When insisting on the unbelievable is not a crime against humanity

By Terry Prone PEOPLE are a bit sheepish about missing the Iraqi Information Officer’s diatribes, but they do miss him.

Even if he represented a despicable despot, an intolerable regime and the losing side, he was hugely popular his TAM ratings went from nothing to the highest virtually overnight.

Muhammed Said al-Sahhaf was a virtual unknown a fortnight back. By the time the Americans entered Baghdad, he was as familiar a face as Brad Pitt and damn nearly as popular as George Clooney.

Not that the Americans ever reached Baghdad, the way he told it.

They walked into a trap cleverly set by the Iraqis, and the Republican Guards now had them surrounded.

Just as, when the Americans claimed (with some truth) to have taken the airport and re-named it, al-Sahhaf

explained that the Iraqis were going to employ a devastating 'unconventional' approach against them that very night now they had them in target position.

The implication was that the Yanks might be under the illusion they'd captured the airport, but they really hadn't, and Saddam's army were going to beam them out, Scotty, in some diabolically clever way.

When the Information Officer disappeared, he did it as suddenly as he had been wont to appear. Out of nowhere, he would pop up in front of the media beret and glasses in place ready with the latest diatribe about the "scoundrels" and "villains" and "criminals" who had invaded Iraq.

Mr Sahhaf, the media star of the war, never let facts get in the way of a good outburst. Any bothersome bit of data he would dismiss as resulting from rumours spread by the allies.

He claimed the rumours were based in the belief they cause confusion, so the Allies were telling "lies, asserting that there is a landing here and there".

His dismissal of fact was matched by a set of terms of abuse which managed to be both vivid and archaic, sending Arabs to their dictionaries to find out the meaning of his latest version of 'infidel'.

International media found him irresistible, not because he was accurate his statements were demonstrably and constantly so far from the truth as to verge on mythical but because he was entertaining.

Fidel Castro wrote to a comrade 50 years ago that: "Propaganda is the very soul of our struggle."

Iraqi's defence minister not only knew that, but appreciated a reality of more recent vintage, which is that mass media, driven by TV, values spokespeople by their entertainment value rather than by their content.

Many of the war correspondents whinged that the American's man in command was dull.

A great strategist he might be, but his entertainment payoff wasn't good, whereas al-Sahhaf might be out of touch with the facts, but he delivered passion, conviction and vulgar abuse right up to the end.

Iraq's Minister for Information was in a great tradition. Lord Haw-haw, the part-Irishman named William Joyce who broadcast propaganda for the Nazis, delivered much the same mix of passion, conviction and vulgar abuse.

Throughout the Second World War, millions of people in Europe, including thousands in Ireland, tuned in nightly to what was then called the wireless, to hear his pretentiously posh accent saying "Germany calling, Germany calling".

In the beginning, Joyce waged a devastating propaganda war, delivering to Britain the news of ship-sinkings and the downing of warplanes before the British Government released it.

His reports subtly enhanced the facts from his masters' point of view and demeaned the allies' efforts.

Like al-Sahhaf, Joyce could have been a potent diluter of allied morale, but never was, serving instead as something between a ritual hate figure and a nightly radio amusement arcade.

Unlike al-Sahhaf, Joyce didn't know when the party was over. Whereas the Iraqi's last appearance was as untruthfully authoritative as ever, followed by immediate and total silence, Lord Haw-Haw went out with a whimper.

On April 30 1945, as Hitler was saying goodbye to his household entourage in Berlin in preparation for his suicide a few hours later, the allies overwhelmed Hamburg just as, last week, the Anglo/American troops overwhelmed Baghdad.

Joyce, who was in the city, didn't abandon his microphone. Instead, one last time, heavily fortified with alcohol, he went on the air to assure the world that Germany still retained "the spirit of unity, the spirit of strength".

Drink slurred his speech and pushed him into the repetitive ("let me tell you") phrases of the drunk, as he alternately blustered and burbled his way through a few minutes of verbal self-deception that beats anything al-Sahhaf later produced.

Germany, he said, had a united people modest in their needs.

"They are not imperial," he went on, in a confiding tone. "They don't want to take what doesn't belong to them. All they want is to live their own simple lives."

After that breathtaking summation, there was just time to reaffirm his faith in the dying third Reich and murmur that his listeners might not hear from him again for a while.

The only unchallenged truth in the entire broadcast and perhaps in all of his propaganda work was that prediction: as soon as the war was over, he was tried by the British as a traitor and hanged.

If today's allies proposed the same fate for the missing Iraqi Minister for Information, there would be an outcry around the world.

Insisting on the unbelievable is not a crime against humanity.