Ethics�InternationalAffairs2003 VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2

Carnegie CouncilO N E T H I C S A N D

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

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DEALING JUSTLY WITH DEBT

Ann Pettifor • Jack Boorman Arturo C. Porzecanski • Thomas I. Palley

THE REVIVAL OF EMPIRE

Jedediah Purdy on the new liberal imperialism

Pratap Bhanu Mehta on empire and moral identity

Jean Bethke Elshtain on equal regard and the use of force

Robert Hunter Wade on the invisible hand of empire

David Singh Grewal on network power and globalization

REVIEW ESSAYS

David Campbell on war and the media

Jeffrey K. Olick on collective guilt

RECENT BOOKS ON ETHICS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

ROUNDTABLEDEALING JUSTLY WITH DEBT

Contents

Introduction 1

Resolving International Debt Crises Fairly Ann Pettifor 2

Reviving Troubled Economies Jack Boorman 10

The Constructive Role of Private Creditors Arturo C. Porzecanski 18

Sovereign Debt Restructuring Proposals:A Comparative Look Thomas I. Palley 26

Introduction 34

Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments Jedediah Purdy 35

Empire and Moral IdentityPratap Bhanu Mehta 49

International Justice as Equal Regard and the Use of Force Jean Bethke Elshtain 63

The Invisible Hand of the American Empire Robert Hunter Wade 77

Network Power and Globalization David Singh Grewal 89

Representing Contemporary WarDavid Campbell 99

The Guilt of Nations? Jeffrey K. Olick 109

Recent Books on Ethics and International Affairs 119

Contributors 137

Guidelines for Submission 139

REVIEW ESSAYS

BOOK REVIEWS

SPECIAL SECTIONTHE REVIVAL OF EMPIRE

Despite living in an age commonlyunderstood as being awash withimages of atrocity, there are few

writers who theorize the relationshipbetween political conflict and its pictorialrepresentation. This relative absence meansthat various assertions about the power ofpictures have come to dominate popularunderstanding. Foremost among these aretwo fundamentally contradictory claims,which, Susan Sontag observes, are “fastapproaching the stature of platitudes.”1 One,the “CNN effect,” is that the power of newsimagery is such that it can alter the course ofstate policy simply by virtue of being broad-cast. The other, the “compassion fatigue”the-sis, argues that the abundant supply ofimagery has dulled our senses and created anew syndrome of communal inaction.

Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, On Photogra-phy, remains one of the classic statementsabout the politics of representing violence,and an important starting point in workingthrough the merits of the above claims.Although it may seem like an anachronisticpractice in the contemporary pictorial econ-omy of international news, photographyremains an important portal through whichthe politics of images generally can be con-sidered. While television, with its stream ofvideo imagery, may be the premier source ofnews and information from distant places,its very preponderance may limit its stayingpower in the minds of the viewer. As Sontag

argues, “photographs may be more memo-rable than moving images, because they are aneat slice of time, not a flow. Television is astream of underselected images, each ofwhich cancels its predecessor. Each still pho-tograph is a privileged moment, turned intoa slim object that one can keep and look atagain.”2

Partly because of its role as contemplativemoment, photography provides an impor-tant interpretative resource for televisionand its images, helping to set a standard bywhich the mundane is marked off from thesignificant. The famous BBC film of the 1984Ethiopian famine—shot by MohammedAmin and Michael Buerk at Korem in Octo-ber of that year—had an impact in theUnited States because, in the words ofWilliam Lord, the executive producer ofABC’s World News Tonight, “it was as if eachclip was an award-winning still photo.”3 Inaddition to providing something of aninterpretative code for the meaning ofvideo, the ubiquity of video in the represen-tation of the other has given the photographa renewed role as a site for reflection. AsJohn Taylor argues, “The immediacy and

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Representing Contemporary WarDavid Campbell

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 2003), 144 pp., $20 cloth.

1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 104.2 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: AnchorBooks, 1990), pp. 17–18.3 Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the MediaSell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Rout-ledge, 1999), p. 117.

