The showing of the American press in the Gulf War was, in the overall analysis, pretty poor. There are exceptions to this general rule, but the list is very short and it consists mostly of CNN people: Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman don’t have much company on it. Christiane Amanpour deserves a place, not only for her reporting, but also for her dry wit. Peter Jennings of ABC did a pretty good piece called “Line in the Sand.” Dorothy Rabinowitz deserves mention, but the war she was covering was that of the press against the military, not the military against Iraq. At its best, the press was workmanlike and fairly competent. At its worst it was amateurish and incompetent.
And ignorant. In a piece on surface-to-surface missiles shortly before the start of the bombing, the missiles shown supporting the voice-over were SA-6s—surface-to-air missiles that do not remotely resemble, in form or function, what was being discussed. The first day of the ground fighting, ABC’s Forrest Sawyer reported on “Soviet-made 135mm artillery fire.” The Soviets don’t make a 135mm piece; he was probably referring to the 130mm M1946, give or take five mm. CBS’ Bob McKeown was among the first U.S. newsman to send back live pictures of Marines liberating Kuwait City; interviewing Kuwaiti citizens on the street, McKeown asked an armed Kuwaiti freedom fighter, “Is that a Kalashnikov or an M-16?” At one of the British daily briefings during the bombing, CNN’s Rick Sallinger asked how planners could tell the difference between military and civilian fuel storage facilities, apparently under the impression that military and civilian vehicles would use different flavors of gasoline.
“The sloppy and sometimes stupid questions at widely watched military briefings—for many viewers their first exposure to the mechanics of news gathering—simply erode the standing of the press further,” Newsweek wrote.
This opinion was not, predictably, shared by all of the press. Stephen S. Rosenfeld wrote a column entitled “Grading the Press,” in which he handed out A’s and B’s to his colleagues and his profession, no C’s, D’s, or F’s. The B grades:
The A grades:
A grading system in which there are only two grades basically translates into pass-fail. Let us take an A grade to mean that Rosenfeld is satisfied with performance, a B to mean that it could have been better. One of the two A’s goes to Arnett—who deserved it. He did good work, as did Amanpour and others when they rejoined him. Rosenfeld was simply defending a colleague against unwarranted criticism.
“Encouraging a broad public debate” really translates to talking about a subject. Kissinger and Brzezinski are fixtures on the expert circuit. They and the other military and diplomatic “strategists” produced such a babble of conflicting and overlapping opinion, portentously delivered, that the fascination of us “amateur generals” wore off quickly. They were one of the reasons why we put so much credence in what the military briefers said; the real military men seemed to know what they were talking about.
The lower grades—what we could take as “fail”—were in the two more important areas of the press’ functions: telling the story and sorting out the reasons for events. Censorship was widely blamed for the failure of the first. The second is probably due first to the determination to re-report Vietnam, followed by the realization that this wasn’t Vietnam, the public wasn’t up in arms, and that the press as a whole was out of practice at being Ernie Pyle, William L. Shirer, or Bernard Fall.
The basics of reporting are “Who, what, when, where, why,” in that order. The press didn’t remember how to find these primary bits of information in other than an adversarial mode. It was reduced to asking “How do you feel?” To this question, admittedly, there are many possible answers; unfortunately, they all translate into “good,” “bad,” or “indifferent.”
When the press was admired by the public, it was often for reasons other than its reporting. Arthur Kent, of NBC, became a celebrity by driving vaporous ladies wild. Fan clubs sprang up and admirers sent him telexes and phone messages, apparently more in response to his good looks than because of his command of the subjects he was covering. Johnny Carson dubbed him the “Scud Stud.” Luckily for domestic tranquility, no female reporters were dubbed “Scud Sluts.”
Much of the press is politically correct and it is fashionable to be anti-military. The press spends much of its time talking to other members of the press corps. The result, when it comes to war coverage, is often inbred stupidity.
“I think you had 20 years since Vietnam,” Peter Braestrup, a veteran war correspondent stated on CNN’s “The Press Goes to War:”
You had a small sprinkling of experienced military people and you also had a vast gulf between the military and the media. There’d been a divorce in American society since Vietnam, since the end of the draft, between the military and the population as a whole. And the media people were kind of yuppies in the desert when this thing started... They didn’t know the difference between a battalion and a brigade, a cannon and a missile...
“But so what?” Bob Beckel, the moderator broke in to ask him. “I mean, they were reporters, they wanted to report the story...” The statement is indicative of the questioner’s own ignorance. Reporting on military operations without knowing the basic facts about military organization, hardware, and tactics is akin to reporting on farm affairs and referring to “horsies and moo-moos.” The journalists were taking the test without having done their homework.
