The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Tuesday, inflation slowed last month, while home building rebounded. A new report said the nation's college sports programs are ridden with financial and academic irregularities. Iraqi rebels claim to have captured a key oil producing city. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. Judy Woodruff is in Washington tonight. Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: On the NewsHour tonight we turn first to the state of the Soviet Union. Now that the votes are counted we ask three Soviet journalists what lies ahead for the country and for Mikhail Gorbachev. Next, two stories from behind enemy lines during the Gulf War. CNN's Peter Arnett tells what it was like reporting from Baghdad, and a Kuwaiti citizen tells of being captured and held by the Iraqis. Finally, another in our series of conversations on lessons from the war. Tonight, ethicist Willard Gaylin.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: Inflation slowed last month. But the news was less encouraging than it appeared. The Labor Department said the official rate of inflation was up just .2 percent in February, the smallest advance in nine months. But the closely watched core rate of inflation which excludes the volatile food and energy sectors was up .7 percent. The depressed housing industry showed some signs of life last month. The Commerce Department reported the construction of new homes and apartments was up more than 16 percent in February, the biggest gain in more than a year. On Wall Street today stock prices took a steep plunge. The Dow Jones Average closed down more than 62 points. The selloff came after IBM said it expected sharply lower earnings in the first quarter of the year. Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: A blue ribbon commission today charged that the nation's college sports programs are riddled with financial and academic irregularities. The report from the Night Foundation, a Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, said college presidents must regain control of athletic programs which use student athletes to make money while ignoring their academic needs. The report culminated an 18 month study of college sports and it said the problem can no longer be swept under the rug. The Reverend Theodore Hessberg is president of Notre Dame University and co-chair of the Commission. He said he would love to "put the sleaziness of intercollegiate athletics to rest and ensure athletes are receiving a good education."

REV. HESSBERG: These youngsters are not here to entertain people, although they may do that. They're here to get an education first and foremost, and if they don't pass, they don't play. And there's no monkey doodle business about this. There's no mickey mouse. They take standard courses and they make progress each semester, not just each year, towards a degree. And if they come up wanting in the middle of the season, they stop playing.

MS. WOODRUFF: Hessberg said many collegiate programs are governed by television contract and fund-raising efforts. He said colleges must control the financial affairs of their athletic department and not leave it to coaches and athletic directors.

MR. MacNeil: The Senate today voted to halt arms sales to allied nations that have not made good on their pledges to help pay for the Gulf war. The arms ban was part of a war costs measure approved by a 98 to 1 vote. The bill provides almost $43 billion to pay for the war. Up to 15 billion would come from the U.S. taxpayers. Foreign contributors would cover the rest. But only about half of the $54 billion pledged has been paid. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emerites would be among the nations most affected by the arms sales ban. Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney cautioned against drastic cuts in arms sales to the Middle East. He said the U.S. must protect its allies in the region. He spoke at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

SEC. CHENEY: Arms control may play a part in terms of trying to create a more secure and more stable Middle East. Certainly I would expect that that's true, if we're talking about some of the weapons of mass destruction, some of those capabilities, but I also believe that we have to be very cautious before we automatically assume that reducing shipments of arms to the Middle East is necessarily going to favor our friends or make them more secure. I also think there might conceivably be a trade-off at some point, that if, in fact, we are not going to allow our friends in the region to acquire the capabilities they think they need to provide for their security, we will simultaneously be accepting a larger burden ourselves to do it with U.S. forces.

MR. MacNeil: Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq said today they control large areas of the City of Kurkuk and have begun pushing loyalist forces out. Iranian Radio also reported that rioting had spread to Mosul, Northern Iraq's largest city. Fighting continues in the Southern City of Basra as well. Refugees reported that the streets are littered with the bodies of people killed in the rebellion.

MS. WOODRUFF: The group which holds two of the six American hostages in Lebanon issued a statement today renewing their conditions for freeing the hostages. The Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine said release of the Western hostages was linked to freedom for Arab prisoners being held in Israel. The group is believed to hold Americans Allan Steen and Jeffrey Turner. Today's message was accompanied by a photocopy of a picture of Turner. He and Steen were both teachers at Beirut University College when they were kidnapped on January 24, 1987.

MR. MacNeil: Poland's president, Lech Walesa, arrived in Washington today to begin a week long tour of the United States. He was greeted by Sec. of State James Baker. Tomorrow he meets with Pres. Bush. Walesa said the purpose of his trip is to thank America for its support of Polish reforms and to invite U.S. businesses to invest in Poland's new free market system. Vote counting in the Soviet referendum on preserving the Union continued today. With the final results still several days away, Soviet officials said so far, Mikhail Gorbachev's call for a renewed Soviet federation had won the approval of more than 3/4 of Soviet voters. Mr. Gorbachev today announced long anticipated price reforms to take effect April 2nd. The controversial price increases, some as high as 200 percent, effectively abolish enormous state subsidies for food and many consumer goods. We'll have more on the Soviet story shortly. In Yugoslavia today, the military vowed not to interfere in the country's politics but said it would not allow civil war to break out. The statement appeared to lesson the possibility that the army would take control of the rapidly disintegrating Yugoslav federation. But it left the door open to military intervention in the case of an escalation in the dispute between rival republics over the future of the country.

