The war on TV (2003)

This text is part of a correspondence maintained amb friends over the other side of the pond, never published. It was about the second Iraq war that was going to last several years, as initially shown on television.

The war on TV

Sunday afternoon. Cloudy and spring cool. It rained a bit this morning. There was a public open “calçotada” picnic in Ferran, a small village at the northernmost limit of Tarragona’s municipality. To qualify for the picnic you were supposed to hike over, ride a bicycle or a horse all the way from Tarragona’s downtown. I walked; a smooth 10 km hike through the wooded area that forms Tarragona’s landscape East towards Barcelona. Ethel opted for the BBT ride along with some friends with a detour over the hills of some 25 km of a pretty rough ride. Happy her, she is in very good physical shape. I gave up bicycling some time ago on account of some prostatic trouble, so there.

I reached Ferran before anyone else. Since it was drizzling I went into the local bar for a coffee. While I read the newspaper someone stole my walking cane. How about that?

The rain mercifully stopped around lunchtime and we had our cookout “calçotada”: fresh onions broiled in open fire, dipped in a “romescu” sauce (garlic, “romescu” peppers, almonds and olive oil), a foot-long piece of sausage and white beans, with a large toast of bread spread with fresh tomato and oil (“pa pages, amb tomatec”). All of it washed down with red wine from the Terra Alta. An orange for dessert. A few laughs, our hearts lightened by the Terra Alta wine, and a ride back home, the bikes on a rack and a teetotaller driving. 

Somewhat exhausted, I settled for an afternoon on the couch, in front of the TV set. And there it was the war.

Through the satellite dish, we received a whole lot of news channels: CNN, both the international and the Spanish channel; MSNBC Intnl., Euronews, the European competitor of CNN; Skynews, a British channel; Foxnews; three French channels, TV 5, Tele and Chanel 5; the Italian RAI, the Portuguese TV, and three different Arabic channels from Morocco, Egypt and Algeria. All that plus the five Spanish TV stations. Some neighbours said they could see the Al-Jazeera Qatari television, but apparently, you must reorient the satellite dish. Being a Sunday afternoon many channels offered summaries of the 11 days of the war, plus the reports from the different journalist “embedded” with the Anglo-American troops and two long interviews with the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Myers and another British top military official, and the morning report of General Tommy Franks.

I’ve been zapping through all the channels to get an idea of how they were presenting the events. All told, the British Skynews comes best, both in scope and hard facts. CNN had all their reporters kicked out of Iraq by the regime, (funny thing: the reporters refer to the contendents as “the regime” for Iraq and “the coalition” for the British and American forces) and their journalist report from Kuwait, Jordan or somewhere else. Euronews is good for their resumes, so are the French channels. The Catalan TV, TV3, offers very complete and well-organized summaries every evening. Foxnews comes out too lopsided and fiercely bellicose and bigoted, usually being rather ultraconservative, redneckish as they are. The Arabic channels are more difficult to follow, knowing nothing of Arabic and their quality is, on the whole, poor.

Altogether no one could claim that there is no information about the war and its consequences. And by now I am more convinced than ever that it is and it is going to be a tremendous disaster, not only for the direct victims, the dead, the maimed, the disposed, the refugees and the soldiers on both sides but for the whole humanity. Especially for the Western world. We will pay dearly for all this. No way can I foresee any good out of such a mess.

The world economy will suffer. The credibility of what can be called “the system” will drop. The role of the international bodies will be once more put into question. Whatever the “world order” could be, will be distorted. The military, from both sides, will come again as a bunch of incompetent dummies: the Iraqi as suicidal zealots and the Anglo-American as prepotent failures. 

And the ethics of the human race once more downtrodden. Bad times.

XA    Sunday, 30 March 2003