Reprinted from Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2.© 2003 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

normality of television imagery have revivedphotojournalism.”4

This was certainly the case on and afterSeptember 11, 2001. Many newspapers pub-lished remarkable images captured by pho-tographers who were at or near the WorldTrade Center as soon as they learned of thedisaster. With Manhattan being one of theworld’s most media rich environments,some of the world’s best-known photojour-nalists found the biggest story of recent timetaking place in their backyard. With the Websites of well-known media outlets offering acost-effective capacity for publishing thework of these photojournalists, we were ableto see the powerful images of JamesNachtwey and Anthony Suau, along withSusan Meiselas and Gilles Peress, faster thanwas previously possible. Even television net-works helped to support Sontag’s con-tention that the photograph offers aprivileged moment. On the Friday after theSeptember 11, 2001, attacks, two news pro-grams in England concluded their broad-casts with a series of still images, each staticon the screen for much longer than usual, tothe accompaniment of somber music.

Being a site for contemplation does notnecessarily make the photograph an instru-ment for political change. According to Son-tag, the image itself cannot create apossibility that otherwise does not exist: “aphotograph that brings news of someunsuspected zone of misery cannot make adent in public opinion unless there is anappropriate context of feeling and attitude.”The image can, however, help develop anattitude. While a photograph “cannot createa moral position” it can “reinforce one—andcan help build a nascent one.”5 As a result,the event or issue has to be identified andnamed as an event or issue before photogra-phy can make its contribution. This means“the possibility of being affected morally by

photographs is [determined by] the exis-tence of a relevant political consciousness.Without a politics, photographs of theslaughter-bench of history will most likelybe experienced as, simply, unreal or as ademoralizing emotional blow.”6

In Sontag’s 1977 account, however, thequestion of an image’s power was also a prod-uct of its repetition and usage as much as thepreviously existing political context throughwhich it was read. Indeed, Sontag went as faras to suggest that “concerned photogra-phy”—the self-consciously humanistic workof recognized documentarians—had satu-rated popular consciousness in the previousthirty years to such an extent that the com-munal conscience had been deadened ratherthan aroused. Because shock depended onnovelty, repeated use bred familiarity andpassivity if not contempt.

Despite being assured in her conclusionson the power of photography, perhaps themost significant of Sontag’s 1977 argumentswas that photography has an intrinsicallydouble character from which its meaningcould not be easily fixed. This double char-acter stemmed, Sontag wrote, from twoimperatives that have continued to give itforce as a very particular aesthetic genre.From the fine arts, photography was drivenby beautification. From a combination ofthe sciences and nineteenth-century literaryforms, photography was animated by thedesire for “truth telling.” Together, these twoimperatives produced a struggle that, atbest, resulted in an uneasy coexistence thatwas never very far from erupting in a debateabout the merits of one over the other. Beingirresolvable, this clash of the two impera-

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4 John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastro-phe and War (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 1998), p. 46.5 Sontag, On Photography, p. 17.6 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

tives is in many ways at the heart of photog-raphy’s continued appeal. As Sontag writes:“Photographs are, of course, artifacts. Buttheir appeal is that they also seem, in a worldlittered with photographic relics, to have thestatus of found objects—unpremeditatedslices of the world. Thus, they trade simulta-neously on the prestige of art and the magicof the real. They are clouds of fantasy andpellets of information.”7

PHOTOGRAPHS AND POWERRECONSIDERED

That Sontag should return to the themes ofOn Photography in her new book, Regardingthe Pain of Others, and that this returnshould be followed by the most media-satu-rated war in human history, provides uswith a significant context for assessing Son-tag’s contribution to an account of war pho-tography. For what is most significant aboutSontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others is itsopenly expressed doubt about the assuredclaims of On Photography concerning thepower of photographs.

This revision stems from Sontag’s recog-nition of the “dual powers of photography”to both “generate documents” (the pellets ofinformation) and to “create works of visualart” (the clouds of fantasy).8 This structuralundecidability inherent in photographymeans that a number of—indeed, almostany number of—responses to a particularimage is possible. Given the time for con-templation allowed by the fixing of theimage, the construction of meaning arisesfrom the complex interplay of the photo-graphic representation, its location, accom-panying text, moment of reading, as well asthe frames of reference brought to it by thereader/viewer. They might turn us off, orturn us on; they might frighten us, or theymight anger us; they might distance us, or

make us feel proximate; they might weakenus or they might strengthen us. But what-ever the response, it is not media saturationthat leads to political inaction: “People don’tbecome inured to what they are shown—ifthat is the right way to describe what hap-pens—because of the quantity of imagesdumped on them. It is passivity that dullsfeeling.”9

