f the Pentagon does indeed execute the Iraqi war plan it calls
"Shock and Awe" this month, the very brevity of the intensive
bombing campaign presents a challenge all too familiar to John R.
MacArthur. A former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and foreign
desk editor for United Press International, MacArthur is now publisher of
Harper's Magazine. He is also the author of Second Front:
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, a penetrating
investigation into how the Pentagon promoted unprecedented curbs on the
press in the opening days of the Gulf War.
With the Defense Department warning journalists to get out of Baghdad,
the stage is set for a repeat of the kind of information-control that
kept the American public uninformed about the true dimensions of the
earlier war, he said. "The Pentagon is expecting a kind of
Panama-style war, over in three days," he said. "Nobody has
time to see or ask any questions. I think if embedded reporters see
anything important -- or bloody -- the Pentagon will interfere. Same
result, different tactic: the truth gets distorted."
He expects Al Jazeera, the Arab TV network which some in the military
refer to as the "enemy station," to be "knocked out in the
first 48 hours, like what happened in Kabul."
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