‘Naysayers’ Are Needled in Britain : Media: Conservative papers go after Gulf War doubters, both journalists and politicians.

Britain’s journalists swapped angry charges Sunday over their coverage and commentaries on the Persian Gulf War.

The media war pitted newspapers and commentators who supported the allied war effort against those who had cautioned against a military attack, and the hawks accused the “naysayers” of ignorance or naivete or, in some cases, of being outright propagandists.

Conservative papers took special delight in running “what they said would happen” articles, recycling quotes made during the crisis and, in the process, embarrassing some of the Labor Party politicians who made them.

Like the U.S. Democratic Party, many in the Labor Party had expressed reservations about going to war to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and some had predicted ghastly casualties and high political costs.

The Sunday Times quoted Labor’s former Defense Secretary Denis Healy, who has warned that oil would reach $65 a barrel if war broke out, and who declared on Jan. 16 that “It is surely madness to embark on war when there are alternatives available.”

But members of the press seemed to take less delight in needling politicians than in ridiculing their competitors. The conservative Daily Telegraph cited the liberal Guardian’s Feb. 8 headline saying that “U.S. Forces Face Hemorrhage as Blacks and Reservists Declare Refusal to Fight.”

Other papers reprinted another Guardian editorial that said, “A divisive war would destroy the international consensus and inflict almost as much damage on America as did the tragedy of Vietnam.”

Both British television networks have been criticized for the anti-war tone of their evening commentary programs.

The British Broadcasting Corp. and Independent Television News specials on the war were condemned by John Keegan, a military historian and defense editor of the Daily Telegraph, who, after praising reports from the field, declared:

“The facts were so stark that the simplest layman could have concluded that, once battle was joined, the Iraqis would be overwhelmed in a few days of fighting.

“Have the television grandees told us any such thing?” Keegan asked. “They have not. On the contrary, for day after day they have strung us along, turning an open-and-shut case into a cliffhanger.”

Some commentators believe that the future of the government-funded BBC may depend on the perception of its Gulf coverage.