Truth's sad fortune: First casualty of war

Peter Preston, Guardian News Service, London

So it begins. The flashes of light in the night sky, the distant explosions, the appearance of a "relentless" George W. Bush talking command and control. We slowly remember what war is like; but we need to remember, too, that truth is the first casualty of conflict, that the briefers, bureaucrats and politicians who act as "reliable sources" in peace are operating now under different house rules. .

Apply common sense to the tales of the first 26 days. Troops massing at this or that frontier post. Air strikes "imminent" (three weeks ago) or "within 48 hours" (eight days ago). SAS teams already staging search-and-destroy missions inside Afghanistan. Common sense asks a difficult question. Would anyone who really knows tell a journalist such things if they were true? Why not send Osama bin Laden a postcard instead?

The Falklands war was more than a distant side-show. It hugely impressed the Pentagon. Ensure that reporters are cooped up on aircraft carriers or minded by male nurses far from the front and, as long as you keep decent clamps on back at the political ranch, there is total information control.

How will this latest, very curious conflict be played out? Pull down the handbooks from their dusty shelves. For we are going by the book.

The start of the horror -- the destruction of the twin towers -- was uncontrolled disaster: for the thousands of innocents who died, for dreams of security and illusions of intelligence. The world was out of control. One task in the days since Sept. 11 has been to regain equilibrium.

The building of this fabled international coalition against terrorism may or may not prove vital in the end. But, with leaders shuttling from summit to summit, it has certainly filled in the time while the military mammoths got their lugubrious act together. There's been a Gulf-style pause. Now, as bombing begins, we can begin to sense a pattern.

Would Saddam quit Kuwait as billions of dollars rolled into the desert? He had the chance. Will the Taliban give up Bin Laden and save their regime? That, obviously, has been the descant of the past couple of weeks. The answer is now written in the night over Kabul.

Meanwhile the control freaks have had their thinking caps on. The world's correspondents (one factor) are there in force and deployed: Uzbekistan, Quetta, Peshawar, and the Afghan enclave where the Northern Alliance rules. But, save for the deeply unfortunate Ridley and a handful of Afghan agency reporters, they aren't in Taliban country, let alone camped outside Bin Laden's rural retreat. Suicidal peril and impossibility co-joined.

Better still, the Taliban themselves seem to be PR mutts. They can't field a Tariq Aziz figure looking grave, just a deputy ambassador in Islamabad looking perplexed. They have already blown what credibility they had; losing bin Laden, then miraculously finding him again) In their isoloation, they won't be able to take western camera teams to inspect any civilian casualties of air attack.

They are sitting, silent targets. That won't stop protest waves round the Arab world on Monday, nor will it necessarily catch bin Laden. But it does mean that the only clear TV evidence of effectiveness, however carefully selected, will come from the Americans and the Britons.

What can go wrong? Plenty -- even apart from bombs gone astray. Bin Laden himself, as Sunday's television interview showed, has a malign gift for PR. He could stage a dismaying series of catch-me-if-you-can for the cameras. Proof of his death or capture will need to be absolute before the briefers celebrate. More terrorist onslaughts are high on the agenda. More American lives in places like Saudi Arabia lie on the line. Hostage-taking could wreck every equation.

Even so, because restraint equals thinking time, a measure of control has returned. The war of perception, vital after Sept. 11, is on a more even keel. The perception is that governments still govern and can seem to call the shots. The hope must be that some finite battle in an unseen field far away will soon be enough to end any shooting war and, with a little help from the Pakistani secret service, leave Al-Qaeda headless.

But then the dissonances of difference begin to impinge. The FBI and CIA, caught short by 19 men with penknives, are obliged to exalt the potency of bin Laden's network. Poison gas, germ warfare, nukes? Some or all of these visions may have a sliver of reality to them, but they also conveniently turn a low-tech enemy into a Bond villain.