MS. WOODRUFF: That's it for our summary of the day's top stories. Just ahead on the NewsHour, the Soviet vote and Gorbachev's future, Peter Arnett on war reporting from Baghdad, a Kuwaiti hostage talks about his Iraqi imprisonment, and some surprising lessons from the Gulf War. FOCUS - STATE OF THE UNION

MR. MacNeil: The Soviet Union had an unusual experiment. A referendum in favor of maintaining the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a Federation but around the vast nation voters sent many contradictory signals and many complained that it was a side show to far more pressing problems of finding food and other basic goods. Six Republics where breakaway sentiment is the strongest boycotted the election. Those were the Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as Maldavia, Georgia and Armenia. In the Ukraine voters supported the Gorbachev question but also voted overwhelmingly to endorse a declaration of sovereignty. In Moscow part of the Russian Republic voters backed the idea of an elected mayor and the popularly elected President of the Republic. Rural Russian voters gave the Gorbachev plan a big vote and in Kasikstan voters approved the Gorbachev measure but on ballots with the Word Soviet and Socialist edited out. In a moment we will get three Soviet views but first some commentary from an outsider. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told the House Foreign Affairs Committee it was too some to assess the referendum but whatever the final count Gorbachev and the Soviets still faced massive problems.

SEC. CHENEY: The moves toward democracy and demilitarization of the Soviet Union that we all have welcomed now appear to be in doubt. Recent worrisome events raise questions about the prospects for needed economic and political reform and also about the Soviet Union's future course. The economic situation in the Soviet Union today is as bleak as it has been since the end of World War II. The Soviet economy appears to be collapsing. There only remains the question how rapidly the shrinkage is occurring. Estimates for 1990 range from an official Soviet estimate of some 2 percent reduction in Soviet economic activity to at least 10 percent in the 12 months ending in February of 1991. Many experts and Soviet officials anticipate that 1991 will see a further contraction of the Soviet economy. Mr. Gorbachev's success in the eyes of many hinged on his ability to deliver on economic reform. To move the Soviet Union in to the modern era so that it could compete with the West. Success depended first and foremost upon his ability to dismantle the old structures that clearly did not work and to put new structures in their place. In my view to date he has clearly not achieved that transformation, Given this failure we have to anticipate there will continue to be economic decline and increased prospects to significant unrest. If the Government peruses additional anti reform steps Moscow will find itself locked in a vicious cycle. It is hard to discern at this point a strategy at the center for dealing with these problems or regenerating a process of reform. During his recent swings through Russia he has tried to reposition himself at the center of the Russian political spectrum. Nonetheless in recent weeks rather than moving toward great openness to resolve the underlying problems Gorbachev appears ready to rely on the Security services and the military and their use of force to maintain order inside the Soviet Union. Reform need not fail. The President has said many times that we want the process of reform in the Soviet Union to succeed. We still hope that it will be successful. The Central Government we believe may still be able to take steps to return to the path of reform.

MR. MacNeil: We now get the views of three Soviet Journalists. Yeleana Khanga writes for the Moscow News and is currently a fellow at the Rockerfeller Foundation in New York. Vitali Korotich is Editor of the Magazine Ogonyok and also a member of the Congress of Soviet People's Deputies. He is now a fellow at the Gannet Foundation Media Center at Columbia University. And Melor Sturua a Political Columnist for the paper Isvestia, currently is a visiting Professor at the Hubert H Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and he joins us tonight from Boston. Vatali Korotich is Cheney's assessment fair that there is no central strategy for economic reform at the moment and that political reform is stalled or in reverse?

MR. KOROTICH: I have the same feeling. I have a very dangerous feeling that Gorbachev and our Government want to fulfill their task having the previous system. Still fighting for the ideals which failed. Still talking about Communist perspectives and all those things which stopped our development for many years. I think now is a very dangerous moment. It is not a solution to our economically problems. It is possible to make prices so high that people will eat less but it is not an economical decision.

MR. MacNeil: Ms. Khanga do you see this as a dangerous moment in the Soviet Union.

MS. KHANGA: Well talking about rising prices it is very dangerous because right now I am thinking of people who under the level of poverty, single mothers, people with several children, unable people and retired people. It was real hard for them last years but now when the prices go and that is not a guarantee the food will be there. So you know it is not a solution.

MR. MacNeil: Melor Sturua how do you feel about Cheney's assessment that he sees no strategy for economic reform at the center?

