At the great daily political news commentary blog reaclearpolitics.com, co-host Tom Bevan has his own separate opinion page. And he's got a must-read post today, with tremendous insights from an interview with Karl Zinsmeister on U.S. media coverage and opposition to the Iraq War.

Zinsmeister is a top conservative writer and editor. His work includes the recently published "Dawn Over Baghdad." In the RCP interview with Bevan, he beautifully captures something I've been noticing for a while now. Liberal critics of the war, and the media in particular, somehow imagine that establishing a free society in Iraq, and pre-empting global terrorists bent on destruction of the United States should be as easy and perfectly executed as dialing out for Domino's Pizza. Journalists fall into this trap because so many are so removed from the military, Zinsmeister argues. It wasn't always this way.

Zinsmeister notes the...

....desire for instantaneous results in the American public generally, not just in the press corps. We’ve gotten used to these kind of painless, antiseptic, immediate-gratification wars. We’ve been spoiled in the Balkans and Grenada and some other places and we’ve started to think about war the way we think about the rest of our life: you pick up the cell phone and you dial in the request and it’s delivered to your front door and two days later you move on to something else.

That’s not the way wars go. Wars are much slower and sloppier enterprises. Iraq is a very typical war and it’s been done well, but I wonder if the public understands or remembers anymore what a well-fought war is like.

I’ve been looking back at World War II recently and remembering, for instance, the Battle of the Bulge. In the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers were sent to fight in waist-deep snow with no winter clothing, and I’m thinking to myself, “today, that would be reason to hang somebody. What commission is going to attack them for that?”

Look at Iwo Jima. I believe 7,000 men were killed at Iwo Jima. It's a four-mile by two-mile island in the middle of nowhere with no resources. I wonder, would we, in our contemporary worldview be able to look at that and say, "that’s a glorious triumph for the US Marine Corps," or would we say, "somebody’s got to be court-martialed over that screw-up?"

....If you treat a war like a Superbowl, where you blow the whistle, have your three hours and then blow the whistle and go home again, you’re going to be frustrated and disappointed because that’s not the way a difficult war gets prosecuted.

...There is this impression among a lot of these reporters that there was a bad postwar plan or there wasn’t any postwar plan. My experience with combat is that the plan goes out the window about five minutes after the fighting starts. That’s the way combat goes, and that’s the way combat always has gone. If you have this pointy-headed expectation that a war is something you can plan out in advance, write your thesis about and bring to a conclusion, you’re going to be disappointed.

Part of this impression is a reflection of the fact that so few reporters have any contact with military people or military life anymore. It didn’t used to be the case. It used to be that there was a lot of back-and-forth between the elite colleges that produce our top rank reporters today and the military. For example, seven hundred Harvard graduates died in World War II. There was not a Chinese wall that separated the world reporters came out of from the world soldiers came out of.

Today, unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. Most of the reporters I met in Iraq don’t have any friends at all who were in the military. They don’t have any Uncle Louie who served. They have no contact with the military whatever. They have very little knowledge of who military people are or what military responsibilities are, and that often leads them to unreasonable expectations and bad reporting.

So it’s a mixture of factors, but I think the first step is for the media to acknowledge that they’ve got a problem, that they’re not doing a very good job, that the public is recognizing the problem, and that they’ve got to figure out better ways to write about wars in the future.

Again, there's much more from this interview at Bevan's post (second link from the top here). Excellent stuff. Every single metro-daily foreign editor and ombudsman - especially at papers so carelessly fond of snatching up the latest anti-U.S., anti-Bush "reporting" on Iraq from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times - should read the whole thing, then think long and hard about Zinsmeister's analysis.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at July 26, 2004 02:03 PM

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