Scripting the News

BBC celebrates the fall of Saddam by trying to pretend he didn’t even exist.

In a series of short (10-minute) films, dramatic haikus to mark the five-year anniversary of the preparations for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq (BBC2, Monday-Friday), the BBC has again shown the narcissism of small imaginations. Narcissism, because like so much of what passes for debate on Iraq, the programmes stare obsessively at the images the media themselves create of the conflict and its causes; small imaginations, because these images are tightly bounded by a tacit but iron will to confine all debate within variations on the theme of Americo-British responsibility for a disaster.

The films were shot in grainy sepia with a things-are-getting-worse musical score, and actors of the quality of Juliet Stephenson, Patrick Malahide, Stephen Rea and (next week) Kenneth Branagh playing such roles as Elizabeth Wilmshurst (Stephenson), the Foreign Office legal adviser who resigned because she judged the war illegal before it began; Sir Jeremy Greenstock (Malahide), the UK's ambassador at the UN charged with the impossible task of building a majority for war on the UN Security Council; General Tim Cross (Rea), the British Army's most experienced rebuilder, who struggled in vain to persuade Donald Rumsfeld to plan for the postwar Iraq; and Colonel Tim Collins (Branagh), who will - to shift from review to preview - next week re-enact the speech Collins made to men about to do or die - "We go to liberate not to conquer".

Biased-BBC also note the deep seeded one-sidedness of the tone of the reportage, complete with bringing on Richard Perle to play the goat. Why he keeps getting on the various BBC “newsy” opinion products, I’ll never know.

In all of this, there was not one hint of more than a sentence that the war was fought against one of the 20th century's greatest monsters. It was as if we were to dissect the crassness of Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War, with no reference to slavery; the tactical blunders of Winston Churchill without the Holocaust; or - let us be up to date - the ramshackle nature of the US-British-French coalition, with Milosevic's ethnic cleansing brushed out. This, for the defining conflict of the early 21st century, is what our media do: that is, they render it unintelligible.

Which is no exaggeration. It’s exactly the impression I got, which was to crane their necks to NOT mention key facts and events to prop up the angle of their coverage, more than the coverage itself.