This Media Life

Bipolar Iraq

But there are the bodies.

The Bush people, as they argue their story line, have to distract people’s attention from the dead. The president doesn’t mention the bodies; doesn’t attend funerals. Body-bag shots are on the media proscribed list. You can sense their frustration in this regard—that the bodies are always, annoyingly, the story. This is partly a military-civilian disconnect. Our job, you can hear Rumsfeld saying, is to minimize casualties, not to eliminate them. In sheer military terms—troops deployed versus casualties sustained—it’s not even that bad. Arguably (although it’s an argument you lose by making it), the kill ratio indicates a big success. I mean, you can’t really fight a war if everybody is precious—if nobody is expendable.

And yet, the great nonmilitary sensibility of the country, and of the media, sees each body as a story, and multiple bodies as a bigger story, and the aggregate of bodies as a really damning piece of evidence.

There is a socio-military calculation on the part of reporters and politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) and, one would assume, military people as well, as to how much is too much. What’s sustainable and what’s a big problem?

When the number of soldiers killed in the aftermath exceeded the number of people killed in the actual war, that was seen as a problematic milestone.

When the total number of people killed in Iraq II surpassed the total number killed in Iraq I, that got serious.

Oh yes, and significant multi-casualty incidents are major bad news. Mogadishu levels would be very dicey. Beirut levels in the Reagan era might well put the whole proposition over the top.

Now, what the Bush administration is arguing is, in effect, that our enemies know these numbers. That they cannot damage us enough to truly harm us or even to actually hamper our mission, but they can inflict enough damage to frighten us (or frighten you—or frighten the media)—precisely because our tolerance for damage has been set artificially low.

Not least of all by Democrats and by the biased media!

And so we move from a military war to a political one.

This is the exact opposite of the wars of the last generation—of the Clinton approach or even of the first Bush administration—that constant and obsessive cost-reward analysis.

Of not being caught out there without a way back. Retreating from Mogadishu. Not following Saddam into Baghdad. Of always making the calculation about when the consensus might divide. Of not making people choose sides. Of not letting there be two stories told at once.

The Bush people don’t believe there are two sides. Not two right sides, anyway. This mission is sacrosanct. The WMD canard and the sexing of intelligence reports happened, not least of all, to protect the mission. Nobody is going to go for broke in an elective war—it had to be a necessary war.

There’s no debate. There’s polling (of course) but no interest in consensus. Stubbornness (Rumsfeldness) is both virtue and strategy. If you refuse to engage in any back-and-forth but just say what you believe relentlessly, repetition eventually changes perceptions.

Righteousness went out of favor in the post–Cold War world (incrementalism, globalism, complex systems analysis came in). But righteousness is surely back. The righteous don’t compromise, don’t negotiate, don’t wimp out. The righteous (even if they had planned not to have to) take casualties (unlike that thoroughly nonrighteous Clinton, who hated to take casualties).

There’s no longer even a pretense that this is about conventional success measures (indeed, failure suddenly seems part—even a necessary part—of the great ultimate success). The we’re-not-quitters stance of the Bushies (and that the Democrats are, ipso facto, quitters) is explicitly disconnected from any talk about how we’re actually going to win.

The arguable merit of the Bush position—life is certainly better in Iraq—is subsumed by its larger, relentless, messianic, and fatalistic ambitions.

We’re at the bear-any-burden stage. That is, in most political terms, a wildly unpopular place to be. We are, after all, selfish, self-obsessed Americans.

So the only way they’re going to sell this is to turn it from a problem-solving issue into an ideological one. “We are fighting that enemy in Iraq, in Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities,” said the president.

It’s a setup. We’re going to have to choose position (1) or position (2).

The Democrats and Howard Dean play into that hand (Bush-bashing is probably good for the Bushies.)

It’s them or us.

Winners or losers.

Lefties or real Americans.

We’ve been here before, and we know how badly it turns out.