War, Image and Legitimacy

Viewing Contemporary Conflict

James Gow, Milena Michalski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415481779
• eBook ISBN: 9781134145423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines how image affects war and whether image affects our understanding of war. Crucially, how can moving-image representation of conflict affect the legitimacy, conduct and outcome of contemporary warfare?

The collapsing Twin Towers of September 11; the hooded figure at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the images of beheadings on the internet; the emaciated figure in a Bosnian-Serb concentration camp; the dancing flashes across the skylines of Baghdad as US-led air bombardment deals blows to another 'rogue' regime: such images define contemporary conflict.

Drawing on a wide range of examples from fiction and factual film, current affairs and television news, as well as new digital media, this book introduces the notion of moving images as the key weapons in contemporary armed conflict. The authors make use of information about the US, the UK, the 'War on Terror', the former Yugoslavia, former Soviet states, the Middle East and Africa.

War, Image and Legitimacy will be of great interest to students of war and security studies, media and communication studies, and international relations in general.

1 Introduction

The collapsing Twin Towers of September 11, the hooded figure in a web of electrodes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the frozen images on moving screens of those whose beheadings were available to those seeking them out on the internet, the emaciated Bosnian Muslim figure at the barbed wire fence of a Bosnian Serb concentration camp, the dancing flashes of detonations across the skylines of some capital – Baghdad, Belgrade, or elsewhere – as US-led air bombardment dealt blows to another ‘rogue’ regime and its long-suffering people: these images define contemporary conflict. More than that, they – and whichever other images become available – dominate the various environments in which the legitimacy of armed campaigns in an era of rapid international and transnational change is contested – politically, socially, legally and communicatively. There is a competition over images – the images, rightly or wrongly, appear to distil the essence of a conflict. They are the short cuts to understanding, and so at the heart of the competition for hearts and minds in different quarters in modern war. Images are the key weapons in contemporary warfare.

This is why the relationship between war and moving images matters, and why both that relationship and the nature of moving images as weapons warrants investigation. How does image affect war? How does image affect our understanding of war? And this means, really, how does image affect our plural understandings of war – of war as it happens, of war in history, of war in memory, of war in general, and of war in one of its specific manifestations? Crucially, how can moving-image representation of conflict affect the legitimacy, nature and conduct of contemporary warfare? What is the nature of this most important of weapons? What are its characteristics? These questions of relationship and qualities are vital to understanding how images work as weapons, and so how their use can be controlled or countered, as far as these might be possible.

This volume explores the nature of moving-image media and their relationship to legitimacy and war. Legitimacy is the key to success in war; the image is the key to the formation of legitimacy, or critical challenges to it. This book maintains that the key weapon of war in the contemporary era, therefore, is the moving image – but, just as with other weapons of war, it is a blunt instrument. It is a kinetic force, but of a different type to the outwardly destructive kinetic force of more conventional weapons – as shown below. The moving image is a blunt instrument because of the means of delivery, its nature and its constraints. Our aim is to show how image and human experience are salient in the fictional representation of war, and how, in the nature of moving-image media, these same elements are vital in constructing, shaping and defining interpretation and understanding in non-fictional film, whether current affairs and documentary, or television news. Images are inevitably a short cut in the quest for detailed comprehension and accuracy. Whether they generally support or deny the bulk of other empirical material, moving images, by their nature, are limited yet powerful.

Media and war: moving images and meaning

Images are not new; war is certainly not new; and nor are the links between images and war.¹ But there is something, it seems to us, altogether new in the salience of the image in understanding contemporary war. The images of commercial jets as cruise missiles and the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center emphasised the importance of images – or their absence – in reporting and interpretation, whether actuality or fictional, of contemporary conflict, as well as making Usama bin Ladin (hereafter UBL²) a household name.³ The overriding importance of the image – above all the moving image – is a feature of the contemporary era. At the same time, the character of contemporary war also presents new issues of legitimacy. The confluence of these two trends makes them central in the study of contemporary conflict.

