Fifty-seven boxes were recently returned to the Kurdish city of

Sulaimaniya in Zeit trucks—large Russian military vehicles—by the

Iraqi government authorities. Each box contained a dead child, eyes

gouged out and ashen white, apparently drained of blood. The families

were not given their children, were forced to accept a communal grave

and then had to pay 150 dinars for the burial.

—London Sunday Observer, 1987

When the man responsible for such an atrocity—one among many

others and not by any means the worst—appears on American

television to talk to “America’s most respected newsman” about

his hopes and fears, his devotion to his people, his respect for

American leaders, and his strong religious faith, is it then just

a matter of good manners not to mention the dead children, like

John Cleese’s character in “Fawlty Towers” not mentioning the war

to his German guests? Presumably Dan Rather, who recently (as he

puts it) “found himself” interviewing Saddam Hussein in one of

the latter’s presidential palaces in Baghdad, would say that it

was. And, unlike Basil Fawlty, Rather was far too slick to get

caught inadvertently mentioning his interlocutor’s career as a

mass murderer.

But manners, like TV, can only operate within a limited moral

framework. The intimacy and familiarity of the medium naturally

lead us to assume that those who appear on it inhabit