War Stories (48 page)

Chris Matthews of NBC warned that if the United States went to war with Iraq “[It] will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe.” His colleague at NBC, analyst Gen. Barry McCaffrey, predicted that if there were a battle for Baghdad, the U.S. would probably take “a couple to three thousand casualties.” As of April 11, the day after the battle for Baghdad, the United States reported 102 troops killed in action.

On March 29, just nine days into the war, the
New York Times
boldly proclaimed, “With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made two gross military misjudgments in concluding that coalition forces could safely bypass Basra and Nasiriya and that Shi'ite Muslims in southern Iraq would rise up against Saddam Hussein.” Coalition forces safely crossed Basra and Nasiriya and the Shi'ite Muslims did rebel. Unfortunately for the
Times
, the CENTCOM war plan didn't call for bypassing either city, nor did the coalition forces expect or receive an “uprising” by any Iraqis.

Seymour Hersh, famous since Vietnam for his “investigative journalism,” wrote in the March 31, 2003, edition of the
New Yorker:
“According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. . . . ‘It's a stalemate now,' the former intelligence official told me.” One can only wonder who these “military men” were that Mr. Hersh “spoke to.” In the aftermath of the victory, most of the media seems to be criticizing Secretary Rumsfeld for not anticipating the consequences of a
short
-duration war.

This is the kind of negative reporting Brit Hume was talking about. Now, in retrospect, Hume's observations are dead on: “The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong. They didn't get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong.” He adds, “This level of imperviousness to reality is remarkable. It is consistent and it continues over time. I think about this phenomenon a lot. I worry and wonder about the fact that so many people can get things so wrong, so badly, so often, so consistently, and so repeatedly. And I think that there are ideas lurking under the surface that help to explain why this happens. In brief, when it comes to the exercise of American power in the world, particularly military power, there seems to be a suspicion among those in the media—indeed, a suspicion bordering on a presumption—of illegitimacy, incompetence, and ineffectiveness.”

The problem, of course, is that these wrong assumptions and incorrect “facts” get played prominently in the prime-time newscasts and in the front-page newspaper stories, and become part of the official record. Unfortunately, the record won't show how many Iraqis were treated by Army and Navy doctors, medics, and corpsmen. The record doesn't reflect how Army engineers and Seabees rebuilt water
treatment plants, repaired generators, and fixed irrigation systems. And the record doesn't include enough heartwarming stories about the compassion American warriors have for the children of Iraq.

One such warrior is a young Marine officer I know well. Matt Grosz was just a kid when his dad and I served together at Quantico, Virginia, and at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Now Matt is a Marine captain, commanding “India” Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. I saw him in Kuwait just before the war started. His regiment endured some of the toughest fighting of the campaign on the way to the capital. After Baghdad was captured, Matt's unit was sent to Karbala, where he was given the mission of protecting a large suburb of the city. Not content to act simply as an “occupation force,” Captain Grosz started a whole range of civic action projects that led to local elections and even the formation of a youth soccer league. His one regret: “The Iraqi kids beat my Marines.”

But the media ignored the CENTCOM press release in June on this emblematic success story. When I asked a CENTCOM public affairs officer if the story had been picked up, she replied, “I guess their attitude was ‘not enough blood,' so it wasn't important.”

According to Hume:

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The attitude of the media in times of war is all the more puzzling when considered in the context of what America has done in the world over the last century—and in particular, what the American military has done. It entered World War I toward the end, tipped the balance, and saved our friends and allies. In World War II, it led the free world to victory against genuinely monstrous evils. After that war, it gave aid and comfort to defeated enemies on a scale never before seen. Considering its actions in Japan alone, the U.S. should go down in history as one of the most benevolent victorious powers in history. Japan owes its economy and democracy to Douglas MacArthur, and to the leaders of the American government who put him there to do what he did.
But it didn't stop with Japan. There was the Marshall Plan. During the entire forty-five-year Cold War, America projected military power over Western Europe and in many far-flung outposts elsewhere, such as South Korea. It protected the people who had been our allies, and many who had been our enemies, from the next great evil, Soviet communism—an evil, I might add, which many in our media refused to recognize as such. Then, upon the victorious end of the Cold War, one of the first things the U.S. did was work feverishly to make sure that the reunification of Germany went forward in a way that would work and be effective.

This is the record. It is available and known to the world. It's not particularly controversial. Yet even within this context, ideas have somehow germinated among those in the media, as when America embarks on something like the Iraq war, there are all kinds of tremulous suspicions and fears about what we might really be doing. How many times have we heard it suggested that we're in Iraq for the oil? Does this make any sense at all? If we are there for the oil, why didn't we keep Kuwait's oil after the Gulf War? The best and simplest explanation is that we're just not that kind of country.

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If the so-called mainstream media has a hard time figuring out what kind of country we are, it must be even more difficult for the entertainment industry. There was a time when Tinseltown regarded entertaining America's families as its primary purpose. Interestingly, during World War II, many of Hollywood's leading actors served in the military—Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney, and Jimmy Stewart, to name a few. For decades actors and actresses such as Bo Derek, Marilyn Monroe, Ann-Margret, Connie Stevens, Jill St. John, and Raquel Welch, joined Bob Hope in freely giving of their time to entertain the troops overseas, as did musicians like Louis Armstrong. Filmmakers like John Ford and stars like John Wayne had no problem making pro-America, pro-military movies.

