The Blue Voice

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Writing history in real time: The politics of war

As my Blue Voice partners know, one of the themes I've focused on a lot in my 3+ years of blogging is how memories and lessons learned from the Vietnam War influence the ways people react to the Iraq War. The other day I reviewed a book by Jeffrey Record that dealt with lessons that the officer corps learned from the Vietnam War.

I'm also interested in the ways popular memories of the Vietnam War influence the way the public perceives the issues in the war. A friend of mine just pointed out today that Roy Edroso just acknowledged my solo blog's attention to the rightwing myth that grew up around a guy named Foster Barton that was supposed to show how much antiwar types hate our soldiers. Roy writes, "I should mention that Old Hickory was among the few, the proud, the brave who picked up the Barton bullshit."

I can't take credit for the "brave" part: all it took was paying a little attention to the stories and following up a bit. The "few" and the "proud" I'll accept for that one. (I mention this in the spirit of the great labor leader John L. Lewis, who liked to say, "He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.")

That's a big part of why I find myself oddly fascinated by the defensiveness of some of the posts at the Tanker Brothers "milblog" when they are talking about the politics of the Iraq War. Which they often do by setting up straw men about what antiwar critics say and then enthusiastically knocking them down.

At a post called "I wonder ...", one of their posters puts up a photo identified as US soldiers being nice to a family in Mosul, Iraq. The poster I think is called Aussie_Chic but sometimes signs the posts "Mel" and this one is signed A_C. Hard to keep up.

The point of the post is that scenes like that are part of the good news from the Iraq War that the mainstream media is not promoting well enough.

One of their commenters, "lacop", responds by saying in various iterations that there's nothing wrong with photos like this and sure people enjoy seeing US soldiers being nice to the locals and the people we're supposedly helping responding in a friendly way. But the implication that somehow the war in Iraq only sounds like its going badly for the US is some kind of willful misrepresentation by The Media in America is a whole different issue. See Lacop's comments here and here and here.

Then "Brat" made a separate post following on this thread. (Brat previously honored me by devoting a post to vigorously objecting to one of my comments on a Blue Voice post by Wonky Muse.)

Brat puts the following in the form of a stock conservative criticism of the alleged Liberal Press:

Because of what I choose to read, who I choose to listen to, I get the whole picture, or at least a more nuanced telling of what is going on. Why, just this very morning, I got an email from one of my guys 'somewhere out there' about an RPG attack on them. This in a place where I KNOW U.S troops and their allies are not running about killing and maiming innocents. Am I supposed to believe that this soldier, and many others like him, use their time to make these stories up? And, will I see these stories in the msm? Probably not, unless they deign to say in a throwaway line "4 more US troops killed today". And no, I won't even address the media's handling of numbers and no-names when it comes to our own, but somehow manages to be right there to record the weeping and wailing of named citizens when a local suicide bomber has wreaked mayhem - again!

Well, it's nice that Brat gets the whole picture. From their posting the last few weeks, the Tanker Brothers posters seem to rely very heavily on press releases and photos provided by the services' PR departments. And also on anonymous sources like the one he quotes in this paragraph above, which is fine, except the only fact from his source that he transmits to his readers is that somewhere in Iraq the enemy is firing RPG's at American troops. Which apparently is something he thinks is not being reported in the mainstream press.

He also seems to think that the American press doesn't publish names of American soldiers killed in action. Strange. Here's an article from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Mississippians killed in the Iraq war 11/20/06. Included is this young man from my hometown of Shubuta, Damian Heidelberg, who was 21 years old when he was killed in 2003. The biographical sketch of him says:

In their last conversation before Pfc. Damian L. Heidelberg left for Iraq, his childhood friend Jerry Jones Jr. told him not to go and get himself killed. "He just told me that he was trying to make something of himself," Jones said. "He was trying to make it for his family and his baby." The 21-year-old administrative specialist from Shubuta, Miss., was killed Nov. 15 when two Black Hawk helicopters collided in Iraq. He was based at Fort Campbell. Heidelberg, a former choir member and church usher, was "a wonderful young man, sweet and mild-mannered," said Phyllis Heidelberg, his aunt. "He was slow to speak, loved to go to church and always had a big smile." Jones said the two were inseparable as children. "That was my boy," Jones said of his life-long friend. "If he got in trouble, I got in trouble. We were always in it together." Heidelberg is survived by his father, Grady Jones, his mother, Deborah Heidelberg, and a 2-year-old daughter, Stacie.

This list also reminds me how odd it is that politicians keep referring to the soldiers in Iraq as "kids". A number of these soldiers featured in that article were in their late 20s or their 30s when they were killed. Two were in their 40s. I always wonder when I hear a speaker say that how much actual attention they've paid to the American deaths.

I'm also struck by statements like the following, from Aussie_Chic/A_C/Mel in the comments to that post:

So, all you people who think the soldiers are monsters and who protest in favour of the enemy, get your banners ready. We'll make sure you are out in front to welcome them!!

Now, just who are the people who say "soldiers are monsters" and the people who "protest in favour of the enemy"? It would be nice if Aussie_Chic/A_C/Mel would tell us the names of two or three Senators or members of Congress who have taken those positions.

This is something that has become part of the Vietnam War folklore and for some people will be incorporated straight into the folklore of the Iraq War. Already has been, actually.

But it really is a refutation of straw men, shooting down things that no one in the US is saying. Unless maybe it's another obscure group that no one has ever heard of like the nudists who carry banners supporting Muslim terrorism that Aussie_Chic as "Mel" was writing about several days ago.

