The video of Saddam's execution shows how useless old-fashioned propaganda is against the anarchic, hit-and-run nature of the new media, writes Fintan O'Toole
In the beginning we see a strange, dimly lit room, with stairs leading up to a steel cage in which we can discern a shadowy, humanoid shape, barely illuminated by a naked bulb. The lens through which we are viewing this ghostly scene twists onto the iron stairs and we hear the distinct metallic sound of rapidly ascending footsteps. Now the human figure at the top comes into focus, directly under the bulb, so we can see quite clearly the bearded face of Saddam Hussein. The camera shifts jerkily, as if recoiling in horror, so that just as the long looped noose is being lifted in position, the angle of the lens drops and we can see only the bars of the cage and a section of dangling rope. The camera then rises again to reveal the noose being dropped carefully over Saddam's head, as a fussy mother would tuck her child's scarf around its neck.
Suddenly, the camera weaves drunkenly around as if its bearer is being jostled and we hear the rising chorus of shouts and taunts. For a few seconds, it points only at the patterned steel floor. Saddam's voice can be heard intoning a prayer. The cries for vengeance on behalf of the Shia Sadr family (some of whom were tortured to death by Saddam) have a visceral, atavistic power that cuts through the plea for order and dignity uttered by one of the presiding officials. Saddam begins to pray aloud again, acquiring amid the tumult the aura of a persecuted saint.
The camera weaves back upwards from the floor, and gets Saddam in its view again, just in time for him to drop suddenly out of the frame. For a moment, you think the camera has jerked away, but then you realise that it is steady and that it is Saddam who has moved, falling gently through the trapdoor. There is an eerie creaking noise and then an even louder crescendo of shouts and roars above a black screen, broken by fuzzy, wraithlike shapes. From the darkness, a discernible image emerges momentarily: the head of Saddam Hussein, skewed sideways now, a thick strand of rope jutting upwards, as though emerging from his mouth. The head begins to swing back and forth nauseously, as if someone is pulling the rope. Weird flashes of ethereal light spin across the screen and the video ends.
BY WEDNESDAY EVENING, a day after it emerged on the internet, five million people had viewed this 156 seconds of anarchic cruelty on Google Video alone and the character of the first great news event of 2007 had changed beyond recognition. A solemn political moment - the bringing to justice of a sadistic dictator - had been transformed into a sectarian lynching. The carefully arranged historical record had turned into a sickening snuff movie. Most stunningly of all, Saddam himself, the Butcher of Baghdad, had changed into a martyr, a brave and devout Muslim, with the presence of mind in the moments before death to upbraid his tormentors for unmanly cowardice. And all of this had been done by nothing more magical than a camera phone.
The history that was made was certainly not that intended by the US, Britain or the Iraqi government. But history was made nonetheless. The unofficial video of Saddam's execution can be seen as the moment when the new media age moved definitively from shaping the reporting of events to shaping the nature of those events themselves. The execution as seen in the camera-phone footage is not the same as the execution pictured in the official, relatively dignified images released by the Iraqi government. The latter is the culmination of a successful invasion: Saddam was deposed, tried, sentenced and executed. The former is the culmination of a disastrous, ignorant and incompetent intervention: what should be a moment of liberation instead serves merely to underline the violence, tribalism and anarchy that have been wrought by the invaders.
The video shows us, too, that what has happened to propaganda bears an exact parallel to what has happened to war. The United States perfected conventional warfare, and its easy victory in Iraq demonstrated a kind of invincibility. It also perfected the management of the reporting of warfare. After Vietnam, when a relatively free media sent back the images that made the war unwinnable, the US and Britain learned the lessons. As early as 1970, the senior British commander, Brig FG Caldwell, remarked that, if Britain were ever to go to war again, "we would have to start saying to ourselves, 'are we going to let television cameras loose on the battlefield?'" In the Falklands war in 1982, the British pioneered the new technique of having journalists "embedded" and therefore tightly controlled.
It worked - almost no images of the violence were transmitted back home - and since then western propaganda wars have been run along similar lines.
BUT JUST AS conventional military superiority proved relatively meaningless in Iraq, so victory in the conventional propaganda war is proving to be equally useless. Battleships can be sunk by suicide bombers in rowboats, armoured columns can be halted by improvised explosive devices. The enemy is mobile, elusive, evanescent. Likewise media strategies can all but flatten independent journalism, but they are useless against the anarchic, formless, hit-and-run nature of the new media. The images that have burned holes in US strategy in Iraq have not been created by professional journalists. The photographs of torture in Abu Ghraib were taken as trophies by US soldiers. The horrific videos of hostages being beheaded were made by the murderers deliberately to taunt and disgust western audiences.
The video of Saddam's execution was made and presumably released by an official witness.
The most powerful propaganda now is feral and viral, living on the margins of official consciousness and spreading uncontrollably through digital contact. Flickering on the edges of our rational awareness, it haunts our imaginations with blurry horrors.