Who Won Gulf War II?

            The weekend TV pundits
declared Saddam Hussein the victor of Gulf War II. This even though U.N.
weapons inspectors returned to Iraq and the sanctions remain in place. Saddam
is now "better off" (Al Hunt, CNN's Capital Gang ), having divided the
allies (Steve Roberts, CNN's Late Edition ) and gained "a new
international legitimacy" (Paul Gigot, NewsHour With Jim Lehrer ). The
return to the status quo ante has politically isolated the United States
(Gigot; John McLaughlin, The McLaughlin Group ). Second prize was awarded
to Russia, for insinuating itself into the dispute and re-establishing its
power base in the Middle East (Eleanor Clift and Pat Buchanan, The
McLaughlin Group ). William Safire on NBC's Meet the Press moaned
that the week's events marked "the beginning of the Baghdad/Moscow axis," in
which the impoverished Russians would rearm the Iraqis in return for oil.
Safire all but promised Armageddon would soon follow.

            "I think
we've got a better audience worldwide," said Nazar Hamdoon, the languid Iraqi
U.N. ambassador. Better audience? Did he win sweeps week with his performances
on Meet the Press , CNN's Evans & Novak , and ABC's This
Week ?

            Doyle McManus decoded Hamdoon on PBS's Washington Week
in Review . Saddam had played a successful bait-and-switch game on the West:
First, he conjured up the bogus inspector crisis--complaining about U.S.
domination of the U.N. teams and ejecting them--to attract the world's
attention. Then he changed the subject to the unjust imposition of sanctions on
his people. Enlisting the Russians in his cause, he successfully moved world
opinion toward lifting the restrictions.

            Swallowing
the Iraqi bait whole were Gulf doves Robert Novak ( Capital Gang and
Meet the Press ) and McLaughlin, who once again called for an end to the
sanctions. Dying Iraqi children were "something the liberals should think
about," said conservative Novak, tapping his long-hidden well of compassion.
Clift, Roberts, and others also sympathized with the starving Iraqi masses, on
whom the sanctions have fallen the hardest. McLaughlin displayed a statistic
claiming the sanctions had contributed to the deaths of as many as 1.4-million
Iraqi civilians since the end of Gulf War I. That, of course, set off a
squabble about the validity of the numbers and a fumbling calculus of how many
lives had been saved from chemical and biological warfare by keeping Saddam "in
his box" since 1990.

            
The pundits gave President Clinton no credit.
The peaceful resolution revealed him as weak, was the consensus view. "As
president of the United States, he didn't feel he was potentially powerful
enough to exercise" his options, said former Newt aide Tony Blankley, now
opinionizing on CNN's Late Edition . Almost alone supporting the
president was Mark Shields ( Capital Gang , NewsHour ), who said the
"commando columnists" calling for Saddam's scalp must understand that
assassinating him was "never a possibility" during Gulf War I and isn't "a
possibility now."

            Presaging
next week's clichés, Novak, Shields, and Susan Page ( Late Edition ) said
that only a renewed "Middle East peace process" could bring stability to the
region. Pissier than a skunk, Safire rejected the linkage between the Iraqi
disturbance and the civil war in Israel/Palestine. "Back seven years ago there
was no Oslo process and the Arabs were with us because they were afraid--they
were being attacked," he said.

            The commentariat left nothing but furious gnaw marks on
Issue 2, the fertility therapies behind the "miracle" of the McCaughey
septuplets. Their problem is that the survival of all the babies decanted the
necessary conflict from the story. This Week 's George Will did work in
an abortion angle, exclaiming that Congress would never regulate fertility
technologies because the Supreme Court had decided that "a fetus is
nothing."

            Issue 3, the Piscataway,
N.J., civil-rights settlement (in which civil-rights groups paid off a fired
white teacher to avoid a potentially unfavorable Supreme Court ruling), also
sputtered on the shows. Defending the settlement were Mara Liasson on Fox
News Sunday ("Bad cases make bad law"), Roberts ("An indefensible case"),
and Clarence Page on This Week ("This is not an affirmative-action case
in the view of the civil-rights community").

            In a
rational world, the loopy charge that the Clinton administration had traded
campaign donations for Arlington Cemetery burial plots (Issue 4) would have
damaged Insight (the magazine owned by convicted felon the Rev. Sun
Myung Moon that published the story), the radio mouths who repeated the lies,
and the Republicans who exploited the story. Instead, the Sunday pundits blamed
President Clinton for being the type of guy who would do that sort of thing,
even though he didn't do it. "People were really ready to believe it," said
Susan Page. It took root, said Brit Hume ( Fox News Sunday ), because it
had a "ring of truth" to it.

            

               Breaking News: Susan Page reported on
Late Edition that President Clinton would make a January recess
appointment of Bill Lann Lee to the job the Senate won't confirm him for,
assistant attorney general for civil rights.

            
               A Fun Fact You Wouldn't
Know Unless You Watched the Sunday Shows: Two babies are twins. Three are
triplets. Five, quintuplets. One? A singlet .

            
               Wacky Tangent of the
Week: 
               Washington Week in Review host Ken Bode scolded the New
York Times 
               Magazine for a Nov. 9 fashion spread he said endorsed the
now-discredited fashion trend of "heroin chic." Maybe it's been a while since
Bode has partied till 4 a.m., but to "Pundit Central" 's eyes the models look
like nothing more sinister than extremely tired and slender party trash,
not emaciated junkies.

            

               --Jack
Shafer