How the 'positive' story of the Iraq war could be taught to British children

Few would now dispute the case for the US-led invasion of Iraq was built on misinformation and half-truths but nearly five years on from the dodgy dossier, the government’s propaganda offensive has opened on a new front: the classroom.

"After Iraq was expelled from Kuwait, the United Nations passed a cease-fire resolution. This resolution obligated Iraq to discontinue its nuclear weapons program. Iraq did not honour the cease-fire agreement by surrendering their weapons of mass destruction, and so resolution 678 was revived by the US government."

"Invasion was necessary to allow the opportunity to remove Saddam Hussein, an oppressive dictator, from power, and to bring democracy to Iraq."

This isn’t an extract from Blair’s diaries or a White House press release. It comes from Defence Dynamics, an online teaching resource of forty lesson plans produced by the Ministry of Defence, which it hopes will reach thousands of GCSE classes from this September.

Now newstatesman.com has obtained a draft of an English lesson devised by children’s advertising agency Kids Connections, which has been commissioned by the MoD to produce and market the £200,000 project.

Part of a module entitled ‘Promoting peace and security in Iraq’ it instructs classes to hold a vote on the war, and to produce a piece writing arguing for or against the withdrawal of soldiers from the Gulf.

The teachers’ notes state: "Most students will vote against the ongoing maintenance of troops. Ask students to justify their opinions."

It continues: "Throughout the lesson, students should come to understand that this activity is representative of democracy on a micro scale and by voting, they have exercised their democratic right, a right that is newly available to Iraqis."

A student ‘fact sheet’ states that the occupation has resulted in “Over 150 healthcare facilities completed and many more are in progress. 20 hospitals rehabilitated. Immunisation programme re-started in 2003. 70 million new text books distributed to schools. Sewage and wastewater treatment plants operating again.”

Yet this rosy picture seems woefully at odds with a report by the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, backed by Oxfam, which states that Iraq is facing a humanitarian crisis "of alarming scale and severity".

It finds that four million Iraqis are ‘food-insecure’ and that four million have fled, creating "the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world". The number of Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent since 2003, while 80 percent lack effective sanitation; and of 180 hospitals countrywide, “90 percent lack key resources including medical and surgical supplies". Whilst one of the resources, an anti-war newspaper article, notes that a majority of Iraqis do not support the occupation, no mention of this human catastrophe, nor of the 600,000 Iraqi dead and the daily car bombings, hostage takings and assassinations, is made in the draft.

It is not known how closely the MoD has controlled the content of the lesson plans, or whether the original brief stipulated that it should aim to portray the occupation in an positive light.

On 2 August Schools Students Against the War (SSAW) part of the original Stop the War Coalition and now dedicated to campaigning against recruitment in schools, demonstrated outside the Camden offices of Kids Connections, whose clients include Asda, Nestle and Npower. A letter demanding that they sever relations with the MoD signed by Tony Benn and Lyndsey German was to be handed over. When no-one appeared it was pushed through the letter box.

"We are angry that the Army is being so underhand in getting children to join up under a false impression of what Iraq has become” said Tali Janner-Klausner, convener of SSAW. “The military has no place in education.”

Kids Connections last night declined to comment.

In February the New Statesman revealed how a retention crisis that saw a 12,000 soldiers leaving the Army last year alone, was forcing the military recruiters to target children as young as 14 via their Camouflage youth information scheme and schools visits to barracks.

Defence Dynamics has been introduced to replace the Defence Schools Presentation Teams, which toured 460 secondary schools a year at a cost of £2.1m. Derek Twigg, parliamentary undersecretary of state for defence, told Parliament that the teams “allow us to get our message over about the importance of defence” and that “civilian and military staff are seen as excellent role models and there are consequently significant benefits for future recruiting.”

He further noted that Defence Dynamics “will enable us to reach many more children than are visited by the touring Defence Presentation Schools Teams, and at a significantly lower cost.”

However, the MoD denies that Defence Dynamics is an attempt to target potential soldiers. A letter from Twigg to Conservative MP Mark Harper stated “Neither the Presentation Teams nor Defence Dynamics have a direct link to recruiting into the Armed Forces, and it is not their purpose. We therefore have not measured a recruiting effect as the teams’ purpose is to increase awareness and understanding of our work.”

Asked why else the MoD would wish to increase awareness of its work amongst school children, a spokesman said: “I can’t explain it any other way: it’s literally to raise our profile and let people know what we do, the same as any other company.”

“We recognise that this isn’t necessarily a direct attempt at recruitment” says Sam Fairbairn, who organised the demo. “It’s propaganda to give a falsely positive image of Iraq, so when the Army attends careers days children have been softened up and are less hostile to the military.”

Kids Connections had asked the Stop the War Coalition to contribute a leaflet from a 2006 demo to the English teaching resources, stating that “there is categorically no recruitment agenda to this initiative.” The Coalition declined, citing the “inherent pro-war bias within the project.”

The MoD is by no means the first controversial group to target schools: British Nuclear Fuels, BP and arms manufacturers BAe and Rolls Royce have also produced online teaching resources explaining the importance of their work.

Despite claims by the MoD that pilot schemes have had a ‘very positive’ feedback, teachers are unimpressed.

“As a lesson plan it’s insanely complicated,” says Victoria Elliott, a secondary English teacher. “The focus is not really on the skills supposedly being taught, but is instead about getting information across, which is completely irrelevant to English teaching.”

“Lots of firms try and get us to use their material but it always reflects their interests and agenda. The insidious comments about Iraqi’s new-found democracy made me laugh aloud. I certainly wouldn’t allow myself to be used a recruiting sergeant in the classroom.”

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