No time for ‘a whoosh of steel’

Russia, where there’s been a disruption of US-Russia strategic arms reduction talks. The unrelenting Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which ‘‘hovers on the brink of a new catastrophe’’.

The effect of Hollywood?

A decade or so after the Vietnam War, in the wake of the many Vietnam movies, some war veterans in the US pasted stickers on their cars that read: ‘‘Vietnam was a war, not a movie’’. But with the new engagement in Iraq, wrote Michiko Kakutani in the NEW YORK TIMES, the Pentagon and television news coverage are blurring the lines between movies and real life in an unprecedented way.

In the opening days of the war, she said, the focus on television was almost entirely on the fireworks spectacle of the American air attack on Baghdad — which looked like a son et lumiere show, not the deadly bombing of a city of 4.5 million people.

And on ‘‘heroic and often unrepresentative’’ images that consciously invoked famous cinematic sequences, like the caravans of troops driving across the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. The war in Iraq, she said, was the apotheosis of every favourite Hollywood genre: ‘‘from the combat thriller to the coming-of-age tale to the blow-’em-up, special effects extravaganza.’’

Different images

WITH at least 500 reporters, American and non-American, ‘‘embedded’’ inside US troop units, eating and sleeping among soldiers, debate rages in the US media over whether embedded media may end up taking root, losing their objectivity.

Two completely different readings have emerged of what has been happening, wrote Hazem Saghiyeh in the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily AL HAYAT.

The first: The Iraqi people have put up a brave resistance, Americans and British have suffered significant setbacks and made major propaganda blunders.

The alternative reading is that too much is being made of America’s setbacks, some resistance was always expected and the Americans have taken losses because they’ve refrained from carpet bombing to avoid civilian casualties.

The Gulf War of 1991 was seen around the world mostly through the lens of US-based CNN. This time, as Rami G. Khouri, executive editor of the DAILY STAR in Beirut, Lebanon pointed out, there are 20 Arab and American television networks in the battlefield, both of whom ‘‘provide a distorted and incomplete picture of events while accurately reflecting emotional and political sentiments on both sides.’’

Khouri wrote of that day this week when Arab television showed pictures of dead and captured American troops, many of which were eventually shown on American TV. But Arab channels the same day also showed a horrifying picture that never made it to American TV: of an Iraqi child who had died during the bombing in Basra, half of her head blown off. ‘‘You had to see both images simultaneously that day to fully grasp the dimensions of this conflict…’’

Is it Eye-rack or Ee-rack?

As the word ‘‘quagmire’’ appears with increasing frequency in the US media, a growing anxiety that things may not be going according to war plan. When what many at the Pentagon had reportedly termed the ‘‘Voila Moment’’ didn’t materialise, at Basra or elsewhere, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof spelt it out in the NYT: ‘‘So far’’ he wrote from Kuwait this week, ‘‘the effusive welcome the White House counted on has been largely absent’’.

War plans, he said, seem to be based ‘‘not just on our first-rate military expertise, but also on hunches by ideologues in Washington who have never set foot in Iraq’’. Someone should at least tell officials at Central Command briefings that ‘‘we are not invading Eye-rack, but Ee-rack’’, urged Kristof. (The GUARDIAN expressed concern that even British troops are adopting the American-style ‘Eye-rack’).

Avoiding the F-word

P.S.: The NEW YORK POST carried a story this week with an ‘expletive’ deleted: ‘‘When President Bush flew to Florida yesterday, Air Force One’s menu featured ‘stuffed freedom toast’ since F….h is now a dirty word, but the broader question is how to fry the F….h for stabbing America in the back on Iraq.’’