MR. STURUA: Well it seems to me that there is a strategy but this strategy will never work because Mr. Gorbachev opts for old measures, centralized economic strategy and as I understand without free market oriented economy we can't solve our problems. We can't solve our crisis. That is why it seems to me that you can say there is a strategy which will never work.

MR. MacNeil: Do you agree with that?

MR. KOROTICH: Yes, yes, because for many years we are in this way. It necessary not only to change the horses but the road. But we are still changing old horses.

MR. MacNeil: Now is the referendum which has just been taken which is a historic and dramatic thing to happen in the Soviet Union in one sense. Is that going to make any difference?

MR. KOROTICH: It simply helped people to decide if they want to live in previous kind of state in big empire or they want to have commonwealth or they want to have more independence states united in new kind of unity. Political voices in many places. In Moscow it was directly 50 to 50. In many places they were divided in the same way. It means that people need changes. The referendum itself means nothing. People simply need changes in two ways. Proposed fine, now it is necessary to wait for results and then it will be possible to decide.

MR. MacNeil: I mean already the question has been answered affirmatively by about 75 percent of the Soviet voters in a very big turnout. Does one need more results than that to know?

MR. KOROTICH: People believe that now it is necessary to change and people believe that if it started with Gorbachev we must move with Gorbachev in those changes. It is a wise decision. But in the same way and Gorbachev must understand that it is impossible to move in the same way. That ideas of Communism that ideas of our previous system they put us to the dead end and now people believe that we'll change something. People are ready to keep together as an old marriage which has failed but ready to keep together because they have children and they have common property. They are ready to live together and they only decide what kind of unity it will be. This question is the main question.

MR. MacNeil: What do you see coming from the referendum, what difference will it make?

MS. KHANGA: I don't really quit agree that referendum solves any kind of our problems. I would compare the referendum with a marriage where the husband says I don't want to stay in that family any more and the wife says I want to live with my husband. So they go to the court and the Judge asks lets make a referendum. The husband says I already said I don't want to be in that family. The wife says I want him. So what is the solution. Like six Republics refused to be inside of the Soviet Union. We made a referendum. Did we convince them to go back? No. We knew that before hand and now we know the same thing.

MR. MacNeil: But what Gorbachev has been trying to do as I understand it is to create a new kind of Federation in which the Republics would all agree on their relations to the center. Having established this referendum that a majority of Soviet voters want some kind of Union to continue will it make it easier now to work out those arrangements in a new constitutional set up.

MS. KHANGA: I think the question in the referendum could be put to each Republic. Do you want to be in that Union and on the base of goodwill we could establish goodwill relations and figure out how to work but the question was not phrased in this way. So I don't see the solution.

MR. MacNeil: You don't think that it answers anything about the future relationship of the Republics to the center?

MS. KHANGA: I mean we are in the same situation that we were in before. There was no doubt about it that a majority of the Country who will vote will be on the side of Gorbachev saying yes we want the Union. The Generation of my parents they were fighting for that and lots of people are tired of all those changes of reforms that don't work. They want stability.

MR. MacNeil: Melor Sturua does the referendum make it easier to solve the relationships between the Republics wanting more autonomy and sovereignty and the center.

MR. STURUA: Well Lenin, by the way the founder of the Soviet Union, which now President Gorbachev wants to keep intact compared statistics with a prostitute. So you can use statistics as you wish. And this particular referendum reminds on the very popular Russian toy the Matrioska doll. You open it there is another one inside, and so on and so on. You can read the results of the referendum as you wish but the main result is that the Union doesn't exist any more. Society is divided, house divided. More than that it seems to me that some Republics unhealated so to speak the sense of this referendum. I mean Russia and the Ukraine. I am not talking about six Republics who absolutely abstained and didn't participate. But more than that the referendum itself is a mousetrap. Because if you say to the Federation you are saying yes at the same time to the Soviet Socialist Federation but the Republics they don't want to be Soviet and Socialist. If the Union is Socialist is means that it will be again the Centralized state ruled by the Communist Party. So it seems to me that it sounded like a paradise. Everyone wants to be healthy, wealthy and happy but it wasn't so. Then you have to take in to count one more thing. Before the Peristroika every referendum gave us one and the same result 99 percent. Now we just have 75. It shows how the society is changing and I can read this result as the defeat of the referendum because 25 percent 1/4 of the country said no to this quite shrewd question which was asked in the referendum.

MR. MacNeil: And a lot of them didn't vote in the Republics. Is he right about that. Is this a defeat?

MR. KOROTICH: You see it is very interesting because in the Supreme Soviet it was voted the question of the name Socialist in the name of the country. I voted against. Next day all the list of deputies that voted against the word socialism was published in the Communist Party newspaper. As a list of terrible enemies and the MInister of Defense told that may be I am paid personally by special secret services from abroad because it is impossible. In this way fear is inside the country and government try to put fear in the country. And in the referendum many people were afraid to vote simply as they like.