The press’s anti-military tone was set by the political columnists, such as Mary McGrory, Flora Lewis, Colman McCarthy, and a handful of others. They produced an absolutely predictable “party line” of opposition to to the military, and to War (with a capital “W”).
McGrory referred to the Gulf War as “George Bush's designer war — high-tech, low casualties...” The press coverage of the Gulf? “They report what the brass tells them to report. They are censored, of course; they are chaperoned as well... One who struck out on his own, Bob Simon of CBS News,” she hinted darkly, “disappeared in the desert.” (Simon was released — by the Iraqis, not by the Americans — before the cease-fire was signed. Bearded and skinny, he seemed happy to return to the custody of his American tormentors once the Iraqis were finished literally spitting in his face.)
Some good things were done by the press, though, and paradoxically some of the best things that were done earned the most flak from those who should have known better. Peter Arnett was the foremost victim of this. The CNN reporter was the sole American still reporting from Baghdad for most of the war, our “man on the inside.” Reporting with the Iraqis at his elbow, he kept us abreast of as much of the mood and tone of Iraqi officialdom as he could. His efforts were commendable, despite his condemnation by Sen. Bob Simon — who should have known better and who at least later apologized.
Probably the root of the press’ problem with the war was the fact that the public was suddenly getting its news raw and uninterpreted. The daily military briefings gave the public as much as the military was willing to release, followed by a question and answer session that usually added nothing to what had already been said. Many of those reporters who did bravely strike out on their own came to grief, like the lost CBS crew, like the lost gaggle of newspeople rounded up by the Iraqis near Basra as they tried to cover the aftermath. When they succeeded in their missions, they often produced filler material, footage or reports with no basic content.
Because the press was in the position where it could have gone on to flesh out what was presented at the military briefings — more information on the tactics and quality of the units involved at Khafji, for instance — and because it didn’t do that, its complaints over the repression of the military of its coverage of the war seem without very much substance.
The Gulf War could be termed the “CNN War” with a good deal of justification. With 24-hour news available, we came home from work and turned it on, without having to sit through reruns of Norman Lear comedies until the networks were ready to feed us. If we were lucky enough to stay home for the day, we could leave the TV on CNN and get the news as soon as it was reported.
This was the raw news that Newsweek objected to, and it was the difference between CNN and the broadcast networks. Being closer to the source, we did our own interpretation, rather than having Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings do it for us. We found ourselves trusting Bernard Shaw because he usually kept his opinions to himself. When he did give them, the fact made them more valuable, making us feel like he’d thought about them first.
CNN did occasionally make a try in the direction of interpreting the news—with its “Special Assignment” series, especially — but the tries were half-hearted. It was obvious that nothing was being added to the value of the information.
This is the difference between reporting and journalism, it seems. Journalism would like us to believe that it checks its information, ponders and considers, analyzes and interprets, while all reporting does is pass on what happened or what somebody said. Journalism also gives us fabricated quotes, and somehow managed to ponder, consider, analyze, and interpret that the Republican Guard was being “decimated” at the same time Wolf Blitzer was reporting what somebody told him. For all its reporting of the opinions of 13-year-olds, its pieces on combat gynecologists, and the premature demise of the Republican Guard, CNN remained head and shoulders above the traditional networks.
Of the three major news magazines, Newsweek was almost as far ahead of the pack as CNN was. U.S. News and World Report, the smallest in circulation, usually lacked the depth and detail of the Big Two. Time’s editors seemed consistently to be trying to report Vietnam, waiting with bated breath for the body bags to roll in and the Sixties to return. “The War Comes Home,” it reported as its cover story of the February 18th issue, with a picture of a young-looking Lance Cpl. Thomas Jenkins, who had been killed in action. “A small California mining town mourns a native son killed in a desert battle in Saudi Arabia,” it informed us, lugubriously.
Newsweek, in contrast, usually seemed supportive of the war, despite some remarkably silly letters to the editor, despite hiring some ill-informed experts, and despite occasional efforts by its reporters to push in the other direction. It hired retired Col. David Hackworth as a correspondent in Saudi Arabia, which at least gave an informed look at what was happening on the ground, despite his occasional posturing and a large ego.
Probably a good deal of Saddam Hussein’s miscalculation in the course of his war can be attributed to the American press and its opinions. Time and Newsweek were usually wrong in their assessment of the military’s capabilities. Newsweek, for example, in assessing the Army’s capabilities:
When they hit Iraqi lines, U.S. ground forces will be counting on their own expensive and sophisticated weaponry, but the technological match between them and the Iraqi Army is much closer than it was in the air... the images from this phase of the battle are likely to be the traditional kind: grueling and bloody.