With this observation, Sontag not onlychallenges the compassion fatigue thesis; shequestions the notion of the CNN effect.With regard to inaction in Bosnia despitethe steady stream of images of ethnic cleans-ing that made their way out of Sarajevo,Sontag argues that people didn’t turn offbecause they were either overwhelmed bytheir quantity or anaesthetized by theirquality. Rather, they switched off becauseAmerican and European leaders proclaimedit was an intractable and irresolvable situa-tion. The political context into which thepictures were being inserted was already set,with military intervention not an option,and no amount of horrific photographs wasgoing to change that.10

Having been subjected in the last twoyears to the media-saturated events of Sep-tember 11, the war in Afghanistan, and thewar in Iraq, we might think that beingimmersed daily in the visuals of distant warshas been a historical constant. Up untilWorld War II, images of atrocity were rela-tively rare, and conflict came to us textuallyand somewhat late. Up until the Vietnam

representing contemporary war 101

7 Ibid., p. 69.8 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 76.9 Ibid., p. 102.10 Ibid., p. 101. For an argument against the CNN effectin relation to images of Bosnian atrocity, see DavidCampbell, “Atrocity, Memory, Photography: Imagingthe Concentration Camps of Bosnia—The Case of ITNversus Living Marxism, Part II,” Journal of HumanRights 1, no. 2 (2002), pp. 157–58; see also www.virtual-security.net/attrocity/atrocity2.htm.

War, photographs of combat and its conse-quences—or, at least those photographs ofcombat and its consequences that werereleased for use—were often positive in boththeir intent and effects. In large part, that isbecause these images were produced by offi-cial cameramen who were either commis-sioned by the military for this particularpurpose (as in the case of Roger Fenton andthe Crimea War) or at least had their pres-ence sanctioned by the authorities (as withMatthew Brady during the American CivilWar). Thus, our status as a “spectator ofcalamities,” and a spectator of distantcalamities in real time, is a thoroughly mod-ern if not late-modern experience, Sontagpoints out. Indeed, “The understanding ofwar among people who have not experi-enced war is now chiefly a product of theimpact of these images.”11 Given the struc-tural undecidability of photographs, thiscentrality of images to our experiencesmeans we can be subject all too easily toimperatives that then employ pictures intheir service, trading on the sense of imme-diacy that comes from their documentarymode to banish any thoughts of the fantasythat springs from their role in the visual arts.

In Regarding the Pain of Others Sontagmaintains the position established in OnPhotography that photographs can buttressand expand a previously established moraldisposition, but they cannot create thatdisposition themselves out of nothing.This is particularly true in the context ofconflict. When a war is unpopular and thatfeeling has come to be prior to the takingof photographs,

The material gathered by photographers,which they may think of as unmasking theconflict, is of great use. Absent such a protest,the same antiwar photograph may be read asshowing pathos, or heroism, admirable hero-ism, in an unavoidable struggle that can beconcluded only by victory or by defeat. The

photographer’s intentions do not determinethe meaning of the photograph, which willhave its own career, blown by the whims andloyalties of the diverse communities that haveuse for it.12

PICTURES AND WAR: IRAQ 2003

In the Iraq war of 2003 imagery was centralto the conflict and often the subject of con-flict itself. In this context, the Pentagon’sstrategy of “embedding” reporters and theircamera crews with fighting units, and hav-ing them operate at the behest of that unit,continues the long-running tradition of aclose relationship between the media andthe military. Although the details of thearrangements and their effectiveness havechanged over time—from the combinationof accreditation and daily briefings in Viet-nam, the restrictions on access that resultedfrom the dependence for transport in theFalklands, to the selected pools and videobriefings in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91,and the embedding of Iraq 2003—at nostage in the post–World War II period hasthe U.S. or U.K. military operated withoutdetailed media management proceduresdesigned to influence the information(specifically the pictorial) outcomes.

