INTRODUCTION

In most cases, the images and reportage that came out of from Iraq was apolitical - the usual shrug:

"War is hell, but war is unavoidable. So what can you do?"

There remains a strong belief in the military that the Vietnam War was lost because of the critical United States press. As Hess (Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War, p. 138) explains, the content of state media at the time was not directly policed. For the critics, this led to the collapse of morale in Vietnam itself, as the state media “was driven by network executives ‘demanding’ spectacular stories and bloody action footage.” Sensationalism, in other words, created what Hess (p. 138) calls a “competition in beastliness”, which attempted to show American warfare as “immoral and unjustifiably destructive.”

This was the direct result of the emergence of what was called “the new journalism”, which was also, at various times, called “investigative”, “adversary” or “partisan” journalism. As the Vietnam War continued, reporters stationed in Saigon distrusted the information given to them by the military, which was, by their own admission, sometimes wrong.

The Iraq war itself was portrayed very differently. This was largely because the “liberal media” feared by the military was heavily controlled and moderated within Iraq. Only "embedded" journalists were officially allowed, because Iraq itself was considered too dangerous for journalists. The bitter irony, of course, is that the reason why very few independent journalists worked in Iraq was that the situation was considered more dangerous than the situation in Vietnam. So negative images rarely came out of Iraq because the war had made the place less safe than Vietnam.

As it stood, the Iraq War was largely covered by embedded journalists and photographers. In addition to compliance among journalists, unlike with the situation in Vietnam, the US media appeared to take the side of the government, and were reluctant to print many images that drew attention to Iraqi civilian death. Instead, focus was placed on very tightly-controlled series of propaganda images showing, say, the heroic marine, determined and aggressive and generally looking wellard like (Stallabrass p. 36-37).

Of course, the immense danger posed by embedded journalism is that it is not, by its very nature, free. And a free press, according to the tenets of liberalism at least, is a requirement for creating consensus between the public and politicians. In a quite literal sense, the media act as mediators, and stop politicians going wacko and invading places willy-nilly, and generally wrecking the economy, and so on. Oops.

Of course, the added problem with embedded journalism is that the reports tend to trivialise just how absolutely, bloody fucking awful war is. If we forget this, we tend to act rather like Tony Blair and George W. Bush did - the "sod it let's have a war to sort it out" option becomes a real, actual option. It is not, as was seen previously, and is seen by general top-of-the-range politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, as a moral repugnance, a humanitarian catastrophe, and the result of wideparead diplomatic and political failure.

Tony Blair's "no matter what" approach to Iraq revealed in the Chilcot Report probably led to his decision to "sex up" documentation on the conflict when seeking parliamentary approval. It probably also led him to ignore most of the intelligence presented to him about whether Iraq had the capacity or inclination to produce WMDs. Of course, none of this can be proven, and Blair usually uses the "faulty intelligence" argument when defending his own position at the time. Perhaps what makes Tony Blair so, utterly repellent and toxic is that he, like so many others of the now maligned "centre-left" tradition, steadfastly refuse to apologise for the murderous, useless regimes that they oversaw for a decade before the shit hit the fan.

The real problem, however, is that none of this would have mattered anyway.

In 2016, Emily Thornberry called on Parliament to vote through a moderate proposal, and one that the newly appointed anti-war leader of the Labour party Jeremy Corbyn had bent over backwards to gain widespread acceptance for. The proposal was also one accepted by the vast majority of the international community.

Thornberry demanded that an independent enquiry should be led to investigate crimes committed by both sides during the ongoing Saudi-led war in Yemen. This moderate call for an independent enquiry was defeated. As Peter Oborne comments, this result was "shocking, but not surprising":

The Yemen vote demonstrates something that has been apparent ever since the vote on 18 March 2003 to support the invasion of Iraq: the party of war holds a majority in the Commons. It comprises virtually all of the Conservative Party and the Blairite wing of Labour. As Nafeez Ahmed wrote in July, there is a clear and demonstrable connection between the vote for war in Iraq, opposition to an Iraq inquiry, support for the calamitous intervention in Libya, and opposition to Jeremy Corbyn.

Of course, the majority of the population of the United Kingdom are anti-war and, as Owen Jones notes in his very readable and accessible polemic Chavs, the working classes are more anti-war than the middle-classes by a sizeable proportion.

