Table Of ContentAssociated Press April 09, 2003
U.S. Behind Schedule in Iraqi TV Block
By ANICK JESDANUN
Before the war, U.S. military analysts
predicted Iraq's state-run television would
be quickly targeted in an effort to deny
Saddam Hussein a propaganda tool that
reached not just Iraqis but the Arab world
and beyond.
Still, Iraqi TV continued to broadcast for two weeks of war, with some periodic blackouts
apparently caused by U.S. air strikes. Only on Tuesday did it finally go off the air.
Were the Iraqis incredibly adept at hiding and shifting backup transmitters so they could
literally keep broadcasting until the center of Baghdad was owned by American tanks?
U.S. commanders have refused to publicly detail their strategy on the matter, though several
bombing forays in the war's early days did devastate Baghdad's main broadcast center. The
military even touted photos at a briefing March 27 showing a television satellite
transmission facility destroyed days earlier by coalition forces.
Yet Iraqi TV managed to come back each time.
"The positive interpretation of these events is we wanted Iraqi television to stay on the air,"
said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
"Something as high-powered and readily traceable as television signals should be easily
shut down."
Thompson's negative interpretation: "It's something of an embarrassment. It kind of
suggests we don't have as much control of the electromagnetic spectrum as we're supposed
to."
Steve Aftergood, senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in
Washington, D.C., cited several advantages to letting Iraq stay on air.
They include, he said, convincing Iraqis that Americans weren't trying to destroy civilian
infrastructure and monitoring broadcasts to learn what Iraqi leaders were up to.
Repeatedly before Tuesday, Iraqi broadcast and satellite transmissions were knocked off the
air only to return hours later using backup facilities.
But after the latest outage, Iraqi satellite TV showed only a still picture of an army officer.
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A military spokesman, Marine Major Brad Bartelt of the U.S. Central Command in Qatar,
could not even say whether coalition forces were involved in disabling Iraqi TV - or if
Saddam's crippled regime had simply signed off.
An engineer at Arabsat, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab satellite consortium that relays the
Iraqi satellite signal to the wider world outside Baghdad, said the troubles appeared unusual.
"We don't know what is going on on the ground over there," said the engineer, who spoke
from Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on condition of anonymity.
Officials from Iraq's Information Ministry usually called when they had technical troubles
in the past, he said, but Arabsat hadn't gotten a call this time and couldn't reach anyone in
Iraq.
John Pike, director of the research organization GlobalSecurity.org, suggested the United
States might have waited until now to strike television as part of a concerted attack on the
airport and government buildings, two other pillars "if you're staging a coup d'etat."
"It's the simultaneity of them that maximizes the probability you will collapse organized
resistance," Pike said.
Perhaps coalition forces simply weren't trying that hard before, with more pressing matters
such as destroying weapons caches, said Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor for Jane's
Sentinel Security Assessments.
Although television transmissions and satellite uplinks can serve as beacons for coalition
bombers, destroying them is not as easy as dropping a bomb. The Iraqis might have been
using mobile transmitters, or broadcasting from buildings with heavy civilian populations
that the United States would be loathe to bomb. It's not known where Iraq kept its backup
transmitters.
Still, the U.S. military has jamming devices in its arsenal and its decision not to use them
suggests a decision to let the transmissions continue for the first few weeks, analysts said.
Retired Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Baker, a senior fellow at the Center for Defense
Information, said the coalition might want to preserve those facilities with an eye toward
using them later to get its own message out.
"There's a chance here that we don't have it high on the priority list," he said. "We may be
holding back to be able to manipulate that TV station and broadcast."
Copyright © 2003, Associated Press