Given this, Sontag is perhaps surprisinglysanguine about the genuineness of war pho-tography in the contemporary period. Whilerecognizing that many of the now iconiccombat images of the pre-Vietnam periodwere staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershedsuch that “the practice of inventing dramaticnews pictures, staging them for the camera,seems on its way to becoming a lost art.”13

Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likeli-hood of individual photographers seeking

102 David Campbell

11 Ibid., p. 21.12 Ibid., pp. 38–39.13 Ibid., p. 58.

to deceive, she may be right. There was,however, at least one notable instance in Iraqof digital manipulation. This resulted in theLos Angeles Times sacking award-winningstaff photographer Brian Walski, whosealtered image of a British soldier in Basra (hehad combined two photos into one toimprove marginally composition) was usedon the paper’s front page.14

Walski knowingly violated the Los AngelesTimes editorial policy that expressly forbids“altering the content of news photographs,”and quickly accepted responsibility for hiserror in “tweaking ” the picture.15 What isinteresting about the Walski case is that theerror he made was not in constructing theimage per se, but the stage in the process ofproduction of the image at which he did histweaking. In essence, all photographicimages, even when considered in isolation,involve substantial amounts of tweaking—reducing the three-dimensional, color-filledworld to a two-dimensional, framed, flatimage (often in black and white) requiresthe photographer to exclude much thatexceeds the frame. But those tweaks inher-ent to the taking of a photograph occurbefore the shutter is clicked. Walski’s errorwas to engage in tweaking after the shutterhad been clicked. This demonstrates two keyfeatures of the relationship between photo-graphs and reality in war. First, even in theage of the digital image, where there is nonegative to secure an understanding of theoriginal photograph, Walski’s case showsthere remains a strong sense of the shutterfreezing a moment of reality, such that thismoment is privileged as the original thatcannot ethically be altered.

Second, and even more important, theWalski case demonstrates that the larger andmore significant ways in which picturesstructure reality through exclusions arethemselves excluded from the discussion

about manipulation so long as the profes-sional responsibility not to alter what theshutter secures is maintained. Taking thiswider view, Sontag’s belief that the age ofinventing and staging war images is behindus seems seriously misplaced. That isbecause in the contemporary period theissue of inventing and staging dramaticnews pictures has escalated from the actionsof a few individuals seeking to deceive to thewhole purpose and structure of the mili-tary’s media management operation.

In a revealing coincidence, the story aboutWalski’s error appeared in Britain on thesame day as news of Private Jessica Lynch’srescue from captivity was reported. Lynch’srelease was made public through the Coali-tion Media Center (CMC) at the U.S. Cen-tral Command headquarters in Qatar. This$1.5 million briefing operation, with a futur-istic, Hollywood-inspired set replete withplasma TV screens, is housed in a remotewarehouse hundreds of miles from the bat-tlefield, but offering the military overviewdesired by its U.S., U.K., and Australianmedia minders. The CMC was integral tothe strategy of embedding reporters withmilitary units, for those on the front lineprovided images and stories from anunavoidably narrow perspective, while thejournalists at the CMC were given what wassaid to be the broad overview but in effectonly amplified the narrow perspectivedesired by the Pentagon and its partners. Asone media critic observed, the five hundredor more “embeds” (with one hundred cam-eras) were “close up at the front” while the

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14 Duncan Campbell, “War in the Gulf: US war photog-rapher sacked for altering image of British soldier,”Guardian, April 3, 2003, p. 5; and Stephen Bates,“Media:Faking it,” Guardian, May 5, 2003, pp. 2–3.15 Jay DeFoore, “Brian Walski Discusses His DoctoredPhoto,” PDNewswire, May 7, 2003; available atwww.pdn-pix.com/news/archive/2003/050703.html#4.

six hundred CMC journalists were “tied upin the rear.”This meant the military could beconfidant journalists would produce “maxi-mum imagery with minimum insight.”16

The Lynch story demonstrated how wellthis operation could function. CMC jour-nalists were roused from their sleep in theearly hours of April 2, thinking that a majorstory (such as the death of Saddam Hussein)was breaking. Instead they were presentedwith an edited five-minute military video—shot through a night lens, producing green,grainy images of silhouetted figures—detailing the Special Forces rescue of PrivateLynch. The video encapsulated a narrativefamiliar to viewers of Black Hawk Down andBehind Enemy Lines—that the U.S. military“never leaves a fallen comrade.” A single stillimage was taken from this operation andcirculated widely, showing Lynch lying on astretcher aboard a U.S. Special Forces heli-copter, smiling grimly from under a U.S. flagdraped across her chest.

That Jessica Lynch is a fair-skinned, nine-teen-year-old blonde female from West Vir-ginia did not hurt in the process of devisingstories of heroism surrounding her captivityand rescue. Said to be suffering gunshot andstab wounds, and having been reportedlymistreated during her detention in an Iraqihospital, a much-used Washington Post storyfrom April 3 cited unnamed sources asdescribing how Lynch had fought bravelyduring the battle of March 23 that led to hercapture, firing a weapon repeatedly despitebeing hit and seeing many of her comradeskilled.17 Unsurprisingly, the cinematic qual-ity of this description led to quickly pro-duced TV documentaries (the Arts andEntertainment network screened Saving Pri-vate Lynch within two weeks of her rescue)and a massive effort to secure an exclusiveinterview upon her recovery, with CBS(which is part of the media conglomerate

Viacom) offering a package of media induce-ments that included proposals for shows andpublications from CBS News, CBS Enter-tainment, MTV (who dangled the prospectof Lynch co-hosting an hour-long program,with a concert held in her hometown ofPalestine, West Virginia), Paramount Pic-tures, and Simon & Schuster books.18

Apparently Lynch cannot recall anyaspect of her time in an Iraqi hospital orsubsequent release. But subsequent mediainvestigations have discovered that most ofthe dramatic elements of the early accountsof Lynch’s condition and return are open toserious question. A BBC documentary,which interviewed staff involved in Lynch’scare after the war had been declared over,revealed that she had no war wounds butwas diagnosed as a serious road traffic acci-dent victim, had received the best availabletreatment from Iraqi medical staff, and thattheir attempt to return her to U.S. forces inan ambulance had been repelled at a U.S.military checkpoint.19

While the basic coordinates of the Lynchstory were not invented (she was injured,captured, then recovered), the account wasstaged, insofar as the particular narrative

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16 John Kampfner, “War Spin,” Correspondent, BBC2,May 18, 2003. For critical accounts of the CMC opera-tion, see Michael Wolff, “Media: ‘You know less thanwhen you arrived,’” Guardian, March 31, 2003, p. 2; andMichael Wolff, “Media: I was only asking,” Guardian,April 14, 2003, p. 6.17 Michael Getler, “Reporting Private Lynch,” Washing-ton Post, April 20, 2003, p. B6.18 Alessandra Stanley, “In Hoopla Over a P.O.W., A Mir-ror of U.S. Society,”New York Times, April 18, 2003, p. B9;and Jim Rutenberg, “To Interview Former P.O.W., CBSOffers Stardom,” New York Times, June 16, 2003, p. A1.19 Kampfner, “War Spin”; John Kampfner, “Features:The truth about Jessica,”Guardian, May 15, 2003, pp. 2–3.Many of these features were confirmed by the Washing-ton Post’s reexamination of the story two months afterits initial account. See Dana Priest, William Booth, andSusan Schmidt, “A Broken Body, a Broken Story, PiecedTogether,” Washington Post, June 17, 2003, p. A1.

that was attached to and derived from themilitary footage of her release was con-structed by the Pentagon’s media operationto convey a heroic and redemptive meaning.However, deliberate manipulations of thiskind by the military’s media managers werenot new in Iraq nor confined to the Ameri-cans. In Afghanistan, for example, in aneffort to justify the Royal Marines’ role on thesupposed front line of the global war againstterrorism, the U.K. Ministry of Defencetransported journalists to film a controlledexplosion in the mountains outside Kabul.Alleged to be a recently discovered al-Qaedaweapons bunker it “was in fact a ‘friendly’arms dump belonging to a local warlord whowas an Afghan ally of the American-backedprovisional government in Kabul.”20

Nor are such instances of overt manipu-lation the main problem. One of the princi-ple effects of having journalists, cameramen,and photographers embedded with particu-lar units was to ensure that the stream ofimages coming back from the front linerevolved around allied military hardwareand personnel. As New York Times staff pho-tographer Vincent Laforet—who spenttwenty-seven days aboard the USS AbrahamLincoln in the Persian Gulf—wrote after-ward,“My main concern was that I was pro-ducing images that were glorifying war toomuch. These machines of war are awesomeand make for stunning images. I was afraidthat I was being drawn into producing apublic-relations essay.”21

