CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS it that, unlike in Vietnam, there is bipartisan support for “the troops” in Iraq despite the many arguments over the conduct of the war and whether U.S. forces should remain in Mesopotamia. This has been a mantra particularly for Democrats, who understand that they’re vulnerable on the issue.
The problem for Democrats is that their core belief that those fighting in Iraq are simply victims translates into a rhetorical kind of pity that strikes a military mind as condescending. Thus Sen. Barack Obama, in his otherwise soaring speech after his South Carolina primary win, sympathizing with “the soldier who doesn’t know his child because he’s on his third or fourth tour of duty.” Or his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, promising, on the same night, that “when we bring them home [from Iraq], we’re going to take care of them. They have been neglected and ignored. . . . We’re going to give them the health care and compensation and support they deserve to have.”
While all acknowledge the many ways in which America’s hard-worked land forces have made extraordinary sacrifices, this kind of rhetoric is dangerously tin-eared and incomplete when it comes to seeing the war through soldiers’ eyes. And when Hillary concludes her Iraq talking points with a riff on homeless veterans, you can tell that when she looks at Iraq, she sees Vietnam.
Why is this? Why hasn’t the Iraq war–which has “gone on longer than World War II”–made a clearer impression on the American mind?
In the launch issue of the new journal World Affairs, George Packer, longtime foreign affairs correspondent for the New Yorker offers important insights into this paradox. Packer is both an experienced and honest Iraq reporter and a longtime critic of Bush policy, so he is perhaps one of the few qualified to write “Over There: Iraq the Place vs. Iraq the Abstraction.”
He is particularly on point in describing the disconnects he observes in the way Hollywood thinks about Iraq. “Once, after to a trip to Iraq,” he writes,
Packer’s look at the war as Hollywood sees it is a sobering and, I think, accurate assessment; again, Packer’s own policy views have been strongly and often tellingly critical of the conduct of the war. His reviews of Iraq-based movies are strongly negative. He calls Brain de Palma’s Redacted “an aesthetically self-conscious snuff film that mixes fact with fiction and makes no attempt to get the details of Iraq right.” He allows that Wendell Steavenson’s The Situation “contains two more or less recognizable Iraqi characters,” but like other films such as In the Valley of Elah, presents “the war as incomprehensible mayhem.” These films
At a screening of The Situation, Packer asks director Philip Haas why he portrayed U.S. soldiers in such a cartoonish fashion. “Why had he missed their humor, their fear, their tenderness for one another and even, every now and then, for Iraqis?” The answer was, essentially, that an accurate portrait of the war would be too complex. After all, everyone already knew what it was like.
Packer’s look at the Left Coast also echoes much of what’s happened inside the Beltway. The Iraq Study Group, whose principals spent only a few days inside the Baghdad “Green Zone,” already knew what the war was like beforehand and, indeed, were only interested in coming to whatever conclusion could achieve a bipartisan consensus. And from the start, Iraq has been but a rumor of war, for both Left and Right. The insurgents were only Baathist die-hards, “dead-enders.” “Standing up” Iraq could be done in a few months. Conversely, in 2006 the war was lost and U.S. soldiers were hopelessly caught in a sectarian civil war with millennia-old origins. The “surge” was declared a failure before it started. One more excerpt from Packer’s poignant piece:
One can only hope that the success of the surge over the last year has, in addition to improving the security situation in Iraq, pried open that little bit of the American brain that can accommodate facts a little wider. The facts are somewhat more convenient: the war is winnable, but it’s not yet won. If it is won it would be a genuine demonstration of American virtue, but of the sort that reflects the often-ugly business of irregular war. The facts of losing–and the war is losable as it is winnable–remain extremely inconvenient and would almost surely increase the number of crimes against humanity.
Ultimately, fictions about war are only briefly self-serving: until we can see this war clearly, we cannot really know how to fight it. “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make”–yes, there is a Clausewitz quote for any occasion–“is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”
Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
