Few Western journalists saw much of the war in Iraq. Some were corralled in US central command headquarters in Qatar and dependent on Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks's daily news briefings, some were stuck in Baghdad hotels under the protective wing of Saddam's information minister, Muhammad al-Sahhaf, some were embedded with the coalition forces: they were all in different ways in the dark. News organisations did their best to pull together their teams' reports, but they delude themselves and their readers and viewers if they think they were reporting the full story.

LRB 1 April 2004 | PDF Download