MR. MacNeil: So the fact that 25 percent may have voted against it is very significant?

MR. KOROTICH: Yes but people must believe that have power. People must believe that their vote means something. Before our votes never mean and now if they understand that voting they can reach something people will vote and those 25 percent is very important figure.

MR. MacNeil: Start with you Melor Sturua does Gorbachev embrace, is he committed to economic and political reform or is he now the captive of the people who are against reform?

MR. STURUA: Well he is committed to the economic and political reform in the frame work of the so called socialist choice. It means there is no choice because what does it mean freedom of choice. It is up to you to chose socialist or democratic or other way of development but he says no only socialist choice, only socialist federation only socialist pluralism. It makes no sense at all. That is why his commitment is to the quick fix of the same socialist structure which failed. His commitment is to the reform of the socialist system in the Soviet Union which will never work. So I must say that he is not for reform but against it.

MR. MacNeil: How do you see that. Do you see with the referendum on the side now and everybody continuing to clamor for economic reform that the central government wants to and is going to move towards economic reform. To what would be regarded as reform here a free market system.

MS. KHANGA: Well unfortunately in our country the leaders are still afraid of the world capitalism and market economy. They think that they can do a controlled market economy. It doesn't work and people are tired already. We say you can't jump the river in two jumps. You either do it or you don't. So right now we are in the middle of no where. But I think that Gorbachev has a chance. There are lots of smart economists that are just waiting for him to give them a chance to try.

MR. MacNeil: Having this referendum under his belt now give Gorbachev a new opportunity to attempt reform?

MR. KOROTICH: He has this opportunity but we are speaking about the same. It is necessary to separate two things the economy and ideology. Economy is science. Ideology is a very nice thing possible to talk about but necessary to believe that the economy will be done by economists. We still have old retired party leaders who teach us how to organize industry. They have destroyed it five or six times in our memory. But they still teach us. It is necessary to make the economy a science and all economists are pushed out from Gorbachev's team and start to be replaced by old party bureaucracy. So it is very dangerous.

MR. MacNeil: So you agree with Melor Sturua has embraced or has been captured by people who don't want free market reforms.

MR. KOROTICH: Yes I think he starts to be human shield, they start to use him and this way surround him by old style tough liners. He can not do what he likes. I really believe that he wants reforms but he is still speaking about ideology more than about economy and he is still trying to understand whether it will be capitalism or socialism and we have not meat and bread. And it is necessary to make production and not to discuss the empty things.

MR. MacNeil: So I gather from non of you that it is very hopeful that things are going to get better very soon.

MR. STURUA: May I add one thing?

MR. MacNeil: If you can do it very briefly.

MR. STURUA: Yes we spoke quite thoroughly about the economy but the main problem now that exists is the nationalist problem and despite this referendum the quest for independence and serenity. The centrifugal forces are so strong that even the results of the referendum will never give Mr. Gorbachev a chance to keep the old imperial structure intact.

MR. MacNeil: Okay we have to leave it there. Melor Sturua, Yelena Khanga and Vitaly Korotich, thank you. Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: Still ahead on the Newshour, War Correspondent Peter Arnett, a Kuwaiti hostage freed from Iraq and lessons from the war. FOCUS - A WAR STORY

MS. WOODRUFF: Next tonight two sets of war stories from inside Iraq. They are told by an American, the only Western journalist to spend the entire war in Baghdad, and by a Kuwaiti citizen who was taken hostage by Iraqi troops. We start with the journalist, Peter Arnett of the Cable News Network. He was both criticized and praised for the way he reported on the impact of the war on Iraq and this afternoon Arnett talked about his experiences at the National Press Club.