Although there is a strong body of literature on the broad theme of media and war,⁴ with the greater part of that attention focused on issues of media influence on war, including propaganda and the so-called ‘CNN effect’, treating fiction and factual forms together is distinctive, if not quite unique – and the systematic approach to the nature of different moving-image media and the relationship between fictional and actuality forms taken here is, we believe, unprecedented. Where others have made reference to the relevance of fictional representation, this has been incidental and connected to memory,⁵ or (developing from memory work) more focused discussion of the place of drama and documentary in discursive practices,⁶ or consciously addressed, but in an unsystematic way, as in the work of Susan Carruthers.⁷

Carruthers’ work was more or less the first attempt to create an overview of the relationship of news and entertainment media to war, and is a retrospective survey of the twentieth century. Her emphasis is not on understanding war, but, in the end, on the way post-conflict fictional treatment has dealt with reporting and interpretation of particular conflicts, rather than the conflicts themselves. Carruthers’ book is the closest to our volume in many senses; yet it is already notably different in a number of respects, each of which constitutes an important area of our agenda. While, in some senses, the book broadly explores the same field as Carruthers’, in structure and contemporary coverage it goes well beyond the scope of her study. First, regarding the integrated treatment of the fictional form and the relationship to understanding war, whether in particular cases or more generally, Carruthers’ book is structured by chapters relating to different types or degrees of conflict – total war, limited war, terrorism – with various information and entertainment media addressed in an undifferentiated way. Our systematic treatment of the different types of moving-image media to uncover the nature of moving images as weapons, focused on contemporary conflict from the very end of the twentieth into the twenty-first century, is embedded in the structure of our book, which is shaped by consideration of different moving-image forms – fiction, current affairs/documentary and television news.

Our work differs from Carruthers’ and others’ in another crucial respect. Her work emerges from study of propaganda and communications relating to war, and is for the most part concerned with journalism – even where she is treating fictional material. In contrast, the focus in our study is on the nature of moving-image media and their potential impact on legitimacy as the crucial element in contemporary conflict, and so the volume does not deal directly with either journalism (the reporting of war⁸) or propaganda (the intentional efforts by belligerents to shape understanding of conflict, as, for example, treated by Stephen Badsey and Philip Taylor⁹). Although it is necessary to consider propaganda, the concern is not with propaganda as such. In the words of Philip Taylor, propaganda is the ‘deliberate attempt to influence people to think and behave in a desired way’.¹⁰ This is about as good a definition of propaganda as could be desired. It is about material being disseminated.

It is important to be aware of propaganda and that it overlaps with the focus here on images as weapons, but that this is not the concern per se. In propaganda the key element is intent, but the present analysis of image is not necessarily connected with intent. Indeed, one aspect of this is that, even where there is intent, the effect is uncontrollable. For example, the CIA dropped matchbooks with a picture of UBL all over Afghanistan, with a text in relevant languages indicating that he was deemed to be a bad guy and that there was a $5m reward (later increased to $25m) for information leading to his apprehension. This was clearly an object with intent to spread the word that UBL was unsavoury and to lead to his capture. However, the real point of interest as an instrument of propaganda is the address on the flip side: Rewards for Justice, PO Box 96781, email [email protected]. However, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where there were something like 64 computers in the whole country, otherwise they were banned, and, for large parts of the time, there was no power. In this context, it is hard to imagine an Afghan tribesman on his hilltop with his herd having one of these matchbooks land on his head, and saying, ‘my goodness, I must pick up my satellite and send a quick email to [email protected]’. This is propaganda, it has intention, but the intention is not calibrated to cultural environment in which it is intended to have effect. The intention is there. It is certainly deliberate – to get someone to think and act in a particular way. But, it is hard to imagine that the effect and impact were anything other than negligible.¹¹

The key point is that the concern here is not about propaganda per se, because it is not purely about intentional efforts to control information and shape understanding intent. Of course, the present analysis has some relationship to propaganda, but its scope is wider. It is about legitimacy. Nor is our analysis concerned directly with the reporting of war, which has various other dimensions (including print journalism and radio), where images do not necessarily impinge – or can only ever do so contingently, as inter-textual discussion of moving-image media. Indeed, it is one of our concerns that, once the nature of moving-image media is taken into account, as well as that of contemporary conflict, legitimacy will be affected at least as much by the unintentional as by the intentional.

