Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (London)
April 2, 2004, Friday
SECTION: Overseas news; 22
LENGTH: 1098 words
HEADLINE: Images of Fallujah confront America
BYLINE: Bronwen Maddox
BODY:
IT DOES not look as if Fallujah will prove a "Mogadishu moment" - a point of sudden revulsion when Americans lose their heart for a war. The response, so far, has been muted, and not for lack of media coverage, despite editors' very public agonising about how much of the horror to show.
But the brutal scenes of the burning, mutilation and hanging of four US contractors could more insidiously undermine support for the Iraq deployment as the message of Fallujah sinks in. The images show just how deeply some Iraqis - even children - hate the American presence. It is delusion to pretend that, in important parts of Iraq, the coalition is welcome.
It is inevitable that the scenes from Fallujah on Wednesday would be compared with the 1993 massacre of 18 US Rangers in the Somalian capital, and the television pictures of one body dragged through Mogadishu's streets, to cheering crowds.
When US forces left Somalia, six months later, the Clinton Administration said it was handing over as planned to the United Nations. But no one was in doubt that Americans' horrified response to the television pictures was the real cause, even though sympathy for starving Somali children, as seen on television, had provoked the deployment in the first place.
This time, the reaction has been less sharp. Yet people were not shielded from the details, at least in newspapers.
Some television channels shied away from the most shocking images; others blurred the features of the bodies. But yesterday one talking point - on television - was the decision by The New York Times and The Washington Post to lead their front pages with two explicit images.
The New York Times showed two of the burned and decapitated torsos hanging by wire from a bridge. The Post used a picture of charred remains, still in recognisably human form, surrounded by elated young men - boys, really. Two are flapping the soles of their shoes at the corpse, in a traditional insult. All are dressed in Western-style sports shirts and jeans, looking like American teenagers.
Some images were not used by mainstream media, and relayed only on newswires and the internet. One of the first transmitted from Fallujah was of a man's hands rising out of the flames, burnt solid black and contorted into claws by the heat.
Another was of a body, still recognisable, with blood streaming across the street, as a limb began to burn.
US editors wrestled publicly with their dilemma. They wanted to convey the full horror, but were afraid of offending readers and viewers, and seeming disrespectful to the dead men and their families.
After Mogadishu, they were also aware of the political potency of such scenes. One CNN anchorwoman asked viewers: "Does today change the way you look at the war?"
If the American public does not react to Fallujah as it did to Mogadishu, why not? One bald reason is that these were security contractors, hired to protect private businesses, rather than soldiers.
So the massacre was not a symbol of military defeat, like Mogadishu. As captured in the film Black Hawk Down, US teams swarmed into the narrow streets of the Somalian capital to try to seize rebel leader Muhammed Farrah Aidid, and fought for two days to save each other, in what became a rout.
Contractors are also clearly much more vulnerable than soldiers. Yesterday a big US-backed trade fair in Iraq was postponed because of contractors' fears that they are becoming popular soft targets.
Most important, in Somalia, there was already enormous public unease about the US's involvement in a far-off conflict with no apparent exit.
That isn't yet the case in Iraq. Polls - which this week show President Bush with a solid lead over Democrat John Kerry - suggest most feel it is too soon to pull out of a war the US began.
Yet the message of Wednesday's killings is clear. In some parts of Iraq, the Americans are hated. No matter if they are contractors trying to rebuild power lines and water supplies, they are loathed as symbols of foreign occupation.
Tony Blair insisted yesterday that most Iraqis want coalition troops to stay. "The vast majority of Iraqi people are not wanting that (attacks) to happen to coalition troops," he said, although "there will be...extremists, terrorists, former sympathisers with Saddam, who will be wanting to kill as many people as possible".
That is true only up to a point. Fallujah, in the heart of the Sunni region most loyal to the Saddam regime, is not representative of the whole country. Out of 25 million Iraqis, 15 million are Shias who have chosen for the moment to tolerate foreign forces, and five million are Kurds who are running their own patch with calm autonomy. But Mr Blair's words do not quite match the Fallujah pictures. The crowd did not look like extremists or foreign terrorists, if only because so many were so young. They looked like residents holding up signs proclaiming their town as the "graveyard of Americans".
If the killings continue after the handover of sovereignty on June 30, it may test the stamina of the US public in a way that this week has not. In Mogadishu, it was not just the images which rattled Americans, it was the sense that there was no exit.
The same could prove true of Iraq, in which case the images of Fallujah will be remembered and revived.
Simon Jenkins, page 28
HOW THE WORLD'S MEDIA REPORTED THE FALLUJAH AMBUSH
America
NBC: edited pictures so that corpses were less visible
CNN: initially only described scenes; later, after a warning, showed glimpses of burned bodies hanging from bridge
FOX: images limited to shots of burning vehicles and joyous crowds
ABC and CBS: showed blurred footage
The Washington Post: graphic coverage of mob beating charred corpses with shoes
The New York Times: showed burnt corpses hanging from bridge
Los Angeles Times: showed hanging bodies inside the paper
Britain
BBC: showed footage of burning vehicles and rioting Iraqis
Channel 4: showed blurred body being dragged through the street, and clear shots of corpses hanging from bridge
Sky News: long, blurred, footage of corpses being dragged through street
Europe
LCI (Paris): showed clear shots of bodies being dragged down the street and hanging from bridge
ZDF (Germany): only described the event, and showed joyous crowds
Middle East
Al-Aribya (Dubai): initially showed burnt corpse being pulled out of burning car and kicked. Later image was blurred
Al-Jazeera (Qatar): showed blurred footage of burnt bodies
LOAD-DATE: April 2, 2004
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