MediaWatch: March 1991
Table of Contents:
Reporters Predicted Long, Bloody War
SADDAM'S "CAPABLE MILITARY MIND"
Thanks to the combination of superior weapons and brilliant strategy, the predicted bloody, drawn-out ground war became a hundred hour rout. While just about every "expert" was proven wrong about it and the air campaign in which allied planes went nearly unscathed, the media deserve special focus. As ABC's Judd Rose explained on the January 24 Prime Time Live, reporters "are really the conveyors of truth in a very critical time and people need to know that truth."
On the January 4 CBS Evening News reporter Richard Threlkeld discussed war prospects: "Certainly a lot of Americans would die, an estimated 2,500 of them in just the first ten days of battle. American troops would do most of the fighting and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them would be casualties along with countless thousands of Iraqis, soldiers and civilians."
A week before the war began, on the January 11 NBC Nightly News, economics correspondent Mike Jensen warned: "Sometimes war is good for the economy. But war in the Persian Gulf would send oil prices shooting up and set off a wave of inflation worldwide and that would be terrible for the economy."
Two days later Washington Post reporters Molly Moore and Barton Gellman offered this erroneous analysis: "Navy war planes returning from bombing raids may face withering fire from allied war ships that mistake the planes for enemy craft; retreating and advancing allied ground forces may end up confused and firing on each other."
After describing the U.S. war plan, Newsweek reporter Charles Lane cautioned: "Some A-10 pilots worry that the fast-flying F-15E and the Army's gadget-laden Apache helicopter will be of little use against Iraqi tank columns -- and the Iraqis may be able to mount an effective low-tech air defense using concentrated machine gun fire and thick smoke from burning Kuwaiti crude."
During a January 27 NBC special, reporter Arthur Kent asserted: "Saddam Hussein is a cunning man and no where does he show that more clearly than on a battlefield when he's under attack." Anchor Faith Daniels responded: "And that, Arthur, really seems to be this Administration's greatest miscalculation." Kent agreed: "That's right, Faith. He is ruthless, but more than ruthless. In the past 11 days, he's surprised us. He's shown us a capable military mind and he still seems to know exactly what he's doing."
As the ground war approached, Newsweek Senior Editor Russell Watson ominously predicted in the February 11 edition: "Saddam Hussein's soldiers are not known for their skill on attack, but on defense they are among the world's best, and they have had six months to prepare for this battle. They can be expected to fight stubbornly, protected by a daunting array of minefields, antitank ditches and hardened fortifications -- daring their enemies to engage in the kind of brutal trench warfare that went out of military fashion after the ghastly slaughter of World War I."
The same week, Time's Bruce Nelan asserted: "[Hussein] can only hope that the allied troops will come to him in a frontal assault on his fixed positions. If that occurs, his troops would almost certainly let fly with shells loaded with chemical weapons -- mustard gas that sears and blisters, nerve agents that cause death in minutes, or even biological killers like anthrax and botulism."
"Remember all that chatter about a short war? Well, forget it," began a February 4 Time story by George J. Church headlined "A Long Siege Ahead."
