For all three of you who have been reading my very
occassional posts here, you may recall my post-election prediction
about the left using every available means to sabotage the war in Iraq.
Well, Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, has chimed in with
his
strategy. Here, why don't I just post the whole article?
What Iraq needs is a Walter Cronkite
President Bush went on the air this week to pretend again that
things are OK in Iraq. Shades of President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam
nearly 40 years ago. The most important similarity between Iraq and
Vietnam is that both Democratic and Republican presidents lied to us in
wartime. To refresh your memory, here's how we got out of the Vietnam
quagmire:
• Walter Cronkite, CBS-TV news anchor known as "the most trusted man in
America," after a combat tour of Vietnam in 1968 declared, "There is no
way this war can be justified any longer."
• Johnson lamented to aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." He announced he would not run for re-election.
The crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that there is no
Cronkite to call Bush's bluff. Without a strong, trusted, non-political
voice, too many of us remain Bush-blinded. Bush tried keeping the wool
over our eyes again Tuesday on national TV by repeatedly tying Iraq to
9/11. That charge is as phony as his discredited prewar claim that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Most of us who have had personal war experiences strongly believe this
great country is worth fighting for at risk of lives. My World War II
Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman's Badge on the wall behind my desk
remind me of that daily.
They also remind me that war is hell, that we must fully support our
servicemen and women and put their lives at risk only for honest and
just and noble causes.
That's why I'm convinced the best way to support our troops in Iraq is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later.
____________________
My first problem with what Mr. Neuharth has to say
is that President Bush did not go on TV this week to pretend that all
is ok in Iraq. As a matter of fact, he acknowledged that we have a
tough road ahead of us. Neuharth is not clear whether or not this is
the lie he's referring to, regarding Vietnam versus Iraq similarities.
Presumably, he is including this in with the WMD "lie" (which I don't
believe was a lie; why lie about something that will be verified or not
verified just a few months later? Nay, I think the president believed
what he was telling us, and he had the distinct misfortune of being
wrong. There's a big difference between being wrong and lying). But
either way, it appears Mr. Neuharth believes that lying about
war-related issues during a time of war is a pretty serious sin, an
egregious breach of faith, if you will. I would agree. However, I
believe this standard should apply not just to our government, but also
to those whose job it is to give war-related information to the general
public. Making stuff up behind the shelter of an "anonymous source"
that cannot be verified as true or false doesn't do us a whole lot of
good either, although I guess I might disagree with some in the
mainstream media about what is meant by "the good of the people"
in this case.
Next we have the left's familiar and (to me) overused talking point: Iraq as
Vietnam revisited. I think Mr. Neuharth demonstrates the bankruptcy of
his arguments when the best similarity between the Vietnam and Iraq
wars he can find is not to be found in the wars themselves, but in the
political scene surrounding the wars, namely that in both wars we were
lied to by presidents about the war. The best dissimilarity he can find
is that this time we have no trusted media figure to destroy support
for the war, but again, he has nothing for us when it comes to
similarities between the actual military campaigns themselves and what
those similarities may or may not tell us about the winableness or
worthiness of the war in Iraq..
I'm not going to spend too much time on this, since
many others have written on the dissimilarities of Iraq and Vietnam,
and have done so better than I could, but here's a brief refresher
anyway.
First of all, the insurgency in Vietnam had popular
support, and was waged mostly by the Vietnamese people. In Iraq, the
insurgency does not have anywhere near the popular support with the
people of Iraq that the insurgency in Vietnam did. One of the first
rules of fighting an insurgency is,
don't piss off the population,
which is exactly what the insurgency in Iraq is doing. Having your
children, husbands, brothers, sisters, and parents blown up by people
claiming to represent your interests tends to get old after awhile. It
is precisely this that has resulted in an explosion in the amount of
quality, credible intelligence and tips our troops have been receiving
from the Iraqi people. Another reason why the Iraqi people are getting
sicker and sicker of this insurgency everyday is that so many, if not
most (at the very least, the most effective attacks are by the foreign
fighters sneaking into the country from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
etc.), of the insurgents are foreign fighters, not Iraqis. Yes, there
are many Iraqi insurgents, but more and more they are beginning to see
that their insurgency is a losing proposition, especially when they see
the lives that the rest of Iraq are beginning to make for themselves.
Hence, the recent negotiations with some of the Iraqi militants. The
more we can bring those types in from the margins of Iraqi society and
back into the mainstream of civic participation, the easier it will be
to isolate and crush the foreign terrorists living in their midst.
The second dissimilarity between Vietnam and
Iraq is that in Vietnam, we simply did not understand that besides just
defeating the communists militarily, we needed to address the social
and economic problems in Vietnam so that there would be a credible
alternative to communism. In Iraq, we are very aware of this, and a
huge amount of energy is being put into solving these problems. What's
more, Iraqis are buying into this more and more everyday. This doesn't
preclude the possibility of the war going on for several more years,
but it does show that it is progressing slowly but surely towards an
end that will be good for Iraq and the world.
Which leads me to the topic of "quagmire".
Technically speaking, the Vietnam conflict was what is known as a
"war". The term quagmire as it is utilized here by Mr. Neuharth is a
great example of loaded language. For those interested in a great
primer on basic logic and expository prose, I would highly recommend
Anthony Weston's
A Rulebook for Arguments,
where he defines loaded language as "language whose only function is to
sway the emotions." Neuharth's use of the term quagmire functions
to smuggle in his assumption that the war in Iraq is unwinable, and
since it works at the emotional level, he doesn't have to (or so he
thinks) acknowledge or argue for this assumption. I wouldn't have a
problem with him using the word quagmire if he were to first define
what he means by quagmire (why it's a bad thing, etc.), and then show
how it is a good analogy for both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. I might
still disagree with him, but at least he'd have made the effort to
justify his use of the term. Emotive language in an expository or
argumentative essay can be persuasively powerful and pleasurable to
read, if it's backed up with solid arguments, or if the essay doesn't
stand or fall simply on the basis of the emotive language, but on the
basis of other evidence.
But Neuharth does not do this. Just because a
particular endeavor is difficult, costly and may require a long-term
commitment, does not necessarily rule out success in said endeavor.
Neuharth's vision of a quagmire may be that of a tar pit, entombing
forever any creature that ventures too close to it, but at the same
time, the argument can be made that the quagmire we're in (if you're
even willing to grant that we are in one) is more like a football field
covered three feet deep in thick, sucking mud. If you keep at it, it is
possible to get to the other side.
Ok, so there's my simplistic little summary of some
of the reasons why I disagree with the Iraq qua Vietnam metaphor. The
irony of the whole thing is that were it not for Walter Cronkite, we
may have been able to extricate ourselves from the Vietnam "quagmire"
with at least a tactical victory, if not a strategic one. If we had a
Walter Cronkite equivalent today, we would again be taking a tactical
victory and turning it into a strategic defeat. And this is exactly
what I believe most members of the mainstream media want to do. I don't
see how people can credibly deny this when the founder of USA Today,
one of the most mainstream of all media, is openly pining for some
media-hero to come along and mouth the magic words, "There is no way
this war can be justified any longer." So Walter Cronkite said "Let
there be peace", and there was peace, and Walter Cronkite saw that it
was good.
All of this is basically just to say that the mainstream media is
having a harder and harder time trying to mask its desire to go beyond
simply reporting the news in as objective a fashion
as possible to
actively advocating a specific partisan position, namely, end the Iraq
war now, regardless of the damage it does to American, Iraqi and world
interests. And we also discover Mr. Neuharth's other fantasy, given
this comment:
Johnson lamented to aides, "If
I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." He announced he would not run for re-election.
If the media today were respected like they were in the '60's, Mr.
Neuharth seems to believe, a Cronkite-like media messiah would simply
have to say the words, and George Bush would resign (or better yet,
never have been elected in the first place). I suppose nostalgia for the good ol'
days of mainstream media dominance is to be expected, coming from the founder of
USA Today, but is it asking too much of Mr. Neuharth if we also expect him to
acknowledge or address the causes of the public's skeptical attitude toward the media,
and specifically what the media has done to deserve its tarnished reputation? (*ahem*, Dan
Rather, I'm looking at you).
I think a big reason many people are so disaffected
with the mainstream media is the hypocrisy with which they claim to be
the objective bearers of the tidings of the world, be those tidings
good or bad, when in fact they are at least as guilty of partisan
advocacy as anyone else. Advocacy is fine, as long as you're up front
about it, but this is not what people look for from the news media in
particular; they want the truth about what's happening in the world.
On the other hand, total objectivity is not even possible in any subject matter by any person.
Cornelius Van Til
famously discussed the myth of neutrality given the basic assumptions
about life that we all have (presuppositions), and the philosopher
Francis Bacon had addressed this same idea in
New Organon as
early as 1620. Bacon outlined four biases, or idols as he called them
(again, Van Til's presuppositions): idols of the tribe, idols of the
cave, idols of the market place, and idols of the theater. By these he
means the biases of being a member of the human species, the biases of
our own personal point of view, the biases of language (viewing
language as transactions and exchanges of ideas), and the biases of
philosophies, religions and cultures. He sums it up well when he says,
"And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving
rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by
mingling its own nature with it."
At this point many would throw up their hands and
decide that if complete objectivity is not possible, then why bother?
Why not just let your biases run roughshod over everything you do? I
would say that since truth is what most of us are after, as long as we
take into account these biases, and media folks are aware and honest
about them in their work, truth can still be found, and this is why we
should not just give up the quest. Being aware of our and others'
biases is exactly what is meant by taking something with the proverbial
grain of salt. By claiming to be absolutely objective, the news media
crushes itself under the unrealistic expectation of something that it
cannot deliver; pretending to be unbiased will not make those biases go
away, rather, it will simply muddy their work even more. If instead
they acknowledged those biases and tried to remove or work around them
as much as possible, I think we'd all be able to form a much clearer
picture of the world around us.
In Neuharth's last point, he bases his whole article
on an argument from authority, namely his (and other combat veterans')
authority. His credential that justifies him being considered an
authority or expert witness is his combat experience from World War II.
I would agree that being a combat veteran makes Mr. Neuharth an
authority on combat at the tactical level (and the tactical level is
precisely where combat earned its reputation for being hell), but I
think he oversteps the bounds of that authority when he uses it as
grounds for qualification to make strategic claims, inferences and
observations. I'm not saying he can't make any sort of strategic
claims, as that is the right of all American citizens to debate, but
his combat experience alone does not make him a strategic authority.
Any side you care to think of can point to at least one combat veteran
who says, "Take my word as a combat veteran that this is the right
position on issue
x." When you have combat veterans disagreeing among themselves, then what? Who or what decides who's right?
The ad hominem argument cuts both ways; an argument
is not necessarily wrong just because of something about the person who
is delivering or conceiving it, but it's also not necessarily right
based solely on some feature of the person making the argument. The
rightness or wrongness is bound up in the arguments themselves, and Mr.
Neuharth needs to make those arguments, so that we can discuss the
merits of those, not simply agree with the assertions he's made based
on the fact that the person asserting them is a combat veteran. Lest
any combat veterans think I'm disrespecting them, let me say that any
particular subject matter expert, whether they be a combat veteran or
anything else, should be taken seriously when they are expounding on
the subject on which they are an expert. So if Mr. Neuharth was writing
about whether or not war is hell, or the merits of a particular weapon
or tactic he used in World War II, I would say that his words would
have to be taken very, very seriously indeed. On top of that, I am glad
that Mr. Neuharth answered our country's call to duty, and did so with
distinction, at the tip of the spear. But with all due respect, if he
aims to convince me as to the relative worthiness or unworthiness of
the war in Iraq, he's going to have to give me more.
Ok, enough rambling for today. Also, this is subject to revision if I think of anything I left out, or was wrong about.
PS- Props to anyone who can name the song that the title of this article is making reference to.
