Iraq video war create shockwaves

The ghost of the living stalks an ashen Tony Blair as his Labour party begins its last annual conference before a general election from Sunday.
The spectre is Kenneth Bigley, the 62-year-old British engineer taken hostage in Baghdad nine days ago. Bigley’s fellow American hostages have since been beheaded. He is kept strategically alive and just able to videotape piteous pleas to Blair to save him.
The videos are created by the newest media player in the clash of ideologies, former drunk and journalist-turned-Islamist warrior Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The Bigley releases insist only Blair can save the Briton from certain decapitation. Blair has shown no sign he will do al-Zarqawi’s bidding and request his good friend and military ally George Bush to free from prison Iraq’s female Dr Germ, Rihab Taha.
Despite new, deafening cries by his party, Blair has not signalled the UK’s willingness to pull its troops out of Iraq after that benighted land conducted limited elections in January.
But al-Zarqawi’s media strategy has scored an important victory. In a desperate effort to secure Bigley’s release, the British foreign office has publicly and on video been forced to disown American actions in Iraq.
Britain, an Arabic-speaking British diplomat assured Arabs, had not detained any Iraqi women prisoners, not one. That’s the sort of thing the Americans do.
The video war is going al-Zarqawi’s way. His DVDs are dual purpose, unlike the sterile TV sound bites of frenzied Western and other governments forced into bargaining, bartering or bowing to the demands of Iraq’s booming industry of hostage-takers.
Al-Zarqawi’s snuff movies, priced at less than a dollar, are sell-outs across West Asia. With amazing technical skill and finely-pitched Islamist rhetoric and imagery, the films fade footage in and out to the sound of Koranic chanting.
It is only half in joke that the trendy and trite in many Western capitals increasingly believe al-Zarqawi has become radical Islam’s hottest celebrity.
Witness the near hip-hop-inspired macho posturing, flags, logos, righteous anger, guns and gym-honed muscles from Jordanian prison days.
This ruthless killer’s remarkable communications successes recall the concept of the pseudo-event, when something happens only so that it can be reported, like a press conference or an opinion poll. So too al-Zarqawi’s video-taped executions.
But they are no less troubling. They illustrate the extent to which post-war Iraq has become a bit like a giant, Jurassic-style, Islamic-themed park, beaming a gross form of 24-7 reality TV to the outside world.
Within the theme park, exquisite tortures are planned and executed at will, on a smorgasbord, a real kidnappers delight of nationalities. Anglo-American forces encircle the park to fence it off from everywhere else.
Al-Zarqawi’s video clips are like the proverbial message in the bottle, the only real chance of getting through to the outside world. With Bigley’s piteous words ringing in his ears, Teflon Tony, spinmeister and media performer extraordinaire, might well wonder how it got to this.