How the British Media Have Changed the Way They Have Described Iraq Since 1980

Of the many cultural losses in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 occupation of Iraq, it was the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad that came to symbolize the destruction occurring nationally. The level of media coverage of and public concern for Iraq’s heritage was remarkable but short-lived. The intertwining of political and cultural reporting, however, has been a long-standing feature of coverage of Iraq’s history and archaeology. My study, "Ancient Mesopotamia and Modern Iraq in the British Press, 1980-2003" (Current Anthropology), looked at British newspaper coverage of Iraq’s archaeology and cultural heritage from the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 to the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003. In summarising reporting on this period here I mean to highlight the role that coverage of culture, and particularly of heritage, plays as commentary on current affairs.

News coverage of any subject is defined by choice of narrative. It is the story selected by journalists and editors that gives our understanding of the news its coherence and often moral meaning, and with limited time and space the elements of coverage must be selected on the basis of their fit with the dominant story. What this means in practice is that coverage of cultural events and issues is often geared to reinforce or even parallel major political stories. In the case of Iraqi cultural heritage different narratives can be seen to dominate the Iran-Iraq and 1990-91 Gulf Wars, sanctions and the 2003 war and occupation. Moreover, the relationships these narratives bear to political circumstances are themselves subject to change.

Looking first at the 1980s, coverage of the history, archaeology and cultural heritage of Iraq was relatively scarce by comparison with that of Iran. In using the opposition of a theocracy and a secular state to make sense of the Iran-Iraq War for readers, the British press mirrored the self-representation of the Iraqi and Iranian governments themselves: in Iran the new leadership was quick to move away from the references to the Achaemenid Empire favoured by the Shah, preferring to focus instead on the early history of Islam and the origins of Shi'ism.

In Iraq, where nationalism had already engendered a focus on the ancient empires of Assyria and Babylonia, a much more secular self-image was both a natural continuation of existing policy and an ever more politically expedient course for Saddam Hussein, who needed to de-emphasise the fact that much of Iraq’s Shi'ite majority was being sent to war against a state governed on the basis of Shi'ite jurisprudence.* To outside observers Khomeini’s Iran was the more threatening, alien regime and Iranian culture, or more accurately the extremism of the Islamic Revolution, was duly focused on and stigmatised in the British media. Then as now human rights abuses were presented, absurdly, as the products of Islam per se, with all examples drawn from Iran and frequent recourse to a vague bogeyman called ‘Islamic tradition,’ and in this way the traditionalist self-image of the Islamic revolution was easily turned against it by foreign media.

Iraq started to receive more substantial negative coverage at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when both sides engaged in the mass-murder of civilians in the so-called ‘War of the Cities.’ 1988’s Al-anfal (literally ‘the spoils’), Saddam Hussein’s brutal response to Kurdish PUK and KDP guerrilla resistance, culminating in the gassing of thousands of civilians at Halabja, was also condemned by the international press and earned its co-ordinator, ‘Chemical’ Ali Hasan al-Majid his grim epithet. By 1990 Saddam Hussein’s image in the Western media had deteriorated greatly. With the invasion of Kuwait in August and the subsequent Gulf War (whose coverage has been the subject of much subsequent analysis and criticism,** the Iraqi leader would have been demonized in the British press in any case, but in practice the process was already well underway. As with Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s, the historical aspects of Saddam Hussein’s self-representation, previously ignored, were turned against him in the 1990s. This was easily done since he chose to represent himself inheriting the mantle of militaristic Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian rulers, best known as tyrants and oppressors of Israel in the Old Testament.

Coverage of the rebuilding of Babylon is a good example of shifting attitudes: during the 1980s the various narratives attached to it included concern for heritage and ambitions for future international tourism, yet by the early 1990s it had come to stand for Saddam Hussein’s disregard for heritage, delusional isolationism and self-aggrandizement. His insertion of bricks bearing his name every few feet at Babylon was consistently mentioned. At the same time, and without any great shift away from secularism in law or government, Iraq became a new home for the ‘Islamic tradition’ slurs previously levelled at Iran. Generally speaking, coverage of Iraq’s past in the 1980s and 90s resonated closely both with the tone of political coverage and with the British government’s position, i.e. realpolitik and a certain calculated ambivalence toward the Iran-Iraq War,*** followed by support of and participation in the Gulf War and sanctions legislation.

A key difference in 2003 was widespread opposition to military action against Iraq. The extent of human rights abuses and economic exploitation stemming from the invasion of Afghanistan was becoming apparent, and the American government was increasingly seen abroad as bellicose and culturally insensitive. It was into this narrative, distinct from and effectively opposed to governmental support of the U.S. position, that coverage of the threat to Iraq’s ancient sites and cultural resources was fitted. As the build-up to war in Iraq continued this opposition became increasingly entrenched, the defining moment coming with the refusal of the United Nations to support the war. Perhaps the long-standing difficulties in the UN’s relationship with its most powerful member-state partly explain the relative indifference of U.S. government and media to this verdict. In Britain, most media commentators saw the UN as the only legitimate arbiter of legality in any international armed conflict. For them, as for anti-war protestors, the defining safety mechanisms and guarantees of sovereignty of late-twentieth century global politics were being washed away, and the impending threat to Iraq came to symbolize a much broader destruction. It was in this context that coverage of Iraq’s archaeology took on a new political meaning. For anti-war writers the imminent threat to standing monuments (perceived by media and apparently military planners as the significant threat to cultural heritage, contra the historical evidence and expert testimony that pointed to looting as the main problem) brought the indiscriminate destruction of bombing campaigns together with the charges of cultural ignorance/apathy aimed at the US administration.

All of which brings us back to coverage of the looting of the Iraq Museum. (See this and this, too.) For a moment the world’s attention was sharply focused not on the damage bombs might do to sites, but to the far more destructive and pernicious impact the aftermath of war can have on cultural heritage and cultural life in general. For policymakers this has made some difference, although it has not forced the U.S. to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention. Since 2003 the needs of the media have changed again, and the large-scale illicit digging of sites, in particular, has received little coverage by comparison with the looting of the Iraq Museum, although this ongoing destruction of unrecorded material actually represents the greater destruction of information about the past. And as media attention moves away from Iraq’s antiquities there is another, less obvious loss. There is something significant about covering a country’s cultural heritage at all; it is one way of differentiating and humanising people in a place about which most consumers of news will know very little. It can promote empathy. News of the dangerous and unstable circumstances under which most Iraqis are currently living only has its full impact when the reader can see the people themselves, and not just the problems with which they are dealing. If coverage of heritage can be used to alienate and demonize, it can equally build empathy. Journalism has an important role to play here, but not one that can be sustained; for this historians and archaeologists are needed, continuing to promote awareness of Iraq’s heritage abroad after the media have moved on.

*See the self-image of Iraq in the 1980s see A. Baram 1991. Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba cathist Iraq, 1968-1989. New York: St. Martin’s Press; for Iran see E. Abrahamian 1993. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. London, I.B. Tauris.

**See Smith, H. Ed. 1992. The Media and the Gulf War. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press; Keeble, R. 1997. Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare. Luton: University of Luton Press.

*** Chipman, J. 1989. Europe and the Iran-Iraq War. In Karsh, E. Ed. The Iran-Iraq War: Impact and Implications. London: Macmillan. pp. 215-30.