March 2003 was the beginning of the USA-UK invasion of Iraq that continued for more than a decade. The pretext of the US-led military invasion was an aggressive search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No such weapon was ever found but the backbone of Iraq’s sovereignty was destroyed and yet the violence was called ‘humanitarian’ by the Western powers and the Western media. It was also the beginning of the 21st century-war-cultures. The western media corporations sent ‘embedded journalists’ with the army – making an open declaration of their subservience to the invading force. That, in turn, was countered by a phenomenal rise of citizen journalists and digital portals, ran and shared by the peace activists and civil societies, across the globe.

In Majlis, we re-recorded some of the television news from March 19 to April 23, 2003 to keep a chronological account of the violent military invasion that the media called a war. The images on this page are screen shots of the reporting by the embedded journalists as the invading troupes entered the cities in the night, empowered by their high-tech night vision devices. In these images the details of the human settlements are blurred but encircled by the measured range of the tanks and the cameras.

War aesthetics at the beginning of the 21st century.