What Makes a War a War, and Was There Ever a “Truth Era”?

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country [the USA].”

Cutting The Basra Highway by Frank M. Thomas a US soldier who fought in the Persian Gulf War https://history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/resmat/desert-storm/index.html

This quote comes from the 1928 book Propaganda by Edward Bernays. The book is remembered both as a primary influence on the strategies employed by head of Nazi Propaganda,  Joseph Goebbels, and also the text that marked the beginning of the modern field of Public Relations. How exposed are we to propaganda today? What separates it from PR? Marketing? Public service announcements? News media? Pulling at this thread unravels stories that can change the way we view history and our place in it. This blog & podcast series will record some of the notes and interviews produced through my own research into the subject.

As this is an introductory post I thought I'd discuss a couple of subjects on my mind that exemplify the mystery of propaganda and its intersection with media. 

Why was CNN live in Bagdad on the 7 O’clock news for the opening bombing salvos of the 1990-91 US-Iraq War?

Peter Arnett and - - - - - were CNN reporters who reported live from Bagdad when the USA first began bombing the city on the 17th of January 1991. Their landmark broadcast can be found online. However, strangely, their names are omitted from the description on the CNN youtube Rewind series episode. Instead, CNN credits itself and its US-based presenter, Bernard Shaw for the coverage:

“CNN stayed and became the first network to live broadcast a war. In this episode of CNN’s Rewind series, hear CNN news anchor Bernard Shaw famously say, “The skies of Baghdad are being illuminated.” And relive the tense moments during the CNN broadcast as journalists hid under beds to stay live on the air, bombs falling on the city around them.”

So what’s noteworthy about this?

• Most obviously, the bombing began at 2:36am Bagdad time. That’s 7:36pm US Eastern Time. This aligns with the 7 O’clock news on the East Coast of the US and allows for continuous coverage on the West Coast. Perfect timing if you want the US population to watch an event. 

• After the evacuation of most CNN staff, Arnett and two colleagues were left in the studio as the bombing starts. In a later interview, Arnett makes it clear that the bombing was very well expected by he and his colleagues. This is a bit weird given we generally think of militaries being secretive and valuing the element of surprise. 

• Arnett had a reputation for being very aggressive in his pursuit of a story. In the interview linked above, he describes being aware of tension between the US government and CNN over the continued direct coverage from Bagdad at the time. What does this tell us about US governmental & military media strategy and coordination during the war?

• What effect do people with outsized access, like Arnett, have on the way we understand wars?

• There seems to be some brand management favouring the mention of Bernard Shaw, a famous news anchor over Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent.

Jean Baudrillard published an essay series known collectively as “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” arguing that the 1990-91 US-Iraq War was in fact an atrocity, not a war. He described the war as taking place only on TV. On the ground, it was, in reality, a massacre of Iraqi soldiers and civilians with 147 US-led coalition combat deaths compared to 20,000 - 50,000 Iraqi military and 100,000 - 200,000 civilian deaths. He describes the war coverage, including CNN’s work on the ground, as a theatrical prop (paraphrasing) to conceal the truth - it was a massacre. In this framing, Arnett, as a war correspondent, plays a core role in making the counterfactual framing of the Gulf War as a war possible.

If we live in a post-truth era, when was the truth era?

The Gulf War is an event that, according to different people, did or did not take place. While Arnett was indeed “truly” on the ground to report on the Gulf War, according to Jean Baudrillard, what Arnett was reporting on was not “truly” a war. It is tempting to say we are just talking semantics - militaries were fighting, so it’s a war. However, the term seems to imply some power parity.  The current Ukraine War is very different. From Reuters:

“According to an assessment collated by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency, Russia has suffered 189,500-223,000 total casualties, including 35,500-43,000 killed in action and 154,000-180,000 wounded.

Ukraine has suffered 124,500-131,000 total casualties, including 15,500-17,500 killed in action and 109,000-113,500 wounded in action”

OCHR, (via Stastista) puts civilian deaths at 8,791. These numbers are as of 2023-05-16.

According to this accounting, the Ukraine war (also not a war according to Russian leadership) has a military death ratio of 2.8:1 at the widest. Including civilian deaths closes the ratio to 1.8:1.

Compare this to the Gulf War with a combat loss ratio as high as 300:1. Include the lower bound of civilian deaths and the ratio reaches over 1700:1. 

These are not comparable events, and yet both carry the moniker “war”.

I checked the citations for the Gulf War section above on 2023-05-15 and noticed something strange about the way civilian deaths were represented online. The Wikipedia page lists 3,664 civilians killed. It cites a dubious source and gives very different numbers compared to other online sources.

Searching “civilian deaths gulf war” on Google references the Wikipedia page:

However, the next two search results provide very different and much more credible numbers for Gulf “War” and 2003 Iraq war civilian deaths:

Later that day, my Google results changed, (although I still appear unable to correctly spell the word “civilian”). Wikipedia remained unedited indicating that the change occurred with the information Google was prioritising for me.

So why are these search results so weird? The answer is, in part, that someone is editing Wikipedia to manipulate search engine results. This is a widespread practice that sometimes falls under the category of public relations.

There is tension within our remembrance of history - 3,664 vs. 100,000 to 200,000 civilian deaths, on the other, different perceptions of the same or potentially similar facts - was the Gulf War a war or a massacre? It’s hard to say whether the truth was clearer in the ‘90s than it is now.

According to Wikipedia the term post-truth was first used in a 1992 essay by author Steve Tesich that used the Gulf War as an example [hard to cite beyond Wikipedia]. The word found mass circulation in 2015-2016 with Brexit and Trump. (a subject for a different post).

Ralph Keyes gives us another year from which we might date the start of the post-truth era with his 2004 book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. However, as we have seen, the notion of a truth era is dubious. The Gulf War is an incidental example used here purely for convenience. Steve Tesich’s essay reportedly used Watergate (1972) and Iran-Contra (1985) as examples.

All that said, it feels like something has definitely changed in the public consciousness that the broad circulation of the term post-truth is a symptom of. What has changed is worth exploring. With any luck we will find some answers as this project progresses.