World Is Watching Bush-Hussein Showdown : Communications: Instant global coverage brings every feint and move of the gulf crisis into the home.

In the advertisement, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is face to face with George Bush. “The World Is Watching,” reads the text. On the last line are the initials “CNN.”

It is meant to suggest that the world is watching Turner Broadcasting’s Cable News Network, but the advertisement for the 24-hour news channel has a another, perhaps unintended and more powerful, meaning.

The confrontation with Iraq is the largest deployment of American military forces since the Vietnam War and the first full-scale U.S. troop commitment in the age of instant global communications. Today, to a degree far surpassing anything in Vietnam, the world truly is watching--minute by minute, via satellite, in real time.

The signs of the importance of that are everywhere. On Tuesday, for instance, ABC anchorman Ted Koppel gained entry to Iraq, and an exclusive Foreign Ministry briefing, after the Jordanian royal family summoned him to dine in Amman and later agreed to pass a message for him.

The results of Koppel’s briefing were broadcast within hours to America, carrying with them the hint that Iraq might be seeking a diplomatic solution. In the argot of electoral politics, international conflict had become spin control, with Baghdad fully engaged in the game.

And in this war, the anchorman is not merely a messenger. He is a kind of neutral emissary, and the network a virtual nation-state with diplomatic status.

All this raises several important questions about the news media’s role in the Mideast confrontation:

In the most intense crisis of his presidency, how has President Bush managed the public message and the media that convey it?

How are the media, such an important influence since Vietnam, performing in the current crisis?

Is it even possible that a long-term, full-scale military operation is no longer sustainable in the echo chamber of instant, constant global video?

Experts who have been involved in White House and Pentagon communications say that the President, at least initially, handled the news media with marked skill.

If anything, they suggest, television and the press initially showed a lack of skepticism about the Administration’s actions and went out of their way to depict Saddam Hussein as bloodthirsty and perhaps even unstable.

Within a week, however, they note that the media echo chamber--operating at hyper-speed--seemed to have run full cycle. Some of the most influential in the media were casting a cold eye on American policy, a quick reminder of the difficult task the Administration would have maintaining public support for a long engagement. And, critics say, the President, since then, may have made some public relations missteps.

Still, most experts argue that the success of any involvement in the Middle East will not rise and fall with the media.

Even those who believe that the press shaped the outcome in Vietnam argue that the negative images of that war--of a jungle ground war, of U.S. high technology against civilian militia, of uncertain purpose--will not be repeated in the desert sand.

“We are not going to be seeing the brutal, ugly kind of man-to-man combat, or napalm war, which was so offensive to have in our living rooms,” predicted Michael K. Deaver, the image-maker behind former President Ronald Reagan.

Others argue that it is political reality, not news media interpretation, that determines political outcome. “Even if you had (only) the Pony Express and telegraph, the Vietnam War was not going to work,” said David Halberstam, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that war for the New York Times. “There was an essential lack of political legitimacy of the American position there, and eventually the media were going to reflect that.”

From the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, White House officials say, the President and his aides decided to offer the public extraordinary access, including almost daily press briefings. That created, in effect, a continuing conversation with the public. “We’ve gone overboard to be accessible,” one high-ranking White House official said.

Deaver says “the policy itself lent itself to a lot of information.” With the Administration engaged in intense diplomatic negotiations, “they were very busy doing things which seemed to create news”--and that generated “a feeling that it was under control.”

One area the Administration may have been less than candid about, however, was the number of troops being deployed. Initially, it indicated that about 4,000 troops, perhaps two battalions, might be headed for Saudi Arabia.

But even the first night of the Iraqi invasion, Aug. 2, intelligence officials knew and told at least one reporter that 85,000 to 90,000 troops probably would go. Apparently they offered a lower figure publicly to avoid provoking a reaction in Iraq or shocking the American public.

While Administration officials say now it would be unwise militarily to be too precise with troop figures, former White House communications director David Gergen also cautions against continuing to be disingenuous about numbers.

“You don’t want to get into that as a steady diet if you have to increase your numbers there. . . ,” he said. “That dredges up too many memories” of untrustworthy troop and casualty figures in Vietnam.

Another wrinkle of the initial Bush media strategy was that, aside from presidential news conferences, the Administration did little to try to overtly control the “spin” or interpretation of events in the first few days, particularly in the way it depicted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. For more than a week, for instance, Administration officials refused all invitations to appear on network TV news programs.

It hardly mattered. Critics charge that, in place of a reticent Administration, the press by itself did much to characterize events the way the Administration would have wanted. Time magazine even did a psychological profile that included an Israeli intelligence handwriting analysis concluding that Hussein “suffered from severe megalomania with symptoms of paranoia.”

