Examination Witnesses (Questions 200-216)
DR BARRY
POSEN, PROFESSOR
CHRIS BELLAMY
AND MR
PAUL BEAVER
4 JUNE 2003
Q200 Rachel Squire: The other part
of the question you have really touched on and I do not know whether
you want to add any more to it. One was the contrast between British
and American approaches to capturing and later stabilising Basra
and Baghdad. You seem to agree that there were differing approaches
and that reflects a different general approach, experience and
background. The other part of the question was talking about post-conflict
reconstruction playing an appropriate part in the military planning.
Basically you have said, no, it did not, that they should have
had security forces lined up to come and help establish some degree
of law and order and not expect the troops to do it. Was there
anything else you wanted to add to those issues of differing perspectives
and ways of dealing with Basra and Baghdad and the lesson of learning
you have to plan ahead for who comes in after the war has finished?
Dr Posen: There is one thing which
is different about Baghdad and Basra, which is that nobody believed
you could end the war in Basra and everybody believed you could
only end the war in Baghdad. That strategic difference is going
to affect everything you do with military operations. So when
the Americans saw their opportunity, knocked on the door of Baghdad
and saw that the door was not locked, they were not going to stop
and say, "Maybe we should be more cautious, maybe we should
surround the place", whatever. They were going to try and
kick the door in. We do not know much about the fighting which
did happen in Baghdad and the effects on local people, we do know
that those units which tried to stand against the Americans were
essentially shot to pieces, which is only to be expected. I think
that makes a difference and the Americans were certainly fixated
on the idea that victory was to be found in Baghdad. It may be
that the quite understandable focus on victory might cause you
to under-plan for, in the first case of our discussion, the WMD
policing, and in the second case the transition from regime collapse
to what happens next.
Chairman: Two more questions which
are rather contentious. First, Special Forces.
Q201 Patrick Mercer: A huge question
on Special Forces but if you can be as brief as possible please.
What lessons do you think have come out of the role and the way
in which Special Forces were used in the Iraq conflict?
Dr Posen: Special Forces do not
want me to know about them and I do not really feel that I yet
know much. I really do not. I think we have a much better sense
from the Afghan war about some Special Forces issues than we do
from this war.
Professor Bellamy: I think this
war falls into two bits. Because the Turkish option was foreclosed,
it was inevitable that the northern part of the country would
be dealt with using an Afghan-type war, that is to say with Special
Forces acting as liaison with local groups. The way American Special
Forces—and one brigade of American Paratroops, 173 Brigade—operated
with the Kurdish factions was I think quite similar to Afghanistan.
In the south of the country we had something much closer to a
classic pig iron first division war, although one side decided
not to put up much of a fight, although there was a bit of an
attempt at an asymmetric approach by popping up behind the advancing
American troops. One of the key roles of Special Forces is liaison
with local factions and local leaders, local people, and this
war has certainly borne out that as one of the Special Forces'
most important roles.
Mr Beaver: We know very little
in the public domain about Special Forces operations. We know
that there were large numbers of British Special Air Service and
Special Boat Service deployed but, quite frankly, they had their
own air assets, their own aviation support, their own communications
nets, they did not report to the contingent commander, they were
under the command of the US. That is probably about the sum total
of what we are going to learn until the first—
Q202 Chairman: Until the first novel
appears! There must be dozens of Andy McNabs waiting to put pen
to paper.
Mr Beaver: Bravo Three Zero.
Q203 Patrick Mercer: The logical
question then relating purely and simply to British Special Forces:
we have now seen operations across the Balkans, operations in
Afghanistan, operations in Iraq, all depending hugely on Special
Forces. Can we afford to retain Special Forces at the tiny size
they are at the moment, or should we try to expand them?
Mr Beaver: It is my personal opinion
we should be very careful about expanding them. The United States
has 46,000 people in Special Forces Command and I would ask the
question, "Just how special is that?" There are people
in Special Forces Command in the United States who get a patch
and they become Special Forces. That would be, to people in Hereford,
an anathema. I would think that we should be very careful about
expanding the size of Special Forces. We have elite forces—the
Parachute Regiment, the Royal Marines, some elements of the infantry—but
then again we have to be very careful we do not create a two-tier
Army. That I think is equally as dangerous.
