COLUMN ONE : War News: Blinding Effect? : U.S. preoccupation with Iraq has let other nations get away with controversial moves, some analysts say. Congress avoids other issues, and the media seem distracted.

When Taiwanese-American dissident writer Henry Liu was gunned down in 1984 in the garage of his Bay Area home, American investigators painstakingly traced the murder from the killers up to Wang Hsi-Ling, then head of Taiwan’s military intelligence.

Finally, amid considerable American prodding and intense press coverage, authorities in Taiwan convicted Wang and two associates of the American murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment. The sentence was later reduced to 15 years.

But this Jan. 21, less than a week after war broke out with Iraq, Taiwan quietly freed the three men from jail under a special amnesty. The men had spent only six years in prison.

The timing of the release may have been coincidental, yet the results were obvious: Few Americans noticed. Even though U.S. officials had drafted a statement deploring the release of the convicted intelligence chief, not a single member of the American media called to ask for it. No congressman took up the issue, either.

“I guess most people have lost interest,” sighs Nat Bellocchi, head of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial organization that has handled relations with Taiwan since the United States recognized China in 1979.

The freeing of the former intelligence chief is only one of the events here and around the world that have been lost, overshadowed or shunted aside as a result of the current American obsession with the war in Iraq.

Congress, the American news media and, in some instances, the Bush Administration itself have been so absorbed with the Persian Gulf that they have had far less interest than usual in developments elsewhere. Some analysts argue that certain foreign governments have taken advantage of the American preoccupation with Iraq to make moves that they knew the United States would have protested more vigorously in other times.

Such instances include:

--The recent crackdown by the Soviet military in the Baltic states. Developments in the Baltics call to mind events in 1956 when the Soviet Union resorted to tanks to crush the rebellion in Hungary. The Soviet action came when the West was consumed by the Suez crisis, in which Britain, France and Israel sought to regain control over the Suez Canal.

Although the tumultuous events in the Soviet Union have been covered in the American press, they have not generally received the exhaustive, top-of-the-news treatment the networks and newspapers would otherwise have devoted to them. Without such press coverage, the Bush Administration is under less pressure than it might have been to hold up credits and other economic benefits to Moscow.

--China’s secretive trials of a series of dissident students and intellectuals who had been held in jail since shortly after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in June, 1989.

“Because of the war, China is on the back burner right now,” admits Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). “Just getting people to any meeting on Capitol Hill is difficult. Lots of them are going to briefings on the Gulf. We came back to a brand new Congress with a declaration of war. That’s a major responsibility.”

--Syria’s bold move into Lebanon last autumn. Without a Gulf crisis, Syrian President Hafez Assad’s action might well have been treated as a major development changing the map and politics of the Middle East. Instead, it was merely a minor sideshow to the larger drama of the war against Iraq.

“All over the world, governments are doing things they’d rather not have the U.S. Congress look too closely at,” says Roderick MacFarquhar, head of the Fairbanks Center for East Asia Studies at Harvard University. “This is obviously a very good time to do it.”

Congress Distracted

In the early days of a new session, Congress has been distracted by the Middle East conflict. Lawmakers have been far more reluctant to schedule hearings on non-Gulf issues this year, and some admit openly they are more hesitant than usual to criticize Administration policies.

One issue lost to the war, for example, was an expected challenge to the Administration’s decision in January to restore $42.5 million in military aid to the right-wing government in El Salvador, which slipped past with scant notice in January.

“Without the war, . . . they (Administration officials) would have been facing a lot of angry congressmen--congressmen whose anger is now faced somewhere else,” says Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.), who heads a special 18-member congressional task force that has investigated the murders of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador.

“All our constituents see or hear about is the Gulf. If we make a big stink about El Salvador right now, our constituents are going to ask: ‘What about our kids in the Gulf? What about the Scuds? Do we have enough tanks out there? Do our kids have enough food?’ ”

El Salvador Issue

As the El Salvador case illustrates, congressional inattention and reduced press coverage often serve to give the Bush Administration a freer hand in setting U.S. policy than it would have in ordinary normal times.

Yet some critics charge that the Administration, too, is so preoccupied by the war that high-level officials can’t spend time or focus upon what might be, in the long run, international issues as important as the war--such as the future of the Soviet Union or a potential breakdown of the world’s trading system.