MR. ARNETT: When I arrived in Baghdad from Jerusalem just a few days before the war began, I discovered there was no finally honed Iraqi information organization that was controlling our professional lives there. Basically there were a group of conscripts from the Baghdad Observer Newspaper, the English language newspaper, and from the information ministry, and they were assigned to handle the international press and they were completely overwhelmed. Now some of these individuals, our censors, had graduated from Western universities and Scotland and Germany. And they were generally in their late 30s, early 40s. Most I discovered were not in Saddam Hussein's Baath Socialist Party. They entertained healthy reservations about the regime and these became clearer the longer I stayed, particularly as the bombing campaign revealed the increasing impotency of the government. Some of these whom we called "our minders" were diplomats expelled from Washington or Paris, when the embassies were closed, they were generally amiable, sophisticated. All lived at the Al Rashid Hotel, their families were a long distance from Baghdad. They had no contact with their families, there were no phones. They spent every night in the bunkers downstairs because of the bombing and each night as part of the -- as part of my relationship with them, I'd go down with a few bottles or whatever I could find in CNN's ample storage rooms and hand them around and talk long into the night. I mean, we were -- basically they were gregarious, amiable, amenable to discussion when it came to coverage. I think a coverage breakthrough that I made came early in the game when finally I was all alone and we had the set phone, I had a set of instructions how to run it, myself and Mr. Sadoon dragged the phone out into the yard in the evening, it was a chilly night, it was dark, and I had a flashlight and I had fashioned a brief approved script that I'd written about a visit to Baghdad that day. So I read it over the air and anchorman Reid Collins at the conclusion of it said, he said, asked me some questions. Well, how did it look, what about this, that or the next thing, and I was chatting to him and talking for about fifteen, twenty minutes, and Mr. Sadoon was listening, and at the end, he said, who are you talking to? And I said, Reid Collins, and he says, not Esin Jordan, because he knew Esin Jordan, and he knew that we only did business with Esin. I said, no, he was the anchorman. Well, who's an anchorman? I explained. He says, you mean you were on the air? But that was the breakthrough, because later we discussed it at night, he brought me other minders around and we talked of this, he said that there's no censorship, how can we do this, I talked to him about the need for credibility, that was the important factor. I said there was no point in me being in Baghdad if all that I could deliver each evening was a brief, approved dispatch. I had to have the question/a, had to have the Q&A. And by miracle of miracles, I was able to get through to them, so they accepted it. What would a typical question be? I made a note of a couple of them here. Bob Kane, our anchor, would be on the line. He said -- I'd been to Basra -- and I'd say I couldn't talk about any military information at all. He'd say, Peter, on the road to Basra was there much military traffic, you know, was there much military traffic, and I said, well, Bob, there was much traffic in the highway and very little of it was civilian, but on the other hand -- (People in Audience Laughing) -- then they'd say things like Peter, are the Iraqis moving tanks and anti-aircraft and placement into civilian areas, and I remember saying, Bob, if I was to answer you what I know about that question, I'd be pulled off the air, so a little more subtle. We're able to chart the increasing -- the rapid deterioration of Iraqi society and the frustration of the average man in the street and eventually the very negative comments of the minders, themselves. Now they were increasingly unhappy. I mean, our whole CNN crew were being pulled aside in hallways and given complaints about what was going on in the government. We had to be very careful about how we handled all this information. My concern, it was argent provaceurs, making up remarks, it was an attempt to test us, it was always each day how much of this information can we go with, how much could we prove, that was the criteria. Eventually the final, the ultimate of all this maneuvering, discussion, and to a certain amount freedom came on the last night when we were eventually told that CNN had to depart Baghdad with the rest of the press corps. This was about several days after the war ended. I was waiting to go on live in the Al Rashid Garden to talk about this at 11 o'clock at night and Frank Sesno was summing up the news developments over the audio. I was listening to him and a minder arrived. He was a young man. He was a Christian. I'd talked to him before. He was concerned about the fate of his minority in the future, and I turned to him and I said, look, I'm going to be very frank tonight, this is my last broadcast, I'm sorry, but I will be frank, and he sort of looked at me and backed off and as we started to talk, he just looked into the middle distance, into the sky, and Frank Sesno asked me questions like, one was, what about the, what about the bunker, Frank said, and you're about to leave, tell us about that so-called "civilian bunker", and I was able to say, well, the hot rumor here is that Saddam Hussein was in it two hours before it was hit, but I can't prove it. Another question, is there any unrest in Baghdad, and I was able to say, well, we've got unconfirmed reports there's blood in the streets earlier today, and the minder was looking into the middle distance, and on we went for 35 minutes of it, and finally it was over, and I walked over to him and I shook his hand and he sort of smiled at me and walked off into the middle distance and that was that.

MS. WOODRUFF: For the record, the Persian Gulf War was the 17th war covered by Peter Arnett. He won the Pulitzer Prize as an Associated Press reporter for his coverage of the Vietnam War. FOCUS - A HOSTAGE STORY

MR. MacNeil: Two weeks ago in Kuwait, Correspondent Charles Krause interviewed Salwah and Badrya Al Ghanim, members of one of Kuwait's wealthiest and most prominent families. At the time, Salwah's brother, Mahmoud, a businessman, had been taken hostage by Iraqi soldiers. He was one of thousands of Kuwaiti men and teen- age boys who'd been rounded up by the Iraqis in the final days of the war. Mahmoud Al Ghanim was later released and this is his story.

MR. KRAUSE: Mahmoud Al Ghanim is one of the lucky ones. He's now been reunited with his sister, Salwah and other members of the Al Ghanim family. But several thousand other Kuwaiti hostages are still in Iraqi hands. Their fate is unknown. Before his release, Al Ghanim was held hostage 14 days, most of that time at a military training camp near Basra in Southern Iraq. What did you know when you were kept in that military training ground of what was happening outside there? First of all, what did you know with regard to the final days of the war?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: We didn't know what was happening. We -- the bombing which was very close to us -- we were hoping that the satellites had picked up the transfer buses and knew where our location was. Surviving that, the second day bombing got closer to us and we understood from one of the guards that a battleship called Missouri was bombing, so we thanked God that we were not, you know, affected by it, and somehow we had really a belief in the American technology in having spotted us. But the third day when the civil war started, that was scary, that was really scary, because the Republican Army was partly stationed no more than 1/2 kilometer from where we were and heavy artillery was exchanged between the Republican Army and opposing forces in Basra. During that period, we had very little contact with the rest of the world.

