictures prepared, their cameras trained on Baghdad. And then, nothing. Imagine the questions in network HQs: Go with Survivor or stick with the snoozy Baghdad skyline?

Then came the "target of opportunity," propitiously introduced into the popular lexicon as the U.S. shot cruise missiles at Baghdad, in a display that Roland Watson and Elaine Monaghan called "a blitzkrieg designed to terrify Iraqi leaders and their Republican Guard into surrender."

This blitzing took as its particular targets the "so-called Peace Palace" and the "so-called Flowers Palace" (the so-calling is actually Wolf Blitzer's), in an effort to "decapitate" the "command and control," namely, Saddam Hussein. Or rather, Saddam Himself, a term frequently used by news anchors asking probing questions of guest experts. For example, "What would Saddam Himself be thinking at this moment?" Or again, "What if the missile killed Saddam Himself?"

Speculating about such events "as they happen" is precisely the imprecise business of TV reporters and consultants. This time around, the studio-anchored shows include the usual elements -- suited anchors (sitting or standing), charts and colorful graphics, and tallies of "casualties" and "accidents" -- as well as an extraordinary innovation, the "embedded correspondent," each assigned to a unit, according to the Pentagon, "living, traveling and going into combat with it. But instead of a weapon, the journalist will wield a pen [or] videotape camera."

As CNN's Aaron Brown has it, these embedded journalists are set to "give us these snapshots, if you will." They aren't yet so rock 'n' roll as Esquire correspondent Michael Herr in Vietnam (who regularly and provocatively spelled out the costs of such attachment: "You were as responsible for everything you saw as for everything you did," Dispatches, 21). But they are surely in for rough rides, if the first live-TV encounter on March 22 is any indication. As embedded Sky News reporter David Bowden narrated, U.S. Marines fought back Iraqi "resistance" at Umm Qasr, granting viewers the first instance of live-war-TV. Staff Sgt. Nick Lerma observed afterwards that it "rapidly escalated from a skirmish into a full-scale battle," with the camera rolling.

Bowden crawled along the ground to put a microphone into a young GI's appropriately distracted face, to ask, essentially, "What are you doing now?" The U.S. team shot off some rounds at Iraqis in a building, then hunkered down while first a couple of tanks and then an air strike were called in to decimate the building. In the distance, caught by the cameraman's long lens, an Iraqi ran from the building, on fire. Embedding is, most obviously, a next step from Cops, when the officer -- here the terse, camouflaged troop -- pauses in his work to explain what he's doing to an inquiring mind. Except, it's live. Really live. This makes the potential for disaster, tragedy and exploitation huge (one imagines the administration's in-house PR genius Karl Rove offered some resistance of his own at the prospect).

At once horrifying and seductive, even, potentially, addictive in the way that The Real World can be, embedded TV stems from that familiar impulse to watch live car races or hockey games. What would have happened if, on live-war-TV, the Harrier air strike on the Iraqi shooters went wrong, or the Iraqi shooters were more accurate, or the cameraman lucked on a shot of the shooters' blown-up corpses? Even an American corpse? The scene might have transformed into snuff in an instant. Or maybe worse, Iraqi-style execution footage. Ideally, as Lexington Institute's Dan Goure told MSNBC's Lester Holt on March 23, embedded reporters will ensure "truth on the battlefield." More cryptically, if not more realistically, Rumsfeld told Wolf Blitzer, "The television image is belied by what's seen on the ground."

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