Something about 21st century warfare brings out Washington’s lust for historical comparison. The moment the combat starts, lawmakers and the national press corps inevitably portray every explosion, invasion, frontline dispatch, political machination and wartime icon as momentous replicas of the past’s Big Moments and Great Men.
9/11 was Pearl Harbor. Colin Powell’s Iraq presentation at the United Nations was Adlai Stevenson’s Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation. Embedded journalists in Afghanistan strutted around like the intrepid Walter Cronkite on a foreign battlefield. George W. Bush was a Rooseveltian “war president.” The Iraq invasion was D-Day.
A byproduct of reporters’ narcissism, politicians’ vanity and the Beltway’s lockstep devotion to militarism, this present-tense hagiography ascribes the positive attributes of sanitized history to current events. And whether or not the analogies are appropriate, they inevitably help sell contemporary actions — no matter how ill-advised.
Of course, after we were told seven years ago that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” and after an historically unique conflict that has lasted longer than almost any other, you might think the press would start questioning the government’s martial stagecraft. You might also think all the comparisons to the past would stop. Instead, D.C. journalists and lawmakers are now celebrating the supposed withdrawal from Iraq, implicitly presenting the White House’s August announcement as the second coming of V-J Day.
The trouble is that the announcement is anything but, because the war isn’t even close to over. And we know that because the military is quietly acknowledging as much.
Just beyond pundits’ soaring paeans and President Obama’s history-referencing declaration of victory, the Pentagon admits “nothing will change.” That isn’t a paraphrase — it’s a direct quote from the Army’s chief spokesman in Iraq. It came just before a Colorado Springs Gazette dispatch quoted another military official saying “our mission has not changed.” The article then went on to point out that “current and scheduled deployments will resume as planned,” as 50,000 soldiers remain stationed in Iraq.
The truth, in short, is clear: Despite Washington portraying this month’s Iraq announcement as another big happy event created by Great Men, the only history that’s truly germane to this moment is the kind that may portend future misfortune.
If historical allegory must infuse America’s foreign policy discourse, shouldn’t reporters be pondering how our government deceptively employed the same “military adviser” moniker in the disastrous Vietnam buildup? And shouldn’t elected officials remember that “Vietnamization” was the seemingly pro-withdrawal panacea floated four blood-soaked years before U.S. forces finally left Southeast Asia?
Sure they should — but they don’t because it’s easier to pretend this is just another gauzy snippet in a saccharine History Channel documentary.
