THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 12, 1996 TAG: 9609120343
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 56 lines
Old Dominion University officials are finding out just how long a shadow Saddam Hussein casts.
The volatile Iraqi leader's military alliance with a Kurdish separatist faction, which prompted U.S. missile attacks, has deprived ODU of its lead speaker in this year's President's Lecture Series.
CNN international correspondent Peter Arnett, who became a household name with his dispatches from Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, is back in the Iraqi capital reporting on the latest U.S.-Iraqi showdown. He canceled his Norfolk appearance at the last minute Wednesday as the hostilities flared up again.
That sent organizers scrambling for a replacement speaker, and after a few frantic hours they found one: longtime journalist and former presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger.
Salinger will speak at 8 tonight in the ODU Field House on the same topic Arnett was scheduled to address: ``The World as a Global Village.'' The lecture is free and open to the public.
His audience can expect a skeptical, if not cynical, journalist's view of world events since the collapse of communism.
``We'll look at how the Western powers did not understand the reality of the end of the Cold War,'' Salinger said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
``We were hearing from leaders, `Oh, well, now we're going to a stable world, everything's going to be great.' But if any of them had understood history, they would have known that a number of these dictators had frozen things in their countries and they had become very unfrozen and very violent.''
Salinger sees the latest crisis in Iraq as a continuation of a wrongheaded U.S. policy dating back to 1990.
``There was no need for the Persian Gulf War,'' he said. ``It was completely put together by George Bush.
``You had three weeks of troops on the border, from 30,000 rising to 100,000, and the United States never sent one single message to Saddam Hussein saying, `You'd better not invade,' but instead sent messages to him virtually saying, `Go ahead and invade.' ''
Salinger was press secretary to John F. Kennedy from Kennedy's days as a senator in 1959 until his assassination in 1963. He also served briefly in the same capacity for Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson.
After several years in business, he became editor of the French newsweekly L'Express in 1973 and joined ABC News in 1978. He served as Paris bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent and senior editor, retiring in 1993. He is now vice chairman of international affairs for the communications firm Burson-Marsteller.
A Navy veteran of World War II, he is the author of eight books, including ``Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf Crisis,'' published in 1991. ILLUSTRATION: Pierre Salinger, a journalist and former presi-dential
press secretary, will speak tonight instead. by CNB