BY MICHAEL MASSING
Massing, a contributing editor of CJR, also writes for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Magazine.

ANOTHER FRONT

The war may be over, but the battle over press access rages. In a U.S. District Court in New York City, an eclectic group of news organizations, including The Nation, Harper's, and The Village Voice, is pressing a suit against the Defense Department, charging it with imposing unconstitutional restrictions during the gulf conflict.

In the current climate, the outcome of any contest between The Nation and the nation would seem fore-ordained. Yet the effort certainly seems worthwhile: if Dick Cheney and Colin Powell go unchallenged now, there's no telling what they or their successors might attempt in the future.

Looking back at the gulf conflict, though, it seems clear that access was not really the issue. Yes, the pools, the escorts, the clearance procedures were all terribly burden-some, but greater openness would not necessarily have produced better coverage.

Consider, for instance, the case of New York Times reporter Malcolm W. Browne. A veteran war correspondent, Browne was highly critical of the Pentagon's restrictions. "Each pool member," he declared in an article in the Times Magazine, "is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defense, on whose behalf he or she prepares the news of the war for the outer world." To illustrate the point, Browne recounted his own experience as part of a pool taken to interview F-117A pilots returning from bombing raids over Iraq. In one dispatch, Browne's description of the F-117A as a "fighter-bomber" was changed to "fighter"; in another, a colleague's characterization of the pilots as "giddy" was changed to "proud." Browne was also kept from filing a story about the bombing of Iraq's nuclear weapons development plants, only to have General Norman Schwarzkopf make the information public two days later.

Browne's pique is understandable. But what does all this add up to? A sanitized adjective, an altered airplane description, a story delayed for a day. Not exactly the Pentagon Papers.

Of course, had Browne not been forced to join a pool, he might have turned up far more interesting material. I doubt it, though, judging from the work of those reporters who did manage to slip their minders and make it to the front. Telling of loneliness and boredom, cold nights and bad food, their stories offered moving glimpses of soldiers preparing for battle. Unfortunately, they added little to our understanding of the war itself.

Too often, American correspondents seemed to be fighting the last war. Where there was sand, they saw rice paddies, and, like latter-day David Halberstams, they instinctively headed for the front. This was no guerrilla war, however, but a high-intensity, fully conventional conflict, and it required something other than traditional on-the-ground reporting. In particular, it required an ability to digest and make sense of the huge amount of data generated by the conflict.

Take the air war. The general lack of access to Iraq made gathering firsthand information all but impossible. And the press briefings in Riyadh and Washington, with their Top Gun videos, offered little help. Yet the sheer number of bombing raids indicated that something extraordinary was going on over Iraq. The Pentagon insisted it was targeting only military-related facilities, but the attacks on power plants, oil refineries, and other elements of the country's infrastructure suggested a far more destructive plan -- one designed to return Iraq to "a pre-industrial age," as a U.N. report subsequently put it. What was the Pentagon's purpose in all this? And was it consistent with the U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force to liberate Kuwait? Reporters -- busy talking their way through military checkpoints -- never bothered to ask.

Nor did they ponder the extent of the killing being carried out by allied forces. True, it was mostly enemy soldiers who were being killed, and that's what war is all about. Yet many of the victims were hapless conscripts sent to the front against their will, and the policy of slaughtering them seemed to demand some analysis. This was not a simple task, given the refusal of U.S. briefers to estimate enemy KIAs. Yet, by extrapolating from the number of sorties flown, the amount of ordnance dropped, and the "killing box" strategy pursued by the B-52s and other aircraft, reporters could have offered some rough estimates of their own. Busy interviewing grunts at the front, they just didn't have the time.

Similarly, the press failed to scrutinize the types of weapons deployed by the allies. While reporting endlessly on the chemical-weapons threat from Iraq -- a threat that never materialized -- correspondents showed little interest in America's own fearsome weapons. Like napalm. For the first time since Vietnam, the U.S. forces used this flesh-searing substance, mostly to kill Iraqi troops in bunkers. In light of the outcry over the use of napalm in Vietnam, one might have expected questions to be raised about its use in the gulf. Yet the few stories that mentioned the subject seemed entirely perfunctory in nature. ALLIES ARE SAID TO CHOOSE NAPALM FOR STRIKES ON IRAQI FORTIFICATIONS ran the headline over a story in The New York Times on February 23. Only eight paragraphs long, the article explained that a wave of napalm-fueled fire splashed across the mouths of a system of caves or trenchworks may fail to burn the occupants but can remove so much oxygen from the air that the defenders suffocate. For this reason, some opponents of its use have argued that napalm should be classified as a chemical weapon and banned. Nevertheless, napalm remains a mainstay of armies and air forces throughout the world, and has been used in many wars and minor conflicts since it was introduced in World War II. . . . That article was written by Malcolm Browne.

To get at the real story in the gulf, reporters did not have to travel to the front. They did not even have to travel to Saudi Arabia. Most of the information they needed was available in Washington. All that was required was an independent mind willing to dig into it. In short, this war needed fewer David Halberstams and more I. F. Stones.

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