Indeed, Saddam is certainly trying to control what we see, making him a producer -- surely he's learned a thing or two about the media. And obviously, the Pentagon exercises great L.B. Mayer–size production controls. And then there are the news networks: The media, which used to be linked to one side or another (American reporters were side-by-side with American G.I.'s), now has its own overriding interests to protect (and each media corporation has its own interests -- there's not only the war between U.S. and Iraq but also that between CNN and Fox) and conducts its own complex negotiations and diplomatic lobbying efforts.

Perception is a big battlefield -- maybe the main one. (A proposition for the conspiracy-minded: It's not about oil; it's about pictures.)

Which brings us to what each of the parties is looking for: the bounce.

The last time around, the bounce went to Arnett, Shaw, and Holliman, and briefly to Bush Sr., and most significantly to CNN. But since then, in ensuing wars, the bounce has been more elusive.

For one thing, the bounce has become a much more self-conscious enterprise. Arnett, Shaw, and Holliman were actually in harm's way. But Banfield and Rivera, for instance, have more clearly put themselves, or their producers have put them, into something like a Fear Factor episode. Likewise, George Bush is trying to repeat what his father did -- and the sequel may not get near the ratings of the original.

The bounce has gotten much more competitive, too. CNN was a novel idea -- and a marginal player -- when Gulf War I began. Now, in addition to at least two governments vying to control the pictures, there are three 24-hour U.S. news channels, plus the BBC's 24-7 news operation, and now Al Jazeera and the South Asian news broadcasters as well as independent uplinks galore. It is likely that in this war, more than at any time in any other past war, we're going to be seeing a lot of the other side's version of it. The big bounce, many people believe, will go to Al Jazeera -- we'll have correspondents on bad phone lines, and Al Jazeera will have clear and bloody pictures (just whose blood is, of course, the rub). Al Jazeera will likely be supplying pictures (arguably the other side's pictures) to our side.

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Arnett, with his squeezed pugilist's face, is an odd and lonely figure -- he's from another age (from another war).

Indeed, it's doubtful that fame, or the bounce, was what he was after in 1991. CNN was then still in its Ted Turner "the news is the star" incarnation. Many news people speculate that the change that happened at CNN (in part because of Arnett in Baghdad), when the paradigm shifted and the star became the news, is what led Arnett to get on the wrong side of the Tailwind scandal (wherein CNN, with Arnett as newsreader, maintained that the U.S. had used gas on suspected American defectors in Laos). Arnett was negligent or ambivalent in his star duties (not tending his brand), fronting for a weak story that would prove to be embarrassingly wrong -- and took the fall.

After 9/11, Arnett hooked up with an indie news-production group, CameraPlanet -- which does for-hire stuff and documentaries, and runs a rump Internet video-news outlet -- and went to Afghanistan (at the initial meet with CameraPlanet, when it became clear that he was being sought only as a stay-at-home adviser, Arnett abruptly ended the meeting). And now Arnett, with a small CameraPlanet crew, leaves this week to go back to Baghdad to do a National Geographic Channel documentary, On the Brink.

His ulterior motive is to once again be in Baghdad when the shooting starts -- as he, and everyone else, expects it to start -- this winter.

It is poignant to find Arnett, as a freelancer (a 67-year-old freelancer at that) in a corporate world. It is painful, too, to think of him having to compete with his awful spawn, Banfield and Rivera, and, inevitably, their spawn.

And yet it seems right, too. If not Arnett, then who?

Now, Arnett is not only a vastly experienced war reporter but also a vastly experienced media-war reporter (both the once-anonymous wire-service reporter and the once-famous CNN correspondent -- who can match that experience?), which gives an added element of fatalism to his view.

"You have to accept that this is artificial coverage," he says, describing the artifice with great war-reporting detail (the G.I.'s, he says, have gone from sympathetic young guys to frighteningly attired robotic figures).

It's about getting the gets. How many Aziz interviews can you do? That's the measure. Saddam, of course, will be the really big get. (Hitler would have been doing Berchtesgarden exclusives.)

It's a technology game, maybe most of all. Who's on the air is about who has the pictures, which is about who has the uplink. Or it's about what kind of stuff the Pentagon itself, from its superior gun-cam vantages, is handing out at the downlink points. This war may be as much an R&D battle of picture delivery as about payload delivery. (Why not equip G.I.'s with infantry cams and let them narrate their own tape roll on the Today show -- scripted, of course, by Pentagon flacks?)