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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Wealth of Nations: Trade, Iraq, and the Logic of National Interest (April 7, 2003) International cooperation works when countries think that by acting jointly they can advance their own interests. By Clive Crook. Legal Affairs: Iraq and Beyond: Navigating the Fog of War (April 7, 2003) Bush should reject the empire-building ambitions of some of his neoconservative subordinates. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Nobody's Poodle Now (April 7, 2003) When Blair took his country into war, British polls shifted to favor battle. By William Schneider. Media: The Fog of Journalism (April 1, 2003) On television, there's just too much news to absorb. That's why newspapers are still important. By William Powers. Social Studies: It's Time to Break Up the College Color Cartel (April 1, 2003) Congress should permit race-based preferences in private universities while banning them in public. By Johnathan Rauch. Political Pulse: This is Bush's War (April 1, 2003) The Vietnam War was years old before U.S. public opinion became this partisan. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The Quagmire ClubQuagmire has given way to quickmire; instant delivery of a war's reality, followed by instant second-guessing by William Powers ..... The domestic war conversation is starting to feel like a really tedious argument between two geezers on a park bench. Their glory days were the 1960s, see, when a really awful war called Vietnam was raging, and it seemed as if the whole world was coming apart. One thinks this war is exactly like that one. The other is certain that Gulf War II is nothing like Vietnam. There they sit hour after hour, hashing out Vietnam all over again, spewing the old phrases that remind them of their youth: Hearts and minds. Body bags. And, of course, quagmire. Too bad the rest of us have to listen. It's hard to go anywhere right now without running into Vietnam and media people who are desperate to understand today's war through yesterday's. They're not just geezers, either. They are of all ages and ideological persuasions. In the last week, "hearts and minds" has popped up in more than 900 war stories, opinion columns, headlines, and television broadcasts, according to the Lexis-Nexis database. "Quagmire" took a bow about 400 times, but its appearances were more colorful and telling. There's a ritual, a kind of quagmire Kabuki that never varies. Someone employs the word in a war-news report or one of those deeply important "analysis" pieces that are just opinion columns in front-page drag. The most famous quagmirist, R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times, doesn't even have to use the word anymore. He just does an interpretive fan-dance around it and everyone knows what he means. Next, somebody else, outraged to see the most damning of American war epithets applied to this war, takes indignant exception. Earlier this week, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that "the media were in full quagmire mode," and he blamed the perception on overcoverage: "Good grief. If there had been TV cameras not just at Normandy, but after Normandy, giving live coverage of firefights at every French village on the Allies' march to Berlin, the operation would have been judged a strategic miscalculation, if not a disaster." Later, Krauthammer echoed Vietnam again: "The way to win hearts and minds is not to try to appease those who wish us no good, but to stay in Iraq and use the authority of the victor to build a decent and open society." It's only human to think in patterns, and media people have a strange fondness for the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence—strange because it robs the news of its newness. The Vietnam comparison is especially tempting now, because many of the civilian and military leaders who are executing this war came of age just after Vietnam and tend to see all wars through that prism. As it happens, many of our most senior media people are of the same generation, and love any news story about this war that evokes the one they watched as kids. This week, The New York Times reported that "long-simmering tensions between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army commanders have erupted in a series of complaints from officers on the Iraqi battlefield.... Raw nerves were obvious as officers compared Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military realities of Vietnam." What's really striking about the Vietnam argument is that both parties buy into the basic premise of the quagmire. One side insists on imposing an old template on this war. "Look, we're meeting unexpected resistance! It's another quagmire!" The other side objects, but in a way that pays homage to the quagmire, by specifying the conditions that would justify the term: "No, no! Iraq can't be a quagmire, not this soon. In Vietnam, it took years for the military to get bogged down and the American public to turn against the war. We're not there yet." Guess what, Vietnam people? We're never going to be there. In today's media culture, it's simply not possible. The Vietnam quagmire was a result of the government slowly ramping up a distant war, while the public figured out even more slowly, drip by drip by drip, what that war was really about, the human destruction it was wreaking on both sides, and what a mistake it had been. Nothing happens drip by drip anymore. Not in the military with its post-Vietnam faith in immediate, overwhelming force. Not in politics, where cynicism and ruthless practicality reign supreme and no president of either party would ever keep a difficult foreign war going into an election year. And certainly not in the media, which can now turn any distant war into the wallpaper of American culture in a matter of hours, as they've done with this one. The quagmire has been replaced by something entirely new: instant delivery of a war's reality, followed by instant questioning of that war. You might call it quickmire. Whatever you call it, we were in one this week, with its disturbing sense of stuckness. But a quickmire is a stuckness that could be unstuck tomorrow, depending on events and how they play in the news. "Innocents in the Crossfire," said the headline on the welcome page of America Online with its more than 30 million subscribers, one day this week. "U.S. Troops, Wary of Bombers, End Up Killing Women and Kids." Next to it was a picture of a camouflaged coalition solider pointing an automatic weapon at an old woman in black, head-to-toe Muslim robes. The image appeared worldwide less than two weeks into this war. Anyone who thinks that's just like Vietnam is truly living in the past.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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