Television News in Perspective

Fifty-seven boxes were recently returned to the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya in Zeit trucks—large Russian military vehicles—by the Iraqi government authorities. Each box contained a dead child, eyes gouged out and ashen white, apparently drained of blood. The families were not given their children, were forced to accept a communal grave and then had to pay 150 dinars for the burial.
—London Sunday Observer, 1987

When the man responsible for such an atrocity—one among many others and not by any means the worst—appears on American television to talk to “America’s most respected newsman” about his hopes and fears, his devotion to his people, his respect for American leaders, and his strong religious faith, is it then just a matter of good manners not to mention the dead children, like John Cleese’s character in “Fawlty Towers” not mentioning the war to his German guests? Presumably Dan Rather, who recently (as he puts it) “found himself” interviewing Saddam Hussein in one of the latter’s presidential palaces in Baghdad, would say that it was. And, unlike Basil Fawlty, Rather was far too slick to get caught inadvertently mentioning his interlocutor’s career as a mass murderer.

James Bowman in the latest New Criterion. The rest of it is here.