BAGHDAD .

As rockets and car bombs on successive days blasted Baghdad's landmark Al Rashid hotel, three police stations and the headquarters of the International Red Cross, I reflected on President Bush's persistent claims that the press has been overplaying the bad news in Iraq and filtering out the good.

The distraught mother I saw grieving for her wounded son outside the battered Red Cross building was clearly not sharing the president's sentiments. Nor was police constable Omer Sadi, his bloodied head heavily bandaged, very sympathetic to those emphasizing the positive. He was injured in the car bomb blast at his station in northwest Baghdad, an explosion that demolished his new van.

And the American soldiers I met at the scenes of all the bloody incidents were uptight and uncommunicative as they rolled out barbed wire barricades to keep out the curious. Already, since President Bush declared victory on May 1, more US troops have been killed --- over 100 of them --than during the war. So it is entirely understandable that troop morale is bad.

All is not bad. Much has indeed been done to try and improve living conditions for the Iraqi people, and the Americans can point to advances on the political side. But the overwhelming reality in Baghdad is that the security situation is getting worse. This detrimentally effects everything else that's going on, from school attendance to business activity.

So the Bush Administration's attempts to blame the media messengers for the bad news are spurious. These actions are also dangerous because they can shut out the truth. Yet this pattern of behaviour during war is all too common, favored by the leaders of what Americans' believe is the world's greatest democracy. I know because I've been in the firing line in both of America's most significant wars of the past fifty years, Vietnam and Iraq.

In the first month I began covering the Vietnam war for the Associated Press, in August of 1962, I was criticized by the then commander of US Pacific Forces, Admiral Harry D. Felt, for asking what he regarded as negative questions about the war effort. "Arnett, why don't you get on the team," he admonished me. By that, the admiral meant my being unquestionally supportive of US policy.

In actual fact, up to the time of the Vietnam war the American media had generally supported their government's war policies, had been "on the team." But in Vietnam we made a break from tradition, reporting instead on the reality of what we were seeing. The Saigon government was corrupt and out of touch with the people, the US military advisers were frustrated because of their failure to improve the incompetent South Vietnamese army, the so-called Vietcong "terrorists" supporting the spread of international communism were actually nationalists fighting a post-colonial struggle. Such media truths infuriated the John F. Kennedy Administration and there were attempts by the president himself to have a least one reporter fired.

And when American ground troops were committed to Vietnam in 1965 in large numbers, along with South Korean, Australian and New Zealand forces, we continued to tell the truth as we saw it. And that truth included the bitter fact that the US was not winning the war despite thousands of dead and billions in costs. At one point, President Lyndon B. Johnson personally ordered that me and two other reporters be investigated by the FBI to see if any negative information could be turned up that would persuade our employers to fire us.

I am not suggesting that we reporters had unique insights into the Vietnam war. What we did have was a willingness to tell the unvarnished truth as we saw it on the battlefield. In earlier wars the device of press censorship was used to cull out embarrassing information from public view. But these were wars that were seen by the public as "just wars" such as World War Two , well worthy of fighting.

Vietnam was never one of these, a "just war". From the beginning it was an exercise in political gamesmanship with the Soviet Union, an exercise that successive United States governments keep playing despite ample evidence that it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

We reporters were painted as spoilers by the Pentagon and the White House, threatening national interests because of our honest reporting. One of the top pro-establishment columnists of the day, Joseph Alsop, wrote in 1967 that the press corps in Vietnam was "between a rock and a hard place." It would be blamed for criticizing the war if America won and blamed for being unpatriotic if American lost. America lost, and the unpatriotic label has stuck not only to the Vietnam press corps but to any reporter who challenges government military actions.

In this struggle between the democratic press and the power of elected officials in America, the public was basically a bystander, ultimately paying a huge cost in lost lives and bullion before the authorities bowed to reality and ended the war.

In Baghdad it all started with the baby milk plant story. I was reporting live for CNN. The Bush Administration had initially been enthusiastically supportive of CNN's coverage of the 1991 bombing of Baghdad. Our live reports from the ninth floor of the Al Rashid Hotel suggested that the numerous cruise missiles and bombs daily hammering the Iraqi capital were finding their designated targets, namely command and control centers, military barracks and Saddam Hussein's palaces and bunkers. Our reports seemed to confirm Pentagon assessments that civilian casualties were nil.

