Another
factor that comes into play is a desire for instantaneous
results in the American public generally, not just in
the press corps. We’ve gotten used to these kind
of painless, antiseptic, immediate-gratification wars.
We’ve been spoiled in the Balkans and Grenada and
some other places and we’ve started to think about
war the way we think about the rest of our life: you pick
up the cell phone and you dial in the request and it’s
delivered to your front door and two days later you move
on to something else.
That’s
not the way wars go. Wars are much slower and sloppier
enterprises. Iraq is a very typical war and it’s
been done well, but I wonder if the public understands
or remembers anymore what a well-fought war is like.
I’ve
been looking back at World War II recently and remembering,
for instance, the Battle of the Bulge. In the Battle of
the Bulge, American soldiers were sent to fight in waist-deep
snow with no winter clothing, and I’m thinking to
myself, “today, that would be reason to hang somebody.
What commission is going to attack them for that?”
Look
at Iwo Jima. I believe 7,000 men were killed at Iwo Jima.
It's a four-mile by two-mile island in the middle of nowhere
with no resources. I wonder, would we, in our contemporary
worldview be able to look at that and say, "that’s
a glorious triumph for the US Marine Corps," or would
we say, "somebody’s got to be court-martialed
over that screw-up?"
I
think we’ve forgotten. One of the lines I quote
in my book, from a journalist named Michael Kelly, is
that you’ve got to accept death to defeat death.
And any society that’s lost track of that is in
a very precarious position because you can’t fight
really determined and ferocious enemies like Nazis or
kamikazes or mujahedeen unless you are equally ferocious
at some level and at some point.
If
you treat a war like a Superbowl, where you blow the whistle,
have your three hours and then blow the whistle and go
home again, you’re going to be frustrated and disappointed
because that’s not the way a difficult war gets
prosecuted.
Our
mutual friend Michael Barone has talked about the "zero-defect"
standard the media has today, where any mistake or any
disappointment or any mess-up in war is interpreted as
a disaster and somebody’s fault. Somebody’s
got to be blamed.
I
sometimes don’t know whether to giggle or cry when
I see this, when people in the media say, “Why did
we allow the looting to take place?” and I’m
thinking to myself, “Well, I guess at some level
we could be held to account for that but that’s
like saying, why do we let human beings be selfish and
do wicked things or be evil?” That’s just
the way human beings are!
And
there are some things you can’t control. Why didn’t
we anticipate the roadside bomb threat? Well, it had never
been done before. This is a new thing, you have to adjust.
In four or five years from now we’ll have figured
it out, but in the meantime you just have to gut it out.
There
is this impression among a lot of these reporters that
there was a bad postwar plan or there wasn’t any
postwar plan. My experience with combat is that the plan
goes out the window about five minutes after the fighting
starts. That’s the way combat goes, and that’s
the way combat always has gone. If you have this pointy-headed
expectation that a war is something you can plan out in
advance, write your thesis about and bring to a conclusion,
you’re going to be disappointed.
Part
of this impression is a reflection of the fact that so
few reporters have any contact with military people or
military life anymore. It didn’t used to be the
case. It used to be that there was a lot of back-and-forth
between the elite colleges that produce our top rank reporters
today and the military. For example, seven hundred Harvard
graduates died in World War II. There was not a Chinese
wall that separated the world reporters came out of from
the world soldiers came out of.
Today,
unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. Most of
the reporters I met in Iraq don’t have any friends
at all who were in the military. They don’t have
any Uncle Louie who served. They have no contact with
the military whatever. They have very little knowledge
of who military people are or what military responsibilities
are, and that often leads them to unreasonable expectations
and bad reporting.
So
it’s a mixture of factors, but I think the first
step is for the media to acknowledge that they’ve
got a problem, that they’re not doing a very good
job, that the public is recognizing the problem, and that
they’ve got to figure out better ways to write about
wars in the future.