“The war in the Persian Gulf is not the decisive issue for the future,” former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said in a recent Cable News Network interview. “The decision issue for the future still is what happens in the wake of the collapse of communism.

“That’s where most of the resources are. That’s where the future of democracy will be determined. And I don’t think we should ignore these problems,” Brzezinski said. What happens in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China ultimately is more important than what happens in Kuwait.” “The Bush Administration is mortgaging all our policies to what is happening in the war,” echoes Kim Holmes, director of foreign policy and defense studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

American domestic problems--education, public health, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, AIDS--are also largely on hold, in part because of the Administration’s preoccupation with the Gulf War and also because the costs of the war dry up other money. The new budget that Bush sent to Congress Monday is almost devoid of major social initiatives. Most of what the President proposed comprises pilot programs or a reshuffling of existing monies.

Examples in History

The war with Iraq is not the first time this has happened. History shows that once the shooting begins, American presidents have little time, money or energy to commit to other initiatives. Many historians contend that in his preoccupation with the conflict in Vietnam, former President Lyndon B. Johnson lost his chance to achieve his goals for social and racial equality.

“I knew from the start that if I left the woman I loved, the Great Society, in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything, all my programs,” a mournful Johnson told biographer Doris Kearns as he reminisced on the political costs of the Vietnam War.

Adding to the overall impact is that the press, too, has been largely distracted from its usual interest in non-war events.

Over the past few weeks, U.S. news organizations have shifted an overwhelming share of their resources to the Gulf, shrinking drastically the space, the prominence and the reporting resources given to the remainder of the world or to domestic problems. This is particularly true in time-constrained network television, where war news now consumes nearly 90% of all broadcasts.

“There are only two (foreign) stories--the Gulf and Russia,” says NBC News Foreign Editor David Miller. “But we are not the Library of Congress. We are not obligated to report everything.”

At least these events are being covered, if minimally, in the American media. Some critics of the American preoccupation with Iraq worry that there may even be other important phenomena around the world which go completely unreported and unknown--a classic case of trees that fall soundlessly in the forest because no one is listening.

“When was the last time you saw Liberia in the papers?” says Susan Osnos of the New York-based group, Human Rights Watch. “It’s not that nothing’s been happening, but nothing’s written. What happened to India? Remember Kashmir? They were ripping each other to shreds last time we saw. It’s not in the papers anymore.

“It makes a hell of a difference. Press attention is what makes things happen. And embarrassing governments is a very important technique for human rights work. There’s always the threat that Congress will cut off aid to a country.”

Network television is the most extreme in tipping toward a single story.

A two-week survey of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” for instance, shows that roughly 90% of the stories broadcast concerned the war. The other two stories receiving regular coverage were the Soviet Union and the economy.

CBS News officials concede that all foreign and domestic bureaus are involved in war coverage, at least some of the time.

To some degree, the issue is simply manpower. NBC, for example, took its people out of South Africa to Cairo, even though “we expect February to be a critical month in South Africa with the reopening of Parliament, the trial of Winnie Mandela and several divisive racial issues coming to a head,” says foreign editor Miller.

Similarly, “We have a big bureau in Tokyo,” Miller says, “but the correspondent is in Jordan and Turkey.”

Newspapers have a somewhat easier time, perhaps because they have more space and require fewer people. Each of the networks, for instance, has nearly 80 people in the Middle East. Most major newspapers have closer to 10.

But the reactions in print to the war have differed. Of the three major metropolitan newspapers in the United States, the Los Angeles Times has concentrated most on the war. Since the hostilities began, The Times has averaged 24 war-related stories a day in its first section, or roughly half of all stories. On average, six out of nine stories on Page 1 have been war-related.

The New York Times, by contrast, is averaging 17 war-related stories a day, closer to one-third of its front-section news stories overall. On Page 1, it has averaged two or three war-related stories out of seven.

The Washington Post is averaging 20 war stories a day, usually a third of its main news, with three or four war-related stories on Page 1 out of six.

“We haven’t turned away any copy,” says New York Times Foreign Editor Bernard Gwertzman, though all stories are being written shorter. In fact, he adds, “we have to urge our (other) foreign correspondents to file. There is a tendency for them to think that no one is interested.”

