MEDIA What we won

Milan Rai

T he 15 February 2003 demonstrations, showed, as The New York Times observed, that "there may still be two super- powers on the planet: the United States and world pub- lic opinion."
On the other hand, the grass- roots mobilisation failed to pre- vent the invasion of Iraq. Media support? The heavy reporting of the British demonstration on 15 February seems to disprove the idea that the mainstream media opposes, under-reports or belit- tles grassroots movements. A Daily Telegraph columnist was allowed to make an appeal to the readers of the "newspaper of the armed forces" to attend the march. The Times published a special supplement on the demonstration. Do these and other examples of media support not show that the media really are "democrat- ic", reflecting the views of the public, their readers? Perhaps. On the other hand, the scale of the coverage could be taken as an indicator of the level of dissent among British elites Â for self-interested reasons Â reflected by the elite media. What we won The picture becomes clearer when we look at the media treat- ment of the effect of the early 2003 grassroots mobilisations. Elsewhere in this issue (p9), Gabriel Carlyle points out that just days before the war broke out on 19 March 2003 the British government was franti- cally preparing contingency plans to withdraw British troops from the invasion force. Things had reached such a state by 11 March 2003 that British defence secretary Geoff Hoon was forced to ring US defence secretary Donald Rums- feld to explain that the British government might not be able to take part in the invasion Â because it might lose the parlia- mentary vote due on 18 March. Elsewhere in the world, popu- lar movements played a key role in shaping the course of events. One key goal for the Blair government was to secure a UN security council resolution that could be interpreted as authoris- ing the war (to try to neutralise the anti-war movement). In the event, Washington and London did not manage to bribe and intimidate the smaller "middle six" states on the securi- ty council Â Chile, Mexico, Angola, Cameroon, Guinea and Pakistan Â into voting for them. One important reason was the fever pitch of public mobilisa- tion in many of those countries. Turkish democracy The most extraordinary case of nonviolent power came in Turkey. Despite Turkey's mili- tary, political and economic dependence on the US, and despite the offer of $26bn in loans and grants, public opposi- tion to the war grew until it reached 94% of the population. US military planners wanted to use Turkey for both the land and air invasions of Iraq. At a tumultuous vote in the Turkish parliament on 1 March 2003, the government failed to gain enough votes for war, and US planners were forced to re- think. (How is it that Turkey man- aged this, but Britain did not?) The Financial Times observed that the scale of public opposi- tion "may have been the decid- ing factor". 50,000 people marched in Ankara on the day of the vote Â the biggest demon- stration for 20 years. MPs were lobbied on their mobile phones by their constituents during the debate. Media silence All these examples of people power, of the influence of the anti-war movement, have been almost entirely absent from the media discussion of the run-up to the war, reported but effec- tively censored (by the tech- niques discussed last issue). As we remember 15 February 2003, we, the global anti-war movements, must balance our evident failures against our uncelebrated victories and near- successes. We must resist the dreary defeatism of the mass media.