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How we see wars

In 1990 Sadam Hussain invaded Kuwait.  His objective, at the time, was to obtain a strategic port in the Persian Gulf better than what it had already  (which was too close to Iran).  The way the war was portrayed was interesting.  

At the time I was living in London, and my immediate neighbor was a cameraman for TV Globo of Brazil, obviously, when the war started he was sent with his entire team to cover the war.  First, what we see on TV is heavily sanitized, you never see corps and you never see real battles.  

However, the benefit of having a cameraman as my neighbor was to see the raw footage -- not a pretty thing, in fact, the complete opposite.  War is carnage, and this raw footage was just that, total carnage.

The only other time I saw such carnage was on TV in Singapore -- it seems that although the country had issues with TV & movie violence it has no issue with the real thing.  The Kosovo conflict was covered in all its gory details on the evening news (however they edited the movie Aliens to remove the scene when the monster explodes out of John Hurt's chest).

In addition, depending on the source of the news you got very different perspectives; for example, the French (TV5) and the Americans (CNN) had very different reporting on the same battle -- to the point that it seemed they were talking of different events.  BTW the Kuwait conflict was the first ever "live" war covered on TV...

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