One sense that, for Tony Blair, the decision to go to war was not one that would lead to the utter destruction and devastation of millions of people's lives. It was a way of getting rid of a bad man with a moustache. Will Self asked Martin Amis, after Martin spent a week on tour with Tony, what his impressions were. Martin Amis said, witheringly, that Tony "wasn't a big reader." Indeed, Martin never saw Tony with a book. Given that Tony Blair cited one of his favourite books as The Prophet: Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher, one can safely assume that, like the middle class pseudo-intelligentsia he plays God to, Tony is also a pathological status-obsessed liar.

The simplification of war is always a glorification of it. Wilfred Owen, and the other poets of the Great War, did more to preserve the dignity of soldiers than any dull stone monument about "honour" ever could. The problem is that embedded journalism tends to promote the latter idea - not that war is something that ought to be avoided at all costs, but that war is a necessary evil to protect the British state. Also, by its nature, embedded journalism simplifies the narratives of war because it can only ever offer one side of it. It also grotesquely diminishes the civilian suffering involved. It does not challenge the idea that the resort to war is a resort to something that will make the lives of millions of people unbearable. The majority of politicians, who purport to be our representatives in parliament, voted in favour of this simply to rid the world of a baddie with a moustache.

The catastrophic impact of war on human beings are rarely explored by today's mainstream media in a neutral sense. The civilian death toll from Vietnam was around 600,000 and the victims of that war were captured on camera and shown on TV screens. The death toll in Iraq varies from around 500,000 to 1 million, but the framing of these victims is very, very different.

Indeed, the Iraq war is articulated as something that happened in a distant land, far away from our cosseted Western utopia. The press did next to nothing to blur those boundaries and bring home the horrifying, tortured lives that were experienced by the Iraqi people as a result of that "no matter what" decision made by Tony Blair and his parliamentary supporters. In turn, the press on the whole made it easier for us to trivialise war, and see it as a legitimate option for resolving future crises.

The mainstream coverage of the Iraq war was also overtly nationalistic, almost to an absurd degree. It was virtually impossible to find an Iraqi's experience of the war across any of the media. While American or British soldiers who died in the conflict were venerated and drooled over by the press as "heroes" - a designation many of the families saw as a patronising and politicised simplification themselves - the Iraqis, whose lives had been blown to smithereens, were ignored completely. Like slaves in a caste system, their suffering was an irrelevance because they weren't seen as people at all. They were collateral damage, to use the favourite politically correct military euphemism, often used by those who attack the left-wing for their political correctness.

FLASHBULB MEMORIES AND PTSD

What Ejector Seat wants to focus on is the still images of Vietnam and Iraq. More than videos and words, the still image, and the "empty chain of signifiers" that the still image consists of has always had a more direct and stunningly traumatic or stirring impact on the viewer (Stallabrass, NLR, May June 2017, pp. 29-50).

Still images tell us how the story was framed and remembered. With Vietnam, we do not have to read newspaper reports to know what happened in Vietnam. We do not have to pick up a book on the subject either. Our first impressions, usually our lasting ones, are provided by still images.

Time magazine has assembled a collection of iconic still images that capture the Vietnam war.. There are notable omissions, such as Don McCullin's Shell-shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue:

Many of these images capture that crisis in iconographic form some forty to fifty years after the event. Perhaps the Vietnam war has been kept alive by becoming a distinctive part of the mainstream Hollywood narrative. The "Vietnam vet" is essentially a modern variant of the film noir detective, in the sense that he is portrayed as a consistent moral core in a world that has been completely corrupted. Of note here is the often overlooked neo-noir masterpiece Rambo 2.

Still images can be used to score political points. The Republican right are masters of this technique, and are ruthless practitioners of it. They use what Naomi Klein calls the Shock Doctrine. Her exhaustive analysis of how the Republican right exploit catastrophe and confusion to achieve extraordinary political goals suggests that it would be naive in the extreme to assume that these forces had no influence in shaping press propaganda.

In the New Left Review, Stallabrass focusses on the idea of Flashbulb Memories (Brown and Kulik, in Olivier Luminet and Antoniette Curci eds. **Flashbulb Memories, pp. 250-251.)