That's no longer the case. Now Hollywood actors like Robert DeNiro and Gary Sinise, and performers like Wayne Newton, are the exception rather than the rule on a USO tour. Worse still, many of today's actors are activists
against
American foreign policy and use their celebrity status to try and drive a wedge between the commander in chief and the troops he leads. The Dixie Chicks alienated country music fans and many other Americans with comments made by singer Natalie Maines during a performance in London. Maines told the audience, “Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

Actor-turned-political protester Sean Penn is one of the leading luminaries of this movement. He took out a $56,000 full-page ad for an “open letter” to President Bush in the
Washington Post
, just before the start of the Iraq war, in which he claimed, “bombing is answered by bombing, mutilation by mutilation, killing by killing.”

Though Penn hasn't found the time in his very successful career to support our troops with the USO, he was able to embark on a “fact-finding mission” to Baghdad, paid for by the leftist Institute for Public Advocacy, to pursue “a deeper understanding of this frightening conflict.” When he returned, Penn accused the Bush administration of “teaching a master class in the manifestation of rage into hatred.”

He subsequently sued producer Steve Bing for dropping him from an upcoming film, claiming that his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq has made him a “blacklist” victim.

Blacklist? Baloney! Hollywood is full of “stars” who agree with Sean Penn. Robert Redford, Julia Roberts, Woody Harrelson, Bill Cosby, the Baldwin brothers, Jessica Lange, Danny Glover, Matt Damon, Kim Basinger, Oliver Stone, and Jane Fonda have all denounced the war and President Bush. Martin Sheen, of
The West Wing
, dismissed Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “personal feud.” Barbra Streisand judged it “very, very frightening.”

Filmmakers have also jumped on the bandwagon. Robert Altman opined in London that he was “embarrassed to be an American.” Michael Moore has announced that his next “documentary,” entitled
Fahrenheit 9/11: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns
, will “show linkages between President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden.” The Disney film subsidiary Miramax will reportedly distribute Mr. Moore's new effort.

Like other members of the Hollywood elite, Moore doesn't limit his visceral political attacks to the films he makes. During monologues in Great Britain, he also rebuked the dead passengers on the four hijacked September 11 aircrafts. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who writes a column for
The Independent
of London, “Moore went into a rant about how the passengers on the planes on 11 September were ‘scaredy-cats' because they were mostly white. ‘If the passengers had included black men,' he claimed, ‘those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes.'”

Perhaps Mr. Moore would like to express those thoughts to Lisa Beamer, whose husband Todd was part of the rebellion aboard American Airlines Flight 93 before the aircraft went down in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, on September 11, denying the terrorists an opportunity to hit their intended target—the White House.

Starting in the summer of 2002, our “allies”—the French, the Germans, and most of “Old Europe”—began employing every tactic possible in the United Nations to prevent the use of force in Iraq. Encouraged by massive anti-American protests on the streets of European capitals, President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany repeatedly urged the United States and Great Britain to delay plans for military action against
Saddam Hussein until UN supersleuth Hans Blix had “completed” his search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

By the autumn of 2002, U.S. frustration with the snail's pace of Blix's mission was dismissed as “saber rattling” in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels and on the UN cocktail party circuit. In 2003, with Saddam gone, the same voices that had earlier preached patience before resorting to arms are now unwilling to wait for a full and careful search for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. According to the rhetoric coming from the UN, it's curtains for American credibility unless coalition forces immediately find significant stockpiles of nerve agents, biotoxins, and nuclear weapons.

Notwithstanding the UN's unwillingness to help disarm Saddam and notwithstanding the unabated criticism, President Bush again went to the international body asking for its assistance—this time in rebuilding Iraq. Despite a terrorist bombing on August 19, 2003, that destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian national and the head of the UN mission in Baghdad, United Nations officials remain unwilling to help unless they assume absolute control over the effort.

For the UN, it's all about power. Before the war, Secretary-General Kofi Annan insisted that any military effort to oust Saddam without UN permission would lack “the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.” Now Annan demands that the UN be allowed to exercise control over how U.S. forces and U.S. tax dollars are employed and spent in Iraq. All this belies the abysmal, decade-long record of the UN in the land between the rivers.

As we witnessed in Baghdad, the UN-administered Oil-for-Food Program, established in 1995 to provide the Iraqi people with food and medicine, was totally corrupt. Under UN supervision, Saddam stole billions from the program while UN administrators took tens of millions in “management fees.” Hundreds of millions in Iraqi oil revenues are simply unaccounted for—and may be sequestered “in trust”
by the UN—although this can't be confirmed because auditors have been denied access to the UN's books on the program. Attempts by various media outlets to scrutinize UN financial records have been routinely rebuffed. The United Nations has no Freedom of Information Act like the one we have in the United States to permit reporters to examine its records and documents.