A Familiar War Scenario

A Familiar War Scenario

Marvin Kitman

Iraq was a brilliant, quick, lightning-fast, successful war. Grenada on a large scale, the sort of thing visualized in the Reagan days, when we piled up victories against big boys like Panama.

Something is going wrong, as I watch the Iraqi end game on TV news.

What had been billed and sold as a major-league news flash, celebrating the swift triumph of American power, has now degraded to the status of updates. It's being treated as a series of drive-by shootings in the L.A. barrio.

It used to be that every time a U.S. soldier was killed in a traffic accident, it was a major news story. Now it's just "Another Marine got killed today."

But every day, the number of dead and wounded grows in ambushes and sniper attacks from Baghdad to Fallujah. But it's getting to be a drag.

What does this remind you of?

I think what we are seeing now is the Vietnamization of the Iraq war news. And it's scary.

In the beginning of the Vietnam war on TV, the body count was a major story. The names weren't even given, just the numbers. You turned on the "Today" show in the morning, and Frank Blair was intoning something like "57 Americans killed in Vietnam last week, 123 wounded." It was always on a Thursday, I seem to recall. Enemy dead were reported at 2,000,000, or some other large number.

The fake body count was key in our plan for victory in Vietnam. But the bodies kept coming back to fight us. It was like "The Night of the Living Dead." Those rice paddies, I used to think, had a remarkable regenerative power.

There are other signs of Vietnamization.

It began with George W. Bush landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring that the combat phase of the war was over. We were getting out the ticker tape for the parade in Times Square.

But the troops' morale is starting to slip, according to the BBC and NPR. "Why are we still here?" they are asking.

The president's optimism reminded me of Vice President Richard Nixon saying on July 7, 1956, "The militant march of Communism has been halted," and of Dwight D. Eisenhower, his boss, saying on Sept. 20, 1956, "We, today, point to the free nation of Vietnam."

"I can safely say the end of the war is in sight," Gen. Paul D. Harkins, U.S. commander in South Vietnam, said on Oct. 31, 1963. "The U.S. still hopes to withdraw most of its troops from South Vietnam before the end of 1965," Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said on Feb. 19, 1964.

There was what was called "a credibility gap," which, as we watched the first Living Room War on TV, seemed to grow as large as the Cumberland Gap.

I had that sense of deja view the week of May 26, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured us as the bombs starting falling on Saddam's bunker, "There is no question that the strike was successful."

I am revisiting my childhood, trying to keep up with the Iraq war on TV these nights. I can still hear the words that used to rattle around the living room from Huntley-Brinkley on NBC and Walter Cronkite on CBS, when the nightly network news was filled with proclamations by Secretaries of State John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk and Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge and Gen. Maxwell Taylor.

Pacification programs were working. "We can see the light at the end of the tunnel," my favorite military pundit, Gen. William Westmoreland, said in 1967. What he didn't tell us was that when we turned the corner, there would be a dead-end sign.

I can still remember the film clips we saw during dinner. Images of young TV correspondents such as Morley Safer standing in the rice paddies in Pleiku became embedded in my living room war.

In my mind's ear I keep hearing stories about the cessation of bombing in the demilitarized zone, and the reports that intimates of President Lyndon Johnson on Aug. 11, 1965, confided to correspondents that there is more optimism today about eventual success than any time since the election.

As I listen to the analyses of how well things are going in Iraq, I keep expecting that any minute Eric Sevareid will come on talking about the political significance of recent military action in the Mekong Delta.

In my nightmare about our victory in Iraq, I see the next phase. The government we set up, after months of bungling, is not democratic. It turns out that the sheiks and mullahs did not read their Federalist Papers closely enough.

And then I have flashes of the sainted Democratic Sen. William Fulbright's celebrated hearings on Vietnam, back when there was still a Democratic Party. It was Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" who broke the story that the party had been abolished while we watched "American Idol."

The only difference between Vietnam and Iraq, it may turn out, is that the quagmire is made of sand and not mud. "We're doing all the stupid things we thought we could do over in Vietnam," explained

R.D. Bernstein, senior research fellow and director of historical research, Council on Citizen Education at Russell Sage College. "Tell them who to elect, tell them how to govern themselves. Not bothering to pay attention to what kind of people, what kind of culture we're dealing with."

And when things are just not going as well in the post-war game as they're supposed to, will the administration follow the Nixon-Agnew strategy of attacking the press? The media is being insufficiently supportive. Where is our patience?

Here we go again. I'm just warning you. It's not going to be pretty. And it's not going to be good for the home team.

Join our Daily News Headlines Email Digest

Information Clearing House

Daily News Headlines Digest

HOME