MR. KRAUSE: And what were conditions like in that camp?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: Terrible, that is to say, we occupy the space no more than 60 square centimeters, which is in feet 4 square foot, we're alternating sleep, no food, no water, and actually the results today came of the tests, total dehydration of all system, many got sick with dysentery, no facilities, toilet facilities, the whole human element with these forces was not existent. They really seemed to be enjoying what they were doing. They were worse than the Gestapos as we've seen them in Hollywood movies.

MR. KRAUSE: When did you first realize that there was fighting between the Republican Guard and other units of the Iraqi army, when, in effect, did you realize civil war was beginning?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: When the bombing stopped and the artillery started, and we knew that it was the allied forces camping right outside our camp, they could have freed us, that's not taking place, we knew then the forces were fighting, the Iraqi forces were fighting.

MR. KRAUSE: There have been reports, conflicting reports out of Basra. At one point it seemed that the opposition was doing well and more recently the reports are that the Republican Guard seems to have taken control of the city back from the opposition. What is your sense?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: We heard an estimate from some people who were at the hospital that on the first day of the fighting some 5,000 people died and the pharmacist, a friend of ours who had taken the sick to that hospital, saw what the perimeter of Basra looked like, which was just skeletons, you know, all the homes were demolished, smoke coming from everyplace.

MR. KRAUSE: But the bombing continued for five days.

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: For five days. Heavy and then there was a lull, and then there was sporadic -- so we assumed that the opposition was crushed.

MR. KRAUSE: When you were brought back to Kuwait by the Iraqis, you were dropped off at the border, and there was no one there to receive you, as I understand it, and, in fact, there have been accounts that many of the men who were with you became quite angry. How did you feel about that?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: Well, our main goal was to get out of the Iraqi territory, so when we saw the little American flag at the border point, even though in an open truck it was cold, open desert, it didn't really matter, but they were not ready for us because they claim that they were not from home. They could have set up more appropriate accommodation in the form of tents, because we were kept in the same clothes. We had not taken showers for two weeks. We were filthy and we had -- a lot of us were sick and so it was rather disappointing, but amazingly, see, we had taken it with a good heart, but when it took over eight, nine hours, and then asked so many questions even after presenting our documents, some of us had lost our documents, so frustration started, so about 200 of us protested and started walking that distance from the border to Kuwait City which frankly I don't blame them, and I truly feel that our government should have been more ready for us to receive us.

MR. KRAUSE: Do you think this government is demonstrating, is failing in this situation?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: This government is not only demonstrating its total incapability to deal with the situation, but unfortunately, it's trying to dictate its own terms how to deal with the reconstruction of Kuwait, in other words, dealing with the mentality of -- as Kuwait was before the invasion -- dealing with the same mentality of reconstructing Kuwait -- and this cannot be. This just cannot be. If you ask anybody in the street, any Kuwaiti who has stayed behind and defended this country, he will tell you he has no faith, none whatsoever with the present government.

MR. KRAUSE: You got back from the border when, Friday morning?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: Friday morning, yes, after 14 hour journey that covered a hundred and thirty-five kilometers.

MR. KRAUSE: What did you say to Salweh when you first saw her?

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: Big hugs and then telling I'm still in one piece, maybe totally dehydrated, but still in one piece, because I think we are really lucky that we weren't physically tortured. Maybe the number acted as a preventer against that physical torture, because as I said, there were 3500 or 4000 people so they couldn't have had the time to torture us physically, so we were the lucky ones in that aspect. We were really lucky, thank God for that.

MR. KRAUSE: Thank you, Mahmoud, and welcome home.

MAHMOUD AL GHANIM: Thank you, Charles.

MR. MacNeil: The Committee For a Free Kuwait says about 1500 Kuwaiti hostages have been released from Iraq prisons so far. An estimated 7,000 are still being held. CONVERSATION - LESSONS OF THE WAR

MS. WOODRUFF: Now another in our series of special conversations about the lessons to be learned from the Persian Gulf War. Up until now we have heard from a group of distinguished historians. Tonight we turn to a psychiatrist who specializes in ethical issues. He is Willard Gaylin, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York. Dr. Gaylin is also president and co-founder of the Hastings Center which researches ethical issues in the life sciences. Dr. Gaylin, thank you for being with us.

DR. GAYLIN: Thank you for having me.

MS. WOODRUFF: What did you observe, first of all, about the way Americans reacted to this war, about their feeling about it? What struck you about that?

