War and information, “virtual” scenario and “real” terrain of the battlefield: these seem to be the antitheses within which the main international dailies are analysing the war in Iraq, which has been monopolizing the attention of the press and public opinion throughout the world since 20 March. “The culminating battle of this campaign writes the Herald Tribune (26/3) will be in Baghdad and around Baghdad, where the regime remains firmly in control and the air defences of the city, though degraded, are still working. Although the will of Iraq to continue fighting has been weakened, the American forces could find themselves faced by a ‘house by house’ battle which they would have hoped to avoid”. “The challenges of G. Bush”: that’s the headline of a report in which Le Monde (25/3) emphasizes that “never before has an American president involved his country in a conflict with such a high level of opposition. His fellow-citizens will not forgive him for a humanitarian disaster”. According to Patrick Jarreau, “the war in Iraq is a delicate political battle for Bush, who is trying at the same time to advance his conservative programme in Congress. Whether it has to do with the ban on some methods of abortion, the nomination of controversial judges, oil drilling in Alaska or the new tax cuts envisaged by his draft budget, the success rate has been uneven, but the pressure of the executive is strong”. The “shock” images of POWs, on either side, are commented on by another French daily, La Croix (25/3). “The Americans, their British allies and, beyond them, every person of heart and reason writes Bruno Frappat are justifiably scandalized to see the Geneva Conventions flouted by the Iraqis who exhibit prisoners of war in humiliating situations. Just as the Iraqis were right to protest, two days previously, when television channels throughout the world without any restraint, this time transmitted images of Iraqi detainees in degrading situations (…). Apart from its human victims, this war has already, in five days, debased international legality and truth. In the jungle of lies, opinion becomes confused and arbitrary”. In the dramatic and confused situation in Basra “ one thing only is certain: the humanitarian catastrophe“: that the headline of the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung on 26/3. In the ping-pong game of statements and counter-statements, affirmations and denials, “ what’s only certain is that the city’s population is suffering enormously from the war. After electricity and water supplies were cut off, the city is now threatened by cholera and intestinal diseases.“. The political debate revolving around the war and Europe’s attitudes are analysed by an editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung (FAZ) of 25/3: “the discussion on the proportioned reaction to the resistance of a tyrant could lead to the split of the liberal democracies of the West, both in their internal relations and in those between different States“. In another editorial along the same lines in the FAZ of 27/3, Guenther Nonnenmacher declares that “ the beginning of the twentieth century is dated, from a political point of view, to the year 1914, to the outbreak of the first world war. Perhaps future historians will date its end to the year 2003, when the war against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein inflicted a grievous blow on those organizations, NATO and the EU, that had ensured the Western world’s triumph in the Cold War in the second half of the twentieth century” “Bloodless war on TV” is the headline of an article published in the Spanish daily El Paìs of 25/3, in which Javier Del Pino, analyses the way in which “the television networks of the USA have imposed a form of censorship on themselves to prevent disagreeable images from entering homes”: “An American citizen who follows the war only on television writes Del Pino may come to think that the Iraqis don’t exist and that the battles are bloodless. The images are always sanitised, censored by the decision of the broadcasters”. Writing in another Spanish daily Abc (26/3) the jurist Antonio Garrigues Walker proposes, by contrast, three ideas “to prevent the various interpretations of an inexorable, crushing and painful victory causing a yet more conflictual and dangerous peace”: protecting “the interest of Spain”, protecting “the interest of Europe” and “helping the USA to exercise a reasonable and controlled leadership”. If America “wants to be a just and effective leader emphasizes the jurist it must at all costs change many of its conceptions on international legitimacy and legality. In its own personal interest, it must be the first to help to establish and reinforce multilateral organizations with wide-ranging capacity for action and with the necessary degree of independence. Precisely in order to remain the strongest, the USA is more obliged than others to prevent the law of the strongest from prevailing…”
