Live From Baghdad: Let CNN Roll : War coverage: From their side, propaganda; from ours, truth--as passed by censors in Washington, London, Riyadh and Jerusalem, of course.

Who is Peter Arnett and why all the fussing and fuming about him?

Arnett is an experienced, 56-year-old, New Zealand-born foreign correspondent, who covered the Vietnam War for the Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize. Since joining CNN in 1981 he has covered upheavals in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola and such crisis capitals as Moscow, Beirut and Jerusalem. He is nobody’s fool.

The fussing stems from several related factors, none more compelling than the wartime resurgence of American patriotism. Arnett is the last Western reporter in Baghdad, the enemy capital, and he works for CNN, which has mushroomed into the most important network covering the war.

Seen “live” in both Baghdad and Washington, CNN affects not only popular perceptions but also intelligence judgments--on both sides. American and Iraqi officials are constantly watching it and “using” it. When Saddam Hussein wants to communicate with world leaders, or anti-war demonstrators, he simply summons Arnett to a 90-minute interview. When he wants to put out the line that the United States is bombing civilian rather than military targets, he arranges for Arnett to be taken on a “guided tour” of a gutted factory that Iraq says produces baby formula but the White House says produces biological weapons.

In these highly charged days, journalistic objectivity--a kind of split-screen detachment showing both sides of the war, which is CNN’s 24-hour-a-day mandate and Arnett’s professional instinct--comes through to many Americans as something less than red-white-and-blue patriotism. The Administration whispers that Arnett is a conduit for Iraqi propaganda, pointing to a number of his heavily censored reports. (That the Administration may also learn from such reports is not mentioned.) Other networks, sour grapes on their vines, claim that they’re better off not having a reporter in Baghdad, because they don’t want to be “used” by Iraq.

How absurd! They conveniently ignore the fact that their own reports are also being censored in Washington, London, Riyadh and Jerusalem.

Among those critics who are truly malicious, CNN is sometimes referred to as SNN--the Saddam Network News.

Easy does it. Let us not, like the ancient Greeks, kill the messenger because we are uncomfortable about the message. Arnett is a pro. From Baghdad, he provides another dimension of war coverage--perhaps not as perfectly crafted as we’d like, but he’s a reporter, not an artist.

During the Vietnam War, Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times was briefly the only American reporter in Hanoi, and his dispatches infuriated the Johnson Administration and the American people. He was accused of treason.

The sainted Walter Lippman saved Salisbury’s professional reputation. “We must remember,” he wrote, “that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness.”

I believe the American people are able to absorb and digest Arnett’s reporting, the Pentagon’s story, chew gum and walk, all at the same time.