Q204 Syd Rapson: The Americans used
a method of precision strike which was an assassination strike
right at the start of the war. The exact location of these targets
for GPS control must be targeted by Special Forces, so I would
imagine in this conflict because of the surgical strike capability
the targeting is much more important, so therefore we need more
Special Forces to pick out the specific small groups to hit than
we had before.
Mr Beaver: We do not need Special
Forces though. You can use elite forces for that, you can use
artillery spotters, forward observation officers, people who are
Special Forces trained but do not do the full gamut of SAS missions
for example. The other thing you do of course is use civilians.
In Afghanistan a large number of CIA operatives were being used
to do this. It is not a difficult task, even the CIA could accomplish
it.
Chairman: One last small block
of questions, again highly contentious.
Q205 Mr Howarth: I do not know about
contentious, but certainly two of you gentlemen are well placed
to answer them because it is about the role of the media. Obviously
one of the novelties here was the embedding of journalists with
individual units and the effect that had on the perception that
sometimes minor incidents were seen as major military set-backs
when viewed on television here at home. How far did an accurate
picture of the conflict emerge during the major combat phase of
operations?
Mr Beaver: I can speak from what
I saw where I was, in the BBC. There was an overriding feeling
of need amongst the editors to use the embeddeds whenever they
possibly could, whenever they had a line, to get a snapshot. They
did not know they were getting a snapshot and the problem was
you had people with formations who were near Baghdad who were
asked about Basra because they had them there and they wanted
to ask questions. The downside of embeddeds is that you have a
snapshot in time and space which is about as far as they can see,
which in a sandstorm is about 20 metres. There has to be analysis
to go with that. You might say, "He would say that, wouldn't
he", but there does have to be the big picture.
Q206 Mr Howarth: You were very good,
Paul.
Mr Beaver: Thank you very much.
I think it is absolutely vital that if you are going to have embedded
journalists then they have to be properly equipped, properly trained
and properly monitored. You might ask to whose benefit is an embedded
journalist. Is it to the public's benefit, is it to the Army's
benefit or to the government's benefit or whatever. I think it
is probably all. You do get a good and accurate picture of what
is happening there just in that time and space. What you do not
get is the worry that the Armed Forces have of having too many
unilaterals going around, people who are not embedded. Twenty
seven journalists were killed in this operation in 28 days and
that is a large number of people to be killed. Almost all of those
were freelance in the wider sense of the word, and were going
around doing their own thing. That is a very dangerous thing to
do in a war. The problem is from a reporting point of view everyone
thought this was Kosovo all over again, which was a relatively
benign environment.
Q207 Mr Jones: I think you have put
it correctly, you need embedded journalists and analysts. There
was a journalist near Nasiriyah where there was a fierce fight
going on where they got some nice pictures, and obviously the
journalist on the ground was describing what was happening and
it looked very spectacular. I think if I remember correctly that
you were looking at the pictures as well and were saying, "Quite
frankly, this is not really an intense battle..."—
Mr Beaver: This was the Umm Qasr
battle where the television cameras rolled for five hours and
there was one building and eventually it was bombed, which was
the highlight of the whole afternoon.
Q208 Mr Jones: That is right.
Mr Beaver: That, I am afraid,
is not so much a function of the journalists but a function of
the TV coverage. 24-hour news requires pictures and it was a Saturday
afternoon and that was the entertainment value of it. If you compare
some of the stations—for example the American television
network, Fox—they were very courageous (and I use that not
in the Civil Service way) in the way in which they put their camera
crews right in the frontline, and it was almost like having someone
saying, "Wow, gee, look at this happening, this is just amazing",
it was somebody reporting really from the heart as opposed to
the measured tones of, say, John Simpson in the north of Iraq.
You had the full spectrum of entertainment and showmanship through
to the very thoughtful and sometimes not positive coverage.
Q209 Mr Jones: The Fox coverage was
quite memorable. In one of the first raids into Baghdad they shot
up a truck, and the journalist was explaining this was a great
thing and it was basically an Army truck they were shooting up
quite badly. How do you get it right in terms of trying to distinguish
between, let's say, the journalists on the ground, who obviously
has the adrenalin going and perhaps has not got the analytical
background which you have got, and the analyst? How do you get
the balance right? It does give an impression to the public, and
then that is picked up by other networks and others, that there
are problems or issues on the ground, whereas really what is actually
happening is what would happen normally in a conflict situation.
