Jingo all the way - media jingoism - Nov. '97 US-Iraq conflict - Editorial

Noam Chomsky could not have done a better job scripting the media coverage of the November showdown with Iraq. The range of acceptable debate ran the gamut from assassinating Saddam Hussein (the liberal position), to bombing Baghdad (the centrist position), to sending in the ground troops (the rightwing position).

During the crisis, it was virtually impossible to find any voice for peace in The New York Times or The Washington Post or on Nightline or This Week. Almost all the discussion focused on which military option the U.S. government should choose.

Thomas Friedman, the former chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now its foreign-affairs columnist, fired first. In his November 6 column, entitled "Head Shot," Friedman got right down to business. He advocated assassination. "Saddam Hussein is the reason God created cruise missiles," he wrote. "Given the nature of world politics today, and given America's feckless allies, the U.S. will get only one good military shot at Saddam before everyone at the U.N. starts tut-tutting and rushing to his defense. . . . So if and when Saddam pushes beyond the brink, and we get that one good shot, let's make sure it's a head shot."

Friedman was urging the Clinton Administration to break the law. Since 1978, an Executive Order has banned the use of assassination by the U.S. government. He was also urging the Clinton Administration to violate the Constitution. Only Congress has the right to declare war. Assassinating a foreign leader is surely an act of war.

But Friedman was not alone. George Stephanopolous, Clinton's former senior adviser, who plays a liberal on ABC's This Week, said on November 9 that "assassination is the more moral course."

Sam Donaldson, the ostensibly liberal co-host of the show. concurred: The United States should get rid of Saddam "under cover of law."

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter went along for the ride. On November 17, he wrote, "It won't be easy to take him out.... But we need to try, because the only language Saddam has ever understood is force."

"Take him down," added Newsweek's puerile editorial section, "Conventional Wisdom."

Traditional hawks like William Safire, A.M. Rosenthal, and Jim Hoagland were all of a feather, screeching for an attack. And William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, said only U.S. ground troops could dislodge Saddam.

At Ted Koppel's prompting, Lawrence Eagleburger urged a sustained bombing of Iraq. A few days later, Eagleburger and Stephanopolous were on Good Morning America with another free-wheeling debate. Stephanopolous called again for assassination ("It's illegal, but not immoral") while Eagleburger took the high road ("We should blast him day after day").

Newsweek and Time were especially egregious the week of November 24, when war looked most imminent. A life-sized picture of Saddam Hussein's face (replete with bloodshot eyes) glared out from Time's cover. A smaller Clinton pointed at Saddam's nose. Headline: "The Showdown."

Newsweek displayed not one but three head shots of Saddam Hussein on its cover. Six menacing eyes leered at the reader. The headline: "Can We Stop Saddam? His Dark Threat of Biological Warfare."

Time's lead article by Eric Pooley carried this subtitle: "As Diplomacy Falters and His Allies Balk, Clinton May Have to Go It Alone with an Air Strike Against Saddam." And it featured this choice bit of writing: "When the Iraqi nemesis bared his fangs...." The article all but begged Saddam Hussein to shoot at a U-2. "Clinton's choice would be simplified the moment Iraq launched a missile at a U-2 . . . or merely locked the plane in its radar-tracking sights."

Newsweek entitled its lead story "Saddam's Dark Threat." Accompanying it was a photo of a row of U.S. jet fighters raring to go (see Ruth Conniff's story on page 10). The opening paragraph compared Saddam Hussein to the big bad wolf: "He huffs and puffs." By the second paragraph, the scare machine was working at full speed: "Saddam decides to make Americans share the suffering of his people. He hires a terrorist cell to launch a biological- or chemical-weapons attack against an American target.... A zealot with an aerosol pump hidden in his briefcase standing inside a New York subway station--or outside the White House--could create chaos and slaughter."

This coverage was designed to help Clinton prepare the American populace for war. Clinton did his part, saying Saddam was "a threat to the children of the twenty-first century." Defense Secretary William Cohen whipped up hysteria by schlepping a bag of Domino's sugar onto the Sunday morning shows. He warned that if the bag was filled with anthrax and if someone dropped it in D.C., half of Washington would be dead.

Only after the Clinton Administration decided, fortunately, that a military attack would have enormous negative consequences did William Cohen put the sugar back on the shelf.

And only after the Russians had brokered a deal with Iraq did The New York Times publish a story by Nicholas Wade entitled "Germ Weapons: Deadly But Hard to Use." Wade pointed out that even if Iraq had chemical or biological weapons, it doesn't currently have the means to deliver them.