On the M1 tank, the magazine quoted Andrew Duncan, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: “It will prove less mobile than its inferior colleagues because it will run out of fuel sooner.” Not only that, but “its powerful turbine sucks in vast volumes of air; it is unclear how its three giant air filters will handle desert dust.”
On the Apache helicopter, its acquisition and targeting system had never been tried in the heat and dust of the desert, implying they had sat idle during the time they had been waiting for the ground offensive to start and had not taken part in exercises. The Iraqis had 40 Soviet Mi-24s and 60 French Gazelles, both of which were fitted with tank-killing missiles which had proven effective in the Iran-Iraq war.
We were outclassed in artillery, too. But worst:
Iraq’s great equalizers are low tech: trenches, minefields and tank ditches... But for all the technology being deployed on both sides, the battle may hinge on the ability of allied commanders—more professional than the Iraqis, but less tested in combat—to think their way around obstacles.
Nor were the experts all that much better in their assessments. James Blackwell, CNN’s resident expert in military affairs, opined while the air war was still in its early stages that a ground campaign would be bloody, not as easy as the air war had been to that point. The Iraqi army had defended Iraq during the war with Iran, and we could not assume it would retreat or surrender.
At first, Newsweek reported, “Pentagon planners worried about military experts hired by the networks diagramming possible allied flanking attacks on TV. But soon they realized that so many different maneuvers had been leaked that Iraqi intelligence must be hopelessly confused.”
For all its shortcomings, the press was very interested in itself. Besides Rosenfeld’s self-congratulatory back-patting, CNN had “The Press Goes to War” periodically, to discuss how the press was doing. This was in large part a carping session.
In one memorable episode, Richard Reeves of the New York Times stated categorically that “We’re being lied to every day.” He didn’t know what the lies were—he didn’t know enough to cover the war, and he doubted anyone else did, surely one of the most inflated egos ever seen on television. Journalists couldn’t talk to soldiers—American citizens!—without having someone there to say “You can’t use that.” Reeves considered a military officer “just another bureaucrat” and saw no reason whatsoever to trust one. The press should just give up and go home, rather than “volunteering to be a handmaiden to the government.”
Dorothy Rabinowitz, of The Wall Street Journal appeared on the same program with Reeves and pointed out that Americans had gotten 25 years of an adversarial relationship between the press and the government, and now the bill was coming home; the people weren’t impressed with the arguments. Rabinowitz saw no reason to say the military was lying, and castigated the press for making itself the central issue. The public didn’t accept the press’ axiom that its role was that of the skeptic; if there was security at stake, the public was willing to take less than everything the press could dig out of the corners. It would settle for the available facts.
Elsewhere, Walter Cronkite didn’t agree with her, and he took upon himself the role of the press’ senior complainer. In testimony before Congress, he stated that the U.S. military was arrogantly “trampling on the American people’s right to know.” Journalists should be given free access to the battle front—like they had enjoyed in Vietnam. “The military... has the responsibility of giving all the information it possibly can to the press and the press has every right, to the point of insolence, to demand this,” he thundered in a piece in Newsweek. “An American citizen is entitled to ask: ‘What are they trying to hide?’ The answer might be casualties from shelling, collapsing morale, disaffection, insurrection, incompetent officers, poorly trained troops, malfunctioning equipment, widespread illness—who knows?”
Polls suggested that the public supported the military’s imposition of controls on journalists. The press and its supporters tended to be dismissive of these. “Don’t get blinded by the polls,” Jeff Cohen, of the liberal Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting—not a reporter himself, at least—advised:
A new study from the University of Massachussetts about what TV viewers know, what this study found... is that, the more you watched TV, the less you knew about the Gulf War policy or the Middle East region, and the less you knew, the more you supported the war, and the level of ignorance from heavy TV watchers is something that I think pollsters should question the basis on which the American public makes its opinion and not just its opinion.
Not very coherent, perhaps, or even very grammatical, but indicative of the esteem with which the rest of us were held by the press. Roughly translated, Cohen simply stated that our opinion didn’t count; if we knew what he and the rest of the elite knew, then we wouldn’t have been supporting the war as we did.
Once the victory was won, the effort began to educate the public into “correct” opinions: the accomplishments of the war hadn’t been as great as they had seemed at the time.
Bill Moyers blamed the United States for creating Saddam Hussein, calling him a “Frankenstein’s monster” that had escaped from the laboratory. He compared the dictator to Battista, Somoza, Marcos, Thieu, the Shah, and Noriega and faulted Bush and Reagan for backing Iraq against Iran. He made the obligatory salute to Powell and Schwarzkopf and the bravery of the troops, but stated flatly that “this was never an even match.” The process of rewriting history was begun, starting from the point of blaming the victim, as had been done with Kuwait.
