Abstract
This timely book brings into sharp focus the effort that is put into controlling and manipulating public opinion in Britain and the United States, both covering up some wars and creating support for others. Keeble discusses, for example, the campaign that was mounted to identify Saddam Hussein as the ‘new Hitler’ after his invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990. The Daily Telegraph wrote of his ‘Hitlerian determination’, the Observer described him as ‘this Hitler of the Gulf’, for the Independent the comparison with Hitler had ‘a kernel of truth’, for the Daily Mirror he was ‘the Hitler of the Middle East’ and for the Sun he was ‘a Fuhrer freak who models himself on Adolf Hitler’. The US press was much the same. What this coverage neglected to examine was that this ‘Hitlerian’ figure had only recently been a close ally and friend of both the United States and Britain, who turned a convenient blind-eye when it suited them to his domestic repression, which included the routine use of torture. His regime’s predilection for torture, including the torture of children in front of their parents, was to be used against him once he stepped out of line, but was of no interest whatsoever when he was both a friend and customer.
As Keeble points out, Britain, the United States and Saudi Arabia supported Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in 1980, a war that was to cost the lives of more than 400,000 Iranians before it finally ended in 1988. Without this covert support, Saddam Hussein would never have been able to sustain the conflict for so long. It was essential – indeed one can go so far as to say that for both the US and Saudi Arabia, the Iraq-Iran war was a proxy conflict being fought by Iraqi conscripts on their behalf. Britain was principally concerned with keeping in step with the Americans and making money through arms sales. Recognition of this puts Donald Trump’s current threats against Iran into context as merely the latest phase of a continuing US hostility to an Iran that refuses to accept the status of US client, a hostility that has already cost hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. While his manner is positively deranged, he is, in fact, merely reverting to the United States’ traditional aggressive hostility towards Iran.
This is just one of the flashpoints that Keeble explores in Covering Conflict. The book examines the relationship between what he terms the ‘new militarism’, the agencies of the secret state and the media. ‘The mainstream media are’, as he insists, ‘tied closely to this secret state through shared economic and political interests’, and mobilised in support of the ‘new militarism’. In the process of exploring the relationship, the book throws out multiple insights into many episodes, not necessarily related to the ‘new militarism’, episodes that the reader thought he or she already knew just about all there was to know. The role of the infamous Information Research Department (IRD), established by the Attlee government back in 1949, in the framing of the Shrewsbury pickets in 1972, for example. Or the fact that MI5 had recruited the services of many of the industrial correspondents working in the national press and made good use of them during the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike. Or that Ernest Withers, ‘the eminent photojournalist’ who chronicled the activities of Dr Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s was, in fact, an FBI informant, betraying those he professed sympathy for. And so on.
Even with regard to the Vietnam War, as Keeble shows, most US journalists supported it, with sections of the media only beginning to express dissent once divisions within the US ruling class over the conduct of the war began to emerge. The American media deliberately did not report atrocity after atrocity, atrocities often actually witnessed by journalists, such was their support for the war. The opportunity to investigate and expose the My Lai massacre of March 1968, a horrific episode of rape and mass murder, was turned down by the mainstream media. It refused to take on the military cover-up. Instead, the massacre was only finally exposed to the light of day in November 1969, eighteen months after it had taken place, through the efforts of ‘the small, alternative Dispatch News Service and dogged investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’. Newsweek actually reported the massacre as ‘An American tragedy’! The mass slaughter of tens of thousands of other Vietnamese civilians never received any scrutiny, not least because there was no convenient scapegoat available like Lieutenant William Calley, so that the finger of accusation would inevitably end up pointing at the generals and the politicians.
The setback of the Vietnam defeat was overcome under Ronald Reagan who increased the CIA’s budget by 15 per cent in 1982, by 25 per cent the following year and so on. Under Reagan, the United States went on the offensive, running ‘a massive LIC [Low Intensity Conflict] offensive strategy’ that was wholeheartedly embraced by the media, orchestrated by the secret state. Indeed, press manipulation ‘became a central strategy of the Reagan administration’. Support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan was just one front in this offensive, although admittedly the most important. The CIA subsidised the Afghan war at a cost of more than $5 billion, matched dollar for dollar by the Saudis. And alongside this LIC offensive, a renewed arms race was imposed on the Soviet Union. All this prepared the way for the disastrous US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the equally disastrous overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya. As Keeble puts it in his all too brief final chapter, the ‘new militarism’ had ‘become disaster militarism’.
Keeble has written an invaluable book, an important contribution to our understanding of the world we find ourselves living in, a book that can be legitimately described as required reading. Without wishing too much more work on him, one looks forward to what he has to say about the Trump presidency and its relations with the media, the US military and the secret state.