Sometimes you run across a newspaper “analysis” whose resemblance to a FOX news story leaves you slackjawed - a story whose omissions define it more than the content. One expects this level of print journalism in the administration’s unofficial outlets of the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal’s editorial page - but in the New York Times?
Such an analytical piece - “Where are the war heroes?” - appeared Sunday. The Times thought you might like to know why “the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized [heroes’] actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.”
Although the underlying reason seemed conspicuous, I wanted to know how the Times would frame it. So I began reading about the lack of Iraq war heroes, “a deficiency,” as the paper put it, “with a complex cause.”
In the third paragraph a slew of reasons were itemized to highlight the issue’s complexity. “Public opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.”
OK, I thought. The paper has now given the peripheral reasons; it’s saving the staggeringly obvious one for the last. It’s just building up for … what, suspense maybe? Suspense among those who’ve been paying no attention whatsoever?
So on the article went, offering quote after quote by quotable notables with insight into the various reasons already listed. There was military historian Richard Kohn: “No one wants to call the attention of the public to bloodletting and heroism and the horrifying character of combat.” And there was Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer Jr., who the Times paraphrased as saying “the short shrift given to heroes cannot be separated from the specifics of the war. Fighting an insurgency does not lend itself to individual heroism.”
Item by item the Times substantiated through experts each reason already offered. “The military wouldn’t be foolish enough to choose a soldier and promote them,” said author Mark Bowden (“Black Hawk Down”), “in part because of widespread ambivalence about the war.” Finally came this: “Instead of highlighting heroes, the military and the White House favor a two-pronged approach: for those who are likely to support the war, there is occasional talk of heroic sacrifice; for the larger national audience, there are speeches about victory.
“It is a rhetorical split that mirrors the larger national divide between the minority who serve in the military and those who do not, said Anthony Swofford, a former Marine and the author of ‘Jarhead.’ And it leaves important stories untold and unappreciated.”
End of article.
Talk about stories going untold and left unappreciated. I thought I had missed something, so I reread the piece. But the appalling hole in the “analysis” was still there.
In asking why the “deficiency” of war heroes - a deficiency that the story correctly posits as having “a complex cause” - there was no mention of the most striking cause, which is profoundly rooted in what the story only touched on: the “widespread ambivalence about the war.”
In the past we had so-called “good wars” - WWI and WWII, the first of which we entered with open and noble intentions (and only after suffering unprovoked belligerency), the second of which was history’s most justifiable war - and from them came heroes for good reasons. The public could rally behind genuine heroes because the conflicts were genuine. There was no “widespread ambivalence” about what we were doing and why we were doing it.
But like the Vietnam war, this was a war of choice - a stupendously poor choice. Hence the widespread ambivalence that is spreading wider by the day and for good reason. You know the grim history; there’s no need to recite it here. This was a war chosen by a few and sold to millions on mountainous lies.
In short, American heroes have come from honest causes. That the Times could have missed that - or intentionally ignored it - was an act of journalistic malpractice. Readers deserved better.