Just as we don’t need scientists (mouse-haired the lot of them, I guess) to tell us redheads are powerful. With a golden halo to distract you, who’d feel pain? Pass the L’Or?, I feel a headache coming on.. Propaganda is a vital ingredient of military strategy during the conflict with Iraq. The enemy is manufactured, its leaders demonised, and its strength grossly exaggerated Yet the media are not part of a massive conspiracy. Rather, the war myth is the result of profound geostrategic, ideological, social, political and economic factors.

Constantly repeated – and tightly controlled – battlefield images of coalition forces in action feature as never before on TV, while seemingly endless speculation by military commentators only serve to crowd out the views of oppoenents to the aggression by the US and the UK. The US desperately needed to fight a “big” war to help “kick the Vietnam syndrome”, to legitimise its enormous military budget and to reinforce the power of the military/industrial/intelligence elite.In the end there was nothing more than a series of massacres bureid beneath the myth of heroic warfare. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported in his autobiography that 250,000Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict – compared to just 150 in the US-led forces (most of them through “friendly fire”).Reporters such as Robert Fisk of the Independent and Peter Sharp of ITN, who dared to operate away from the pools, were intimidated by the military and some of their journalist colleagues. Most of the crucial military action in 1991 came from the air, and since journalists had no access to fighter jets, the conflict was kept largely secret.This time a repeat of the same kind of media controls was never feasible since the Middle East has been swarming with thousands of journalists for months. In any case, military censorship regimes always serve essentially symbolic purposes – expressing the arbitrary power of the army over the conduct and representation of war.For their part, mainstream journalists, influenced by professional norms and conventional news values, can usually be relied upon to apply self-censorship. All the mainstream print and broadcast media, just before the bombing of Baghdad on 20 March, were happy to highlight Pentagon leaks that suggested 3,000 missiles and precision-guided bombs would be dropped on Iraq in an early “shock and awe” campaign.Now, as the UK/US tanks build up outside Baghdad, countless unnamed Iraqi troops and conscripts are being killed away from the TV cameras.

When civilian homes are destroyed, such tragedies are “inevitable”, the fault of “Saddam” or simply “mistakes” – blips in an otherwise smoothmilitary operation rather than moral outrages.Take, for instance, the coverage of the bombing of the Baghdad market on 26 March How many were killed? “At least 14,” say the media But they remain anonymous – dehumanised “targets”. We can expect no profiles of the Iraqi dead or their grieving families.Richard Keeble is professor of journalism at Lincoln University, and the author of ‘Secret State, Silent Press’ (John Libbey), a study of press coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Coverage of the looming humanitarian crisis in Iraq has been dominated over the past few days by two images. The first is of battle-trained British troops struggling, almost panicking, over the task of distributing food and water to populations that are unwilling to form an orderly queue. The second is of the supply ship Sir Galahad, after many delays, finally docking at the port Umm Qasr with its eagerly awaited aid cargo. Both give an equally distorted picture of what is needed now by the people of Iraq.