According to Brown and Kulik, when we experience a traumatic event, our memories "store" these events like still photographs. Hence, we experience trauma as a still image - an event that recurs endlessly, and one that does not go away over time, as it ordinarily would when post-traumatic subjects are exposed to traumatic events.

The good news is that this isn't entirely accurate. As Van Der Kolk comments

While people report that these experiences are etched accurately in their minds, research has shown that even those memories are subject to some distortion and disintegration over time.

Obviously, our memories are fallible and can be manipulated in certain ways. We can be gaslighted into believing that certain events and certain things happened in certain ways, and we can post-rationalise things in ways that make random occurrences seem inevitable. We often perpetuate these myths in the case of love. Rather than simply seeing love as a chance occurrence between two people who happened to get along, many people prefer the idea that "destiny" had somehow brought them together, that they were "made for each other", and so on. Obviously, this usually requires a good deal of self-delusion.

In the case of the PTSD sufferer, it is good news that these images can be exorcised from the memory, or altered in ways that make lives more bearable. However, the bad news is that images can be manipulated to create narratives that suit the interests of people who do not have the best interests of humanity at heart.

This may explain one of the stranger effects that the Iraq war has had. Namely, it has made us empathise endlessly for British and American soldiers and the families of soldiers who died during this conflict. But, it has also normalised the execution of 600,000 to 1 million innocent people as nothing. Not even the most recalcitrant left-wing politician in the public eye is willing to mention the deaths of Iraqis without footnoting a reference to the dead soldiers as well.

PEREIDOLIA

The September 11th attacks are useful for analysing the media, because it shows us how they attempted to contain and control the chaos by imposing upon it a particular narrative. Of course, 9/11 "went viral", but in a plethora of ways that couldn't, at first, be managed.

It did, however, suggest differences between the still image and the rolling video. One of these was the common assertion that the clouds of smoke from those buildings contained the images of Satan. More here.

This phenomenon is known as pareidolia, and images of this sort continue to proliferate on various conspiracy theory / religious websites. Indeed, some of the preachers on the Evangelical right in the United States claimed that September 11th was exactly what Osama Bin Laden constructed it to be - it was God's revenge on the West for its decadence, promiscuity, support for gay rights, letting women out of the house, talking to pets more than God, and generally not being insane.

Perhaps this pareidolia is an example of something more abstract and less kooky than it originally seems. The photograph is innately strange and has magical properties. Film, on the other hand, overtly attempts to replicate reality, albeit in strange ways. As the anarchist saying goes:

The world is magical but its institutions are crafted to try to convince you that it isn't.

The still photograph has the strange capacity to capture moments. So perhaps there is something totemic about the photograph. Still images can transcend the alienation that we all experience as capitalist subjects. This alienation kills our wonder and the desire we have to experience a world outside of the confines of our own habits, addictions and routines. An ideology, or mythology is enforced, which is primarily associated with giving exchange value more meaning than use value. This is a systemic function of capital accumulation and generating a "surplus value" for capitalists. Being trapped in a capitalist mode of production ensures the prioritisation of a commodity's "exchange" value over its "use" value. It is the difference between the two that creates surplus value for the capitalist, and, for anarchists and communists at least, guarantees a dull, miserable and meaningless life.

With Marx, the suspension of time also means the suspension of labour, which is the source of all value. Thus, suspending time remains a very powerful myth. In art and the occult, which straddles musical performance, the consumption of psychedelic substances, and transcendence in general, one of the primary purposes of the artistic, creative process is to channel something "timeless". Lives are devoted to, and sacrificed for this myth.

THE CRUSADE AGAINST TERROR

Of course, in our era, the Photoshopped image that used to be the sole reserve of the Stalinist regime, is now prevalent. The question is whether images, and their content and framing, can be used repeatedly, as with PTSD patients with malfunctioning "flashbulb memories" of the traumatising event, can traumatise an entire culture. This is, of course, most obviously attempted in totalitarian states, such as the former Soviet Union and North Korea. In such states, the head or heads of state could be articulated as the “flashbulbs” of their society. And the states of mass mourning after the deaths of the Dear Leaders suggest that the subjects of those states are trapped by those images. In other words, they are effective.

