‘Them and us’ – a fine line is being drawn in the desert right now

IS it naïve to believe that there is a ‘them and us’ in this war, a ‘them’ of barbarous Iraqi leaders and an ‘us’ of liberal democratic society?

No doubt some people regard such distinctions with deep scepticism. But most of us draw a line between the cruelties of the Iraqi regime, which is guilty of conduct unimaginable in civilised countries, and the imperfect democracies trying to bring Saddam down.

Sometimes you wonder, though, if the ‘them-us’ distinction is real or imaginary. On Sunday night one of those televised reports from ‘embedded’ journalists came in from the battleground in Iraq. To a background score of gunfire and explosions, a bomb was launched into a building containing Iraqi combatants. When the building burst into flames, the American soldiers could be heard cheering.

Such footage can hardly be helpful to the Allied cause, since it must galvanise opposition to the war throughout the Muslim world, where millions of people are already susceptible to an anti-Western strain of Islam. But it doesn’t play well at home either, because it reminds us that some of the things done in the name of Western democracy are far from pretty, and anything but humane. It becomes harder to see the distinction between them and us.

The other danger, of course, is that it plays too well to the folks at home.

While the footage didn’t show pictures of dead Iraqis (unlike Iraqi television and Al-Jazeera which paraded images of dead and captive American soldiers), it was no less dehumanising of the people killed.

You could easily forget who was inside that building: injured soldiers like in any other war zone, scared young men crying for their mothers as they bled to death.

I know we can’t switch on the horror every time we see an image like that on TV during these weeks. And I know that the US soldiers, if they are to be able to fight at all, must be keyed up and hyped up to a point where cheering becomes a very necessary release. But if we can watch those images and still sleep soundly, we ought to be worried.

It’s a point that keeps getting lost in the endless debate about the role of journalists in the war. All the talk is about the manipulation of the media by the military and the shackling of the press by the use of ‘embedded’ journalists. That is a bit of a sideshow.

It is true that there are many things journalists will not be told. It is true that there will be some short-term spinning by Donald Rumsfeld and Gen Tommy Franks in order to wrong-foot the Iraqis and boost support for the war. And there is no doubt that, for different reasons, the US and Britain will underestimate the death toll on both sides.

But sometimes all the press can think of is freedom of the press. The fact is, free expression is in a fairly healthy state. Even the strategy of ‘embedding’ journalists, intended by the military to co-opt journalists to the Allied cause and prevent any reports that are unhelpful to the cause, places the media in the role of moral watchdog over the actions of the armed forces.

Free expression was also alive and well at last Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles, when award-winner Michael Moore lambasted George W Bush (to a mixed reaction of cheers and boos) and got widespread and benign coverage for his outburst throughout the western world. For all the jingoism and superficiality of American war coverage, for all the manipulation by ratings-driven television, and for all the war propaganda supposedly purveyed by the US administration, the writ of free speech still runs in the western world. It’s one of the differences between us and them.

But the flip-side of free speech is that our insatiable desire for information may end up undermining that difference. Our temptation is to focus on the role of reporters like Terry Lloyd who was killed in Iraq over the weekend after coming under fire, possibly from British forces, near Basra. Lloyd was a brave journalist who was the first to report from Halabja in 1988 when Saddam Hussein’s forces killed thousands of people in a chemical weapons attack.

There are many like him. But other journalists covering this conflict are the pimps for our obsession with war as a form of entertainment. They feed us a diverting diet of maps, battle plans, diagrams and graphics and their war seems more like a computer game than the dirty real-life story that it is.

We don’t like to think about all this because it leaves us with a moral conundrum. We know that war can never be fully dispensed with, such are the imperfections of the human condition, but we need to know its harsh realities if we are to avoid its horrors in the future. We also live in a culture where the free transfer of information is considered a good thing.

And since these acts of war have been authorised by legitimate governments, it follows that we should be allowed to see them. But gazing too long into humanity’s sewer may cause us to be poisoned by the noxious gases which emerge. There is a lot to be said for averting our eyes.

It is bad enough that Western soldiers cheer when they incinerate their enemies, because the moral difference between us and them suddenly becomes dangerously thin. But if we at home forget that it is a human being in that building, crying for his mother in the darkness, hasn’t the line vanished altogether? Fear brings out people’s worst traits.

Ever since 9/11, the Americans have been sorely tempted to tear up the rule book on humane conduct in their efforts to stamp out terrorism, and they may even have done so in Guantanamo Bay where mystery shrouds the treatment of al-Qaida suspects.

It does not augur well that supposed deep thinkers from the left and right in American politics advocate the use of torture to get information out of terrorists. Their logic is simple. Captured al-Qaida suspects like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Yasir al-Jazeeri might have specific operational information about likely terrorist attacks, and if thousands of lives could be saved by torturing the truth out of them, then the thumbscrews are justified.

Others disagree. “We cannot abandon our morality in pursuit of that information,” says Jed Babbin, formerly Deputy Undersecretary of Defence in George Bush Senior’s administration.

“At the foundation of the natural law is one of the distinctions between us and them: we will fight and kill to defend our way of life. But in doing so we will not cross the line that separates us from them. We are Americans, the good guys. We don’t need to become something else to win this war.”

So far that is true. But what happens if the Americans are drawn into a guerrilla war in the streets of Baghdad?

What happens if the regime can’t be overthrown easily under the Marquis of Queensbury rules?

We can only hope that the respect for civilians which has characterised the Allies’ conduct so far will continue if this war gets dirty. For the moment, the line between us and them just about stands.