Jingo all the way.

Noam Chomsky could not have done a better job scripting the media coverage of the November showdown with Iraq. The range of acceptable debate ran the gamut from assassinating Saddam Hussein (the liberal position), to bombing Baghdad (the centrist position), to sending in the ground troops (the rightwing position).

During the crisis, it was virtually impossible to find any voice for peace in The New York Times or The Washington Post or on Nightline or This Week. Almost all the discussion focused on which military option the U.S. government should choose.

Thomas Friedman, the former chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now its foreign-affairs columnist, fired first. In his November 6 column, entitled "Head Shot," Friedman got right down to business. He advocated assassination. "Saddam Hussein is the reason God created cruise missiles," he wrote. "Given the nature of world politics today, and given America's feckless allies, the U.S. will get only one good military shot at Saddam before everyone at the U.N. starts tut-tutting and rushing to his defense. . . . So if and when Saddam pushes beyond the brink, and we get that one good shot, let's make sure it's a head shot."

Friedman was urging the Clinton Administration to break the law. Since 1978, an Executive Order has banned the use of assassination by the U.S. government. He was also urging the Clinton Administration to violate the Constitution. Only Congress has the right to declare war. Assassinating a foreign leader is surely an act of war.

But Friedman was not alone. George Stephanopolous, Clinton's former senior adviser, who plays a liberal on ABC's This Week, said on November 9 that "assassination is the more moral course."

Sam Donaldson, the ostensibly liberal co-host of the show. concurred: The United States should get rid of Saddam "under cover of law."

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter went along for the ride. On November 17, he wrote, "It won't be easy to take him out.... But we need to try, because the only language Saddam has ever understood is force."

"Take him down," added Newsweek's puerile editorial section, "Conventional Wisdom."

Traditional hawks like William Safire, A.M. Rosenthal, and Jim Hoagland were all of a feather, screeching for an attack. And William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, said only U.S. ground troops could dislodge Saddam.

At Ted Koppel's prompting, Lawrence Eagleburger urged a sustained bombing of Iraq. A few days later, Eagleburger and Stephanopolous were on Good Morning America with another free-wheeling debate. Stephanopolous called again for assassination ("It's illegal, but not immoral") while Eagleburger took the high road ("We should blast him day after day").

Newsweek and Time were especially egregious the week of November 24, when war looked most imminent. A life-sized picture of Saddam Hussein's face (replete with bloodshot eyes) glared out from Time's cover. A smaller Clinton pointed at Saddam's nose. Headline: "The Showdown."

Newsweek displayed not one but three head shots of Saddam Hussein on its cover. Six menacing eyes leered at the reader. The headline: "Can We Stop Saddam? His Dark Threat of Biological Warfare."

Time's lead article by Eric Pooley carried this subtitle: "As Diplomacy Falters and His Allies Balk, Clinton May Have to Go It Alone with an Air Strike Against Saddam." And it featured this choice bit of writing: "When the Iraqi nemesis bared his fangs...." The article all but begged Saddam Hussein to shoot at a U-2. "Clinton's choice would be simplified the moment Iraq launched a missile at a U-2 . . . or merely locked the plane in its radar-tracking sights."

Newsweek entitled its lead story "Saddam's Dark Threat." Accompanying it was a photo of a row of U.S. jet fighters raring to go (see Ruth Conniff's story on page 10). The opening paragraph compared Saddam Hussein to the big bad wolf: "He huffs and puffs." By the second paragraph, the scare machine was working at full speed: "Saddam decides to make Americans share the suffering of his people. He hires a terrorist cell to launch a biological- or chemical-weapons attack against an American target.... A zealot with an aerosol pump hidden in his briefcase standing inside a New York subway station--or outside the White House--could create chaos and slaughter."

This coverage was designed to help Clinton prepare the American populace for war. Clinton did his part, saying Saddam was "a threat to the children of the twenty-first century." Defense Secretary William Cohen whipped up hysteria by schlepping a bag of Domino's sugar onto the Sunday morning shows. He warned that if the bag was filled with anthrax and if someone dropped it in D.C., half of Washington would be dead.

Only after the Clinton Administration decided, fortunately, that a military attack would have enormous negative consequences did William Cohen put the sugar back on the shelf.

And only after the Russians had brokered a deal with Iraq did The New York Times publish a story by Nicholas Wade entitled "Germ Weapons: Deadly But Hard to Use." Wade pointed out that even if Iraq had chemical or biological weapons, it doesn't currently have the means to deliver them.