One of the issues with photography and our “flashbulb memory” is that techniques can be employed to emphasise a particular political priority, and different techniques and styles can be combined to create a common stylistic ideal that gives the viewer comfort or discomfort. Soviet propaganda, for example, had a distinctive style or design. Similarly, Nazi iconography was, for many, the first time mass marketing or branding had been used effectively.

The still image can “influence and alter remembered history” (Stallabrass, p. 46). With the Iraq war, the ever-changing narrative for justifying intervention required an ever-changing set of images to rescue the project from imminent disaster. A regime can, in theory, fundamentally change the way a society “remembers” an event.

Memories, according to Stallabrass (p. 46), “should be thought of as continual reconstructions rather than as recordings, not laid down once and for all, but through a process of repetition and rehearsal which continually alters them.” In other words, memories can never provide us with an objective “record” of events. Furthermore, events can also replicate one-another through their use of framing or context. For instance, many of the key images used to project 9/11 across the world were Christian in tone. Thomas Franklin’s “Raising The Flag at Ground Zero” was widely distributed:

What is immediately summoned up here is religious iconography. The photograph, taken from a distance and therefore bringing the background into sharp focus, can be read as being part of a long tradition of crucifixion imagery. The only difference being, of course, that instead of Christ on the cross, here we have the American flag, and the men gazing toward heaven in what Stallabrass (p. 42) calls a "gesture of patriotic transcendence."

These still images, of crosses and flags, shaped and framed the way the coming war - the quest for vengeance - was to be orchestrated. Colin Powell famously said that the event was to be a "crusade", which immediately drew attention to the religious narrative and the clash of civilisations that many people from the Evangelical Christian right wanted the events to represent.

As Hal Foster (‘The Last Column’ LRB 8 September 2011) comments, the media and individual experience was saturated by “the talk of relics and icons, the appearance of crosses and stars”. This, he goes on to note, gave 9/11 a sacred significance:

“Early on, Ground Zero was described as ‘hallowed ground’, and to this day 9/11 is often treated as an event that cannot be assimilated, which passes all human understanding... this trope tends to render the historical event a theological one.”

Our memories are tied intimately to our sense of empathy for certain people and to certain events and even certain objects, such as the American flag. Immediately, by framing this conflict as a religious one, it was possible to declare open season on any Muslim country that was deemed to be an inconvenience for United States / British foreign policy goals. Conversely, 9/11 also had a huge impact on the popularity of Al-Qaeda. The name "Osama" was the most popular name for Muslims across the world in the year that followed 9/11.

What these early pictures suggest is a break from Kissenger / Nixon era politics, where proxy-wars were engaged in coldly and rationally, in order to serve the greater good and promoting a balance of power across the world. Instead of this, the imagery was that of a Holy War - a Crusade against the forces of evil and terror. It was often rhetorically challenging to state that this was not a Christian versus Muslim affair, and often news reports had to shuffle in the typical disclaimer that the "overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims... blah blah blah... APR 14.9%"

PRO-CHOICE / PRO-LIFE WARS

The Iraq war was visually framed very differently to the Vietnam war. Particularly, this difference is generally best articulated when innocent people are presented as victims of the conflict. Obviously, children are typically best remembered and provide the most iconic images for any anti-war conflict.

One of the most prominent images of the Iraq war was the photograph of a 12 year old boy, Ali Ismail Abbas, whose arms were blown off in a US missile attack that had killed “his parents, brother, and eleven other relatives” (Stallabrass, p. 38). This image, and similar ones, were printed in Britain and Canada. This was not featured as heavily in the American press, but eventually, once a narrative was decided upon, the press felt the images wouldn't affect "morale":

This image offers a strikingly different one to the famous image of Kim Phuc during the Vietnam war.

Obvious differences can be drawn between the Kim Phuc photograph and the Ali Ismail Abbas one.

Firstly, the Kim Phuc photograph shows her, along with several other children, actively running from the bombing site. The picture captures the actions of the United States directly, and also pictures the immediate impact of that strike in the background. By contract, more or less all of the photographs of Abbas are taken from his hospital bed. This has significance because, although the fact that Abbas’s mutilation was the result of a United States bomb, and although this fact was not covered up as such, the child in the hospital bed is nonetheless portrayed as a passive victim of an act of God, rather than a victim of a foreign policy machine run amok. As Stellabrass (p. 38) says, the photographs of Abbas have what she calls a quality of “quasi-religious and undefined redemption.”

