Journalist speaks at WVU
MORGANTOWN – Acclaimed print and broadcast war correspondent Peter Arnett doesn’t regret his 2003 comments to Iraqi television that got the Pulitzer Prize winner fired by NBC and National Geographic Explorer. Speaking primarily to West Virginia University journalism students Wednesday night as a guest of WVU professor Dr. George Esper, a Uniontown native, Arnett said time has proved truthful his comments about failed U.S. war planning in Iraq.
“It was absolutely accurate,” said Arnett, who noted that the only people of import who saw the initial broadcast were in the Associated Press bureau in Cairo. But their reporting sent his comments worldwide and caused problems for Arnett, who like Esper had gained fame as an AP correspondent covering the Vietnam War.
According to CNN.com, in the controversial interview Arnett said, “The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of Iraqi forces.”
Arnett also said he wasn’t on the NBC staff at the time of the controversy, but was only helping out that network because he was already in the country.
At WVU, Arnett also made a more formal presentation Thursday night, titled “From Vietnam to Iraq: A Changing Media World,” as part of the Ogden Newspapers Seminar Series hosted by the P.I. Reed School of Journalism.
But he told Esper’s class and other students that many Iraqis supported the U.S.-led toppling of former dictator Saddam Hussein because “they were sick of Saddam and his sons.” However, Arnett said the reality is that the Iraqis are “tough, hostile people” with a 3,000-year history in a volatile region, and they don’t necessarily favor a continued U.S. presence.
“In Iraq, I think that what the (U.S.) soldiers are doing is really appreciated (by the American public),” said Arnett. He said that the embedding of reporters and the subsiding of post-9/11 fever have positively affected media reports, noting, “I think it’s getting to the point now where you have balance and reality.”
Arnett said that journalists are human, too, and felt the same disgust, fear and anger over Sept. 11 as other Americans. But he noted that the passage of time has proven that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, debunking the Bush administration’s prime justification for going to war. And the war toll now includes 1,500 U.S. dead, 15,000 to 20,000 Iraqi dead, and a $200 billion to $300 billion financial cost to the United States, said Arnett.
After winning his Pulitzer Prize for covering the Vietnam War, an assignment where he spent 13 years and wrote 3,000 stories, many of them battlefield accounts, Arnett joined the CNN television network in 1981. During his 18 years with CNN, he covered many armed conflicts, including Gulf War I in 1991, when he gained further acclaim for his live reports from Baghdad.
He’s interviewed Hussein and terrorist Osama bin Laden, doing the latter interview in 1997 in a cave in Tora Bora. Although he’s put himself in harm’s way many times to get the story, Arnett said he doesn’t worry about his own safety. He said that so many soldiers fell dead around him during Vietnam that he often feels he’s lived on borrowed time.
“I’m totally fatalistic,” said Arnett, who explained that although the airplane does corkscrew landings to avoid ground fire when he travels back to Baghdad, “I haven’t had a hangnail in 40 years (as a journalist).”
Arnett said that as a journalist, he always prefers to witness events because that perspective puts him closest to the ultimate goal of finding and reporting the truth. He said that 64 reporters died in Vietnam in the attempt to bring the truth about that conflict to the American and world publics.
“The example (reporters) should set is reporting what they see,” said Arnett. “More information is better than less information … The sooner we can get to the truth of the issue, the better. I’m willing to risk shot and shell to get to the truth.”
Arnett said that worldwide, 200 to 300 journalists are killed each year, in places like Sierra Leone and Ghana, for simply doing their jobs. He said most of them are barely paid and still run the risk of being killed just for doing local news.
Arnett also said that the U.S. government often derided those who performed truthful reporting in Vietnam, even as soldiers in the field hailed those reporters for telling the real story. “After the war, we were basically accused of aiding and abetting the enemy,” said Arnett, who added of Vietnam, “It was the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place.
“(But) in those days, who do you believe? The president or the reporter? You believe the president.”
Esper, who was nominated for his own Pulitzer Prize while in Vietnam, said of Arnett’s dedication, “No one (in the press) saw more combat, and no one put himself more on the line.”