LONDON, 22 March 2003 — Highly enhanced images, graphic photographs and video clips can never bring home the reality of what happens on the ground in times of war.
Veterans of previous battles speak of the images, sounds and smells of conflict, and the way in which every sense reaches a heightened state of alert.
A friend who lived through the Balkans War in the mid-90s said that he had recently seen the Hollywood epic Saving Private Ryan. He confirmed that, despite the film’s brilliant cinematography and production, it never came close to conveying the true horrors experienced at first hand.
One of the most cynical features of war is that a human life becomes a statistic, and often a negligible one. In response to reports published by international charities, which stated that close to 50,000 Iraqi civilians could perish if a war was waged by US and British forces, a US spokesman said that this figure was exaggerated.
The spokesman explained that the US administration’s estimate was that closer to between 10,000 and 15,000 Iraqi civilians would be killed. It’s baffling how valueless 15,000 lives can, all of a sudden, become.
Human emotion becomes muted. How can any news reporter convey, to an audience sitting at home eating dinner, the grief expressed by a father who has just lost his children, or a woman who has discovered the body of her husband under the rubble of their home?
How can the true bewilderment of an orphaned child be captured? How can the pain of shrapnel in a young man’s spine be put across?
Yet possibly the most damning feature of modern warfare is the fact that images of the horror, fear, loss, pain and destruction of those on the ground can cause many to be amazed by how advanced we have come in the field of computer-enhanced presentations. The computer game-like presentation of war simply overrides real senses and emotions.
My wife lived through the first Gulf War of 1991. When it became evident that the US and Britain had decided to bypass the UN, and that war seemed inevitable, she ran me through the routine that the Iraqi people have become so used to: the process of trying to stay alive.
When, on Tuesday, images of the UN weapons inspections team departing Iraq were shown on the news, she suffered what I can only describe as an anxiety attack.
She explained that the last time she had seen such images had been in 1991 and, just before the allied forces’ attack was launched, she, along with the rest of the Iraqi people, felt a significant sense of loss and abandonment. The term “sitting ducks” would have been appropriate, had it not been so desperately tragic.
She tells me that, when pictures of foreigners leaving Baghdad were shown in 1991, Iraqis felt that everyone worth something had been saved and rescued. They, on the other hand, were worth nothing, and therefore had to wait for the missiles to fall.
Those same feelings of isolation and terror will be experienced all over again. This time, though, the Iraqi people have been ravaged by a 12-year battle for life, and have given up on the hope that they will be spared. The questions are when, whom and how many.
The disruptions that occurred on Thursday morning, caused by demonstrators against the outbreak of war, brought understandable anxiety and frustration to commuters and those with appointments to attend. However, one could not help but feel unsympathetic toward those complaining when considering the plight of Iraqis, whose lives we have disrupted, time and again, over 35 long and painful years. To cap it all, we have decided to attack them with unprecedented military might in order to “liberate” them from the very evil that we were instrumental in bringing about.
So what can we do? Well, we could start by trying hard to imagine what is going in the minds of Iraqi men, women or children as night begins to fall, air-raid sirens wail and as missiles and bombs start dropping from the skies.
We won’t be able to, but it’s worth trying nevertheless.
— Anas Altikriti is head of media and public relations at the Muslim Association of Britain