Mr Beaver: What I think is important
about the way in which the media comes through is that each war
is different. It is rather like the way you fight a war, the way
you deploy the journalists is different, and for news organisations
it is the same. Short wars are better because you can put more
resources in and therefore they want a fast moving war. In terms
of the lessons learnt, or lessons identified, there are still
reports being written. It does seem to me that there were significant
successes about this from the media perspective. They had people
just about everywhere excepct in the west of Iraq where the Special
Forces were operating. There were some negative sides to it as
well because we did not get a full picture. I would imagine that
the military and Ministry of Defence would look at it exactly
in the same way, they often got their message across but very
often there were people in Baghdad, for example, who were upsetting
the Government here because they were not necessarily following
the Alastair Campbell line.
Professor Bellamy: I think the
key to this is to have a mix of different types of journalists.
There were about 700 embedded journalists in theatre. There is
an impression going around that embedding is something new, well
of course it is not. There were embedded journalists with the
two British brigades and British Divisional Headquarters in the
previous Gulf War; in the Falklands of course all the journalists
there were embedded because there was no other way of getting
there. So it is not new. I think also the procedures in terms
of training them and assigning them to units well before the conflict
started and not allowing them to move from unit to unit—you
were deployed to that battalion and that was your battalion—have
been tightened up a bit. I think the editors were absolutely right
to use material from the embedded journalists in the frontline
wherever possible but you also needed non-embedded journalists
a bit back from the front, in places like Kuwait, and you needed
experienced analysts back in London or wherever who were capable
of giving context and perspective. On the example which Paul has
mentioned of basically a platoon attack on a building, it takes
somebody who knows something about military operations to say,
"Okay, it has gone on for five hours but it is a platoon
attack, this is not the operational future of the war at stake
here." Finally, most importantly, to me, incredibly, we did
have people in Baghdad. I know that they were accused of having
to spin the Iraqi line but all those broadcasts came with health
warnings and everybody knew that, and I think the people in Baghdad
were incredibly brave. The Iraqis could have strung them from
lamp-posts just like that. So you have essentially four classes
of people. I think the media coverage, in my humble opinion, was
very good. Of course the British and US Government line was not
always spun, but that is what journalism is about.
Q210 Mr Howarth: I know you have
to go, Dr Posen, would you like to make a contribution and then
you can stand down and we will hold on to the other two for five
minutes more?
Dr Posen: I wanted to add a point
to this business about having journalists further back in the
theatre. My impression is that the journalists at CentCom were
pretty unhappy people because they got a kind of a thin gruel
every day. Where I think you saw the most powerful coverage, the
most interesting coverage, of the war was when you encountered
this unexpected level of resistance from the Ba'ath Party militia
up and down the Euphrates and this was causing genuine problems,
and they were genuine problems, and the embeds figured out they
were genuine problems, the officers on the scene told the embeds
they were genuine problems. The journalists in CentCom basically
were getting all this information, I think they were actually
talking to each other and their own embeds in the theatre, and
they were doing what the military does, they were collecting field
reports, looking for patterns, seeing patterns and calling it
as they saw it. This caused great discomfort in CentCom. This
was where you began to see the line being advanced, "You
are only looking at this snapshot, you do not know what you are
seeing, so stop saying things", and the journalists after
a while basically dutifully shut up. They had got the story and
had the story drawn away from them, in my opinion. So my own view
is that you have a pretty interesting system here for getting
at the basic pattern of the conflict. It proved uncomfortable
for CentCom and I think they had to bob and weave a little bit
to try and portray their preferred version of the conflict as
it was going on. My impression is that serious people in the American
military know that those middle days were cause for concern, because
those middle days suggested two possible things. One, the Baghdad
fight could turn out to be very nasty. Two, the post-conflict
situation could turn out to be very nasty. These were two things
which the public in Britain and the United States had a right
to know. Even if it was inimical to the public relations part
of the war, the populations had the right to know there might
be tough days coming. I found it striking that in Washington and
in CentCom the interest was not seen this way, the interest was
seen as, "We have to spin the story a different way."
