The Media Rewrite, Review the Gulf War

Desert Storm is over and now the magazine reports and analyses are piling up like allied convoys gridlocked on the road to the front.

Overall, the tone is celebratory, with a few embarrassingly stale predictions colliding head-on with blustery hindsight. The first thing readers will notice in scanning the verbiage is that the word war has largely been replaced by new terms such as turkey shoot, rout, cakewalk and nature hike.

Despite the brevity of the fight and stringent press restrictions, publications did get a glimpse of the action.

* U.S. News & World Report’s Joseph L. Galloway pulled strings and was granted special permission to break away from the Department of Defense pools. He traveled with the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) as the 16,530-member force conducted what one officer called “the greatest cavalry charge in history.”

* Newsweek’s Tony Clifton rode along with the Marine’s 2nd Armored Division’s “Hounds of Hell” Battalion.

* And the New Republic’s Michael Kelly flanked the allies and found himself being surrendered to by deserting Iraqis.

Because the Iraqis were so resolutely defeated, the combat reportage, even from different fronts, has a similar, happily anticlimactic tone.

By all accounts, most of what little back-and-forth fighting occurred took place over a distance. The only story in which human is pitted face to face against human is reported in Newsweek.

In that account, an Iraqi suddenly jumps on the turret of a tank that the forces are bypassing as abandoned. He levels a rocket launcher at a passing Jeep-like Humvee. An American soldier watches, believing he’s about to be killed. Then then there are two huge explosions and the Iraqi vaporizes.

Maj. Robert Williams, an ethics professor turned tank officer, had seen the Iraqi and fired. “I killed my first man today, and I’m not sure I feel very good about it,” he said. (The American soldier he saved is presumably less ambivalent.)

If there is one area where magazines are unequivocal, it’s in their feelings toward Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Life Weekly even goes so far as to feature a shot of a Stormin’ Norman as a chubby 2-year-old, along with a remembrance of the boy and the man by his sister Sally.

The Vietnam war changed her brother, she says.

“He didn’t talk much about it, but once in a while he would show how deeply wounded he felt.”

That, however, is to simplify and understate the general’s feelings. In the March 11 New Republic, Schwarzkopf recalls an evening when that same sister, who was opposed to the Vietnam war, suggested that the anti-war demonstrators had a point.

Schwarzkopf was enraged. “I burst into tears!” he told C.D.B. Bryan, the author of the book “Friendly Fire” and of the New Republic profile. “Here was my own flesh and blood doubting. I was in tears that we could even dare take the other side.”

Schwarzkopf threw his sister out of the house. But the next morning he woke up thinking, “You were wrong, Norm Schwarzkopf, you were dead wrong!”

The New Republic piece never explains what Schwarzkopf meant by that.

But it may no longer matter. For editorial writers, television anchors and a battalion of cock-tail-lounge philosophers, Operation Desert Storm has provided a poetic resolution to the open-ended trauma of Vietnam. The voices of dissent, clamoring since before the Tet Offensive, have been drowned out by concussive waves of elation.

While many opponents of Desert Storm can and will stand honorably behind their convictions, most critics--at least those who are honest with themselves--must realize its time to eat at least a little crow.

For instance, in the March 4 issue of The Nation, Alexander Cockburn intimates that “an Iraqi triumph is conceivable, with the U.S. advance halted, the attack on Kuwait stalled, the casualties and reverses mounting at a rate beyond the power of military censors to suppress.”

Will Cockburn concede that he misjudged Bush et al?

The New Republic, which never actually opposed the war, does just that in its March 18 issue--although it reserves much harsher lashes for those who were openly critical rather than merely skeptical.

Among the fallacies the New Republic believes have been blown to smithereens: the argument that economic sanctions alone might have liberated Kuwait; “the fashionable idea that no war against an Arab state could marshal Arab support,” and the notion that Saddam could turn even a rout into some sort of personal victory and glorious martyrdom.

All that said, it seems likely historians will spend decades looking for shards of truth amid a hastily abandoned minefield of doubts.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for example, set off a tiny explosion before the ground war began with a package of articles in the March issue titled: “Iraq and the Bomb: Were They Even Close?”

Using diagrams and descriptions that are unnervingly detailed, the Bulletin presents persuasive evidence that Iraq had a long way to go before joining the ranks of nuclear nations--contrary to the hype that helped push the U.S. Congress to endorse Desert Storm. Time magazine reminds us that the Saddam who is America’s new Great Satan, was once pal to many U.S. politicians.

Take the case of Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who has gotten much publicity recently by excoriating the media for its supposedly pro-Saddam coverage. In a tete-a-tete last spring, Simpson confided to Saddam (who had just threatened to incinerate Israel with chemical weapons): “I believe that your problems lie with the Western media and not with the U.S. government.”

But Simpson is hardly alone in finding the role of the U.S. media problematic. In U.S. News, David Gergen argues that many Gulf reporters “went beyond their appropriate and important role of asking tough and probing questions and basically approached the early days of this conflict from an anti-war perspective.”

Like the Iraqis, though, most of the reporters in this war were unwittingly set up to be mowed down. “In recent years,” Gergen says, “the war colleges have trained officers to become so media-savvy that when commanders like Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf took on reporters, it was no contest.”

What no one seems to dispute is that Desert Storm was really two wars: The allies against the Iraqis and the military against the press. In the words of Col. David Hackworth, Newsweek’s rookie correspondent (and bona fide war hero): “I had more guns pointed at me by Americans or Saudis who were into controlling the press than in all my years of actual combat.”

Hackworth was “very unhappy with the military’s paranoia and their thought police who control the press. . . . We were like animals in a zoo and the press officers were like zookeepers who threw us a piece of meat occasionally.”

In its March issue, the New Republic quotes a “seasoned journalist’s” assessment that most American correspondents covering Desert Storm were “like senior citizens on a package tour.” This temerity was, to a large extent, enforced upon the press by the military. But the press long ago bowed its head to this bullying, having wimped out en masse to the press pool concept soon after being left behind on the invasion of Grenada, the magazine reports.

The peculiar quality of how this war is perceived, however, may come not just from military restrictions and media failures, but from a new national unwillingness to see things as they truly are--or at least in their entirety.

In his March 18 column, the New Republic’s Michael Kinsley ponders the unpleasant issue of Iraqi casualties.

“Like everything else about this war, the spread of callousness on the home front happened at lightning speed,” Kinsley says.

Kinsley is astonished that the first news discussion of Iraqi casualties he encountered came a full 34 days into the war. And even after that, reportage on Iraq had an air of unreality, he says. As an example, Kinsley looks at how the press discovered and covered fuel air explosives (or FAEs).

When the Los Angeles Times first broke the story that Iraq possesses and might be willing to use this “poor man’s nuclear weapon,” the media uniformly portrayed the bombs as heinous and barbaric.

When the media learned that the U.S. military also had the weapon, FAEs were discussed with awe, as a last-resort response should Hussein do something heinous and barbaric with his weapons.

But when the ground war started and, as an “experiment,” the U.S. began blasting away with these weapons--which suck the oxygen out of the air, asphyxiating any soldiers who aren’t already fried--the media pretty much shrugged. “By then,” Kinsley says, “Who cared?”

Kinsley gives another example: Americans were justifiably horrified when Iraqi thugs ripped Kuwaiti babies from their incubators. But, he points out, as a result of allied bombing, “there have probably been no operating incubators for several weeks in Baghdad.” So, Kinsley asks rhetorically, what is the moral of all this? “For the moment, as America revels in victory, let’s just leave it at this: don’t be so damned smug.”