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It is almost sixty years since the populations of Western Europe and United States experienced war on their own territory. In old NATO countries we have grown up without personal exposure to conflict, or to the civil problems of surviving in a battlespace. Although we are involved in overseas interventions, our ignorance is not mitigated by the tiny element of the population who are directly involved in these events. We are therefore educated largely by reports and imagery that are second hand, selected for us by news editors and government officials. When national interest intensifies in a particular conflict, our exposure to war reportage increases but we have no experience against which to test these images and the image selectors themselves in many cases have no knowledge of conflict.
Years of peace obscure the importance of security as a primary need; it must come before shelter, health, prosperity and education, about which we now have such a developed knowledge and experience. But when so much of our defence effort is deployed overseas, can we continue to be poorly informed about our security? Three recent exhibitions tackle the question with interesting and varied results: Moral Combat in St Leonard's Shoreditch (London), Iraq Uncensored at the Proud Gallery (London) and Attack! at the Kunsthalle, Vienna.
All three exhibitions to some extent respond to the assumption that war imagery can still be controlled, as it was in the Falklands and to a lesser extent in the 1991 Gulf War. Today this assumption has been overtaken by technical developments. It was true that due to the limitations of 1990s satellite technology, the public felt that reporters at General Schwarzkopf's desert headquarters were 'managing' an ideologically selective, or spun, version of the war. But by the second Iraq war in 2003, digital technology removed problems of satellite access, resolution and portability. By 2003 the viewing public was bombarded with a continuous flood of frontline imagery. It was still the case that the embedded observers tended to report from the perspective of their hosts and only on the narrow sector of the battlefield that they could see. But beyond the strictly US and UK national perspective, local people published their images on internet sites and the restrictions that Western editors attempted...