Images of Death Give Iraq a Boost in Propaganda War

In the shadow war of the Persian Gulf--the battle for public sentiment--Iraq on Wednesday delivered the equivalent of a fuel-air explosive through the images of charred Iraqi women and children.

The pictures--men weeping, women stricken with grief, bodies mangled after an American bombing attack--led news broadcasts from Moscow to Tel Aviv to Paris to Amman, Jordan.

American officials could counter with only explanations in English, and some diagrams of the facility they said was really a military command center. In propaganda terms, such a response pales before the vivid telecasts from Baghdad.

The video images also landed in a context of believability, propaganda experts said, coming at a time when several world leaders already were expressing worries about Iraqi civilian casualties. In the Soviet Union, for instance, where President Mikhail S. Gorbachev spoke out earlier this week about civilian casualties, state-run television noted that innocent women and children are increasingly the victims of the American bombs.

“The worst fear of the Gulf War appears to have occurred in Baghdad,” French anchorman Patrick Poivre d’Avor somberly announced to open the evening newscast on the leading French network. German television noted that the bombing had come on the 46th anniversary of the start of the Allied blitz on Dresden.

In the Middle East, it probably does not even matter if the bomb shelter where hundreds may have been killed was also being used as military command and control center, experts said.

“Internationally, this is a disaster for the United States,” said Garth Jowett, a professor at the University of Houston specializing in propaganda. “It confirms what has come out of Baghdad for the last 10 days--that this is a war against Arabs, against civilians, and not a war to free Kuwait.”

The pictures were especially effective compared to previous footage from Iraq, say those reviewing Iraqi propaganda. Earlier images of bomb damage did not actually show civilian bodies being removed from the carnage, thus leaving some doubt as to whether allied bombing caused the deaths.

The Iraqis appeared to know instantly that they had a powerful propaganda weapon. Ministry of Information officials brought the roughly 20 Western journalists kept in Baghdad to the scene in time for Americans to send their feeds for the morning news programs and the British Broadcasting Corp. for the 1 p.m. broadcast.

Perhaps more significantly, the Iraqis for the first time allowed Western journalists to send their reports without Iraqi censors demanding to review the copy or video in advance. This in turn allowed some reporters to remark on air that their stories had not undergone the usual explicit censorship. “There were no restrictions on journalists as we covered this story today,” ABC’s Bill Blakemore said in his report.

Allied military and political officials were put clearly on the defensive. At first, American authorities said they had no information about the bombing.

Three hours later, U.S. military briefers in Saudi Arabia had put together a detailed explanation that this was a military command and control center. An hour later, the White House issued another defensive statement. Still later, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney defended the bombing, and finally more context was added in the Pentagon afternoon briefing.

But U.S. officials’ contentions that they did not know civilians were located in the building led Western reporters to ask whether the Pentagon had failed to try in advance to find out.

And the story dominated the press worldwide.

All American networks gave large portions of their newscasts to the story, with much of the secondary discussion focusing on the attack as a political disaster for the allies. Ed Turner, executive vice president of Cable News Network, said his network restricted showing footage of the attack to twice an hour because it was so powerful it could become “an emotional distortion of what you are trying to say as journalists.”

In France, all four of the main news shows, including the two state-owned channels, devoted about 15 minutes of their half-hour newscasts to the bombing.

Israeli television, which is controlled by the government, showed much of the edited CNN footage reported by Baghdad correspondent Peter Arnett, and a full American explanation for the bombing.

“Damn you, Bush. Why women and children?” a middle-aged Iraqi man who reportedly had lost his entire family was quoted saying on Jordanian television. “Our families are lost.”

In Mexico City, an anchorman for Televisa’s Channel 2 news program was dismissive of U.S. claims that the shelter was a military control center. “Be that as it may, the concrete fact is that more than 700 women and children are dead, among them babies, practically newborn, who have been incinerated, suffocated and crushed,” Abraham Zabludovski said.

Few broadcasters worldwide showed the most graphic footage they had. The exception was German television, which said there were “at least 1,000 casualties,” and Jordanian TV.

Notably, Egypt’s state-run television made no mention of hundreds of civilians reportedly killed and showed no video, reporting only that U.S. officials were denying Iraqi claims that the target was a civilian bomb shelter.

Taken together, analysts said, the bombing amounted to the most powerful signal yet of how effectively Saddam Hussein is starting to wage the battle for the mind.

Most analysts said it was significant that the attack came the same week that U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, Jordan’s King Hussein and Gorbachev all have given credibility to Iraqi charges by deploring civilian casualties.

In the Middle East, this has even given rise to theories of an American conspiracy.

“There is a growing suspicion in the Arab world that because the United States is delaying in the ground war that it secretly has decided to pursue a terror tactic against Iraqi civilians in order to persuade Saddam to come to the peace table,” said Col. Ralph Cossa, senior fellow at the National Defense University.

Logically, such a theory makes no sense, Cossa said, because it is Hussein who scores the most propaganda points if Iraq suffers civilian casualties, but the idea persists nonetheless.

“Saddam has opened the canvas up to a much broader range of issues besides the invasion of Kuwait” by talking about destroying Islamic culture, mosques and schools, said propaganda expert Jowett.

Such a strategy is a classic method of undermining an opponent’s public relations position, Jowett said, since controlling information and keeping the focus tight is the key to controlling a public agenda.

“We either lack the sensitivity to understand what plays in the Middle East or we haven’t cared,” Jowett said. And despite some mistakes, “Saddam is mastering on the job how effective these messages can be. Our government is playing catch up.”

The audience in the United States is also a target of the propaganda war. University of Virginia Commonwealth Prof. Ted J. Smith III, author of two books on international propaganda, argued that Iraq need not persuade Americans that Iraq is the victim in this war to be a winner in the battle for the public mind.

“The goal of a propagandist is seldom to convert people from one viewpoint to the opposite. It is to make us uncertain which viewpoint is true,” Smith said.

Iraq’s swift response to the bombing could also perhaps inhibit American bombing in Iraq, some suggested. “Any reasonable military planner is going to weigh the pluses and minuses of any (bombing) target,” said Col. Cossa. “As the propaganda campaign comes more to the fore, that will have to become a bigger part of the equation. But what decides it depends on the target.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City, Michael Ross in Cairo, Mark Fineman in Amman, Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow, Rone Tempest in Paris, Dan Williams in Israel, Tamara Jones in Bonn and William Tuohy in London.