Laforet’s concern is well founded, but themedia outlets themselves share responsibil-ity for the glamorizing coverage of warachieved through the embedded system.The fact that reporters and photographerswere embedded might have increased theprospects of favorable coverage but did notguarantee such coverage. While one BostonHerald reporter was so embedded he felt

comfortable in calling out Iraqi positions tohis military unit (and thus played a role inkilling three Iraqi soldiers), a WashingtonPost story on the shooting of civilians has ledto a Pentagon investigation of the unitresponsible.22 These differing outcomeshave produced an ongoing debate in mediacircles about embedding in which journal-ists are clearly undecided about the costsand benefits of the arrangement.23

Nonetheless, what is most striking aboutthe embedded journalists’ coverage of theIraq war is the way in which the images ofthe conflict produced by the allies’ mediawas so relatively clean, being largely devoidof the dead bodies that mark a major con-flict. In this outcome, the media is a willingaccomplice. An account of a Time magazineeditorial meeting helps explain this:

In the darkness of a conference room at Timemagazine last Friday, a war of terrible andbeautiful images unfurled on a screen: thesteely-eyed marine taking aim, the awe-struckIraqi pointing to bombers in the sky, thebloodied head of a dead Iraqi with an Ameri-can soldier standing tall in the background.

The last image was an appalling but vividrepresentation of American dominance in avery violent week. But Stephen J. Koepp,

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20 Jon Swain,“War doesn’t belong to the generals,”BritishJournalism Review 14,no. 1 (2003),pp.23–29; also availableat www.bjr.org.uk/data/2003/no1_swain.htm. In a similarvein, while Australian reporters are at some distance fromtheir country’s forces, Australian Department of Defencetraining videos have been supplied and used by the mediato provide both still and moving images said to be Aus-tralian forces in action in Iraq. See Margo Kingston, “InHoward we trust, but why?” Sydney Morning Herald,March 26, 2003; available at www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/26/1048653740850.html.21 Vincent Laforet, “Photographer Worried about ‘Glo-rifying War,’” Editor & Publisher, April 23, 2003; availableat www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1871177.22 Nancy Bernhard, “Embedding Reporters on theFrontline,” Nieman Reports 57, no. 2 (2003), pp. 87, 89.23 For a U.K. perspective, see Roy Greenslade, “Media:Fighting talk,” Guardian, June 30, 2003, p. 6.

deputy managing editor of Time, dismissedthe photograph as a candidate for the issue tobe published today. ‘‘You want a little picturewith your blood,’’ Mr. Koepp said. The photoand editorial staff assembled in the half-lightmurmured in agreement.

Large numbers of Iraqi soldiers have beenkilled, according to the Pentagon, and morethan 2,000 Iraqi civilians, the government ofSaddam Hussein said, many of them in the lastweek. But when James Kelly, the managingeditor of Time, lays out the 20 pages of photosintended to anchor the magazine’s coverage ofthe war, there were pictures of soldiers, battlesand rubble, but no corpses.24

The relatively bloodless coverage of conflict(and not just that in Iraq) derives from themedia outlet’s invocation of the criteria of“taste” and “decency.” This is most oftenexpressed as a concern for the anticipatedreaction of readers and viewers, now readilyavailable to newspapers through the officesof ombudsmen and readers’ editors. Oftenthis concern is so strong that some U.S.newspapers have the presumptive principlethat “intrusive” images containing bodies orblood will not be run, or, at the very least,only after extensive editorial discussion.25

Their British counterparts demonstratedsimilar self-imposed restraints.26 Televisionbroadcasters are even more bound becauseof regulations, so that while their camera-men record the complete picture of deathand destruction in war, and their reporterslament their inability to convey the fulltruth, the vast majority of that footage issimply deemed too gory to be shown.27

The media’s concern for taste and decencyhas meshed perfectly with the military’s long-established aversion to images of death. InWorld War I, the British War Office prohibitedthe appearance of bodies (regardless ofwhether they were British or German) in anyofficial photograph or film, an edict that ledalso to the censorship of war paintings that

depicted dead soldiers.28 In the Persian GulfWar, the sensitivity was so great that in oneinstance pool photographers had film rippedfrom their cameras to prevent publication ofimages recording the aftereffects of a Scudmissile attack on U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabiathat left twenty-five soldiers dead.29

The same sensitivities—though nowextended to the captured as well as thedead—were on display in Iraq when al-Jazeera broadcast images of U.S. prisoners ofwar and U.K. casualties. U.S. networks heldback from showing the footage for at least aday before releasing it in very short clips withidentifying features obscured.30 Despite the

