"Just for the record,'' the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV would never show such footage. The things we see – the filth and obscenity of corpses – cannot be shown. First because it is not "appropriate" to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war.
That of course was in 1991. The "highway of death", they called it – there was actually a parallel and much worse "highway of death" 10 miles to the east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned up to film it – and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the photograph of the shrivelled, carbonised Iraqi soldier in his truck. This was an iconic illustration of a kind because it did represent what we had seen, when it was eventually published.
For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War – there was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the offing – it was necessary for them to have died with care, to have fallen romantically on their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those First World War paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor, without a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to make it on to the morning news programmes.
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