DR. GAYLIN: Well, I think it was clear to all of us that as horrible it is to say, that war is a kind of tonic. The people were mobilized by it. There is a kind of thrilling thing in a war, at all wars, I might say, in the beginning. This was a peculiar war. It only had a beginning. There was no middle, a beginning and an end. Wars become disgusting and terrifying in the middle when people we know are touched by them, or somehow or another when our whole lives are changed by them, but this was a war which played into the need for community and also was a kind of war which was a corrective too. It wasn't just a war. It was when it happened.

MS. WOODRUFF: What did you mean when you said it was a tonic? What are you saying?

DR. GAYLIN: Well, we live kind of hum drum lives and there is a sense of enuit, boredom, frustration, et cetera. I think almost any mobilizing force is a tonic. People get excited about a snowstorm. People get excited even when there's a disaster like in New York when there's a transit breakdown of one sort or another. What it is is that it puts us in touch with other people. It forms a community. We live in a kind of isolation and anomy that is very, very frightening I think, and so even a war, what it did was make a collective community of 200 million people, that's not easy to do. Most of us don't even have a community of five in a family.

MS. WOODRUFF: When you say it made a collective community, what do you really mean, because for many people, the war was watching television and watching television news, reading about it in the newspaper, what do you mean?

DR. GAYLIN: We were all watching the same thing. We were all reading the same articles. We couldn't wait for it, particularly this war, which turned out to have a good guy, a bad guy, heroes, none of the mess of Vietnam, none of the agonies or frustration and impotence, and it led to an ending which had a kind of almost theatrical quality to it, so that it did have a stimulating effect on people who do lead fairly dull lives.

MS. WOODRUFF: But is there something -- is there something wrong with taking pleasure or pride or whatever in what I think some --

DR. GAYLIN: Of course there is. Maybe not here. I mean, I happen to think this was a just war, a good war. Whether we should have gone actually the way we did is beside the point. I don't want to get into politics. Much brighter people discuss the political aspects of it. But in a sense, there is pride, particularly after the sense of frustration after Vietnam. There was such a sense of impotence, such a sense of betrayal. I just recently saw Gen. Schwarzkopf in a remarkable interview with Barbara Walters in which he talked about his own humiliation as a senior officer at the lack of leadership, his contempt for the leadership during that war. If he as a professional soldier felt it, all of us were in agonies about that war. This then came as a corrective. Now I don't think that's going to last forever. But it also pointed out a hunger that is here for some integrating force for our lives.

MS. WOODRUFF: But on the other hand, on your point about it being a tonic and making us feel good, as you know, some commentators have pointed out that there's something almost inappropriate about that when after all, tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed, we flattened the infrastructure of the country. How do you strike a balance there, or should Americans even worry about that?

DR. GAYLIN: Well, I think of course, that was the starting point I think that both of us comment on, but it is a shame that this is where we have to find a sense of community, but this is something we've done to ourselves. It wasn't just the Vietnam War. We have seen a progressive movement away from the sense of community. We kind of had a glorification of the isolated self, so that everything in our country has been individual-oriented, to hell with the community. We talked about rights, rights, rights, rarely about duties or obligations and responsibilities. Now I understand that for the helpless rights are everything, so rights defend the helpless, but it's duties, obligations, and responsibilities that expand us, that makeus feel more than just survivors.

MS. WOODRUFF: All right. Sense of community, what do we do with it if it's there, as you say?

DR. GAYLIN: Well, it isn't there. Last night on your program the speaker said that he had a sense of community. I don't see it anywhere. I think what he would see --

MS. WOODRUFF: This was Walt Rostow, the historian.

DR. GAYLIN: Yes. What Mr. Rostow was seeing was a hunger for community. Now that's worrisome because it leads to a couple of things. One, it leads to the glorification of war, and no war in a sense should be glorified. It's a necessity at times, and it's just at some times, but it's dreadful for the very reasons you gave to ennoble it as such. It may be a necessity. But what there is out there is a hunger for some sense of community. We've done this to ourselves. We've acted as though individuals' existed in splendid isolation.

MS. WOODRUFF: But what do we do with that now, with this hunger, what do we do with it?

DR. GAYLIN: What are the solutions you want?

MS. WOODRUFF: That's right.

DR. GAYLIN: Well, don't forget, you're not talking to a surgeon. See, surgeons are wonderful; they have simple solutions. You take a knife and you cut. You're talking to a psychiatrist so my solutions are slow, tangential, elliptical, difficult, and they cost a lot. I will say that I think they work. I think that people are desperate for service, are desperate to belong, are desperate for community. People want to help. We've had a rotten leadership. We've had rotten models. We've had the assumption on the part of our leaders that we were all selfish, that we were all autonomous. It's very dangerous because we are not. You take an individual away from other individuals and he ceases to be human in the best senses of those words.

