  |
|||
 
|
  Interviewed by SIMON DALLOW
Peter Arnett has reported on conflict throughout Asian and the Middle East in his 50 year career, witnessed the fall of Saigon, and interviewed Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, he also brought CNN's 24 hour news to the world, won a Pulitzer Prize and is now writing a book on the final days of Saddam's regime, and he's a character in a recent HBO movie about his experiences during the first Gulf War in Baghdad. This exerpt shows Peter arriving at the hotel where the rest of the CNN team are staying. Film exerpt… Peter you’re laughing away at that, didn’t you ever got to the point where you thought you were indestructible? PETER I know I'm definitely not indestructible, I am destructible, in act I live most of my time in Baghdad now and every day or two people I know or people close to those I know get killed and a lot of it just sort of peripheral action you’re driving to the airport and a car bomb is aimed at a US military unit or security force and you’re in the way and boom you’re dead and if you’re moving around the city and you get involved in a traffic scene where there's gunfire exchange, boom you can be killed. So I'm fully aware of that and I just keep my fingers crossed. SIMON So you just resign to what a random lottery of life in a war zone? PETER You know a city like Baghdad, five million people, each day some of them die, but most of them live, and even in Vietnam where many died you know you had a population of 50 million and many did die but as I said most lived so I have always played the odds that I will probably survive, and so far it's worked. SIMON So far. What makes someone want to become a War Correspondent? PETER I think there's – yeah there's a great tradition of reporters going with the military, initially maybe the great writers, Julius Caesar himself you know recorded his own actions as a military commander and certainly from the invention of the penny press and modern media in the 19th century the tradition of war reporting became very popular and as a young man in Invercargill and in Bluff I read the Fleet Street reporters' stories of World War II and the Spanish Civil War and the great adventures and I really thought these guys they can go and enjoy the war and they don’t have to shoot anyone, and I figured out that if you were a reporter you can go in for a lot and always leave and that’s the advantage I have. I live in Baghdad but I can leave any time I like, but the US troops there and most of the Iraqis there are stuck they can't leave. SIMON You describe it as you said as a boy as many of us do you read the stories of the war correspondents. It's a romantic notion though, how does the reality differ? PETER Well of course it is very very different, and that’s what I found in Vietnam, I was assigned there in 1962 as a young AP reporter associated Associated Press, US Associated Press, and of course it was death and destruction, terribly dangerous, but the biggest influence on my career was the meeting in Saigon in 1962 of the young American contingent of reporters, David Halbersan, Neil Sheehan, Stanley Connor, all went on to win Pulitzer Prizes become great historians and they took to Vietnam the view that government is accountable for its decisions. Up to that point a country declares war World War I, World War II, the media went along and beat the patriotic drum, these reporters had been in the south, in the American south, the civil rights struggle and they had a jaundiced view of authority they'd learnt, and they were also very well educated at major universities in the States, so they went to Saigon and demanded accountability of William Westmoreland and the general command, they demanded accountability of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, of course that made us very unpopular but I think it showed me there was more to covering war than the glamour and the thrill. We had a real responsibility and I still feel that way in Iraq. SIMON That desire can go across all journalists though, what separates the successful war correspondent from the one who doesn’t make it? PETER Well you survive, that’s the main difference. SIMON Those who can't handle the stress of being in that zone. PETER Certainly and I guess New Zealand, Australia and America's the same, most reporters would be satisfied with one war, because you know the credibility you gain from being in a war you know puts you on a fast track to management and success in the industry. So you know most of the reporters who covered the Vietnam, the Americans with me, either went on to write you know important books or went right up in management they didn’t need to go to any more wars. I was a different case I was from New Zealand and I was working in an American medium, and there weren't the opportunities say in management in the United States that would have been for an American but on the other hand when I went to live in the United States I didn’t want to be in management and I felt that you know I had a role to play in the world as a reporter. Another factor in my career that was very important, I spent 20 years with the Associated Press which was committed to cover all wars and still does, then I joined CNN which also had a stake in coverage, so for 40 years I was working for new organisations who when they thought of war thought of covering it and they thought of me, so you know they gave me the financial backing, the support, the security, the insurance and that was very important. I mean now I'm an independent writer in Baghdad it's a whole different scene. What I have to worry about my own security CNN pays 15 hundred dollars as day to security people to assist them, I can't afford 15 hundred dollars a day. SIMON We'll come to the highlights of your career and there are so many of them very shortly but I want to ask you about your observations of the fighting man, you wrote at length of the despair and devastation experienced by men under combat. How much does war reveal the true character of men? PETER Well you have two or three categories, you have the professional solider of which the US military in particular you have the graduates from Westpoint, the officer corps, and they're you would say steadfast, I mean that is a career option, many of them are descended from you know officers of previous wars, there's a great tradition, fighting tradition, so they would go through one war after the other, and you know after Vietnam the famous Vietnam syndrome that affected soldiers it didn’t really affect many in the office corps because you'd you and certainly in the United States you get a lot of prestige in the military, huge military force. Where