But on Day 4 bombs rained down on an industrial plant on the western outskirts of Baghdad, and the honeymoon was over. I was driven to the location by my Iraqi "minder" along with a WTN film crew. We pulled off the highway past a large faded poster of Saddam Hussein comforting a distressed child. The small signpost at the entrance bore a crudely lettered sign reading "baby milk plant" in English and Arabic. The structure was barely recognizable as a building. The sheet aluminum walls and roof had been ripped off and scattered in the yard. The steel roof girders were twisted and blackened. The machinery underneath was a tangled molten pile. The plant had been empty of workers at the time.

Iraqi officials at the scene explained that the factory produced twenty tons of milk powder per day for the children of the capital. They showed us plastic spoon-making machines with their output scattered across the floor. I was walking up to my ankles in white powder. Documents lying around described the product as a a mixture of malt, sugar extract and milk. I picked up an armful of intact packets to distribute to kids back at out hotel. It looked like an innocent production plant to me.

That night I reported to CNN on my satellite phone what the Iraqis told me, that the plant was the only source of infant formula in Baghdad and was not a legitimate target. And I went to bed. When I awakened in the morning I tuned into BBC radio, and discovered that I had reported one of the most controversial stories of my career. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called me a liar. President George Bush himself had watched the milk plant report, Fitzwater declared, "and was not pleased". The installation was not producing milk powder as the Iraqis claimed, but was actually "a production facility for biological weapons" according to Fitzwater. And as for CNN reporter Peter Arnett, he was "a conduit for Iraqi disinformation".

So began a war of words that paralleled the real war happening on the ground, and via TV in the living rooms of people around the world. The baby milk plant was simply the first of an avalanche of images from inside Iraq that seemed to give the lie to the Pentagon's repeated boasts that its new generation of weaponry was mistake-proof. Day 8, three houses and their inhabitants were destroyed in Baghdad. Day 9, several city blocks were bombed and levelled in the town of Al Dour north of Baghdad, with many dozens dead. Day 10, more bombings of homes in Najaf. CNN was bearing the brunt of official wrath because it was regularly scooping the competition and attracting large audiences with its coverage.

Coalition military commander General Norman Schwarzkopf solved his moral dilemma by turning off CNN in his command bunker. The Bush Administration, well aware that America's avid television viewers were fixated by the war coverage, orchestrated an elaborate campaign of character assassination. I was denounced on the floor of Congress. Representative Laurence Coughlin of Pennslyvannia charged that "Arnett is the Joseph Goebels of Saddam Hussein's Hitler-like regime." The CNN president received a letter from 34 congressmen who charged that my coverage "gives a demented dictator a propaganda mouthpiece to over 100 nations". Conservative members of the British Parliament compared me to turncoats of world war two. And there was much more.

My critics' rationale was that my observations were either direct lies, or if they were backed up by video then the incidents themselves had been fabricated by Iraqi intelligence. The suggestion was that Saddam Hussein would raze his own cities for propaganda pictures. Maybe some people might even believe that if it was repeated enough, and certainly in these first weeks of the war the Bush Administration was escaping serious criticism. But then came February 13, and the blame game was over.

At 4:50 that morning an American jet bomber dropped two precision-guided missiles on a civilian airraid shelter in the middleclass Amariya district of Baghdad. Women, children and old men were packed inside the shelter, and nearly four hundred of them died in the cauldron of explosions and fire. Hordes of reporters descended on the scene and within hours the most gruesome pictures of the war shocked viewers around the world. The Pentagon tried to argue that that shelter was a legitimate target because it sprouted radio antennae and could have had a military use. Few were buying that idea. The Russian foreign minister who visited a few days later told me President Mikhail Gorbachev had sent him to Baghdad "because such carnage has to end."

The debate over the Amariya shelter bombing shifted attention from my credibility to the Pentagon's. The pictures had been so shocking that people did begin to question policy. Few argued that the consequences of a bombing raid that killed so many civilians should be ignored, particularly in a high tech war where such mistakes were not meant to happen. Long after the war I learned that policy had indeed been had changed by the shelter carnage, and that so-called "military-civilian targets" were struck off the bombing lists, at least for what remained of the Gulf War.

The Pentagon fortunately resisted a more direct way of controlling the media in Baghdad by not bombing the Al Rashid Hotel or the Information Ministry. Then Joint Chief of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell waxed indignant at the time at the very thought of such actions.

But since then the toleration of unpleasant war images seems to be taxing the patience of American policy makers. The Clinton Administration approved the bombing of the TV Center in Belgrade during the Kosovo War just hours after several western TV reporters had completed their evening newscasts. The Kabul bureau of the controversial Al Jazeera news organization, the "Arab CNN", was blown apart during the assault on Kabul in 2001.

