The imagery of war

“It doesn’t take the most powerful nations on earth to create the next global conflict, just the will of a single man.”

So runs the tag line of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a video game due to hit the stands in November. According to pre-release reviews, gamesters take on the role of an SAS (Special Air Service) operative charged with stopping a delivery of weapons of mass destruction in London. Scenes of warfare are played out on the London Underground and at the houses of parliament, with a chemical agent released. Bombs also rain down on New York, Paris and Berlin. This virtual warfare, according to the game’s creative team, is not aimed at reflecting real events but at simulating a World War III-type scenario.

Nevertheless, Mediawatch-UK and supporters of the victims of the 7/7 bombings have called for its ban on the grounds of extreme insensitivity. By contrast, Osama Bin Laden’s death was, in a matter of days, reduced to a 3-D online video game — KumarWar Episode 107: Osama 2011 — where players can, in a frenzy of trigger-happy fervour, lead the team of virtual US SEALS around his Pakistan compound to the assassination endgame. This is the final instalment in a seven-year series of war on terror-based free online video games that debuted in 2004. According to the CEO of the company, it offers closure to the American people 10 years on from 9/11. And, like its predecessors, it has been created with input from former and current US military personnel.

Some may argue that such games — which dehumanise human life and trivialise modern warfare — are not so dissimilar from the pornography of war images that came out of Abu Ghraib in 2004 or those that were posted by American military personnel on a now defunct porn website. Unfortunately, the same may be also said of certain sections of mainstream media that, at times, openly insist on depicting the war on terror through the prism of official Washington.


In 2007, Newsweek ran its now infamous cover story in which it declared that Pakistan, not Iraq, was the world’s most dangerous nation. The tag line itself was not problematic, although it caused resentment among many Pakistanis. But the accompanying image — featuring the mandatory men-in-beards, all angry and gesticulating — was perhaps far more irresponsible. That combination effectively reduced the entire population to nothing more than a mass mob beyond reason or feeling. To make its point more succinctly and avoid charges of sensationalism, Newsweek could have simply splashed on its cover an image of Pervez Musharraf, the then president-cum-Army chief.

Similarly, TIME magazine last year provoked mixed reaction when it featured on its cover an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose ears and nose had been cut off by the Taliban. Yet the braveness of this young woman in allowing the world to see her horrific disfiguration was hugely diluted by the accompanying headline: What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.  It also made a mockery of the editorial note, which claimed an unbiased interest in simply reporting ground realities. “As long as photographs and videos play into the US version of events, then the US establishment is on board,” says Kim Petersen, an editor at Dissident Voice, who has written extensively on the pornography of war. For it is only by controlling the imagery of war, as he puts it, that the warring parties can manipulate the public’s sensibilities and sensitivities towards the war.

This also likely explains President Obama’s controversial decision not to publicly release pictures of Bin Laden’s corp. We now know that the al Qaeda chief was literally caught with his pants down; laying to rest rumours that he was wired with an IED. Yet such imagery would have reminded us that even the most evil of men are still human, just like us.

Better, then, to leave all that to the virtual world. A place where when lives are lost one can just play again.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th, 2011.