This will make it at once all the more important for protagonists to seek control, but even harder for them to achieve this. While policy and news producers can attempt at times carefully to choose what to feed to the public, there is such a plurality of channels available that no one provider can guarantee to control the agenda, and even less chance that, if they manage to set the agenda, they will be able to control how material is then used, interpreted, understood and relayed by others.¹² Crucially, it is the nature of the media that counts, not conscious or direct intention – although the impact on legitimacy will, of course, have implications for one or another actor’s propagandistic purpose. While moving images are key in the battle for legitimacy at the heart of contemporary conflict, they can often constitute an unguided, imprecise and largely uncontrollable weapon. Thus, while both news reporting and propaganda have relevance for the present study, and relevant material is addressed contingently, the focus is on the nature of moving images and the types of narrative they determine – and so the kind of weapon they constitute.

This study focuses on the nature of moving images, how the key media are structured by their dependence on such images, and how this produces particular output with a potential impact on our understanding of war. The impact of images on conflict is not, of course, a novelty of the twenty-first century. For example, the impact of images at the political level can be seen in the case of two British army sergeants in Palestine, who were hanged in 1948, precipitating the end of the Mandate territory, in face of Jewish, proto-Israeli terrorist attacks and insurgency.¹³ One national newspaper, the Daily Express, carried an account with a picture on the front page, and it became a cause célèbre in the House of Commons, very much in a way more characteristic of later times. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was the first time that dead bodies had been shown, and they were booby trapped so that when the troops went to cut them down they were injured. That image really resonated at breakfast time and people had had enough. But, in fact, over three years, although around 300 people had been killed, this image set the agenda.

Earlier than this John Hartfield¹⁴ recognised the power of images, both as they were being used by the Nazis and as a means of combating them; he incorporated Nazi images into counter-Nazi work against them. Hartfield is important because he had already identified that, in strategic engagement with opponents, given the increasing availability and means of distributing images, hearts and minds will be most affected by retinal impact. The extent to which this is true has grown during the course of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. The thing that is going to cut through everything else will be the one that has instant impact on the retina – what, for Hartfield, was the retinal flash. The battle for hearts and minds, so often cited in the context of anti-terrorist and counterinsurgency campaigns, and increasingly in the context of all armed conflict in the contemporary era, notably in the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ and the engagement of US-led forces in Iraq, is not just that. It is a battle for hearts, minds and retinas.¹⁵

Retinal impact and moving images hold a vital place in contemporary armed conflict, as may be seen from this brief overview. The characteristics of contemporary warfare differ from previous eras. Contemporary armed conflict is characterised by issues of asymmetry, atrocity, variegated loci of political control, as well as issues such as ethnicity, political community, mass migration and, crucially, sovereignty, law, human rights and morality in more fluid environments than ever before.¹⁶ These features of contemporary conflict may be seen in the major cases throughout the 1990s and beyond 2000 – Iraq and the broader Middle East, al-Qa’ida, Africa, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia (all of which feature to a greater or lesser extent later in this book, particularly in the chapters on different types of moving-image media). The character of contemporary conflict makes the certainties of war in even the recent past of limited or even no relevance. In these circumstances, legitimacy is central to success – a conceptualisation and an argument developed in Chapter 7.

