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29 July 2003: "Complacency"
Iraq, as I have maintained for a while now, is not Vietnam. But it would certainly help my case if certain people, in government and the media, would stop behaving as if it were late 1967. At the beginning of the month, I argued that Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be channeling General Westmoreland; two weeks later, this was confirmed to a large extent when Rumsfeld's assertions that the situation in Iraq did not even resemble a guerilla war were contradicted by General Abizaid, the new commander of CentCom, who stated that, yes, this was a "classical guerilla-type war situation." I hope Rumsfeld had the decency to be embarrassed.
One of the seminal works on the media in Vietnam is Michael Herr's Dispatches. Herr spent a fair chunk of 1967 and 1968 in Vietnam, covering the war for Esquire. At some point in the book, he describes how, every so often, some columnist or sub-editor would come over for a week, be shown around a model village and some quiet sector by some minders from the Joint US Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO), and then tell the permanent correspondents that the stories they're filing are pessimistic and defeatist; after all, the sub-editor had seen with his own eyes how the US forces and the ARVN had everything sewn up (and that Charlie was clearly incapable of mounting or sustaining a meaningful offensive).
When I read pieces like "Come on over, the water's lovely" by Mark Steyn, or the transcript of this Fox News interview with Christopher Hitchens "on What It's Really Like in Iraq," I can't help having associations with that particular passage from Dispatches. If there is any difference, it seems to be that Steyn and Hitchens don't seem to need CentCom's PAO to instil a sense of smug complacency, they can do that all by themselves.
Certain elements of the these pieces stretch credulity. Steyn conveys the impression that he was quite content to take a single vehicle, on his own, and go toddling through the Syrian Desert. Having visited the Middle East myself on a couple of occasions (and having read some manuals on driving in hostile terrain), I know that it is extremely unwise to travel for long stretches through (largely) unhabited terrain without having a minimum of two vehicles, with at least two people per vehicle. And my visits, I might add, were to Oman and the UAE, which are a far cry from Iraq as far as public safety (though not necessarily the condition of the roads) is concerned. If the impression I draw from Steyn's piece is correct, the man is monumentally stupid. It's more likely he wasn't actually travelling alone, but that would detract from the adventurous spirit of the story.
In Hitchens' case, what stretches credulity is the response from John Gibson, the programme's host: GIBSON: You know, Christopher, we never hear about that. I would think that Fox would have a camera crew or two in-country, who would be only too eager to convey this sort of thing. Are those crews missing all this stuff that Hitchens just stumbles across? I mean, sheez, "we report, you decide," right? If their guys aren't reporting it, how can I decide?
The bottom line is that the situation in Iraq might not be as dire as advertised by some, but it is not good. The post-war administration got off to a bad start, so much so that the head of that administration was replaced; forty-odd GIs have been killed since the declared cessation of "major combat operations" on 01-May-2003. The situation is definitely salvageable, but there is no room for complacency. Public support for the Vietnam War was undercut to a large extent because a picture had been painted which was too rosy, and which was subsequently torn down. Steyn and Hitchens would do well to take note of the fact that those correspondents from the Vietnam era who are remembered were those who erred on the side of caution.
Iraq is not Vietnam, but I'm just waiting for someone to proclaim that there is "light at the end of the tunnel." If that happens, the two wars will, indeed, have drawn an inexorable step closer to each other. (I'll also have comeback ready, from a thirty year-old Doonesbury episode; "Why, having dug yourself into a hole, do you insist on calling it a 'tunnel'?")
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