RADIO REVIEW: 'With this technology, the US will know the exact location of any legitimate leader of any foreign country and be able to destroy him . . . and that's terrific." Retired US admiral Gene LaRocque was almost certainly being intentionally provocative when he spoke in the wee hours of Thursday morning on the BBC World Service.
(RTÉ Radio 1 relayed the World Service broadcast overnight as the assault on Iraq began - definitely a better call than RTÉ TV's CNN.) LaRocque wasn't confessing to any provocative intent, however, and he carried on boasting after the presenter suggested the remarks were "somewhat disturbing". According to LaRocque, "We're in a position to spread terror throughout the world . . . there's no defence." The fellas in the World Service studio reckoned the old admiral was merely saying in public what many in Washington think in private.
That station's presenter was, thankfully, prepared to question LaRocque's apparent faith in technology. "Your statement is predicated on the assumption that something has been hit - that you haven't destroyed a school or a hospital." It was a rare moment of clarity in the course of a morning otherwise devoted, across the dial, to admiring punditry about "tactical surprise" and "surgical strikes".
The hours of airtime given over to such talk was not merely naïve, it was dishonest. On Up All Night (BBC Radio 5 Live), the globally-scattered BBC panellists gave a consistent impression that they knew what was happening as a result of the "highly-targeted" Baghdad bombing. In fact, all they knew was that there had been explosions, and with no one on the scene to observe the effects, they seemed happy to spin spurious military propaganda. They were entirely lost in admiration, for example, at America's cleverness in taking over the frequency of Iraqi state radio - until the BBC's own Rageh Omar in Baghdad explained that he had just tuned in to its usual diet of patriotic exhortations and pro-Saddam songs.
The BBC coverage of the war in its early phase hasn't been the worst, e.g. on Thursday's Today (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday) the news headlines, unlike those on Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), explicitly admitted to ignorance about the extent of casualties. However, and perhaps unsurprisingly, BBC Radio 5 Live is a different story. Evidently suffering from Sky News-envy, the all-news station has been gigglingly gung-ho, inviting listeners, for example, to name the invasion project "Operation Slam Saddam" and whatnot.
The 5 Live line of "national unity" (something it pretended to debate but actually promoted) was evident from early in the week, even before the station went orgasmic, during the Commons debate, about the wonders of British democracy and of Tony Blair's passion and sincerity. (It took the Irish Independent's Bernard Purcell on Morning Ireland to suggest what a pointlessly foregone conclusion the Commons exercise in democracy constituted.) Back on Sunday evening, the station's Matthew Bannister presented a story-so-far compilation, On the Brink of War, with Sky-worthy efforts like: "Then Saddam issued a direct threat to the West: he said the Iraqi people would rise up against the invaders . . ." That Saddam, threatening us like that, such an evil bastard.
Actually, he is. (Or perhaps, by the time you read this, was.) But at times the efforts to prove this self-evident fact sounded like special pleading. On Liveline (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) we heard about Saddam's son Uday, and his predilection for spotting a girl across a nightclub and eventually, if other advances failed, raping her. (Who does he think he is, a Kennedy?) Horrific behaviour, no doubt, but when Rattlebag (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) followed with an account of how Clark Gable got away with killing a woman through drunk-driving because the studio organised a patsy, listeners recognised the narrative pattern: irresponsible elites do awful things. (The Gable story, though, is quite possibly an urban myth.)
Much journalism during wartime is miserably dehumanising. Are we, for instance, so far from the race-memory of Gettysburg and Gallipoli that we must regard Iraqi soldiers (as opposed to civilians) as so much expendable desert dust? Double standards? Try the sniggering "expert" description of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb on Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) as a "weapon of mass disruption" (sic). Jargon? Listen to Áine Lawlor refer, without explanation, to "psy-ops". Credulity? How about the BBC reporter who said the US will hit "as many targets as they can without civilians nearby". Stupidity? A British hack assured us, speaking of the US press centre in Qatar: "If we're going to get any clarity it'll be there."