And Gulf War Two this year saw the most aggressive effort by the US Government to manage information since Vietnam, an effort largely aided and abetted by a media that had bought wholeheartedly into the war on terrorism with few caveats.

Because I had covered the first Gulf War in 1991 I decided to cover the second in 2003, but at age 68 my role as a journalist was changing. I had left CNN in 1999 after 18 years of frontline war coverage and was becoming more of a commentator and analyst rather than news reporter. This suited me fine, and I appeared regularly on US and international news programs to discuss international issues, and gave many interviews of my views of the news media and the state of the world.

I covered the Afghanistan war on terrorism as a documentary maker, and produced seven half-hour programs for high definition television. During 2002 I spent several months in Baghdad also producing TV documentaries for the American market, and discussed and analysed the Saddam Hussein regime at length on talk shows, particularly as the prospect of war loomed large.

My view of what was happening in Iraq was shaped by the many interviews I had with senior Baghdad officials, and the growing body of evidence from UN weapons inspection teams that the Saddam regime seemed to have divested its weapons of mass destruction along with the programs that had produced them.

It was also apparent to me early on that the motives for the Bush Administration to attack Iraq were based more on historical factors that contemporary ones, and that the war on terrorism was a convenient excuse to rid the Middle East of a regime long seen as a thorn in America's side.

It was also clear from the Baghdad interviews I had undertaken that while the regime realized its military weaknesses, it also was aware of its political strengths, particularly the ability of the Baath Party to mobilize a post-war guerilla campaign to punish the Americans. "We have been shaping the minds of Iraqis for 30 years," the deputy prime minister Tarik Aziz boasted to me in an interview in February this year. "America can attack us, but to win it will have to brainwash 25 million Iraqis."

I was in Baghdad producing a documentary for National Geographic Explorer TV when Gulf War Two began. Because this organization had a professional association with the US network NBC, I was pressed into service to do live coverage of the war. The NBC Baghdad bureau had been closed and the American staff had left town, along with most other US news organizations. So our small Geographic team simply reopened the bureau and started reporting live from the roof of the Information Ministry and the Palestine Hotel as first the "shock and awe" bombing campaign began, and the war unfolded.

But even as I was reporting on the war I was also continuing my role as commentator and analyst. I gave many interviews to my numerous colleagues from other countries who had stayed on to cover the War. Many of these reporters told me my example of staying in Baghdad during the first Gulf War had shaped their careers.

I was also aware that the old barriers to communication in times of crisis were being lowered. Even though the Arab TV news networks of Al Jazeera and Al Arabia were seen by US authorities as basically anti-American, senior Bush Administration officials regularly appeared on them to present their viewpoints.

It was in this environment that several days into the war I gave an interview to Iraqi TV. I had been approached by the Iraqi producer after a press conference with the Information Minister Al Sahaf, and I had no hesitation. I talked about the bombing of Baghdad and the potential negative impact on US policy if civilian casualties rose, I discussed the problems American military commanders were having with implementing their war plan. My comments were similar to those I had been making to other news outlets.

But because of my high profile on the NBC network, the most popular in the United States, I was immediately trashed by right wing critics who launched a deluge of criticism similar to that I had encountered in the first Gulf War after I had interviewed Saddam Hussein, and covered the Baby Milk Plant story. Unlike CNN which had stuck by me in 1991, NBC very quickly let me go. But by the afternoon of that day I had been hired by the London Daily newspaper to cover the war, and worked with several TV outlets as the war ended and the post-war crisis developed.

I am currently living in Baghdad researching a book on the former regime and covering the developing situation for various news clients.

The great virtue of American democracy is that its free, aggressive media usually comes back on course, the truth is revealed sooner or later, and balance returns to the political system. There is no way for even the cleverest political "spinner" to present Iraq in any other way than being a potential disaster-in-the-making for America. The reality of the brutal TV and newspaper images of daily mayhem and carnage in Iraq cannot be denied, and should not be denied.

That accounts for the growing criticism, even from his rightwing media allies, of the actions of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose lack of foresight resulted in a seemingly quick military victory but a possibly lost peace. And the American public is also losing patience with the blood-letting and the financial costs of the war, as the president's sinking poll numbers reveal. More and more people want better answers to Iraq's problems than they are currently getting.

A war reporter can take little professional satisfaction from watching his worst fears being realized. The reporter can only move on to the next part of the story, and tell it how it is. I've found in my career that the truth hurts, and that there is a tendency for authorities to blame the messengers of doom rather than the reality they bring. But then, if I wanted to be popular I would have gone into another line of work.