106 David Campbell

24 David Carr, Jim Rutenberg, and Jacques Steinberg,“Bringing Combat Home: Telling War’s Deadly Storyat Just Enough Distance,” New York Times, April 7,2003, p. B13.25 Randy L. Rasmussen, “Arriving at Judgments inSelecting Photos,” Nieman Reports 56, no. 3 (2002), pp.67–70; and Michael Larkin, “Deciding on an Emotion-Laden Photography for Page One,” Nieman Reports 55,no. 3 (2002), p. 77.26 Annie Lawson, “Editors show restraint with warimages,” MediaGuardian.co.uk, March 31, 2003; avail-able at media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,924949,00.html.27 Both reporters and cameramen in a series of U.K.documentaries discuss this conundrum openly on themedia and Iraq. See Jon Snow, “The True Face of War,”The War We Never Saw, Channel 4, June 5, 2003; andFergal Keane, “Iraq: The Cameramen’s Story,” BBC4,June 30, 2003. For the view of three U.K. television newseditors that reveal the restraints, see “Media: What canyou show?” Guardian, March 31, 2003, p. 7.28 Michèle Barrett, “Review: Shell-shocked,” Guardian,April 19, 2003, p. 34.29 Patrick J. Sloyan, “What Bodies?” Digital Journalist,November 2002; available at www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0211/sloyan.html.30 Bill Carter and Jane Perlez,“The Networks: ChannelsStruggle on Images of Captured and Slain Soldiers,”New York Times, March 24, 2003, p. B6. Subsequentbroadcast of a seven-second clip of the bodies of twoU.K. soldiers, filmed by al-Jazeera but used in a BBCdocumentary, drew criticism from their relatives, theMinistry of Defence, and the British prime minister,but the BBC was not deterred from its use. Jamie Wil-son, “Blair fails to get BBC to remove Gulf bodiesfootage,” Guardian, May 29, 2003, p. 6.

representing contemporary war 107

Bush administration’s frequent disregardfor international conventions, and notwith-standing the Pentagon’s earlier release ofpictures from Guantánamo Bay of captivesin degrading confinement, Secretary ofDefense Donald Rumsfeld rushed to decrythe broadcasts as a grave breach of theGeneva Conventions. While the Interna-tional Committee of the Red Cross says anyimage “that makes a prisoner of war indi-vidually recognizable” is a violation of Arti-cle 13 of the third Geneva Convention of1949, this issue was complicated by a num-ber of factors.31 First and foremost, al-Jazeera was broadcasting Iraqi TV footagerather than producing the images. More-over, it was doing so at the same time asnumerous U.S. and European networkswere broadcasting images of Iraqi POWs,some of which were provided by Pentagonand Ministry of Defence film crews in Iraq.That made Iraq and the allies (rather thanthe broadcasters) equally culpable, becauseonly states are subject to the convention.

Nonetheless, this issue propelled al-Jazeerainto the limelight. Al-Jazeera took an edito-rial decision during the Iraq war to show allthe shocking images that came its way(whether taken by its eight crews inside Iraqor from tapes supplied by other sources). Thefact that al-Jazeera’s images were, in the wordsof John MacArthur, “too honest,” had theparadoxical effect of making al-Jazeera thestory rather than the images and what theyrepresented.32 Given that its cameras were theonly ones outside both the system of embed-ded journalists and the Western media’sadherence to codes of “taste,” al-Jazeera’simages of the conflict were unrelentinglyhorrific. Yet they were no more than whatappeared, in actuality, before its cameralenses. The footage of civilian casualties anddead soldiers (whether Iraqi, U.S., or British)was unedited and unpackaged. The sense of

immediacy and proximity that these imagesachieved—whether as video or still framesgrabbed from that video—gave them a forceunmatched by the cleaner, more distancedpictures produced by journalists at the CMC,just down the road from al-Jazeera in Qatar.Al-Jazeera’s approach led some televisionexecutives to argue they had a credibilityproblem with worldwide audiences who seethe shocking images on non-Western chan-nels. While refraining from advocating thatthe BBC emulate al-Jazeera, the deputy direc-tor of BBC News, Mark Damazer, deemed hisnetwork’s coverage “too conservative” and inneed of a rethink with respect to the broad-casting of shocking images.33