"To serve as weapons, both anthrax and botulinum toxin need to be inhaled," Wade wrote. "That requires gently dispersing them as a mist at ground level, a difficult task in war conditions. A crop-dusting plane, the ideal delivery vehicle, would have little chance of reaching its target." Biological and chemical weapons can also "be dispersed from bombs or missile warheads, both of which Iraq was working on. But the technical problems are severe, experts say."

Where were these experts when the rhetoric was at its most reckless?

Here's why the talk of assassination, bombing, or ground troops was mere jingoism.

First of all, many countries, including the United States and some of its allies, have many more weapons of mass destruction than does Iraq.

During the Iraq crisis, Defense Secretary Cohen said that Saddam Hussein might have enough weapons of mass destruction to "kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth." Cohen neglected to mention that the United States has the capacity to destroy every man, woman, and child several thousand times over.

Other countries in the Middle East, especially Israel, have a much larger arsenal than Iraq's. Israel has nuclear weapons and probably has chemical weapons. Egypt and Saudi Arabia also have chemical-weapons programs, according to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

But Cohen didn't mention Israel, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia when he ran down a selective list of countries with chemical or biological capacities.

Nor did Cohen admit that the Pentagon has adopted a new and dangerous policy to use nuclear weapons against any country that launches a chemical or biological attack on a U.S. ally. As Hans Kristensen reports in the September/October issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, this violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And it reneges on repeated pledges by the U.S. government not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers.

Second, Saddam Hussein, thug that he is, is not uniquely diabolical. China has nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. It occupies Tibet and represses its own people, yet just weeks before the Iraq crisis, Clinton was toasting China's President Jiang Zemin at the White House. Suharto in Indonesia has a record of brutality that stacks up to Hussein's, but the Clinton Administration likes him. "He's our kind of guy," one senior official said after Suharto visited the White House.

Third, the issue during the Iraq crisis centered above all on the authority of the United Nations, not the security of the United States. The proper forum for handling it was in New York, not Washington. When the media and White House officials said that the United States should act unilaterally if it could not get the approval of the Security Council, they were affirming a cherished Washington doctrine: Go with the U.N. when it's on your side, ditch it when it gets in the way.

Had the Clinton Administration acted unilaterally, it would have been the height of imperial arrogance. And it wouldn't have even accomplished the goals Washington had laid out: to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

U.N. inspections have done more to downgrade Saddam's weapons than all the bombing of the Gulf War. Even after six weeks of aerial assaults in 1991, Iraq still maintained its stock of chemical weapons and its program to build nuclear weapons. Only the U.N. inspections have managed to grind down Saddam Hussein's nuclear program and pinpoint his chemical and biological blueprints.

The media's jingoism was most evident in its heedless disregard of Iraqi lives. Lawrence Eagleburger and Ted Koppel spoke with great equanimity about acceptable levels of "collateral damage." By this phrase, they meant dead Iraqi civilians.

Hasn't the United States killed enough Iraqis already?

More than 100,000 died during the Gulf War because George Bush's "nightmare scenario," as some of his advisers called it, did not come true: Saddam did not retreat from Kuwait. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers were killed in the infamous "turkey shoot" as they were retreating in a ragged line back to Baghdad. Thousands of others were buried alive by U.S. armored vehicles.

After the war, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died as a result of sanctions, according to the United Nations. The media have made little mention of this suffering. That, too, is imperial arrogance.

The U.S. policy toward Iraq in the last six years has been unconscionable. It has punished the Iraqi people for the sins of a ruler they did not choose. The United States must lift all sanctions on food and medicine, now, no matter what Saddam Hussein is doing.

This is not to diminish the threat of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. They are scary. What is to be done about them? The world community needs to agree to rid itself of them. But the United States has no moral authority to insist that other countries destroy their stockpiles while we're sitting atop the highest pile.

The United States says it will destroy its 31,000 tons of chemical weapons, but it has barely begun. And it has more nuclear warheads than any other country in the world. These are still the biggest threats to "the children of the twenty-first century."

The way to peace is through disarmament. The way to peace is through the United Nations--a United Nations that is not a mere instrument of the U.S. government.

When the United States commits itself to disarmament, and commits itself to working with--not just bullying--the world community, it will be in a position to demand that other countries disarm. But not until then.

For now, at least, the Clinton Administration has chosen not to heed the jangle of the jingoists. May restraint continue to prevail.