The war in the media over Iraq has claimed its first casualties. An opening blast by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and some sustained and tenacious reporting in the New York Times took down Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle. The New Yorker’s salvo slammed Perle for blatant, opportunistic hypocrisy by contrasting his anti-Saudi agitation with a murky business lunch he attended with Saudi businessmen, brokered by notorious arms dealer and Iran-contra linchpin Adnan Khashoggi. As Perle was likening Hersh to a " terrorist " in various media outlets, the Times actually found a smoking gun in Perle’s hand — evidence of a sweetheart deal with bankrupt communications giant Global Crossing that relied exclusively on his Defense Department connections. " Let me explain my milieu and context, " whined Perle in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday. Thanks, but no thanks, Prince of Darkness.

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera’s journalistic play-acting in Iraq also came to an end this week. This time, the excitable Rivera got so overexcited that he started giving away troop positions and intentions on camera. The Defense Department saw what Fox and Rivera were reporting and decided to kick Geraldo out of the sandbox. Good riddance.

On the other hand, news about the firing of NBC/MSNBC/National Geographic Baghdad correspondent Peter Arnett for an interview he gave to Iraqi state television immediately set off alarm bells among media observers. The US military might be happy to have cameras in Baghdad to assess bomb damage, but it isn’t so keen on reporters broadcasting civilian grief caused by the carnage of war. Arnett’s made a highly regarded career out of covering US military failures (a Pulitzer for his AP Vietnam reporting) and successes (Gulf War I), which has made him a magnet for criticism. His reports of civilian casualties in the first Gulf War brought harsh criticism from US military officials — and his role as the on-air reporter for a controversial CNN report on the US Army’s alleged use of nerve gas in Laos during the Vietnam War got him reprimanded (under Defense Department pressure) and ultimately caused his departure from that network.

In other words, a media analyst’s first reaction to the firing is that Arnett is a convenient scapegoat. But when you watch the interview (which is available on CSpan.com), it becomes clear that Arnett’s termination was the only course available to his employers.

It’s not that giving an interview to Iraqi state television was wrong. The professional courtesy toward his host country’s media that Arnett cited at the beginning of the interview is a fact of life in such situations. It’s a lower-key version of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages begin to identify with their captors. When you depend utterly on the Iraqi information ministry for access, ticking it off is not a good idea. So sitting in the chair across from an Iraqi flack on Baghdad TV wasn’t a mortal sin or termination-worthy offense. Rather, it was as Arnett said: he used the interview as a platform for a self-driven, self-obsessive, and at times utterly fictitious critique of the US war effort. Just look at the Iraqi host’s first question, posed in English: " Let us start with a question about the general image that you look [sic] now in Iraq. " The answer to that question could go anywhere. It could be as simple as " Grim. There is great human suffering in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq — on both sides. "

Instead of taking this tack or one similar to it, however, Arnett inexplicably chose first to offer an effusive panegyric to the " freedom " to report that Iraq’s ministry had given him. He then offered an assessment of the war’s effect on US public opinion. It’s precisely a topic that Arnett — in Baghdad — can’t assess with any credibility. His answer was sheer fiction.

Arnett put the icing on the cake by repeatedly dredging up — without prompting — incidents from the first Gulf War. It was not as if his host asked him a specific question: " Mr. Arnett, how do the incidents of civilian casualties in the present conflict stack up against those in 1991? " The host simply asked if Arnett had been to any of the places where Iraqis allege that civilian casualties have occurred. The rest was all Arnett — and in English as well, with no excuse to be found in misquotation or bad translation.

Arnett told Britain’s Daily Mirror that he was in " shock and awe " at getting canned. He also argued that " I want to tell the story as best I can. " But part of telling the story is having credibility on both sides of the conflict. Arnett lost that credibility with the coalition and its supporters in one fell swoop by succumbing to the Stockholm syndrome and telling his Iraqi interlocutor what he wanted to hear — rather than the truth.