Fox News has its own view of reality

The movie "Polar Express" takes viewers on a fantasy trip to the North Pole. The computer-generated virtual reality that the movie creates is amazing. I saw it Thanksgiving evening.

The next day a friend recorded a 2-minute segment on Fox News Channel about the "scandal" of the United Nations' oil-for-food program. In its way, it, too, was an amazing fantasy trip into a virtual reality.

The finale of "Polar Express" is reaching the North Pole to meet Santa. Santa is important because he has a fantastic bag of toys. But "Polar Express" is pretty benign compared with the fantasy of Fox.

Fox News Channel's report on the "scandal" of the oil-for-food program concludes that it was the willingness of critics of the U.S./U.N. economic sanctions program "before all the facts were in, that partially enabled Saddam Hussein to get away with killing so many of his own people." This is serious, non-benign fantasy.

Four days before this segment aired, I spent 45 minutes on camera with the Seattle-based Fox News Channel reporter who put the story together. From that entire interview, one sentence of mine made it into the story: "The kind of suffering that we knew we intended to inflict on the Iraqi people -- and we maintained for all of those years -- is still fundamentally our responsibility."

What didn't make it into the story were any of the reasons I gave as to why this is the case. Here are some of them:

The oil-for-food program didn't begin until 1996, more than six years after sanctions began. A "scandal" in a program that didn't yet exist cannot be blamed for six years of Iraqi deaths.

In 1992 The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 46,900 Iraqi children under 5 died from January to August 1991. Extrapolating this death rate over the years until the oil-for-food program began -- half the period of the sanctions -- yields a horrible estimate of 400,000 Iraqi children's deaths.

In 1992 The New England Journal of Medicine stated the major cause of children's deaths in Iraq was water-borne epidemics caused by U.S. Gulf War bombing of Iraq's civilian infrastructure.

L. Paul Bremer, formerly the top U.S. leader in Iraq, said it would take $100 billion to repair Iraq's civilian infrastructure. He said Iraq had "neglected its infrastructure for 30 years." He made no mention of the Gulf War destruction. This amount is far beyond any alleged scandal, far beyond smuggled oil money, far beyond $2 billion we say Saddam spent on palaces.

A colonel writes in a U.S. Air Force magazine that destroying Iraq's electrical generating facilities caused "perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths" but argues that the Air Force should do this because of the benefit of "indirectly targeting civilian morale."

The New York Times gave away the real reason for all this cruelty and death. In March 1991, a story said, "By making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people we would encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power."

Now a virtual reality is being maintained -- in the face of these unreported or long-forgotten facts -- by Fox's repeating what has become our four-word national mantra: "It's all Saddam's fault."

But who in the world -- except millions of Fox viewers -- believe it? Sad to say, it's tens of millions of consumers of U.S. news who haven't heard these facts and, unless they look, also won't know any better.

One basic question remains: Will we leave this virtual reality and recognize what we have done to the Iraqi people from 1991 on?

Bert Sacks of Seattle sued the federal government to overturn a $10,000 fine levied against him for violating economic sanctions on Iraq by taking medicine and toys to sick Iraqi children. He lost his court case in October.

Add P-I Opinion headlines to