Philip Hammond: Iraq, 2003  Framing post-Cold War Conflicts

INTRODUCTION

The 1990s and early 2000s were characterised by a high level of activism on the part of the major Western powers. More than half of peacekeeping operations mounted by the United Nations (UN) since 1948 were set up in the decade after 1989, for example; at its peak in 1994, the number of troops deployed on such missions reached 72,000 (IISS 1999: 291). The Cold War NATO military alliance first saw action only after the fall of communism, bombing the Bosnian Serbs in 1994 and 1995 and again bombing Yugoslavia in 1999. Britain and France undertook unilateral military missions in former African colonies, and for the first time since 1945 Germany and Japan sent troops overseas on active duty.

The rationale and justification for this activism, however, were necessarily different from the past. This book is about how the media have interpreted conflict and international intervention in the years after the Cold War. By comparing press coverage of a number of different wars and crises, it seeks to establish which have been the dominant themes in explaining the post-Cold War international order and to discover how far the patterns established prior to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks have subsequently changed. Throughout, the key concern is with the legitimacy of Western intervention: the aim is to investigate the extent to which Western military action is represented in news reporting as justifiable and necessary. For journalists, charged with writing the first draft of history without benefit of hindsight, the work of interpretation and analysis must be direct and instantaneous. Yet reporters do not work in a vacuum: their writing will be influenced by the stock of ideas circulating in the culture in which they are working, particularly those which are taken up and promulgated by powerful sources. Below we first outline a number of key debates which have been influential in shaping how the post-Cold War world has been understood, before going on to examine the role played by the news media.

Explaining post-Cold War conflicts and interventions

Although the threat of nuclear war has receded, the post-Cold War world hasnot been peaceful. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), there were 57 different major armed conflicts in 45 different locations around the globe between 1990 and 2001. In any one year, there were on average around 27 ongoing major armed conflicts (SIPRI 2000: 17; SIPRI2001: 66). Both the dynamics of these conflicts and the Western response to them seemed to call for new explanations, but such explanations have been controversial, not least because how conflicts are understood would seem to have a bearing on how governments might react to them. As we shall see, much discussion of media coverage of recent crises has centred on whether the `wrong' interpretation has sometimes inhibited an effective response

Culture and anarchy

One of the most common ideas about post-Cold War conflicts is that the collapse of communism unleashed pent-up tensions. As the 1992 SIPRI Yearbook put it:

The end of the Cold War ... removed various restraints exercised over parties to ethnic conflicts during the Cold War....The conflict in Yugoslavia followed the end of the Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. It brought to light old and unresolved animosities between, in particular, Serbs and Croats. The Communist regime had kept these animosities under control through repression.(SIPRI 1992: 420)

In this scenario, `old animosities' based on ethnic or national identity had been simmering away under the surface only to burst forth once the restraint of communist repression was removed.

Phil Hammond, Emeritus Professor of Media & Communications at London South Bank University

'Sapere aude'