The Press Put In The Line Of Fire

Brigadier Cordingley, as he was at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, is according to those who have worked with him, a thoroughly good egg. However, the picture which emerges in his book is of someone struggling to keep his irritation under control.

In the Eye of the Storm is peppered with snide side-swipes: at the Royal Air Force, whose airmen were living in hotels while the soldiers were in tents; at a Saudi Admiral, whom Cordingley counts as a friend, but whose office is a little too plush to be tasteful; at the Ministry of Defence, which won't agree to his plans and wants the Desert Rats reassigned to another part of the front line.

 

Most of all, his sarcasm is roused by our friends in the media, who Cordingley thinks hung around too much, trivialised the issues and got in the way of military men doing their job. The brigadier muses over whether commanders can now be ruthless enough, in a television age, to pursue the enemy to the limit.

All of these irritations may be excused as the contemporary account of a commander's feelings. Yet over five years after the end of the Gulf War, the complaints look niggling and misplaced; it is Cordingley's inability to restrain his bitterness which seems to trivialise the threat which his men faced.

And there is a bigger problem with Cordingley's complaints about the media: a review of the articles published at the time does not support the idea that the press was trying to generate emotional scare stories. Indeed, if anything, the broadsheet newspapers were excessively gushing in their support for the brigadier and his Desert Rats.

On the eve of the battle, for instance, The Time reported Cordingley's speech to his men saying, to an outsider he had carried off the occasion more or less perfectly. John Keegan, the highly-respected defence editor of the Daily Telegraph, said of the Desert Rats, the military resolve of the troops is total. If I were Saddam I would leave today. There is little sign of the morale-sapping copy which the brigadier claims dragged him down.

Even in the incident which clearly caused the most difficulty, Cordingley can have little room for complaint. Defence correspondents, who for the most part had to provide specialist analysis of the crisis from London, were flown to the desert to meet the brigadier during the build-up to war. The reporters who were there, such as David Fairhall of The Guardian and Peter Almond of The Telegraph are thoughtful and experienced writers, a far cry from the baying press pack which Cordingley implies he faced.

In response to questions, the brigadier said that with two such large armies facing each other, there were bound to be high casualties, but that he hoped most would fall on the Iraqi side. The reports which appeared the next day were prominent, but were not sensationalist and accurately reflected what the brigadier admits he said. The roof fell in because Tom King, then defence secretary, started issuing thunderbolts from the MoD about the reports, some of which evidently struck Cordingley, and which, equally clearly, are still smarting. But what can an army general seriously expect if he stands up at a press conference and says that a lot of people are going to be killed in a war? It may have been little more than a bald statement of the truth, but it was breathtakingly naive.

Many officers, unskilled in these dark secrets, tend to regard the media as a bolt-on nuisance, which they can deal with when they have finished their real job. In fact, maintaining public support is vital to any western officer who wants to achieve a military objective, and the media are powerful forces in shaping public opinion.

Successful soldiers, and for that matter the leaders of large businesses, learn that lesson and use it to their advantage.nclude virtual="/incs/bottom.inc"-->