Secondly, one of the differences between the memorable still images from Vietnam and those of Iraq are statuses given to those victims. The Daily Mirror drew attention to just how distorted perceptions about the Iraq war had become, by focussing solely on Abbas’s well being.

Contrary to the Kim Phuc photograph, Abbas’s mutilation was contextualised as an unavoidable tragedy – an act of God, almost. With Kim Phuc, the presence of United States marines looking indifferently at the landscape around them, almost ignoring Kim Phuc's suffering, and the fact that the image was photographed during the event framed it within its actual context – Kim Phuc was not a religious icon, to be held up as an example of how the United States and individuals who wanted to give money to a charity set up to help Abbas get replacement limbs were a force for good in the region.

Instead, Kim Phuc remained anonymous for decades after the photograph was taken. She was representative of one of millions of innocent men, women and children who were murdered, maimed and mutilated by the United States army. While Kim Phuc remained unknown for a long time after the famous photograph was shot, Abbas became the centre of attention within the global media.

Tellingly, Abbas's own opinions about the war were silenced, because he believed that the United States were at war they were involved in what he called a "criminal oil grab" (Stallabrass, p. 38). This inconvenience was not reported anywhere. Besides, what this Iraqi victim said did not matter, because Abbas was simply an icon in a quasi-religious set of photographs. The now-inevitable charity fund has a certain Victorian feel to it, suggesting as it does that sanctimony and the kindness of the rich can adequately replace a welfare state and regimes that do not dismiss children who lose their families and their limbs as collateral damage.

What is more troubling are the similarities that these image of innocence have with images that come from the Evangelical fascist right wing in America. In particular, the cynical and manipulative manner in which Abbas was "doubly used", both to "denounce the American barbarians" by the Iraqis, and to "prove the magnanimity" of the Americans bears a striking resemblance to the anti-abortion imagery widespread across the United States (quot. from Brian Storm, ed. Desert Diaries: Photojournalists on the War On Iraq, p. 39).

The foetus, in this type of imagery, is used as an icon that, in turn, subjugates the female body that surrounds and nurtures that foetus. Images of innocence (Abbas, or the foetus in the womb cradled by the large male, paternalistic hands) help to separate context from event. In this respect, the Iraq war and the iconography used to represent it, was emblematic of the regressive, anti-abortion line taken by the well-funded libertarian right in America. The policy, which purports to protect the child from "murder", is actually an attempt to re-institute situations where women are trapped by their own reproductive cycles.

The difference between the photographs of Ali Ismail Abbas and those of Phan Tai Kim Phuc demonstrate the importance of appreciating context. If we extend the metaphoric implications of both the right-wing representation of Abbas and the right-wing representation of the foetus, what becomes clear is that both are articulated as disembodied victims without any contextual meaning. Abbas was a "victim of war", not a victim of US imperialist interests in siphoning oil out of Iraq. Abbas, like the foetus, is silent, or when not silent, has words put into his mouth to spout anti-abortionist propaganda about foetal innocence.

In hospital, it is easy to see Abbas as a victim without context. As the Leeds-based anarchist band Chambawamba put it in their album Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records.

CONCLUSION

The mass sympathy elicited by the reproduction of certain images of insulated innocence are acts that "depoliticise" events. Of course, this tit-for-tat happens to be popular in the current climate, where what is really meant by making something political is making something left-wing. Hence, the feeble, borderline-homophobe Tim Farron desperately propping up his flagging ratings as a politician by referring to Jeremy Corbyn's response to the Manchester bombings as an "attempt to score political points." If contextualising an event within its broader context, rather than fumbling around looking for guilt money from a philanthropic middle class minority, is "political point scoring", then I am all for it.

In short, what I have argued for here is an appreciation, at all times, of context. And a denunciation, at all times, of war. I have also argued that amputee child victims of American imperialism should be framed within a political context of American imperialism, and not seen as one-off charity events to demonstrate the magnanimity of the American people. I have also argued that wars should never be justified using quasi-religious iconography.

None of this should be controversial. Let's see.