The Tyranny of Imagery
A lie gets halfway round the world before truth has time to put its trousers on. So said Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's distinguished secretary of state, but his complaint today is more than a bit behind the times, given the explosion of information on the Internet and 24-7 cable TV. Lies travel faster than truth because truth is more complicated. Today, however, a simple lie is more lethal than ever because the imagery that accompanies it is so quickly absorbed by the mind. What we see on TV seems so real-"But I saw it with my own eyes!"-that false perceptions often become impossible to correct. We used to say power comes from the barrel of a gun. Now it comes from the lens of the video camera.
Remember Somalia, just over a decade ago? Television confronted us with images of millions of people starving because of a clan war; half a million died. Asked why he decided to intervene in Somalia and not Sudan, the first President Bush wrote: "Somalia was where television was." Indeed. When TV next gave us the image of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, after a horrific firefight memorialized in the book Black Hawk Down, it led President Clinton to pull our troops out. TV giveth, and TV taketh away.
Global TV has been a significant factor in international relations since CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. "CNN is the 16th member of the Security Council," said Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the secretary general of the United Nations. Television may not have decided policy, but the "CNN effect" certainly helped set the agenda. Witness Tiananmen Square, where the cruel nature of the regime in Beijing was forever memorialized by the image of a skinny student staring down the barrel of a tank. Witness America's support for Mikhail Gorbachev against the military coup after President George H. W. Bush saw TV cameras record Boris Yeltsin clambering onto the top of a tank. Witness the indelible horror of the September 11 attacks. Some images are unforgettably powerful, signal moments not just in photojournalism but in politics, an instance when the image truly represents a dramatic truth.
Terrorists, perhaps better than anyone, understand how images amplify their message. They know that horror and drama are magnets for media attention, so they manufacture moments of horror and drama. Instead of simply killing their victims in cold blood, they behead them on camera and post the video on a friendly website. A handful of depraved men with video cameras, perhaps better than anyone, can make leaders with the strongest armies in the world back off. Osama bin Laden's terrorists understand this. Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was explicit in his message to the former al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi: In the war against the West, media are half the battle.
HD detail. This has great relevance in the conflicts of our day between states and nonstate actors such as terrorist organizations, when the gap between media and public expectations of decisive victory and the ability of the military to deliver such clear results is so wide. Take casualties: Given our powerful conventional and high-tech military capabilities, the public wants to know why we can't limit our casualties. But these wars are fought among people in countries where the enemy doesn't wear uniforms to separate, and where it hides among the local populace, making casualties inevitable.
Another example is civilian casualties. The public and the media rightly believe that innocent civilians on the other side must be spared. Yes, you can kill Saddam Hussein and his cronies. But when hostile Iraqis fire on our troops from teeming neighborhoods, the TV images of innocent women and children killed and wounded are inevitable. TV images of civil destruction bring pressure to pull out. Global television means we can watch bombs falling and soldiers dying, bringing home the reality of warfare in ways never experienced before, not even in Vietnam, making it almost inconceivable that a western country could ever again fight a war of attrition like Vietnam, with every misstep covered in high-definition detail.
Then there is the desire to achieve a clear and decisive victory at the end of the fighting. We are used to signing ceremonies-remember the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered, and the white flags that end wars in the movies? That old framework no longer applies with terrorists and nonstate extremist groups. So wars today last longer than the public expects or wants. This is true of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and of Israel's involvement in Lebanon. A final observation: When our political leaders seek to build public support for military intervention by claiming "our aim is victory," their promises often exceed the reality of the possible. This can only increase the frustration of the public and the media.
Television today has collapsed the time frame in which military action can hope to sustain public support. Once the military conflict becomes a consistent top-of-the-news story, the klieg lights of the global media will affect the scope of military activity. This is especially true in areas where we have to take into account the role of al Jazeera and al Arabiya, which emphasize the negatives of any involvement of the United States in the Middle East. These are just some of the issues that highlight the differences between the old frameworks of conventional wars and the new irregular wars.
