Stardate 20030330.2112

(On Screen): Peter Arnett was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his reporting during the Vietnam War. In 1991 he worked for CNN and was the only major TV news reporter in Baghdad during the war. His satellite reports from there helped make CNN the top-rated news station during the crisis. A few years later, he left CNN.

Arnett was the on-air reporter of the 1998 CNN report that accused American forces of using sarin gas on a Laotian village in 1970 to kill U.S. defectors. Two CNN employees were sacked and Arnett was reprimanded over the report, which the station later retracted. Arnett ultimately left the network.

Now he works for NBC, and is back in Baghdad again, and he's just given an interview on Iraqi TV. I won't go so far as to say that he just committed treason, but it was highly irresponsible, and almost certainly will prolong the war and raise the body count, especially among Iraqi citizens. We haven't seen anything like this since Representative McDermott's interview in Baghdad last year. That was bad, but in many ways this is worse.

Part of war is psychological. One of the things we've been trying to do is to shake the confidence of the Iraqi leadership, because having them break and run is one of the ways this war could be ended. There are a number of other ways in which it could help. Arnett's interview assures the Iraqi leadership that they're doing well, that the original American plan is in shreds and that we're hurriedly writing another one, and that the government of Iraq has a good chance of winning. In one fell swoop he may have undone months of psyops.

The Iraqi strategy has always been to prolong the war, to try to make it as bloody as possible, with a high body count both in American soldiers and in Iraqi civilians. The idea was that as the cost in civilians rose this would energize the American left to oppose the war, and as the cost in GIs rose it would reduce support from the right. The theory was that this would eventually bring pressure to bear on Congress, who would in turn put pressure on Bush or even revoke his authorization for war.

Arnett told them it's working, and that if they just keep it up, Bush will back off.

In answer to your question, 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, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments. ...

Yeah, I think American policy and strategy is the weakest when it comes to the Iraqi people. The U.S. administration is concerned with the possibility of killing civilians, because the international community is very concerned about the Iraqi people. President Bush says he is concerned about the Iraqi people, but if Iraqi people are dying in numbers, then American policy will be challenged very strongly.

So all you have to do is start creating scenes of mass death among Iraqi civilians, and claim that they're the result of American bombing. If you do that, then it's going to bring intolerable pressure to bear on Bush and he'll have to withdraw.

That wouldn't actually work; there's every reason to believe that Bush intends to continue to prosecute this war no matter what. But if this does encourage the Iraqi government to start creating lots of death scenes to blame on us, then the people killed will actually be dead, and their blood will be on Arnett's hands.

Whether or not the last two market-explosions in Baghdad were theirs or ours, this virtually guarantees that there will be some bomb blasts somewhere caused by the Iraqi government itself. Arnett told them that they need to provide some high-profile events, the more graphic and tragic the better, to give America's anti-war protesters political ammunition, and by so doing wrote the death warrant for perhaps hundreds of Iraqi civilians. He indicated that American resolve was weak, and by so doing drastically reduced the chance of a revolt to topple Saddam.

NBC fully supports him.

The interview was broadcast in English and translated by a green military uniform-wearing Iraqi anchor. NBC said Arnett gave the interview when asked shortly after he attended an Iraqi government briefing.

"His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy and was similar to other interviews he has done with media outlets from around the world," NBC News spokeswoman Allison Gollust said. "His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more. His outstanding reporting on the war speaks for itself." ...

He went to Iraq this year not as an NBC News reporter but as an employee of the MSNBC show, "National Geographic Explorer." When other NBC reporters left Baghdad for safety reasons, the network began airing his reports.

National Geographic Explorer? What in hell was he doing in Iraq working for that show?

NBC's statement today was disgraceful in itself. Arnett's "outstanding reporting" is going to get a lot of people killed.

NBC wasn't re