At least during the Vietnam War, there was marginally more substantial evidence for such a thing. There were small but very visible groups around like the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground)

Tanker Brothers is also flogging an Iraq War version of the "spitting on veterans" story that has become a seemingly inextricable part of the urban folklore about the Vietnam War. They quote the story from the Yankeemom blog:

And now here is the part that just sends me through the roof:
He [a soldier] told her he had just been downtown for some reason or another and someone had thrown coffee on him and someone else had spit on him and called him baby killer (they’re not very original around here I know).

The account there is also the kind of anecdotal, unverifiable story that all of the known stories about Vietnam vets being spat on by antiwar protesters are. In Yankeemom's account she's even getting it second-hand.

As hokey as the following may sound, that post (which involves a hitchiker) also reminded me very much of my mother's favorite scare stories about why it's risky to pick up hitchhikers. As she told the story, it was during the Second World War after her first husband had been drafted (he was killed in the Battle of the Ardennes) and she saw two men in sailors' uniforms hitchhiking on the road as she was driving. She almost stopped to pick them up. But then she remembered the warnings she had received about picking up hitchhikers. So she drove on. Later, those same two hitchhikers were picked up by a sheriff's deputy to give them a ride. The two sailors murdered him and stole the car.

Now, I've never gone into newspaper archives or anything to see if the story checks out. But that's how I learned never to pick up hitchhikers. I'm also very sure that my mother wasn't telling me the story to convince me that all soldiers were hitchhiking murderering monsters.

What strikes me in all these posts is how they reproduce favorite conventional stories of one kind or another. Saying that doesn't say that they are false, although Tanker Brothers often asks us to take their facts on faith.

Here's one about soldiers handing out toys to Iraqi children. This image of American soldiers handing out toys to children harks back to one of the most cherished images of the post-Second World War period, of Americans handing out candy to kids in occupied areas of Europe.

And those stories are based in reality. My Austrian mother-in-law has fond memories of American soldiers handing out chocolate candies to the kids in their area during the occupation time.

But I find these stories from Iraq today a bit disturbing. Because in the most troubled areas of Iraq, like Baghdad or Fallujah and many other cities, people get killed just for talking to Americans. Local commanders obviously have a more specific grasp of local situations than even soldiers in a different area of Iraq. And any actions that promote goodwill towad Americans are clearly beneficial.

But, seriously, I think even bloggers should think twice before promoting the notion that soldiers should be giving out treats to children in a situation like this. In the high-risk areas, children interacting with soldiers could literally become targets for violent retaliation. As the posters as Tanker Brothers never tire of reminding us, the enemy in Iraq can be viciously brutal and often ignore the most basic laws of warfare.

And in terms of actual news about the status of the war, people who confuse feel-good stories like this with news about how the war is going are kidding themselves.

Here is Juan Cole's report about action on Monday in Baghdad:

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that on Monday running street battles erupted in several districts of Baghdad between guerrillas and Iraqi police. In Salikh, the Bank district, Sumer, and Tujjar, residents were forced to flee their homes lest they be exposed to kidnapping or caught in the cross-fire. The fighting, mainly with small arms fire, began when guerrillas attacked a police checkpoint. Police attempted to close off the affected neighborhoods. They also closed Salikh Bridge, which is among the main point of access to Baghdad from northern provinces such as Diyala, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah. The closing created traffic jams and forced drivers to use an alternative route into the city.

Here is part of the Reuters news from 11/20/06:

BAGHDAD - Police found 60 bodies in various parts of Baghdad over the past 24 hours, an Interior Ministry source said. [An AP report put the number of bodies at 75.]

BAGHDAD - Gunmen attacked the convoy of an Iraqi deputy health minister, Hakim al-Zamily, killing two of his guards, but the minister was unhurt, Zamily told Reuters.

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb hit the convoy of a junior minister, Mohammed al-Oreibi, an official in his party said. Nobody was hurt in the blast.

Now imagine if the city involved were Washington DC, or Atlanta, or Kansas City:

WASHINGTON DC - Police found 60 bodies in various parts of Washington over the past 24 hours, a Homeland Security source said.

ATLANTA - Gunmen attacked the convoy of the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control killing two of his guards, but the duputy was unhurt, Atlanta police told Reuters.

KANSAS CITY - A roadside bomb hit the convoy of the Assistant Secretary of Education on a visit from Washington, a Kansas City police spokesperson said. Nobody was hurt in the blast.

Now none of these things would mean that schools in Washington weren't having a routine day, or that grocery stores in Atlanta were closed down, or that police in Kansas City weren't being helpful to lost children.

But if guerrilla attacks of this level of violence - 60 people executed for political and/or religious motives in Washington, DC and the rest - people would go into a frenzy, and no one more so than rightwing Republicans. No one would be saying, "Gee, sure, there were some people murdered but how come nobody is reporting on the fact that the Washington public schools had a nice day?"

And this kind of thing has become a routine day in Iraq.

The Tanker Brothers blog promotes various programs and charities to benefit soldiers, which is great. They also offer obituary notices and various kinds of tributes to soldiers, which is understandble and commendable. More power to them for those kinds of things.

But when they confuse feel-good official press releases with actual news on the status of the war, that shows a lack of seriousness in understanding the Iraq War itself that will affect how some people try to tell the story of this war after American troops are eventually out of Iraq.

People who are serious about understanding the war and its various effects can't rely simply on heart-warming stories about handing out candy and toys to little kids. Despite the undeniable fact that the latter kinds of stories are much more pleasant.

People were tending crops in the countryside in most of the United States and stores were open in Baltimore and Atlanta and Charleston while the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg were taking place in 1863, too. But it was those key battles that turned the tide of the Civil War.

posted at 6:32:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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