The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict by Peter Beaumont
Harvill Secker, £16.99
PETER BEAUMONT nearly killed himself writing this book. That is not an attempt at a put-down; it expresses my admiration for a winner of a George Orwell Prize for Journalism and a man, therefore, with a close kinship with members of the Tribune family. He was also a colleague of mine for six years on The Observer, where I saw him so committed to the reporting of wars that it threatened his own sanity as he observed the murderous antics of his fellow-human beings, from Iraq to Lebanon and from Afghanistan to Angola.
At the launch of his book the other day, he made the wise decision to let it speak for itself. Instead, he struck out in a fierce philippic against war itself, a practice all too rare these days when government spokesmen on both sides of the Atlantic whitewash the latest Western atrocity, believing the public will accept and indeed welcome the most horrific military action as long as it can be represented as against the terrorist-minded, undemocratic or those seen as a threat to our national interests.
“We subscribe,” Beaumont says, “to a curious convention, all of the media, that when we write about war we largely ignore the detail of the consequences – what bullets, bombs and knives do. It is regarded as bad form to describe the reality of the everyday horror of conflict.” Thus, he puts his finger on one of the reasons why Westerners, cut off from the reality of the actions of their politicians, military and arms manufacturers by the Alastair Campbells of the government spin machine and by cautious media managements, are often bemused by the criticism welling up from the victims of Western atrocities.
Western journalists embedded with invasion forces are steeped in the values of the conquerors. Consequently the consumers of Western media, softened up by Tony Blair’s fables about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction and the foolish words of John Reid, the Defence Secretary who said “we would be perfectly happy to leave [Afghanistan] in three years without firing one shot” are deprived of a true picture of the actions of those making war in our name.
Beaumont is not on the side of the Blairs, the Campbells and the Reids. He describes being in a fire fight and then, in minute detail, the effect of a bullet on the human body: “Corruption. It is the odour that undertakers call tissue gas, the smell of death and of the gut-shot man whose own bacteria, living in his bowel in faecal matter, have been driven out into his body by whatever struck him. Later the skin discolours to a coffee shade, experienced with increase pain and swelling. As the condition accelerates, casualties experience high fever, irregular heartbeat, shock and finally the multiple failures of organs.”
The author succeeds magnificently – to such an extent that this book should be required reading for every student of international affairs, every enthusiastic armchair strategist and every aspiring entrant to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
As someone who did his share of bayonet practice as an infantryman in national service long ago, I can say that warfare today, even in the absence of atomic weapons, has become so comprehensively inhuman that the people of Britain must no longer be inveigled into it. Not even by an ally like that nice Mr Obama of the United States with whom, as we are constantly reminded, we have nearly as special a relationship as they have with the Israelis.
Hugh O’Shaughnessy
