TV AND THE GULF WAR : As the Ground War Begins, TV Is Left on the Sidelines

All dressed up on a Saturday night with nowhere to go.

That epitomized television’s dilemma in reacting to word that the allied ground campaign against Iraqi forces was under way.

Predictably, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were instantly on the story. Besides the headline, though, what was the story? A Pentagon news blackout fed the murkiness.

As if the Persian Gulf War were now sealed off in a distant, other-worldly realm, the early coverage bore out what many had been forecasting: In its initial stages, at least, this would not be a ground war that TV could show. It would be one that TV would talk about.

So on came the familiar analysts, the war maps, the file footage of troops and weaponry. And, this being TV, on came the talking heads and theorizers.

NBC’s Garrick Utley to pundit Gary Sick: “What do you think could be going on in Hussein’s mind tonight?” Wisely, Sick didn’t bite. Nonetheless, the question was symbolic.

Since the outset of the Persian Gulf crisis, the media have repeatedly sought to “get inside the mind” of Hussein, hoping to understand the man whose moves and motivations they found so baffling.

Of all the loose conjecture about Iraq and its president in the last six months, the Hussein brain probing generally has been the most psychedelically inane, with these empty echoes again resonating somewhat during Saturday’s coverage of the countdown to the most recent deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

At one time or another, just about everyone drawn into TV coverage of the Gulf conflict--from think-tankers to retired military men to reporters to politicians who barely know Mideast from Midwest--has been hit with the operative question: “What do you think is going through Saddam’s mind right now?”

Predictably, the question that is just about impossible to answer draws responses that are nonsense, feeding wild speculation that, combined with President Bush’s calculated demonization of Hussein, has assumed a life of its own.

Undoubtedly the most ludicrous long-distance psychoanalysis of Hussein came in a Time Magazine assessment of his attempt to convey a cool, confident image during his televised interview with CNN’s Peter Arnett. The magazine concluded that Hussein may have been “betrayed” by his own eyes:

“Close watchers of the interview could not help noticing that the Iraqi leader was blinking at a frantic pace (as often as 40 times a minute vs. 20 to 25 times during a TV interview last June). John Molloy, a consultant who trains salespeople to handle stress, says Hussein’s fluttering eyelids may be a sign of a mental breakdown.”

Curiously, Time did not extend its fluttering eyelids test to Bush.

Surely a vastly more credible, if not necessarily unassailable Hussein analyst is Jerrold Post, a Washington psychiatrist who has made the media rounds during the Gulf crisis while advising the U.S. government on Hussein’s psyche.

“I’ve come to feel even though I’ve never met him in my consulting room that indeed . . . I’m sort of in the mind of Saddam Hussein, and frankly, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be,” Post says in a PBS “Frontline” documentary to be shown Tuesday.

The program is “The Mind of Hussein,” and on it Post maintains that although Hussein is not insane, he has a “most dangerous personality configuration which we call malignant narcissism. Such extreme absorption. . . . He has no concern for the pain or suffering of others . . . a paranoid outlook . . . messianic dreams.”

Imagine how he’d feel if he’d actually met him.

Given the White House’s apparent bewilderment over Hussein--and its inability to predict his actions--you’d have to question the value of Post’s diagnosis, let alone the seat-of-the-pants psycho-babble that TV spews daily.

Despite its title, the “Frontline” hour narrated by Hodding Carter is essentially a biography. Although never penetrating Hussein’s mind, it does convey the mentality of an Iraqi state operated through a kind of Stalinist terror.

There is not much new here. Yet in tracing Hussein’s ruthless rise to political leadership and consolidation of power, the program does include some chilling 1979 footage of Hussein purging Iraq’s Baath Party right in front of the camera. One by one, alleged “conspirators” against Hussein are removed from a party meeting headed by him. Then Hussein invites survivors in the meeting to form the firing squad that will execute their departed comrades.

That Hussein himself ordered the meeting videotaped, apparently as a message to other potential “conspirators,” adds another frightful dimension.

There is also a section here devoted to the mixed signals that the United States gave to Hussein on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait, along with criticism of Bush for seeming to personalize the war by portraying the Iraqi president as little more than a neo-Hitler. Of course, Hussein has matched Bush’s name-calling.

Despite all the mind melding, Hussein’s true motivations may never be known. With the crucial ground battle for Kuwait now grinding forward, though, that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.