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The whole WORLD is watching
By John Yemma
Even though our cameras make war a media event, and satellites have changed the spy game, there is stil a disconnect between what we see and what we understand
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CNN's Christiane Amanpour stands on a balcony, bundled in a leather jacket. Baghdad comes into view through the saturated green of a night-vision lens. It looks like a city holding its breath in a dirty swimming pool.
Fat white tracers shuttle into the dark sky. Sirens whine. Distant concussions sound. Seconds pass. Then minutes. The clock is ticking. Something has to give.
Finally, it does.
Commercials roll.
At the end of the century, most Americans experience war as a media event -- visual, immediate, and as short-lived as a miniseries. We are watchers. The world we watch is one in which war -- that madness that has swept through the 20th century as no other, destroying tens of millions of lives -- seems now to involve only a few brave pilots high in the stratosphere, a brace of unmanned cruise missiles, and a lot of luckless Iraqis out in the darkened city. Real people suffer and die in Iraq, but the war we watch has almost no effect on our lives.
Virtual war is part of the programming package in a virtual world, a world where television, telephone, Internet, and computer create the modern reality, a world where IBM's ''Solutions for a Small Planet'' ad campaign makes it seem as if everybody -- from the casbah in Marrakesh to the wilds of Mongolia -- has a cell phone, a laptop computer, and a 401(k) plan. Where everybody thinks as we think, does as we do.
It is an illusion.
While it is true that a definite late-20th-century global culture is taking shape, so far it is a very thin veneer masking a world that remains strange and varied. Remote corners of the globe still brim with a weirdness that you can't fully comprehend by watching cable TV, surfing the Net, or springing for the six-day/seven-night package tour of the rain forest. Even a destination as easy as Europe is another world from ours.
The delightful coincidences of the emerging global culture, of course, are the stuff of good dinner-party chat -- the Red Sox fan you ran into in Burkina Faso, the excellent fajitas available in Dubai. We all have our favorite small-world stories, none more so than people who have dabbled in the world on business trips, archeology digs, or as foreign correspondents.
Here's mine: During the early 1980s, when the city of Beirut had been chewed apart in an ugly, all-out conflict between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, I made my way through the steaming rubble to the Lebanese foreign ministry. The building was all but abandoned. Finally, in one small office, I came upon a jolly man who gave me a card identifying himself as the minister of protocol for Lebanon. We chatted about the political situation, about how horrible the conditions in Beirut had become, and as we parted he pulled out another business card.
''If you are ever in Charlotte,'' he said, ''come by.''
The minister of protocol also owned a Hickory Farms franchise in a North Carolina shopping mall.
Small world, right?
Yes and no. Our conversation, after all, took place in Beirut, a city where until recently people fished with hand grenades and raised their kids in buildings surmounted by machine-gun nests, where a pleasant evening at a French restaurant could be interrupted by a car bomb. Beirut was not the kind of place that makes you think: small world.
Belfast, Sarajevo, Saigon, Monrovia, Algiers -- at different moments in the last half of this century, each of these cities and many others besides have been like Beirut, places where people tried to carry on with their lives as waves of violence crashed around them. And that was mild compared with what went on earlier in the century -- in London during the blitz, Berlin at the Nazi Gotterdammerung, Hiroshima after the Enola Gay.
Happily, there are no new Hiroshimas and very few Beiruts today. The Lebanese capital is being rebuilt; the streets are once again safe to walk. Sarajevo and Belfast are recovering as well. Saigon is peaceful. Berlin is united and tame. Even Russia, with its mafioso and hookers and general malaise, isn't terribly scary.
But even in the comparatively mild global environment we now enjoy, it is not advisable for a westerner to wander too far off the well-guarded path. Tourists at the pharonic monuments in Egypt know that. So do visitors to the Mayan tombs in Guatemala and the game reserves in Uganda. Just when it seems to be a small world after all, a guerrilla army materializes, a fanatic throws a bomb, a bunch of brigands with AK-47s show up -- and we all realize how little we really understand the political passions that fester far from our comfortable homes and well outside the range of CNN's cameras.
We are ending a century of horrific conflict, including two world wars and a nuclear standoff so dangerous that a false move in Washington or Moscow could have extinguished the human race several times over. So the relegation of war to a minor media event today is, on balance, a good thing. Understand that I am not arguing for a return to the good old days of the Ypres or Guadalcanal. Nor should young men and women have to endure distant conflict as a rite of passage to adulthood. But you must admit that the century is closing in a very different way than it began.
