Bottom up

The U.S. Marine Corps was dumb at the top but smart at the bottom in the way it fought the second front in Iraq-the war for hearts and minds, especially those in the Arab world. I say this after hearing what Marine leaders said just before the war and then seeing what they actually did while I was embedded with them. For the Marine brass, there was a big gap between the saying and the doing.

Recall that it was President Bush, the Marines' commander-in-chief, and his point man, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who thought that embedding reporters with military units would help win the propaganda war at a time when the United States seemed to be losing it in the Arab world. If military leaders let reporters hear and see what they were doing, the resulting stories would do the administration more good than harm in the battle to win over Muslims to the American cause: This was a big part of the rationale behind the mandate to open up. Marine leaders talked as if they understood the mandate, but their conduct during the war shows that they really didn't get it.

Exhibit A is Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the top-ranking marine in Iraq, who commanded the 60,000-person 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. For almost the entire war, he refused to meet with the reporters embedded at his headquarters. Faced with Conway's freeze-out, the embedded reporters pleaded with his staff officers to at least tell them what the Corps was doing in the war. Conway's officers agreed to do so only if the reporters showed their stories to the command before transmitting to their publications. The reporters, under pressure to find out what was going on, went along. They got to sit in on the command briefings, and they told me there was no heavy censorship of their stories. Still, this command review of their copy was a form of censorship not required under the Pentagon's embedment rules.

To add insult to injury, Conway agreed to an exclusive April 10 interview with CNN's chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, who had not been embedded with the Marines. A public-affairs officer at Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters must have told the general he couldn't see Amanpour without making himself available to the embedded reporters who had been eating dust with his marines, and whom he had refused to meet with, for weeks. So he finally met with the embedded reporters the day before Amanpour arrived. I was at the Iraqi airfield that morning when Amanpour landed in a Marine C-130 transport aircraft. I was trying to hitchhike back to Kuwait with some soldiers on the same C-130 and was astonished to see that the plane had airlifted two CNN vehicles directly to Conway's headquarters.

Incidentally, I asked Lt. Col. Rick Long, Conway's press officer, if I could listen in on the general's breakthrough meeting with the embedded reporters. I was embedded with the lst Marine Division headquartered farther north, just outside of Baghdad. No, was his answer, even though the reporters embedded with Conway had been allowed to attend a 1st Marine Division press briefing two days before with the division's also-news-shy leader, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis.

Exhibit B is Mattis, a former military assistant to Rumsfeld who must know the secretary's desire to get the American military's story told accurately. Reporters embedded at his headquarters said he refused to meet with them during the crucial first weeks of the war, although I had heard him say in Kuwait, in welcoming us to his command, how important it was for us to get and tell the story. During the two days I was at Mattis's headquarters camp, there was no tent, no nothing where a reporter could type out a story at night without violating the blackout rules.

Exhibit C was the colonels and lieutenant colonels at Camp Ripper, in the Kuwaiti desert, who had a wide array of national reporters camped with them for a week before the war but who made no attempt to meet with them. "That's a good idea," said the battalion commander of the unit I was embedded with when I suggested he meet with reporters once a day rather than limit us to scratching up our own stories, any story, on the dusty base bordering Iraq. Nothing happened. Marine leaders saw no need to stand in the batter's box and swing at reporters' pitches, many of which they could have hit out of the park.

In spite of, not because of, top Marine leaders, the Corps got good press, because the men and women lower down the chain of command, including some colonels, were so impressive and so forthcoming. "We've just got to get better at this," said a major who, unlike the generals, proved educable. He agreed to talk about his job-trying to avoid friendly-fire casualties-after I explained that, believe it or not, neither I nor any other reporter could tell his side of the story. He had to tell it himself. And he did. So there's hope at the bottom of the Corps, but not at the top. The Marine generals demonstrated during the height of the war, when reporters needed them the most, that they just don't get it, no matter what they said in their "I get it" speeches.