The vantage points from which this war was witnessed give future historians a wealth of material, writes Lara Marlow
More than six months after President George W. Bush declared major combat over in the Iraq war, journalists are questioning their own performance.
The international colloquium hosted by the Panos Institute in Paris this week made clear that although this conflict was probably the most broadly - and expensively - covered in history, serious ethical questions remain unanswered.
How do journalists reconcile the duty to report everything they know with the constraints of working under a dictatorship? Why did media covering Washington or "embedded" with US troops so often act as cheerleaders for war? Is Western coverage, like US government policy, permeated with anti-Arab bias?
"The place from which you observed the war had a huge influence on the way you covered it," said Christophe Ayad of the French daily Libération.
Those of us who covered the war from Baghdad had little access to the Iraqi military; the regime did not want us to witness its collapse. But we did see something so obvious that it ought to go without saying: that war is about blood and gore and suffering and dead women and children.
The US television networks, which fled Baghdad, presented a far cleaner, technological vision of the conflict. Most disheartening of all, some of the "embedded" journalists who arrived in Baghdad with US forces lost all semblance of detachment and began to play soldier.
I'll never forget the NBC correspondent whom I encountered on the "Highway of Death" in Daura, south Baghdad, on April 10th. The place was littered with the bodies of dozens of civilians, killed because they had the misfortune to drive into the sights of a US tank gunner.
"We fought our way up here," the US television reporter told me. "We parked our armour here and we had to fire on oncoming traffic, because they could have been suicide bombers."
The 1991 Gulf War was CNN's war, because the US satellite network alone stayed in Baghdad through the bombing. This year, all US networks were either thrown out or ran away before the bombardment. Rym Brahimi of CNN was supposed to have explained CNN's absence at the colloquium, but her bosses prevented her from attending.
Another absent guest was Taysir Allouni, from the provocative, much maligned but very much watched Qatar-based network Al-Jazeera. Allouni has been accused by a Spanish judge of assisting al-Qaeda, and is not allowed to travel. So his colleague Maher Abdallah filled in for him.
Any western correspondent would jump at the opportunity to interview Osama bin Laden, Abdallah said. But his colleague now faces prosecution in Spain for meeting bin Laden after September 11th. "When a white man meets a terrorist, he's a great journalist," Abdallah said bitterly. "And when an Arab journalist meets a terrorist, he's a terrorist."
Lindsey Hilsum from British Channel Four said it was impossible for journalists to report on corruption and self-censorship from Baghdad before the war started. "We had to participate in both, and we didn't talk about it. I believe there was not one journalist who worked in Iraq before the war who didn't pay for a visa." Channel Four kept a supply of Wedgwood ashtrays to mollify angry Iraqi officials. When "minders" detected criticism, they threatened "This is your last visa".
Some Iraqis told Hilsum they wanted the US to invade. "But we couldn't report it," she said. Channel Four would have been expelled from Iraq, and it would have endangered the lives of those they spoke to. "The last executions occurred on April 7th, only two days before the regime fell," she said.
Print journalists from countries without an Iraqi ambassador in residence were far more fortunate. Not once during the Iraq war did a "minder" read my copy or listen to me talking to Irish radio. Yet the idea that journalists in Baghdad were somehow suspect, manipulated, was so deeply ingrained that I repeatedly had to correct radio presenters in Dublin who adopted the BBC's phrase, saying that my reporting was "monitored by Iraqi authorities". It was not.
Doubtless the single greatest error of Western media - especially in the US - was their failure to challenge and investigate claims about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war. Journalists in Washington were lazy, and those on the ground in Iraq were afraid of being labelled stooges of the regime.
Hilsum was visiting the sites denounced by Washington and London at the time. Mr Bush had said Iraqi drones could be used to disseminate chemical weapons. At the drone factory, "I saw contraptions that looked like toys from a model airplane magazine," Hilsum said. "They had scotch tape on the wings! I said to myself, 'Can this really be a threat to mankind?' We should have had more confidence in ourselves, in our own judgment."
Abdallah detected bias in the criticisms levelled at Al-Jazeera. Western television never shrank from showing dead and wounded Iraqis, he said. "You white people with blue eyes and fair hair don't mind seeing Arabs slaughtered. But when an Anglo-Saxon is taken prisoner or killed, like the two British soldiers we showed, the whole West went mad and we were uncivilised."
On April 8th, US forces killed three journalists in Baghdad: Tariq Ayoub of Al-Jazeera, felled by a US rocket on the roof of the network's Baghdad office, and cameramen Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso, killed when a US tank fired a shell at the Palestine Hotel. A Spanish judge last month accepted a lawsuit accusing three soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division of committing a war crime when they killed Jose Couso.
"The US government apologised to Reuters [Taras Protsyuk's employer\], but they destroyed our office and killed my colleague and they never apologised," Abdallah complained. "When a Western white man gets hit, there's an apology, but when a Third World Muslim gets hit, no apology. If anyone can explain this any other way than racism, I'd like to hear it."
The attack on the Palestine Hotel haunts all of us who covered the war, all the more so because the US government refused to make its inquiry public and has never offered a credible explanation. France 3 television was on the same floor as Reuters, and their cameraman rushed to the news agency office after the explosion. His footage of Protsyuk lying face down in a pool of blood, of four wounded journalists wailing and screaming, was never broadcast.
When the lights came back on after the video was shown at the Panos Institute colloquium, no one spoke for several minutes. Many in the audience were weeping. France 3's correspondent Caroline Sinz said she believed the attack was staged to divert attention from what happened elsewhere in Baghdad as the US seized the capital. "They scared the journalists; it was a warning," she
said.
The greatest risks were run by "unilateral" journalists who shunned both "embedding"' and the opportunity to cover the war from the Iraqi capital. Keith Richburg of the Washington Post lived for three weeks in a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the south-eastern Iraqi desert, eating tinned food and siphoning petrol from abandoned petrol stations.
Richburg defended "embedding"' on the grounds that "readers in America wanted to know first-hand what their soldiers were doing". But his own contribution as a "unilateral" was invaluable. "There is always a disconnect between what happens on the ground in a war and what the military spokesmen say," he said.
The first time the US announced that Basra had fallen, Richburg watched from outside the city as US helicopters bombarded it.
"The Washington Post had two front page stories; one from Washington saying Basra had fallen, and mine, describing a very fierce battle."
As a "unilateral", Richburg was also able to debunk false US and British reports of an uprising in Basra, and the story of Private Jessica Lynch, who was allegedly shot and stabbed when she was captured. Iraqi doctors who treated Lynch told Richburg she suffered a broken leg and some scratches in a traffic accident.
Over and above the current debate about press accomplishments and failings, the many vantage points from which this war was witnessed will provide future historians with an unprecedented wealth of material.
If there is one paramount lesson, for me it is the necessity to maintain a moral distance from both sides in war. Ironically, the worst of both sides have come together in post-war Baghdad, where a former high-ranking employee of the Ministry of Information now works for Fox News.
Lara Marlowe reported from Baghdad on the Iraq war for The Irish Times.