In 1900, there were five big powers vying for territory: Britain (which was working to add South Africa to its realm and encroaching on Turkish areas of the Middle East), France (which wanted Morocco and the Levant), Austro-Hungary (eyeing the Balkans), Germany (coveting Alsace-Lorraine), Japan (wanting Korea and Manchuria). Czarist Russia and the United States both had vast land empires of their own. War was still considered an extension of diplomacy, a normal duty for young men, and Europe of the 19th century was used to fighting wars every 20 years. Such wars were fought on battlefields far from the eyes of civilians. Returning soldiers told their tales and nursed their wounds, but the war itself was largely invisible to the outside world.
The wars that broke out in 1914 and 1939 surprised everyone by their brutality. The reason was technology. Machine guns, poison gas, tanks, airplanes, submarines, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons -- all contributed to the carnage. World War I: 9 million dead. World War II: at least 35 million dead. Had push come to shove during the Cuban missile crisis hundreds of millions would have died.
But if technology has produced ever more cunning ways for us to kill each other during this century, it has also contributed an important tool for peacekeeping: the spy satellite. From the early 1960s onwards, the United States and other nations have maintained fleets of satellites in orbit around the Earth. The best of these can identify objects as small as five inches across. The spy satellite thus has made the surface of the planet fully scannable. This is why Iraq and North Korea have been building their nuclear complexes underground.
It is now extremely difficult for a nation to mass troops without being detected. In fact, satellite imagery, coupled with computers, can also analyze the type of exhaust coming out of factories, indicating whether a country has shifted its industries from civilian to war footing.
The political term for this is ''transparency.'' When one country can see what another is doing, and knows that it in turn is transparent to prying eyes, it is less inclined to toy with the idea of a surprise attack. Of course, intelligence analysts need to know what to look for, and how to distinguish a maneuver from an imminent attack: Iraq surprised the world in 1990 with its invasion of Kuwait precisely because it had feinted toward the border several times before.
Since 1986, with the launching of the French SPOT satellite, civilians have been able to buy spy time. At least three American companies are launching private satellites with cameras that can see objects as small as three feet across. And satellites are not the only means of transparency. Live TV shots from Baghdad or Mogadishu are more than TV infotainment. They have the effect of allowing at least a small part of a battle zone to be visible to the rest of the world, thus showing how destructive a raid is being launched.
This continues a pattern that took hold in World War II and the Korean conflict and grew to maturity in Vietnam. Frank reports from the front lines -- news dispatches, photos, TV footage -- began to give the American public a clearer idea of the pain and waste of war. When Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane telegraphed their stories from the Balkan conflict at the turn of the century, a romantic view of war still sold newspapers. By the time of Vietnam, the romance was dead. By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the widespread presence of TV cameras beaming live images back to the civilian world almost certainly helped to constrain the destruction by making it transparent to the rest of the world.
It was President Bush's fear of what the scenes of destruction of Iraqi troops would do in Arab capitals that caused him to shut down Operation Desert Storm after 100 hours. It was images of Kurds dying in the highlands of northern Iraq that prompted the former British prime minister, John Major, to push for a major relief mission. A few years ago in Shanghai, a Chinese military strategist, Ding Xinghao, said that the Chinese officers he knew who watched CNN coverage of the Gulf War were shocked by what they saw and were rethinking their whole modernization effort.
And during the siege of Sarajevo a few years ago, I talked with a United Nations military commander who complained that the media can affect public opinion in an instant, with a few gripping images, and that the military has ''no command and control systems that can match their speed of reporting.'' TV has short-circuited both military thinking and diplomatic maneuvering.
OK, we can see virtually everything on the Earth, but that doesn't mean we understand it. The reason for the vicious ethnic hatred being played out in Kosovo, the story behind perplexing multisided war now raging in central Africa, the anger that motivates a Hezbollah suicide bomber or a Colombian rebel -- these can't be picked up by a remote camera. The world beyond the TV screen remains a place of great diversity and mystery. Even in our own very transparent society, where we have a pretty good grip on the culture, the subcultures, and the many backwaters -- where we watch the Senate discuss our president's sex life and Oprah discuss everything -- we still can't fathom the mind of the racist, the rapist, the assassins in our midst.
Still, there is no denying that more and more people have one thing in common: TV. Bad guys, good guys, perpetrators, victims -- everybody watches. And that makes something of a difference.
So take a little comfort in the comfort of your TV crib. The next time you watch those night-vision images and brace yourself for what passes for war these days, you are closer to the battlefield than American civilians have been since the days of the Civil War. You might not have any better understanding of the underlying reasons for the conflict, or a true view of what is going on outside the range of the video cameras, or indeed any particular interest in watching Baghdad get pummeled again.
But you will be doing what we all now do -- spies, soldiers, civilians -- after a century in which millions died: You'll be keeping an eye on the world.
John Yemma, a former foreign editor and foreign correspondent, is the Globe's assistant to the editor for special projects.
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