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FUm & History, Vol. XXII, Nos. 1 & 2, February/May, 199213 THE GULF WAR AND MEDIA: SOME CONCLUSIONS Philip Taylor It was unquestionably one of the most clear-cut and one-sided military victories in the history of warfare. Although the final Iraqi death toll might never be know, at least 40,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 had died, as compared with fewer than 150 soldiers from the entire coalition who lost their lives in Desert Storm.1 It is possible that as much as 50% of the Iraqi death toll was sustained during the 100 hour ground war. The Iraqis would concede that only 2,000 of their civilians had been killed. Part of the difficulty in assessing precisely how many of the enemy had died was, as American officials cautioned, "that even a tally of buried bodies will be highly imprecise because many Iraqi soldiers were dismembered or charred beyond recognition in explosions of deadly US munitions."2 The media coverage gave very little indication of this. As Ian Hargreaves, Deputy Editor of the Financial Times, said after the war: "the public in Britain and in America will have had the impression that this was a war involving very little death and very little utter horror."3 It did appear, however, that all those pre-war American anxieties about body bags, a hostile media and a poor American military performance had proved unwarranted. One message which emerged was that modern technology, both military and communications, had changed the face ofwarfare. Militarily, it was a warning to Third World countries that might be entertaining notions of flexing their muscles that they had better think again before taking on the champions ofthe New World Order: the United Nations and the First World's leading technologically based military power. The Gulf War had demonstrated that the gap between the world's fourth and first military powers, with only comparatively little help from the latter's 30 friends, was colossal. Not only had the GulfWar exorcised the Vietnam Syndrome from the American psyche, television's coverage of it had revealed the future ~ and the future belonged, in peace preferably but in war if necessary, to high technology. Moreover, the idea that "the media are American," that Anglo-American news organizations dominate the international flow of news to the detriment of the Third World, had not only found substantiating support in the war, it had even been underlined by the coalition's media arrangements, with their Anglo-American emphasis. Ever since decolonization a generation or so earlier, mounting Third World resentment at what was perceived to be the adverse consequences for developing nations of this information and cultural hegemony by advanced Philip M. Taylor is Senior Lecturer in International History and Deputy Director of the Institute of Communications Studies at the University ofLeeds, England His essay is taken from War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester UP, 1992; in US, St. Martin's Press). 14 Philip M. Taylor countries, of this "media imperialism," had now found its apogee. The ability of the American-led coalition to drive its military message home and abroad by superior technology and by controlling international communications systems and news organizations had demonstrated for such people that the New World Order and the New World Information Order had merged into one. The ramifications of this message, particularly in the Muslim world, may take some time to emerge. During the war, Iraqi propaganda had made a great play of the "vile," "hypocritical" and "atheistic" influence the United States in the region, which was being achieved with the connivance of the oil-rich Gulf Arab states — and this clearly hit a chord in Middle Eastern streets. Interestingly, American "black" propaganda (i.e., disinformation) also exploited these themes as a way of encouraging Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. But this was covert activity, unprovable and unattributable. The extent to which such transmissions were responsible for the Shia and Kurdish uprisings at the end of the war will remain unknown until we learn the Iraqi side of the story. Certainly, a few Kurdish broadcasters, disillusioned with the initial coalition failure to help the northern uprising, broke ranks and...

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