The Fog Of War

By Lance Morrow.

Where was the truth? What had been blasted?

The Iraqis said the allied bombs had demolished a factory in Baghdad devoted to making formula for infants. A helpful sign in the ruins identified the place in Arabic and English: BABY MILK FACTORY.

It was one of Saddam Hussein's holograms projected for the world audience, and it caught a flavor of the war -- the shameless and the sinister commingled, a little sham of baby's milk spilled in the Mother of Battles.

The scene also contained a spooky suggestion of the stakes involved, the bracketing of infants and apocalypse. The Americans said the plant they destroyed had manufactured weapons of biological warfare. Someone was lying.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth," said Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917. But that is too simple a metaphor for what is happening in the first war of the age of global information. Truth and elaborate lies, hard fact and hallucination, have become central motifs in the gulf. A war of words and images has taken up a life of its own, parallel to the one in the sand.

A strange metaphysic has gone to work. The truth, as if in honor of the war's complexity and its world audience, has transformed itself into a sort of edgy master of disguises. It bursts forth in a thousand moral costumes. It gesticulates insanely, and exhales wild rhetoric, yet possesses nonetheless a true if dangerous life of its own. It plays elaborate lights across the desert.

In Egypt the wildest rumors have credence partly because few trust the state-run media. President Hosni Mubarak found it necessary to show himself in public to prove he had not been assassinated by pro-Iraqi zealots. A Turkish official said the government was withholding information about military plans in order to ensure its citizens' "peace of mind."

Each side had its own style of working the theme. Allied POWs were paraded in front of Iraqi television cameras. The men, bruised, dazed, possibly drugged, performed a charade that was the moral equivalent of the milk factory, yet there were numerous Arabs who said, "This is Bush's shame. His own pilots condemn the war."

In Saddam's world, falsehood was often propelled by fear, and sometimes worked in subtle ways. Saddam's aides sometimes withhold critical information about the war from him because they are afraid of telling him the truth.

Napoleon once remarked, "The ancients had a great advantage over us in that their armies are not trailed by a second army of pen pushers." The armies in the gulf are trailed by pen pushers, camera lenses, microphones, satellites, the eyes of the world.

The Pentagon and the Bush Administration have come close to achieving their goal of forcing journalists -- and the public -- to rely solely on the information supplied by briefers or gathered in pool interviews in the field. Doing away with independent reporting has been the Pentagon's goal ever since Vietnam. The military has set up a system of media pools to cover the initial stages of the operation, controlling reporters' movements and their access to sources. The system works brilliantly from the Pentagon's point of view, but it has subverted the coverage of the war and given it a dismal, canned quality.

In the midst of all the spectacle, items of honest truth have died of manipulation and censorship. The drama in the gulf commands eerie and unprecedented high-tech global attention, and yet the volume of real information about the conduct of the war is small. The public does not know how effective the allied strikes against Iraq have been, for example, or how heavy the civilian casualties may have been. Clausewitz's "fog of war" -- a phrase endlessly repeated these days -- has become a bright electrical cloud of unknowing.

Still, as White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged, "We have a tightrope to walk" -- between unrealistic public expectations of victory in a matter of days and an anxious skepticism about whether the U.S. is going to win at all. Says a senior White House official: "People see a few films of a missile striking a building where it's completely precise, and they say, 'If it's going so well, why isn't the war over?' " Another senior official says, "In this video-game war, we have been so successful so far that people may really be shocked if Saddam gets off an Exocet and sinks one of our ships or pulls some other big surprise." The parallel universes of the enemies -- that of the alliance and that of Saddam Hussein -- have their own elaborate reality and logic. Each makes some sense on its own terms, each is performing its role in collision with the other before the eyes of the world. Each is persuasive to itself and alien to the other. One side's truth is the other's falsehood. A headline in Al-Rai, Jordan's largest-circulation daily, stated last week, WE ((Arabs)) FIGHT WITH THE SWORD OF GOD. THE U.S. FIGHTS WITH THE SWORD OF SATAN.

The Arabic language, with its splendors, can create a sometimes dangerous political world. A Palestinian academic in the West Bank city of Nablus says, ( "The absence of democracy and freedom of expression leads the Arab to escape reality on the horse of rhetoric." Words create and manipulate truth.

Saddam Hussein's armies last week seemed to be enacting a travesty of the Arab motif of veiling and concealment. In the Arab world, women often veil themselves not because they are punished or shamed but because women, who produce life, must be protected, as a plant in the desert might be. Houses turn inward, the living quarters hidden. The true treasures are concealed. Saddam similarly appeared -- or wished to appear -- to be masking his strength, hiding it in bunkers in the sand.

In war, the world goes into chaotic motion, becomes a verb and not a collection of nouns. Reality blurs. Generals and Presidents need a clear eye for the truth. But the home front and the troops in the line are sustained less by truth than by emotion (propaganda, fang baring, plumage display) and their own myth. Saddam Hussein knows this and makes a fairly gaudy display of mystique. The leaders of the coalition arrayed against Saddam have their idealism and materialism in uneasy alignment, pretty much without illusions. The trouble is that they do not always trust their own people with the truth.

With reporting by Stanley W. Cloud/Washington and James Wilde/Amman