What Manner of Man Is This? : Hussein’s forced TV show with his ‘guests’ won’t help the cause of peace

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein made an unexpected television appearance Thursday that may make a peaceful resolution of the military buildup in the Persian Gulf even more problematic.

Iraqi authorities released videotape of a forced meeting between Saddam Hussein and a group of obviously uncomfortable Western hostages. No doubt the Iraqi president’s aim in staging this unprecedented media event was to appear to Arabs as a reasonable man who wishes only to move back from war and who is deeply concerned about the hostages as human beings. He also wants to impress on the United States and the West that a full-scale air attack on key Iraqi installations will cause fearsome casualties among the thousands of Americans and other foreigners being held at many, if not all, of those installations in Iraq and Kuwait.

Governments in the West reacted to the appalling footage with predictable but nonetheless sincere and justifiable outrage. No one watching the videotape could fail to be moved by the thoroughly helpless plight of the men, women and children forced to be in that room with the Iraqi dictator. At one point in this bizarre and reprehensible performance, the camera moved its lens to a teen-age boy but quickly shifted away as tears welled up in his eyes.

It risks tarnishing the point to suggest that the Iraqi president will require better advice on how to use mass media if he is to project a more positive image in the days and weeks ahead. A repeat of a performance like Thursday’s will probably only serve to inflame Western opinion all the more against him.

It was irritating to hear yet again that the Iraqi president regards these people, so trapped in the winds of war, not as hostages but as “guests.” This cockeyed version of hospitality is insufferably infuriating, and it doesn’t get more palatable with repetition. There can be no further evidence, if any were needed, that the Iraqis are enveloped in a war psychosis that is devoid of all reality.

This is a dangerous business. It is always better for peace to prevail over war. If there is a diplomatic way out, that is the preferable route to take. But every day that option seems less likely, less realistic, more remote.