The condemnation of the invasion violates a post-Sept. 11 law which severely limits the American people’s right to free speech, making laughable the administration’s contentions that it upholds democracy.

The spokesman for the American forces in Doha refused to respond to a question last week about the number of dead and injured within the ranks of British and American forces.

A complete news blackout on how the battle was going and restrictions on the correspondents’ movements led to a backlash on the American street. It understood this to mean that the number of American casualties had increased. The British street had a similar experience.

The blackout has led one correspondent in Doha to write: “The war that we are covering here at the Central Command is the media war. The leader of the American forces only spoke three days after the start of the war and his and his deputies’ speeches have been unconvincing. They say that they have secured Umm Qasr and then the Arab satellite channels broadcast live pictures of fierce battles.”

The deathblow came when the Arab satellite channels and all the British newspapers, despite Tony Blair’s request not to, showed pictures of dead and imprisoned Americans. Then out comes Bush, who ridiculed the UN and international law, to demand the prisoners be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. These lies and contradictions created a feeling of uneasiness in American public opinion. The realities indicate a rise in American and British casualties leading a number of political and military leaders from both the US and UK to say that the war hasn’t really begun and that the real confrontation is yet to come.

The American fear is that television will bring images of American prisoners and American dead into the homes of Americans, thus showing the contradiction between the politicians’ promises and the reality of what is happening in Iraq. The British still suffer from divisions inside the country because of the war and don’t want the media coverage to support opposition to the war and create even more divisions. Following this media conflict, a number of independent American journalists have created a website to receive information from any source to find out what is really happening on the battlefield. This media transformation has exposed the degree to which the American media is controlled and has paved the way for the Internet to be more credible. The British media on the other hand is more liberal than its American counterpart.

In the throes of this media campaign, a statement by a Chinese official comes closest to expressing the current realities: “We fear that the US may have fallen into a ‘new Vietnam’”.