On 9 April, US tanks rolled into central Baghdad, a few dozen Iraqis cheered the felling of a statue of Saddam Hussein outside a hotel housing journalists – and that was that as far as the media were concerned.
Blair “has become, again, Teflon Tony”, declared the BBC’s Natasha Kaplinsky, beaming. Beside her, Mark Mardell agreed: “It has been a vindication for him.” Over on ITN, John Irvine said: “A war of three weeks has brought an end to decades of Iraqi misery” – words that turned sour the moment they left Irvine’s mouth.
In a jaw-dropping display, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, described how Blair’s critics “aren’t going to thank him – because they’re only human – for being right when they’ve been wrong”. He continued: “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.”
We asked Marr how he could claim that Blair had been vindicated, given the arguments of his critics: that Iraq was unlikely to have retained any capability to use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), that this could have been confirmed peacefully, and that war would increase the likelihood of terrorism, embolden US hawks, and cause chaos and suffering in Iraq. Marr replied that he agreed on the need to find WMDs: “I did say, and believe, that he has been proved right about the Baghdad seizure and the reaction of Iraqis . . . This does not represent my, or the BBC’s, final judgement on the war.”
But Marr clearly was passing judgement on the war – Blair could not possibly stand larger and stronger simply because he guessed right on Baghdad’s rapid fall amid cheering crowds. The former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn gave us a more accurate appraisal of Marr’s performance: “This time he really got carried away. It was a very ominous portent of the kind of victory spirit and triumphalism our politicians will indulge in the next weeks, unless they are watched. Marr is poor on foreign affairs as such, and he really has no clue about the Middle East or about how wrong all this could well go for Blair and Britain, not to mention Iraq and the Arabs, in the coming months, on many levels.”
Indeed, the day after the media’s jubilation, the Red Cross suspended its operations in Baghdad, while UN and aid officials warned that the looting of government buildings, embassies, hospitals and businesses constituted “violent anarchy” that would rapidly trigger “a humanitarian disaster”. As we write, 32 out of 35 hospitals in Baghdad have shut down, according to the Red Cross.
On 9 April, journalists across the media once again dropped the pretence of objectivity. They maintained a shameful silence when Blair and Straw claimed that weapons inspectors had been “thrown out” of Iraq in December 1998 having achieved nothing, when in reality they were withdrawn having (in their own words) “fundamentally disarmed” Iraq of WMDs. Journalists said nothing when Blair claimed that Iraqi WMDs presented “a real and unique threat”, while Unscom inspectors and others insisted that any retained weapons would long since have become harmless “sludge”. In other words, journalists stayed silent when the justifications for this bloodbath could have been exposed as utter nonsense.
When we asked the Newsnight editor, George Entwistle, to guess what percentage of Iraqi WMDs the inspectors claimed to have destroyed by 1998, he correctly estimated “95-98 per cent”. And yet an endless stream of politicians has passed unscathed through the Newsnight studio lying about the futility of all inspections and the need for war.
Now, with Iraq a shattered and looted wreck, the same journalists are falling over themselves to declare the same warmongers “vindicated”.
David Edwards and David Cromwell are co-editors of MediaLens (www.medialens.org)
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