you have the problems are with the regular soldier, he signs up for three years or five years and what it is it's separation from family, it is just living in rotten conditions. You know I was in Dubai just a few days ago staying at a hotel and group of Americans came down from Iraq, they had a weekend off and they looked gaunt and tired, I mean they were really ripped, and you know they were under enormous pressure they were having some relief in this hotel and having some drinking and playing, but you know they were showing the enormous pressure of being in contact with danger and also the requirement to kill the other guy and you know resist the enemy. This is stressful. SIMON You covered Vietnam 62 to 75, you were there pretty much for the whole time. How did the coverage of Vietnam change the approach to combat journalism. PETER As I mentioned earlier the reporters, certainly the American reporters demanded accountability of government. It made us very unpopular with the Pentagon, with successive presidents from President Kennedy through Johnson to Nixon, became very antagonistic to the media, they were used to a patriotic supportive media, but in Vietnam the media decided this is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place. A very big difference with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few years is that a patriotic feeling came into the American public, it was 9/11, it was the aftermath, even the media became patriotic so in the second Gulf War when I had the temerity to give an interview to Iraqi television I'd given many interviews to Iraqi television in the past, I've been covering Baghdad since 1991 and I was there every year, I was often in the media. This time it was so insulting you know to the patriotic spirit of the United States I was sort of you know I was a national you know treasonous, yet the previous times no one had really given a damn because no one had been sort of as involved in the conflict there as they became after 9/11 and they’ve perceived it as a threat to national identity. SIMON Let's take it back a little bit to many of the things you've mentioned. You stayed on in Vietnam when it fell in 1975, 30 year anniversary of that next Friday I believe. PETER Yeah I'm going over, I'll be there with my colleagues. SIMON But you also stayed on when Baghdad was bombed in Gulf War 1, that cemented yours and CNN's reputation. How different to now be reporting in an electronic environment? PETER They're still staying on the second Gulf War there were three or four hundred reporters, now most of the American reporters left Baghdad this time, their companies basically didn’t want to be responsible for the you know the dangers, but today even now there's probably 30 to 40 live different broadcasts every day from Baghdad, they happen to be behind you know concrete walls but you can actually work in an electronic environment even in the midst of conflict. The Gulf War showed it in the second Gulf War with the troops embedded with the US and British forces. I mean had live pictures of tanks going into action. So they can function under these circumstances. SIMON Well in 1991 of course a week after the conflict began you interviewed Saddam Hussein, what were your impressions of him? PETER Well you know he had been looked upon as the archetype Hitler of the Middle East and he you know he was a man that seemed pretty in control of his own destiny, he gave me an interview at great length, I mean he was coherent in his answers. SIMON Was he menacing? PETER Not particularly, in fact on the way to the interview I figured he was more concerned than I because the US air force wasn’t trying to kill me but they were trying to kill him. But he's not menacing, when you got to interview people even Osama Bin Laden, they're not menacing, to you the only reason they want to give an interview to you is to put their view forward so they tend to be more pleasant than personal, now I would want to have been seeing Saddam Hussein if I'd been involved in a CIA plot against his life, I'm sure he would have had a different attitude. SIMON Well as you mentioned you said you interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1997 four years before 9/11, how did he compare to Saddam? Did you have an inkling of what was to come? PETER No, we spent an hour and a half with Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains in a cave, he did lay out the framework of his policy, he said he would kill American civilians, he said he would change you know the face of the Middle East, that he'd dedicated his life to the destruction of western society. SIMON Did you believe him at this point, or did you think he was just talking big? PETER I figured he was talking big, on the other hand he clearly had an impressive supportive apparatus, I mean he controlled a very large part of Afghanistan at that point in time. Did I think 9/11 was coming, of course I didn’t, that was an inconceivable possibility. SIMON I'm gonna take you back to Gulf War 1, you contradicted official reports that a bombing target was a biological weapons factory showing instead that it produced milk powder for babies. You were then accused of unpatriotic journalism, how did you react? PETER Well I was very uncomfortable with that, because being called unpatriotic is a tremendous slur on the United States, you know treasonous, and those Americans can get very angry at you and on that occasion there were thousands sent letters to CNN demanding that I be pulled out of Baghdad. SIMON How do you reconcile the objectivity of journalism with patriotism which is never objective? PETER Well in my career the patriotic aspect didn’t arise until Gulf War II because certainly Vietnam was not a patriotic war and American's military excursions after that time in central America and elsewhere were not seen as patriotic wars, so it was only the Gulf War this whole mystique of the national identity with the media and the government emerge and that existed only for a couple of years, it certainly doesn’t apply any more, and it was not easy because the mainstream media in the United States has since admitted that it swung totally along with the British administration being supportive, did not do the kind of investigative reporting they should have done. The New York Times had admitted it went along totally with the weapons of mass destruction claims without questioning, and many American journalists have apologised since for being overly patriotic, but it was part of the feeling of the times. I was in New York City you know when 9/11 happened, I was shocked like so many other journalists, I mean we get pulled along by fear and anger and the 9/11 