THE CHALLENGES OFREPRESENTATION

The extensive management of the mediacoverage of war—as a conjunction of officialrestrictions and self-imposed standards—has for the most part diminished theverisimilitude of the resulting images. Con-strained by the confines of the CoalitionMedia Center, reporters seeking an overviewwere (in the words of Michael Wolff) in dan-ger of becoming little more than a series of“Jayson Blairs,” constructing colorfulaccounts of scenes they had never wit-nessed.34 Organized around imagery of the

31 Anthony Dworkin, “The Geneva Conventions andPrisoners of War,” Crimes of War Project 24 (March2003); available at www.crimesofwar.org/special/Iraq/brief-pow.html.32 Quoted in Snow, “The True Face of War.”33 Jason Deans, “BBC’s war coverage was ‘too conserva-tive,’” MediaGuardian.co.uk, June 25, 2003; available atmedia.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,984976,00.html.34 Ciar Byrne, “US TV networks ‘kissed ass’, says Wolff,”MediaGuardian.co.uk, June 25, 2003; available atmedia.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,984899,00.html. Jayson Blair was the New York Times reporterwhose fabrications resulted in upheaval at the newspaper.

armed forces and their personnel, thesereports were more than sympathetic por-trayals of the war—they were themselvespart of the war. The “media was weaponized”and the imagery was “a force-multiplier”exercising pressure on the Iraqi leadership.35

In this context, photography has its workcut out for it. The speed at which (dis)infor-mation circulates in the media-managedbattle space means the time for contempla-tion and critique offered by the still image ismore compressed than ever. Nonetheless,while the images are unlikely to lead tochange, especially in the short time avail-able, they become part of what Sontag callsthe vast repository of pictures that make itdifficult to sustain the “moral defectiveness”of ignorance or innocence in the face of suf-fering. Images may only be an invitation topay attention. But the questions photo-graphs of war and atrocity pose should berequired of our leaders and us: “Who causedwhat the picture shows? Who is responsible?Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is theresome state of affairs which we have acceptedup to now that ought to be challenged?”36

The conclusion of Regarding the Pain ofOthers is itself something of a battle cry:“Letthe atrocious images haunt us. Even if theyare only tokens, and cannot possibly encom-pass most of the reality to which they refer,they still perform a vital function. Theimages say: This is what human beings arecapable of doing—may volunteer to do,enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t for-get.”37 The Guardian used this Sontag quotein a short editorial to support its publica-tion, twelve years after the event, of manypreviously unseen photographs from the

Persian Gulf War.38 Under the title “Blood inthe Sand,” and edited by Don McCullin,these unsparing images “reveal[ed] the truehorror of the Gulf war,” and their publica-tion was timed to coincide with the globalantiwar marches on February 15, 2003.39

Photographs such as these do not let usforget. But we will be allowed to forget iftimely outlets for images of war are notfound. That on the brink of another war inIraq pictures of the carnage from 1991 couldbe published for the first time is an indict-ment of the amnesia and superficiality Son-tag cites as indices of “moral defectiveness.”40

With that amnesia, Sontag argues, comesheartlessness. But it is not the photographsthat are the problem. It is passivity—not pic-tures—that dull feeling. How, then, can weuse the pellets of information that photo-graphs bear to dissipate the clouds of fantasyin the official coverage of war and overcomethe passivity it enables?

108 David Campbell

35 Lucian K. Truscott IV, “In This War, News Is AWeapon,” New York Times, March 25, 2003, p. A17. Theweaponization of the media also preceded the conflict,especially when it came to the issue of weapons of massdestruction. One of the underreported elements of theBlair crisis at the New York Times was that “the paper’sbioterrorism expert, Judith Miller, admitted her mainsource on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pro-gramme had been the Pentagon’s favoured Iraqi,Ahmad Chalabi. That in turn suggested that the Penta-gon and Mr Chalabi had used the paper to help createjustification for war.” Suzanne Goldenberg, “US papergripped by new crisis of ethics,”Guardian, May 30, 2003,p. 19.36 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 117.37 Ibid., p. 115.38 “The Pity of War: It is right to confront images ofdeath,” Guardian, February 14, 2003, p. 23.39 Guardian (G2), February 14, 2003, pp. 1–17.40 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 114.