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War plan failed arnett { March 31 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55506-2003Mar30.html"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55506-2003Mar30.html
Peter Arnett, Back in the Minefield
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 31, 2003; Page C01
Peter Arnett, who fought off charges of conveying Iraqi propaganda during the first Gulf War, has handed fresh ammunition to those who say he sympathizes with Saddam Hussein's regime.
Arnett, who is in Baghdad covering the war for NBC, MSNBC and National Geographic, granted an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV. In the interview, which aired yesterday, he pronounced the U.S. effort so far a failure:
"It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces . . . help those who oppose the war. . . .
"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan."
The correspondent portrayed himself as a minority voice, saying: "Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I've been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration."
NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust said that "Peter Arnett and his crew have risked their lives to bring the American people up-to-date, straightforward information on what is happening in and around Baghdad. His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy. . . . His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more."
But Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, called the interview "more evidence that Peter Arnett is an agenda-driven reporter" who is "primed to believe the U.S. military is going to fail" and that "people resisting us must have a heroic aspect to them. And he's saying these things on Gestapo-run TV. It's incredible."
Tom Rosenstiel, who runs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said that given the past criticism of Arnett, "this is even more alarming or damaging for him. . . . Blurring the line between reporter and actor in the drama invites that same confusion and maybe even makes it worse."
Two members of Congress chided Arnett on Fox News. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said the reporter's remarks -- including praising the Iraqi Information Ministry for "unfailing courtesy and cooperation" -- were "Kafkaesque" and "just crazy. Let's hope that he's being coerced." The ministry has expelled reporters for Fox, CNN and other Western news outlets.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told the network that Arnett's comments were "absurd."
A White House official said Arnett was "coming from a position of complete ignorance. He's never designed a war plan or implemented a war plan. His judgment is suspect. . . . For him to state that to the Iraqi people is, I'd suspect, a certain level of pandering."
As Arnett noted in the interview, the first Bush administration "got very angry and called me a traitor" when he was a CNN correspondent in Baghdad in 1991. Then-Sen. Alan Simpson apologized for calling Arnett an Iraqi "sympathizer," saying he should have used the word "dupe" or "tool."
During that war, Arnett, whose reporting was censored by Iraqi handlers, interviewed Hussein and took a two-hour guided tour of what Iraq said was an infant-formula factory destroyed by American bombing. U.S. officials said the building was used to make biological weapons, and Marlin Fitzwater, then White House spokesman, accused Arnett of serving as a conduit for Iraqi "disinformation."
Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Associated Press reporting in Vietnam, suffered a major embarrassment in 1998 when he narrated a CNN documentary that had to be retracted over charges that U.S. troops had used nerve gas in that war. Arnett protested that he had contributed "not one comma" to the script, but CNN did not renew his contract the next year.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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