The postmortem was the point where the antiwar movement and the press joined. The January 31st edition of the Los Angeles Times carried an article by John E. Mack and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, of the International Society of Political Psychology, critiquing how the U.S. got into the war. Among the grievous sins the Bush administration had committed:
We demonized and dehumanized Saddam Hussein and we derogated the other side’s conciliatory gestures. There was “personal name-calling... threats and insults.” The dictator had been “demeaned and humiliated,” which had accounted for his failure to vacate Kuwait and restore that which he had destroyed. We should have taken the release of the hostages in December as a show of good faith, not as a cynical attempt to buy time and to drive a wedge into American public opinion.
We denied our own contribution to the problem. The writers refer to the U.S. contribution to “bolstering Iraq’s war machine” and fault Glaspie’s “permissive signals” before the invasion. The unstated implication here is that we somehow drove Iraq to steal a country and then to devastate it, another iteration of Moyers’ “Frankenstein” argument.
We relied exclusively on the threatened use of force, we over-committed ourselves to a course of action, we insisted that the conflict be regarded as zero-sum, and we paid lip service to efforts toward a diplomatic solution. That is, we “entertained only two possibilities: Hussein could get out of Kuwait, or he could remain there and invite expulsion by force.” The writers fault the administration for its diplomatic efforts and for attempting to stare down the bully. The deadlines were bad ideas.
We disregarded the other side’s stated grievances and claims, while demanding unconditional surrender and we used public presentation of conditions to intimidate the other side. “By demanding that Iraq give up Kuwait unconditionally, while offering no negotiating incentives, we forced Hussein into a corner from which he could perceive no way out but martyrdom or fighting back.” By demanding it publicly, we made matters worse.
We took no account of cultural differences. We failed to consider Saddam Hussein’s “willingness to martyr himself and to sacrifice his people” in standing up to the West.
We offered a response that was disproportional to the problem. International boundaries are not “sanctified,” and besides, Kuwait’s boundaries had been drawn “arbitrarily” in 1961 by the British.
These themes were dutifully taken up by other right-thinkers, as witness letters to Newsweek:
Grenada, Panama, Iraq. With every victory, the United States seems all the more ready to use military force. Wouldn’t it be nice for us to solve our own problems before tackling world problems?
The war wasn’t Vietnam redeemed. It was Grenada revisited: find a weak Third World country; demonize its leadership; inflate its military prowess; send in the troops; keep out the press, and watch the president’s poll ratings soar.
In the same vein, the seriousness of the task could be cut down. U.S. intelligence sources were reported by the Washington Post to have significantly overestimated the Iraqis and their capabilities. Only 350,000 troops had been in Kuwait and southern Iraq at the start of the war, fewer than the 540,000 claimed by the Pentagon. Many of the front-line units were manned at only half strength. The Republican Guards were at 80 percent strength. Personnel logs captured after the end of hostilities showed that up until a few weeks before the beginning of the air campaign Iraqi troops were allowed to take leave to visit their families. At least 20 percent never returned to their units.
There are many ways to count the number of troops within a particular area. One method is to count the number of boots and divide by two; this will give a very accurate count, off by only the number of one-legged people. A more reasonable method is to count the number of divisions and multiply by a reasonable strength level, normally a known factor. An American heavy division has about 17,000 men. A Soviet division has about 14,000.
The Iraqis had 42 divisions within the KTO. Using a figure of 10,000 men per division, this would produce a figure of 420,000. Add in corps-level and higher personnel and other non-divisional elements—SCUD crews, for instance—and a figure 20 percent higher is not in the least unreasonable. And a 10,000-man division is not very large in modern-day terms. As it turned out, given the high desertion rate among the Iraqis before and during the air war, a 10,000-man division was the exception, rather than the norm. Had CENTCOM counted on that, and had it not been the case, the casualties could have been much higher on the allies’ side.
The United States is ill-served by this kind of journalism, but there are no real options to getting rid of it. All we can do is hope that the Bernard Shaws of the world eventually outnumber the Bill Moyers’. Young journalists want to be Woodward and Bernstein, not Murrow or Pyle.
There is some hope, though. Along with the pretty boys, light-weights, and would-be heroes, there were Shaw, Holliman, and Arnett, under their table with the microphone hanging out the window to bring us, live, the sound of the air attacks. Col. Hackworth was self-consciously “grunt” (colonels don’t really grunt; enlisted men and noncoms do) but he knew what he was talking about when it came to ground warfare. Christiane Amanpour’s wit contrasts markedly with Cokie Roberts’ superficial understanding of the subject she was trying to discuss; Amanpour was willing to let the story unfold. It was dramatic enough without embellishments.