had a greater effect on Americans than any other event since Pearl Harbour, we now know that. There is a shift back in the US media now to be a more realistic assessment of what's going on, it's a little late for Iraq because the path there is pretty well set, chaos and problems indefinitely. SIMON Can you get a realistic assessment as has been the practice recently when you embed journalists? PETER It is a way to get more information. What you get is a closer angle to what the military are doing, but as one journalist said after the war well it was one thing being with the tanks and watching them fire at those villages in the distance, but we never did see where the shells landed, and she was highly criticised for saying that. But you do get an interesting you know a gripping account of how soldiers actually go into action and I think embedding is a good idea but you also need the other side, it's good to have people who are on the other side to actually see where the shells land. It's not easy to do it. SIMON But do we get enough of a balance? PETER You never get enough balance in war because you know it's difficult to figure out you know the geopolitics or the internal disruption that wars cause, it's an after effect reality that you’re learning, like now I'm writing a book about the Saddam regime. After the war I said to myself you know if he wasn’t making weapons of mass destruction, if Saddam and his people weren't cosying up to Al Qaeda what were they doing, and I've since basically learned that Saddam was in his dotage in the last three or four years he was sort of writing romantic novels, one of which his daughter will publish soon, that his sons were fighting for power within Iraq, didn’t have any you know geopolitical or regional or international ambitions and the country was falling apart. Rather than being this fearsome you know terrorist state that would go on to make weapons of mass destruction and destroy America the place was crumbling after 30 years it was just fronting chaos, we didn’t as journalists know that, now we're finding it out. SIMON You've suggested that son Uday in particular was preparing to overthrow Saddam, was he more dangerous? PETER Uday was psychopathic, on the other hand his father killed a lot of people, Uday was probably capable of you know greater cruelty maybe than Iraq had seen but he did not seem to have as I say you know your political ambitions, he was more interested in getting power within the country, money and all the rewards had brought, he had 17 hundred automobiles, 52 Roll Royces, I counted them all after the war, 52 Rolls Royces. SIMON One for every week. Allow me now to bring in our panel, this is Gillian Bradford from the ABC and from the Christchurch Press Andrew Holden, what would you like to ask Peter. GILLIAN BRADFORD, NZ Correspondent, ABC PETER Yours absolutely right, ironically you know we were much safer under the Saddam regime because they did treasure us they invited in to present their viewpoint, we've since been criticised for presenting that viewpoint but there were no casualties under Saddam, there was one reporter for a British newspaper who made the mistake of getting involved in espionage and he was executed, but the rest of us did alright. Today journalists are as fair game as any other foreigner within Iraq or any Iraqi who is perceived by the insurgents to be supporting development of the country. So basically the international media is totally dependent on Iraqi staff. We live in sort of barricaded hotels in concrete walls and if we travel – if we go anywhere – when I say we I say the mainstream media, if they go anywhere they have security people, it is the Iraqi reporters who go out to take the pictures, do the interviews and a lot of those have died, I mean there's 60 or 70 journalists been killed in Iraq since the war began which is a tragedy. ANDREW HOLDEN, Deputy Editor, Christchurch Press PETER I think Fox should declare its right wing. I think most of other reporters, I mean I'm regarded as being a liberal, I sort of because I go to the battle scenes I shift with what I see, what's in front of me. You know the baby milk plant that was controversial in the first Gulf War the Iraqis said it was a baby milk plant, I went to the plant, you know there was baby milk on the floor a lot of it from New Zealand by the way was sent from New Zealand to be pasteurised and I took samples back to the hotel and from my personal observation it was a baby milk plant, because it was a baby milk plant, but at that point the US didn’t want to be blamed for hurting a civilian target, but I've always felt that if it talk about what I personally see you know I'll have an unblemished career, in fact the two or three times I've had career problems is when I didn’t report what I see but I reported what others had told me or I read what other had written. So report what you see and you never make mistakes. SIMON Speaking of what you saw, we have a photo that you took. I've been reading a book One Crowded Hour by combat cameraman Neil Davis, this is him carrying the Bell & Howell camera, leaping across a field, you took this photo, he later died, you witnessed the death of many colleagues and as you said earlier the deaths of Iraqis that you know and friends of friends. How do you deal with the horrifying experiences the trauma of war? PETER One of the reasons I stay being a reporter is because of people like Neil Davis and so many other wonderful colleagues, Larry Burrows, the great photographer. I know that if they were still alive they'd be in Baghdad with me today, so in a sense I'm carrying on the great traditions that they had, they were pure wonderful journalist photographers, cameramen, particularly Neil Davis. They would be there with me so in a sense I'm representing them. In terms of dealing with the disaster and destruction it's difficult but you know as journalists fortunately we have the cathartic you know opportunity to explain, talk about what we're saying if you’re in mainstream media every evening you give the report of the carnage you've seen during the day. You can tell the story of the misery, so you’re making the whole world miserable maybe but at least you’re getting that information out to the world, and I think that’s one of the missions we have as reporters, you involved the whole world or a whole region or a whole town in what's happening in the community, we're serving a purpose, and if you feel you’re serving the purpose it makes the dangers you know bearable. SIMON Peter Arnett's it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on Agenda, thank you very very much. Copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda |
||