Reporter Peter Arnett, 68, covering his 20th war

By Mike Hughes
Gannett News Service

Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Peter Arnett is accustomed to the sounds of war.

"It was horrendous, it was thunderous," Arnett says of this war's first waves of Baghdad bombing. "But the point is, it was a half-mile away."

For him, that's a comfort zone. By his own count, Arnett, 68, is covering his 20th war.

"I wouldn't want to be anywhere else," he said Tuesday, by phone from his $40-a-day hotel room in Baghdad. "I like being at the big story."

Now he's busy again. Sent to Iraq to do features for "National Geographic Explorer," Arnett has instead been featured on NBC and MSNBC. He remains in Baghdad — even though his old network, CNN, was expelled.

"It is particularly ironic because CNN is not here," Arnett says. "I do get a perverse pleasure out of it."

In 1991, CNN was still struggling for attention. It had Arnett, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman in Baghdad when the first Persian Gulf War began.

"Peter (was) the best war reporter of his generation," Reese Schonfeld, a CNN founder, wrote in "Me and Ted Against the World" (HarperCollins, $26). "All of them (were) in the right place at the right time ... CNN caught lightning in a bottle."

Those three reported live for the first 17 hours of the 1991 war. Arnett stayed on, winning a Pulitzer Prize and propelling CNN to record ratings.

He was later dropped after 18 years at CNN after the 1998 "Tailwind" report, which alleged that American troops used poison gas in Laos during the Vietnam War. CNN ran the story, narrated by Arnett, then disavowed it. Arnett argues that he was a patsy, dropped for something that he hadn't done the actual reporting on.

" 'Tailwind' was almost the death blow to my career," he says. He got to Baghdad this year only because he was doing long-range reports for "Explorer."

Like all foreign reporters in Baghdad, Arnett says, he is constantly accompanied by a government "minder"