Q211 Mr Howarth: It makes the conduct
of war on the part of the military high command extremely difficult
if you are having to contend with a public which is being taken
through a serious roller-coaster as a result of immediate images
on their television screens.
Dr Posen: I think it is perfectly
true but no one forced the military into this. No one forced them
into getting this close to the journalists, into this high level
of embedding, into developing this kind of relationship. The American
military has been very interested in information management for
10 years. They have been teaching it, they have mock journalists
in their exercises, they have mock studios in their exercises,
they see this as advantageous to them. When it does not go their
way, they try and manoeuvre just like they would on the battle
field. I think they have been pretty successful at it and in a
way I think the military journalist community has now had its—I
won't say "trial by fire", it is too dramatic—combat
experience and the next time around I think they will be pretty
tough customers.
Q212 Mr Howarth: So you think embedding
journalists is here to stay?
Dr Posen: I cannot say that, I
am not a good enough fortune teller. If the military backs away
from it and tries to keep everyone out of the game, in some senses
they are going to lose whatever is the advantage they think is
there. The advantage they think is there is being essentially
able to put their own spin on what happens.
Q213 Mr Howarth: What would have
happened in the United States in week two when there was the pause,
with the possibility of retaliatory action being taken by asymmetric
warfare, if there had been a lot of casualties taken by the United
States? We know the aversion to taking casualties amongst the
United States population, perhaps mitigated in part by 9/11, nevertheless
if there had been a large number of American casualties, had that
been shown on American television, do you not think instantaneously
that would have affected the conduct of the war?
Dr Posen: In this case I think
it would have made it more ferocious.
Q214 Mr Howarth: So it would have
emboldened the American people, you think?
Dr Posen: This business about
the casualty-sensitivity of the American people is a strange and
amorphous issue, not easily settled in one discussion. I think
the American people since 11 September have been more willing
to take casualties than even their leaders think they are. I was
not in the United States during the war, I was living in Brussels,
but I talked to my friends to try and get a sense of how it was
seen, and my impression is that the public was pretty ferocious
and if the American military had taken more casualties, I think
the question would have been, "Who didn't send enough fire
power; how do we get it out to them fast enough; whose head needs
to roll for not sending enough fire power." I think that
is the kind of attitude we would have got, not, "Oh dear,
oh dear, let's get out of this."
Q215 Mr Howarth: Can I take you back
to a point Paul made about entertainment versus information. I
think this is hugely serious. I represent a garrison town and
the wives of my constituents who were out there fell into two
camps. One camp were glued 24 hours a day, who were just looking
for their husbands. The other group would say, "I would switch
on in the morning, switch it off, switch it on at night for the
news before going to bed, then switch it off again, just watch
those two slots." It is very difficult for these people.
The idea that this should be regarded as any form of entertainment
personally I think is an anathema. It is trying to manage that
which I think is going to be a major lesson to be learnt.
Dr Posen: I could not agree with
you more but different journalistic organisations have different
standards. There is this slang in the United States, "infotainment",
and for some that is the standard. It is the whizz, bang war and
our glorious fellows and that is the way it is going to be portrayed
and if there is a hot story you are going to stick a camera in
their faces. That is the same way some of the media will cover
any issue in the United States. I think it is a tragedy when war
is covered this way. I think the only thing we can hope for—maybe
I am being naive here—is peer pressure. This is a profession,
the journalistic profession, and there is some peer pressure,
there is pressure from people like you, to try to raise the standard.
I do not think the right answer for a democracy is to suppress
coverage, the right answer for a democracy is to demand a certain
standard from the professionals who make their living out of it.
Q216 Chairman: I think we will draw
stumps. Thank you very much, gentlemen, that was very interesting.
It is one of the longest sessions we have ever had, a testimony
not just to the interesting subject but the very interesting way
in which you were speaking.
Dr Posen: I want you to know it
was an honour for me to be here.
Chairman: Thank you so much. If you have
written anything—I am sure you have all written quite considerably
on this subject—if you would not mind sending us a copy
as a supplement to what you have said, we would be very grateful.
Thank you very much.
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