Marvin Kalb, the longtime NBC and CBS chief diplomatic correspondent who teaches press and public policy courses at Harvard University, believes the press showed “an inadequate degree of skepticism” during that critical first week.

“I make no case for Saddam Hussein, but we have dealt in the past with very unpleasant types,” Kalb explained. Whipping up anti-Iraq sentiment, he suggested, “is not the measure of what is in the best interests of this country.”

Hussein himself, he noted, “was a crucial ally for 10 years.”

Bowdoin College professor David Kertzer warned that characterizing events too simplistically might leave the American public unable to understand such factors as Hussein’s support in other Arab countries.

Coverage of the Arab perspective became more sophisticated in time, monitoring of daily press coverage suggests, as more reporters actually reached the Middle East. The change was particularly marked on the networks, which tended to have fewer reporters in place at first.

But with cycles moving so quickly, by the weekend the President was facing criticism from the highest quarters of the press for policies that in midweek had been widely praised. Instant public opinion polls in the Washington Post and New York Times detected a fragile, perhaps short-lived public support.

The New York Times on Page 1 went so far as to virtually dismiss American policy in the gulf: “Laid bare,” it said, “troops have been sent to retain control of oil in the hands of a pro-American Saudi Arabia so (oil) prices will remain low.” Then, quoting an editorial cartoon, it concluded that “they are there to defend the security . . . the value . . . the principle we hold dear--18 miles per gallon.”

Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield wrote that she could “already hear the distinct drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .” of public support leaking away.

And this week, the networks have focused not so much on Hussein’s bloody past as on such matters as the less lofty purpose behind American involvement. “Had Saudi Arabia not had oil,” CBS quoted one expert as saying Wednesday, “it would have been thrown . . . to the dogs.”

It was as if in an age when the media are increasingly interpretive, a journalistic “scoop” had been replaced by the rush to write the next level of analysis, every cycle gaining centrifugal velocity. It is the same movie we have seen before, this time played at triple speed.

The answers from the best experts on the murky art of media control offer divergent if not completely contradictory advice on how Bush should buttress the Administration politically and hold together the fragile domestic and international coalition.

Gergen suggested that the President should deliver a prime-time speech soon “that explains in the very clearest possible terms what his purpose and goals are” to stem “increasing pressure on the right wing to raise the stakes . . . and increasing pressure from the left, particularly overseas, to compromise for a lesser outcome.” The President’s brief, early-morning address of last week--unseen by most Americans--was insufficient, Gergen believes.

Others, such as former Reagan Administration communications director Thomas Griscom, said being too specific about actual policy goals would set up the President for criticism. “Once you start putting particular benchmarks out there, then you have to achieve them,” he said.

President Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, said the real danger is for the President to become too concerned with these short-term pressures by the press, which demand a new plot change every day, and a new chapter every week.

“In a general sense, the temptation to do something because it will look good in the short term ought to be resisted,” Powell advised.

Indulging that temptation, some believe, may already have hurt the Administration. On Tuesday, the President returned to Washington from vacation to deliver an uncharacteristically blistering partisan attack on the Democrats over the budget. At least some in the media, such as National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts, said it was an attempt to shift the focus of attention somewhat away from Iraq.

If so, the maneuver apparently did not work. The story that night and next morning remained focused on Iraq, and the President was criticized even within his own party for his political charges. The following day, Bush switched gears and delivered his most blistering attack yet on Hussein.

Over time, if handled properly, the Iraq story will become a constant of life and fade from the top of Page 1, former Reagan communications director Griscom argued.

When that occurs, Halberstam agreed, that will make the Bush Administration’s job easier. “At the height of interest, the President’s hands are more tied,” he said. “As it goes down from media overkill, the President has more play.”

That is one reason why those involved in the news media on both sides believe that sustaining a military involvement over a long period of time is still possible.

Fred Hoffman, who did four tours in Vietnam for the Associated Press, covered the military for 25 years and finally became the Pentagon press spokesman for Reagan, said the differences between the Iraq confrontation and Vietnam are drastic. For one, the importance of American interests is clearer this time. For another, he said, the Vietnam War dragged on for four years before public support started to flag, in about 1965.

Deaver argued that the degree of international support of the American situation this time is another significant difference, as is the fact that Hussein invaded Iraq, invoking memories of Hitler’s blitzkriegs.

True, the experts said, with more media constantly echoing themselves, there is now a sensation of hyper-dramatization and hyper-impact greater than during the war in Vietnam. Movie director Oliver Stone told the American Psychological Assn. last week that, “is hysteria.”

Yet those who know that “hysteria” best concur with Powell, the spokesman for the Carter Administration that was itself done in partly by a crisis in the Middle East: “The substance, in the end, is what matters most.”