MS. WOODRUFF: But how can you be so sure that people are ready to serve or to make sacrifice, or whatever you're suggesting about other problems, when we didn't -- when for most Americans -- obviously not for the ones that have loved ones over there, that was a great suffering for them, but for most Americans it was sitting back and watching it on television. I mean, what was the sacrifice that you saw that leads you to think that people are ready to serve?

DR. GAYLIN: None. That's why I think this is a short lived thing. That's why I said it was a tonic. I didn't see it as a cure, but what we should learn from it is that there is a readiness for belonging. There was a sense of enhanced pride which we needed. I don't know how long it's going to last. It was, as you say, partly a passive thing. We weren't there. We weren't involved, but what I think it illuminates is the desperate need for us to be involved somehow with community. You know, the whole history of the '60s was a kind of a contempt for authority and an assumption that the individual alone could find his salvation. It simply isn't true. We see even disillusion is very hard to identify with anything. You see it in sports I guess, another passive thing, where we're all sitting, ready to kill each other over a basketball game or something of that sort. But this country desperately needs to return to a more communitarian base.

MS. WOODRUFF: And what do you think people are ready to do? What is it, what are the problems that you think we're ready to do?

DR. GAYLIN: I think if there wasn't such an abdication of leadership, look, we've got enough problems out there. We at least used to have the community as a family. Now we euphemistically talk about the one parent family. It's a joke. What's a one parent familywhen the parent is a 13 year old black girl in the middle of the city? That's a no parent family. It's two children, one dependent on another, and the other dependent on the state. We have simply got to remember -- you have to go back to Aristotle, if you will -- he was not a bad biologist and he was a superb philosopher and politician -- and recognize that we have to spend more time on the collective. We haven't been doing that. We've been allowing people to lie on the streets of New York because the libertarians in our midst for the best of reasons -- they're all my friends -- are protecting their autonomous rights to freeze in the streets of the City of New York, and I as a psychiatrist can't -- can't bring them into a hospital for two or three weeks because it's benevolence, it's paternalism, and it's suspect.

MS. WOODRUFF: But you're saying that you're convinced based on the experience of this war that many Americans are willing now to make a sacrifice, to serve in a way that they haven't been asked to or willing to before?

DR. GAYLIN: Not just -- oh, I think they were always willing to - - not just on the experiences of this war, of course not. It was too short and I would be really an idiot to make inferences from that, but at any time that there has been a leader, the most quoted statement of John Kennedy, it's a cliche, it's almost embarrassing to say about "Ask not what your country can do for you", touched people. We have had just a paucity of heroes. There's a hero hunger here and I'm very, very frightened that we will take the wrong heroes as they come along. I made a joke, but I suppose Pres. Bush will be our President in perpetuity or at least until - - unless the Democrats draft Gen. Schwarzkopf, who seems to have a certain kind of charisma that Pres. Bush does not have except during the war.

MS. WOODRUFF: What do the American people do then? You're saying that our political leadership leaves something to be desired. Where do they turn? Where do they turn for leadership? Does it have to come from the President? Can it come from somewhere else?

DR. GAYLIN: I'm afraid on the actual level it does have to come from the President. You don't want for Senate, and maybe Schwarzkopf doesn't run for Senate, Mr. MacNeil doesn't run for Senate, I don't, but the kind of people that have to run for Senate are not necessarily the kind from which you'd assume you will get major leadership. If we do, we're lucky about it. I think the President does set a tone because of television, because of the fact that he has a direct approach to people. I'm not sure that the past Presidents we've had, many of them have been very, very good men, except for Reagan, who had a capacity to speak directly to people -- unfortunately he didn't seem to have much to say to them -- but he certainly had the capacity to speak to them. But I do think there's an absence of leadership and I think there's an intellectual community, the academic community is to blame too. It too has a noble individual without recognizing that there is a public space that has to be protected and a communal need.

MS. WOODRUFF: But do you come out of this feeling optimistic, hopeful, or otherwise?

DR. GAYLIN: Well, I'm an incurable optimist. I'm always hopeful, so I wouldn't bet anything on that. And I don't come out of this. I just see this as one small element that the country can be mobilized. There was a kind of sense people, they were all talking, they were all watching, they were all wishing, they were all putting out flags, and there may be a certain amount of hokum with that. But they were trying to touch other people in the community. In that way, the flag, the yellow ribbon, all that stuff was a method of abortive communication.

MS. WOODRUFF: Well, Dr. Willard Gaylin, we thank you for being with us.

DR. GAYLIN: Thank you for having me. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Once again the major stories of this Tuesday, inflation slowed last month, while new home building rebounded. A new study said the nation's college athletics programs are plagued by financial and academic irregularities, and Iraqi rebels said they had captured a key oil producing city in Northern Iraq. Finally, again we close our program with the names of more Americans killed in non-combat related incidents in the Gulf War. Good night, Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: Good night, Robin. That's our NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night with an interview with the president of Poland, Lech Walesa. I'm Judy Woodruff. Thank you and good night.