What gets covered is not the only issue, says Len Downie, managing editor of the Washington Post. Where they get covered also makes a major difference. News of the Soviet Union that would have led the paper normally, for instance, Downie says, is still on the front page, but now it is at the bottom.

And that can make a major difference in a town where presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater has said, only half-facetiously, that the news agenda is decided by whatever happens to be above the fold on Page 1 of the Washington Post.

Still, sorting out the phenomenon of history lost is more complex than merely blaming the messenger. In a sense, news is a three-way conversation--among journalists, their audiences and the people they cover.

“Frankly, the audience is so caught up in what is going on that I think they pay attention to very little else,” says Richard Wald, executive vice president of ABC News.

Some journalists also point out that even in peacetime, the news agenda is shaped in large part by what the White House and Congress want to focus on. And their focus, for now, is exclusively the war. “In the main, if the White House has an agenda to set, that is what the press follows,” says Wald.

There is a debate over whether some foreign leaders are timing controversial moves to take advantage of the American preoccupation with Saddam Hussein.

“When you look around the world, from the unseating of (Prime Minster Benazir) Bhutto in Pakistan last August to the recent Soviet moves in the Baltics to the trials in China, these are all instances where the Gulf has provided a curtain behind which these governments can operate,” argues Harvard’s MacFarquhar.

But others maintain that such views are too cynical and may exaggerate the extent to which regimes in places such as Moscow or Beijing make decisions on their domestic policies based upon the prevailing mood in Washington.

“I don’t subscribe to the theory that the Soviets are deliberately timing their crackdown to the Gulf,” says Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution. “There’s a dynamic of its own there. Just the way I never believed that the Soviet move in Hungary was timed to the Suez Crisis.”

Some Sinologists say China had been preparing to put its arrested students and intellectuals on trial some time this winter, with or without a Gulf War. The fact that the trials took place as the United States was starting a war was merely a coincidence, they say.

“Certainly, they (Chinese leaders) must not be unhappy about this coincidence, but it is a coincidence,” says Harry Harding, a China specialist at the Brookings Institution.

In many instances, the American public and congressional preoccupation with the Gulf War is compounded by another, separate phenomenon: The Bush Administration has become more reluctant to criticize the policies of foreign governments, because it needs their support against Saddam Hussein.

The current Uruguay Round of global trade talks provides one example. Negotiations collapsed in Brussels in December and remain in limbo. Although President Bush has cited the push for a new trade accord as his No. 1 economic priority, the Administration chose not to exert pressure on its European allies to compromise--partly, officials say, because Washington needed their support in building the coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait.

Many economists believe that if the trade talks fail, the world could quickly break up into separate trading blocs in North America, Europe and Asia, undermining the global system of free trade that has prevailed since World War II.

The Administration, some analysts say, is also reluctant to apply pressure against other nations where animosities have been longstanding. The Soviet Union and China are members of the U.N. Security Council with the power to veto resolutions against Iraq. Syria is a Middle East power whose troops have joined the multinational forces in the desert.

So, while Congress and the American news media pay less attention to disturbing events outside the Gulf, the Bush Administration--which has enough personnel and intelligence sources to know what is happening--often has a strong interest in minimizing the importance of these events.

U.S. officials have not been completely paralyzed from reacting to the fast-changing situation in the Soviet Union.

On Wednesday, the Bush Administration announced it will begin sending relief supplies directly to the Baltics and the Ukraine, bypassing the Soviet central government. And both houses of Congress have passed resolutions condemning Soviet actions in the Baltic states.

These U.S. responses, however, came more slowly and were less far-reaching than they might have been if the Soviet moves in the Baltics had been the main international story this winter.

Not everyone believes that the war is drastically altering the congressional agenda.

“This case that domestic needs will go unaddressed because of the war overlooks the fact that they were all set to go unaddressed in any case,” says Thomas Mann, a senior political analyst at Brookings. With a presidential election year coming, he asserts, “this was shaping up to be a rhetorical Congress, not a substantive one.”

Some congressmen and news executives say this may be only a temporary phenomenon. Whether the war is over or not, they predict, within a few months it’s possible they may be able to give renewed attention to events other than the war.

“It’s a question of timing and tactics,” says San Francisco congresswoman Pelosi. “If the President is about to make a serious decision about the use of our ground forces against Iraq, that might not be the day to criticize his policies on China.”