In Iraq, the seemingly endless images of death and destruction are now driving the government agenda, coloring the politics of both parties, and may, perhaps ultimately, force a decision on when and how to pull American troops out. The violence, of course, particularly in the past week and month, is terrible. But it shouldn't obscure the fact that much of Iraq is relatively peaceful and that progress in many areas-restoration of infrastructure, building of schools-is being made. Many journalists, and not just TV journalists, are drawn to conflict and drama and feel little need to provide context or reflect on the conflicting moral pressures that bear on the policymaker. But they are inevitably distorting the story in Iraq when they concentrate on showing American soldiers blown up and focus so little on the benefits they have brought there. Is it any wonder so many Americans today have concluded that the Iraq venture was a political miscalculation and an unalloyed military disaster?
What are policymakers to do? Not deceive, dissemble, and shut off access, for sure-but think more deeply about how to respond to the imperatives of television journalism. When Saddam's regime fell and the insurgency began, the Pentagon offered no images to counter the endlessly repeated scenes of burning American vehicles, smoking Iraqi buildings, and bodies strewn haphazardly through the streets of Baghdad. One bombed hotel is more noteworthy than a hundred rebuilt schools. Donald Rumsfeld almost certainly never considered the effect of seeing hordes of looters making off with Iraq's national treasures. The defense secretary was understandably irritated by all the focus on the looters after our troops had performed so brilliantly, but he would have been much better served if the Pentagon had provided some images of successful relief efforts or Saddam's atrocities.
Liberators. Policymakers must better understand the power of imagery. During the invasion of Iraq, journalists beamed home footage of the American Army winning victories, and the images generated enormous public support. Embedding reporters with the military worked extremely well, yielding gratifying scenes of the lightning-fast drive on Baghdad. We were truly portrayed as liberators. But then came the daily pictures of looting, suicide bombing, chaos, violence, and rioting-the worst of which were the photos of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. In a trice, America was perceived as an unfeeling, occupying power. Public support wilted both here and in Iraq. Throughout the Muslim world, our efforts have been distorted to suggest that we are anti-Muslim. This is a travesty, considering that our soldiers in Iraq are giving their lives to stop Muslims from killing Muslims. And how can television fail to remind the world that America defended Muslim populations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kuwait-not to mention the tens of billions of dollars of assistance to Egypt and the productive relations we have with governments from Nigeria to Indonesia?
Violence is not the only story in Iraq. What can be done to redress the balance-and not have policy driven simply by the emotive power of so much negative imagery? Policymakers must think of the logistics of presenting the positive as much as they do about the logistics of the battlefield. This is not a question of propaganda but of portraying the other realities that television, left to its own devices, may well ignore. In a dangerous war zone, journalists need help to document human-interest stories-families who lost loved ones under Saddam, villages restored to life, rebuilding, the exciting progress in the schools. Image scenarios must be as comprehensively planned as battlefield tactics. This will require a radical new approach. Every appropriate military unit could be equipped with a video camera to take digital pictures that would be made available to the press. They would have to be scrupulously honest and professional in captioning: The picture takers would be selected not by rote but by ability, with a separate media spokesperson at the Pentagon.
What else can our government do?
First: We must seek to maximize our ability to operate indirectly, training an indigenous army to undertake responsibility we normally would have shouldered ourselves. The smaller the footprint of an American military deployment today, the greater the chance of success. Second: The president and his senior aides shouldn't hesitate to complain to the leaders of the Middle East, where the news media are often government controlled and polluted with anti-American sentiment that reflects nothing of our performance and generosity. Third: We must refrain from attacking Islam. If we wish to describe terrorism, let's describe it as an attack on all civilians and all civilized life without regard to race or religion or nationality. Fourth: We must select for senior posts abroad those American diplomats who have the capacity to engage in public outreach and speak the local language and reward them for doing this well.
In this global war on terrorism, there will be no quick victories and few demonstrable successes. We are involved in a long-term process, but it is better to get it right than do it fast.
This story appears in the October 30, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.