Legitimacy is key because the political, legal and operational framework for using armed force has changed and is changing further, particularly as Western governments, post-September 11, may be required to take ‘pre-emptive’ action based on secret information, but will not be able to make that information public. This requires public and media trust (both arenas would later damn governments shown to have failed to act when there was knowledge of threats); but the events surrounding Iraq suggest that public and media support may not be available, absent images, as evidence or means of creating memory and understanding. Whereas most discussion of war and the media in recent years has focused primarily on issues of accuracy in factual reporting and fictional depiction, or their impact on policy making or on public opinion, this volume argues that in television, cinema and the increasingly important World Wide Web, these other aspects are of limited significance – it is image and experience that are salient in shaping and defining interpretation and understanding.

In this context, waging war and mounting military operations became far less a matter of a single armed force amassing sufficient physical strength to overwhelm an opponent – although the capability to do so, where necessary, remained important. It became a matter not of victory in battle, but success in interpreting events. Lawrence Freedman in an excellent and concise condensation of the key literature surrounding this trend emphasised the importance of cultural aspects and argued that the source of victory in contemporary conflicts lay in ‘strategic narratives’.¹⁷ Defining narratives as ‘compelling story lines which can explain events convincingly and from which inferences can be drawn’, he argued that these were vital in maintaining cultural networks, where dispersed or diverse groups cohere around the given narratives, as well as being important for framing issues and the responses to them, based on the analysis that ‘opinions are shaped not so much by the information received, but by the constructs through which that information is interpreted and understood’. He wisely supplements this with the observation that effective narratives work because of an appeal to the ‘values, interests and prejudices of the intended audience’, warning that this can be undermined if later information or events ‘expose’ it as false, or weak, in any way. In summary, narratives are ‘implied with every reference to a battle for “hearts and minds” ’. The key to successful strategy then shifts from destroying an enemy’s assets to undermining the narratives, which give appeal to that enemy and mobilise support for it.

Freedman’s excellent analysis remains limited, because the discussion of narrative does not extend to a developed understanding of the salience of images – that the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ is also one for ‘retinas’ – and the image- and experience-dependent nature of moving-image media. He does, in passing, acknowledge that governments have become aware that ‘images revealing large scale suffering can push them into “doing something”, while images exposing the cost of that “something” may impede action’,¹⁸ and that the ‘pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib were undoubtedly a public relations disaster for the United States’.¹⁹ This is something of an understatement, as the scenes from Abu Ghraib were undoubtedly the biggest blow to the US campaign in Iraq and its Global War on Terror (as we discuss in Chapters 5 and 7). This is why Freedman’s excellent analysis remains incomplete, and why it is essential to recognise that images are not just contingent in the battle for hearts and minds, or the struggle for success and legitimacy; they are central and imperative. Analysis and understanding of strategic narratives must comprehend that the critical framework is moving-image media, and that there is a fundamental need to appreciate the determinants and character of moving-image media. Our mission in this book is to explore these issues and to develop understanding of moving-image narratives and modern war, where, as we argue, images are the key weapons.

Weapons for winning: construction and kinesis

It important to lay out a key assumption in our argument: that images can constitute weapons. This notion is not entirely novel. It is reflected, for example, in the claims of the ‘Bond villain’ in the 007 film Tomorrow Never Dies, played by the excellent Jonathan Pryce, a media magnate, inevitably set on dominating the world by provoking major armed conflict among major powers by using the power he has through broadcast media, who declares that ‘words are the new bullets’ and ‘satellites the new artillery’. Of course, he misses saying that images are weapons, but only a little further reflection would lead to the conclusion that what the satellites deliver with real force is images.

At first glance, this idea might be rejected.²⁰ Use of the term ‘weapon’ might initially conjure up images of instruments created with the specific purpose of inflicting physical wounds on an opponent (or, even, just another living being), such as knives, swords, spears or pistols. However, while undoubtedly this received understanding of what constitutes a weapon is not unreasonable, nor is it developed or refined enough. The notion of a weapon can include anything that serves to disrupt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Moving Images and Meaning: The Nature of the Weapon
• 3 Feature Fiction Film
• 4 Documentary and Current Affairs
• 5 Television News
• 6 The Alphabet of Images
• 7 Image and Experience: Legitimacy and Contemporary War
• Notes
• Selected Filmography and Bibliography