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Times Watch for 04/01/03
Poor, Poor Peter Arnett
Times TV reporter Alessandra Stanley discusses the outing from Iraq of oleaginous Geraldo Rivera of Fox News and also the firing of Saddam’s favorite reporter, Peter Arnett—two guys who truly deserve each other.
“[Arnett] was the only journalist for a major American news organization allowed to remain in Baghdad through much of the gulf war in 1991,” Stanley writes for Tuesday’s Times. “But his career at CNN collapsed when he narrated a documentary, later retracted, that charged that the American military and used nerve gas on American deserters during the Vietnam War.”
Why Arnett was allowed to remain in Baghdad in 1991 is left unquestioned, but as Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg suggests in a story on the same page: “The [first Bush] White House criticized him as helping the Iraqis spread propaganda.”
Of he interview Arnett gave Sunday to Iraqi TV, Stanley writes: “Arnett was doing what reporters often do when reporting on a hostile government — try to convince its leaders that it is in their interests to keep them there….But he was in a war zone, working under difficult circumstances, and NBC would have looked better sticking by him than it did giving him up as soon as criticism grew acute.”
Well, Arnett’s circumstances weren’t all that difficult, compared to journalists less cozy with the Hussein regime, as Rutenberg points out: “Possibly using his connections with Baghdad officials, Mr. Arnett seemed to be gaining a freedom of movement in Iraq that others did not have. Some networks grumbled that the Iraqis were allowing only him to use his portable satellite camera from his hotel room, restricting every other network's cameras to the roof of the Ministry of Information.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story on Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi compares her leadership to “that of her predecessor, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, a centrist who supports the president’s action in Iraq.”
Gephardt indeed supports action in Iraq. But calling him a centrist is a bit much. The American Conservative Union gives Gephardt a 2002 rating of 8 out of 100, definitely placing Gephardt on the liberal end of the spectrum. Even Sen. Hillary Clinton (10) scored higher in 2002 than Gephardt.
Bush’s Big Mistake: Underestimating Saddam’s Support
Times reporters Adam Nagourney and (again) David Sanger team up today on Bush’s speech to Coast Guard workers in Philadelphia. “Bush Defends the Progress of the War” is crawling with anonymous “jittery” Republicans (strange how no jittery Democrats can be found on Capitol Hill, despite being on the wrong side of a popular war). “‘I don't understand what is floating his ship except patriotism and terrorism concerns,’ said one conservative Republican political strategist.” One wonders just who the Times, which considers Dick Gephardt a “centrist,” is calling “conservative.”
The Times questions whether Bush has “miscalculated the support Saddam Hussein enjoys.” If obeying orders of a Stalinist regime on pain of death counts as “support,” then indeed Iraq is full of Hussein “supporters.” They write: “Despite evidence that most Iraqis have not welcomed American forces, Mr. Bush cast himself as the country’s liberator.”
That statement should be laughed at by anyone who’s read the reporting of the Times own man in Baghdad, John Burns, who repeatedly points out the coerced anti-American posture of ordinary Iraqis.
Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mr.
Sanger -- Bush never claimed Iraq war would be easy
Did the Bush administration downplay the risks of war with Iraq? Times Washington reporter David Sanger seems eager to believe it. In his Sunday piece, “As a Quick Victory Grows Less Likely, Doubts Are Quietly Voiced, ” he insists the White House “is scrounging for evidence that it warned the nation all along that this could be a long slog, even in the face of predictions by Vice President Dick Cheney and others that, in all likelihood, the war would be quick and that ‘the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy.’ Mr. Cheney may yet prove to be right, the White House says, but 10 days into the war there is a recognition that the enthusiasm of the hawks got out of control.”
For one thing, Cheney was quoting a Middle East scholar. Cheney’s actual remarks to the convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars: “As for the reaction of the Arab street, the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.’”
Those keeping up on current events probably realize that “liberation” from Hussein’s forces has not dawned in Baghdad or Basra. Of course there won’t be joyful eruptions while Hussein’s thugs remain thick on the ground. Sanger is implying Cheney predicted a popular anti-Hussein uprising the moment the Allies arrived, but that’s not what the vice-president said.
As part of its “scrounging for evidence,” Sanger says the White House “dug out a speech Mr. Bush gave Oct. 7 in Cincinnati, where he said, ‘Military conflict could be difficult.’” But you don’t have to dig that deep to find Bush warning about war. From Bush’s Jan. 28 State of the Union address: "The technologies of war have changed; the risks and suffering of war have not. For the brave Americans who bear the risk, no victory is free from sorrow. This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come."
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org