Friday, March 04, 2005

Sad: What the hell happened to Peter Arnett? He was a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who got top billing at CNN before getting canned for his role in an embarrassingly flawed piece about the U.S. government's use of chemical weapons in Vietnam. Then he caught on at NBC and National Geographic before embarrassing himself once again by going on Iraqi television and pronouncing the U.S. battle plan a failure less than two weeks after the war began (Saddam Hussein's regime fell just over one week later).

Last I had heard, he was working for Britain's Daily Mirror. Now he's writing a news article for Playboy Magazine? According to reports, Mr. Arnett believes Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, was going to overthrow his father and take over the country just before U.S. troops barged in.

I don't know if any of this is true (funny how somebody loses credibility so fast). I'm sure there were all sorts of conspiracies being hatched as the end of Saddam's regime looked imminent. But it matters little, as an Uday regime would not have been an improvement, especially now that Iraqis have elected their own government.

I just find it sad that a once respected journalist can become so careless and shortsighted and destroy his own career.