To war's critics, I say U.S. safety comes first

Bill O'Reilly
The Daily News 3/24/2003

No surprise, ideologues on both the left and the right are screaming that media coverage of the Iraq war is slanted away from their beliefs. The sound and fury are predictable and not very important, because there are so many media outlets that the sheer amount of information Americans can potentially get obliterates any narrow agenda an individual journalist might have.

However, there is a philosophical divide among the broadcast anchor people, and this you should know about.

In a speech at Drew University last week, Walter Cronkite harshly criticized the war and the Bush administration, saying: "The arrogance of our spokespeople, even the President himself, has been exceptional, and it seems to be me they [other countries] have taken great umbrage at that. We have told them what they must do. It is a pretty dark doctrine."

It seems to me the 86-year-old former CBS anchor is minimizing the fact that the Bush administration did try to work through the UN to disarm Iraq. And while it is true many in the administration could do with a Dale Carnegie seminar, it is also true that America was royally screwed in the UN Security Council by our so-called allies.

But the real problem with Cronkite's analysis is that he looks at the situation from an international point of view, while the President and some other newsmen, including myself, look at the Iraq conflict from an American perspective.

Cronkite is an internationalist. That is, he sees other countries in the world as being on an equal footing with America when vital situations arise. A few other national TV anchormen are internationalists as well in varying degrees.

But there are major problems with covering the American war on terror from an internationalist point of view. As a journalist, I want to be fair, but I also want President Bush to put protecting Americans above the economic and political concerns of other countries. Call me a jingoist, but your family's security is more important to me than German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's career.

I understand that some countries are angry that Bush rejected the Kyoto environmental agreement, and, like former President Bill Clinton, I feel their pain. But not nearly as much as the pain I felt watching thousands of Americans die on 9/11. So if someone like French President Jacques Chirac is going to protect Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein because he doesn't like Bush's style, I am going to knock Chirac. Hard.

But Uncle Walter sees the war on Iraq as preemptive and unnecessary because it doesn't have worldwide validation. He believes the agendas of other countries should be considered when making decisions about the defense of Americans, even when those agendas are based on greed and petty politics. I strongly disagree.

The truth is that Cronkite said little while the Vietnam War raged out of control in the 1960s. Finally, he confronted the lies and deceit the Johnson administration perpetrated on the American public, but Cronkite's conversion came very late in that deadly game.

When Clinton bombed Serbia, circumventing the UN and ignoring the objections of France and Russia, Cronkite said nothing. Maybe he didn't notice that the bombing was preemptive and that many nations, disapproved.

So while Cronkite is an internationalist, he seems to be a selective one. But even if he were consistent in giving equal weight to the policies of other nations vis-a-vis the security of the U.S.A., he would be wrong. And if he believes the French view of the terror threat is as valid as the U.S. view, he needs to clearly state that so people like me can challenge him.

Look at it his way. In covering World War II, the young Cronkite would have never given the Spanish view of the war the same weight as the American view. Francisco Franco's Spain was sympathetic to Hitler. As a responsible reporter, Cronkite could not have possibly done that.

Yet, in the war on terror, Cronkite and others like him want a world consensus. This is truly misguided and might even be dangerous to Americans. But Franco would love it.

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