As any matriculant to a serious

football-oriented school

understands full well, the

cheerleading squad doesn't get

to sit down on the job just

because the outcome of the game

is a given; even when the guys

are headed onto the field to

whip some ass on a pathetically

mismatched team that really

quite frankly belongs in just a

whole different division, the

cheerleaders still, by god,

shake their pompoms till the

whistle sounds.

We couldn't help but catch a

whiff of the ol' pigskin over

the last few weeks, as many of

the nation's newspaper editors

seemed to shift responsibility

for covering foreign affairs to

the boys on the sports desk.

Particularly gridironesque were

the profiles of Our Troops in

the Gulf - who were, in the

pages of the hometown newspaper,

ready to go out there and give

110 percent against that bastard

Saddam. One heartland newspaper,

for example, chose to focus on

local sailors serving aboard the

USS Nimitz, a mammoth aircraft

carrier floating around the

Arabian Gulf waiting for the

mother of all coin tosses; the

young sailors were, the

newspaper allowed, "ready and

unafraid if they have to launch

strikes against Baghdad."

The Nimitz, accompanied by a

flotilla of modern destroyers

and hugely powerful guided

missile warships, is a

nuclear-powered floating

airfield nearly 1,100 feet long.

Staffed with more than 5,000

highly trained professional

warriors, the ship carts 80

warplanes around in its belly,

and defends itself with weapons

like the Sea Sparrow Missile

System and several six-barrel,

radar-guided, 20-millimeter

Gatling guns capable of firing

3,000 rounds per minute. Iraq is

a country that - one devastating

war and seven devastating years

of economic embargo and weapons

inspections in the past -

couldn't accurately target

entire nations with its

remarkably shitty Scuds.

Just to round this comparison

out with some amusing little

thanatopic anecdotes, these two

stories:

1. Michael Kelly, a

bespectacled, 5'6" US newspaper

reporter who borrowed a car to

chase around Kuwait while

covering the beginning of the

ground war that concluded Desert

Storm, had to stop reporting for

a while when an Iraqi army unit

insisted that he take them

prisoner. He refused, at first,

but eventually broke down and

gave them a ride to the nearest

Saudi soldiers. Kelly was, being

a journalist, armed with some

pens and a notebook.

2. Earlier, Kelly had been in

Baghdad to witness the start of

the air war, and please do note

that modern warfare requires

that you gain serious tactical

advantage in the air before you

grind out the final yardage with

the ground game. Seeking to

observe bombing damage, he

strolled to a sidewalk near

Iraqi military headquarters and

settled in to watch as first

one, then two, then a final

third cruise missile whistled in

for a series of perfect direct

hits that left the building

looking like, for example, the

Clinton Administration's foreign

policy - a smoldering pile of

rubble.

So it probably makes a certain

amount of sense, floating around

on the Finger of God and

preparing to target a sad-sack

dictator's trashed and battered

goon squad, not to be really

terrified about the whole thing.

One suspects that the sailors,

being highly disciplined

professionals and accustomed to

getting their work done in an

atmosphere of real and

persistent danger, understood

this. The reporters, on the

other hand, may have believed

what they wrote, judging by the

tone of the writing.

Remarkably, however, quite a few

reporters have paid close

attention to the man behind the

curtain, a heartening

development - even if the

curtain was made of wet tissue.

Even more remarkably, much of

the reporting in the last couple

of weeks has done something we

wouldn't have thought possible:

It made us really grateful for

the Internet, which turns out to

be useful for something other

than collecting dirty spam.

Assembling a modest

understanding of world events

turns out to be a bit like

making an omelette by taking

half an egg from every neighbor

on the block; if the local

broadsheet reads like a White

House press release, there are

still little pieces of real -

and contradictory - information

to be picked up via a 14" VGA

monitor and a 28.8 modem.

The ability to prowl for

information beyond the

boundaries of geography and the

abilities of your hometown

editors come in especially

handy when the really big

bombshells seem, for whatever

reason, to land in the mud. The

Los Angeles Times reported on

collaboration between the Iraqi

and US governments during the

Iran-Iraq War, for example, in a

story that whimpered by largely

unnoticed. From the Times

report: