An Army at Dawn (Part II)

(Part one of this series is here)

II - A Desert War in Shades of Grey

PBS has created a portal, a compilation of their Frontline reports on Iraq. A goldmine of information, with interviews, video, transcripts, and more.

Just looking at the overview of the series provides interesting insight onto how the media narrative of the Iraq war has evolved with time.

Originally broadcast on October 9th, 2003, Truth, War, and Consequences is a good place to start. Here's the description from the site:

FRONTLINE traces the roots of the Iraqi war back to the days immediately following September 11, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the creation of a special intelligence operation to quietly begin looking for evidence that would justify the war.

The Long Road to War originally aired on March 17, 2003 - just as the shooting war in Iraq began again. From the PBS description:

With the U.S. apparently within days of attacking Iraq, FRONTLINE draws on its 12 years of reporting on Iraq to chronicle the key moments in the history of America's ongoing confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

Those of us who've worn the uniform over all those years know September 11 was but another of many turns in an extremely serpentine road. We watched the news coverage of the parades of troops returning home back in '91 too - and then we proceeded to rotate in and out of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other points nearby to maintain an uneasy "ceasefire" for the next dozen years. Our seemingly eternal military presence in Saudi - mostly Air Force enforcing the southern part of the "no fly zone" - was a significant factor in Osama Bin Laden's determination to bring death and destruction to the US that fateful day. Though ultimately (perhaps obviously) untenable, the world was happy with that status quo. And as the Iraqi people suffered and died - from starvation or poison gas or other methods to be discussed more fully in a certain upcoming trial - a few opportunists from many lands made fortunes on something we now know was (perhaps inevitably) corrupt - Oil For Food (even more trials to come). Still, from time to time over those dozen years we'd get a quick headline after launching a missile in response to Saddam's violation of UN regulations, and the world went on its merry way.

Yes, September 11 was one of countless events on the road to finishing our unfinished business in Iraq. Being "the" event along that path is a construct of the post-war media, as PBS rather unexpectedly demonstrates for us in quite dramatic fashion.

Everyone has a right to change their mind, of course. But those damn pesky facts just never want to change...

III - A Desert War in Fading Color

In the post-Vietnam era there was a nickname for the war in Korea - "the forgotten war". Just after the horrible glory of WWII and prior to the pure horror of Vietnam, the conflict ended with a ceasefire and no clear victor - a situation that persists - five decades later. The forgotten war indeed.

Now, in order for the Iraq was a result of overreaction to 9/11 narrative to work it's important that we forget another war. Desert Storm has practically vanished from our national memory - and certainly from any discussion of the current situation in Iraq. As noted above, it "ended" with a 12-year ceasefire, enforced with GIs on the line. As noted above, we as a nation are perfectly willing to allow such things to go for decades - we can be quite comfortable with that, as long as we aren't reminded too often of the situation. As noted above, Osama Bin Laden felt we needed reminding. It wasn't just our threat to Iraq that offended him so - it was our presence on the ground in Saudi that fueled his hostility - among many reasons equally inexplicable to those not afflicted with blind adherence to an orthodoxy of hate.

Oddly enough I was in Korea during Desert Storm - the one location from which troops weren't pulled for duty in the desert. And I well recall the abrupt end of the conflict, and from my perspective there near the 38th parallel I could see a bit of the future too. We're never going to leave... I predicted - another short tour opportunity created for yours truly some fine day. Yes, I was a cynic back in those days...

PBS' Frontline series offers a look back at that newly forgotten war too. The Gulf War was first broadcast in 1996. (When was the last time you even heard a reference to "the Gulf War"? Use the term today and it's likely that few would know what you mean.)

Look into the oral history section and you'll find a name you might recognize. It's none other than Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn, whose participation in the project stems from his also being the author of the book Crusade : The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War.

Asked by a PBS interviewer "what were Saddam's miscalculations?" Atkinson responds that they were legion:

Sadam made many strategic miscalculations. He failed to recognize that the world was awash with oil. That Iraqi oil was not critical to the functioning of the Western democracies. There was plenty of oil.

In fact, check out this quote from a recently published book on the latest invasion, from a reporter who was embedded with the 101st Airborne. He describes the Forward Area Refueling Points (FARPs) set up to refuel helicopters advancing ever northward through the desert:

With stupefying obtuseness, the military had named the FARPs for oil companies, despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's insistence that the invasion of a country with 112 billion barrels of confirmed reserves had "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil".

But most soldiers evinced a cool detachment toward their potential Iraqi adversaries. Certainly no hate lodged in their bones. Many had an inchoate conviction that this deployment was somehow linked to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, a delusion encouraged by the nation's political leadership. Long before 9/11, however, the Army had become an expeditionary force that careered among global hot spots. If they were modern legionnaires, these soldiers nevertheless thought of themselves as defenders of a secular faith embracing sundry liberties and entitlements, including many that were noble, and others - such as the daily consumption of more than 25 percent of the world's oil supply by only 5 percent of the world's population - that were less so.

Everyone has a right to change their mind, of course. We'll guess he gained some sort of enlightenment somewhere between 1996 and 2004.

More to follow. In the meantime, I haven't changed my mind. Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943 is a fine account of the early days of US involvement in WWII.