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And that's final! What Did You Do in the Postwar, Daddy?By Rick Horowitz A bit of a puzzler, actually: When is a war not a war? Or to put it another way: Huh? The newscasters read what's put in front of them. The parts that I notice sound roughly like this: "American soldiers encountered stiff resistance today outside the Iraqi village of Such-and-Such, in some of the heaviest fighting since the war ended." Or... "The Pentagon reported the capture today of Just This Many Iraqis, in the biggest American military operation since the war ended." Or... "A U.S. soldier was shot and killed early this morning by Iraqi sniper fire, the Somethingth American to die in Iraq since the war ended." If the newscasters find any of this troublesome, they don't let on. I, on the other hand, find myself sitting there with forehead furrowed and nostrils flared. If there's heavy fighting, I say to myself, if there are large military operations, if there are dozens of fatalities "since the war ended" -- Maybe the war hasn't ended! I mean, not to be a party pooper or anything, but does any of this sound like peace to you? Isn't peace when the encountering and capturing and shooting and killing stop? Or at least drop to the level of occasional nuisance rather than constant concern? Seems to me, though, when you feel the need to send out 1,500 troops at a time, when you find yourself detaining hundreds of hostile foreigners at a clip, you're still fighting a war, no matter what the White House wants you to think. Let's be fair here: President Bush didn't say that the war in Iraq was over. He simply said -- this was way back on May 1 -- that "major combat operations" in Iraq were over. There were reasons he said it that way, and an excess of caution probably wasn't the biggest one. You start declaring wars over, you see, and you might get caught up in all that messy Geneva Convention stuff about returning prisoners and such. Much better if the war is still legally up and running, even if politically (which is to say, photo-optically), you can chalk up another one in the win column. When it's in the win column, you can do your president-in-the-flight-suit-landing-on-the-carrier. You can do your sailor-off-the-ship-and-into-the-arms-of-the-loving-spouse. Triumphant pictures. Inspiring pictures. Anyway, the president didn't say it was over -- not quite. But he was certainly happy to leave that impression. Certainly happy to have the networks pack up most of their cameras and most of their correspondents. Happy to have them drop the 24-7 coverage before things starting turning...less triumphant. Less inspiring. (True, some of the news reports have managed to hang on to the president's fine distinctions, but that simply means they're talking about "the largest combat operation since major combat operations were declared ended." Not much of an improvement.) And let's be fair again: With the Pentagon brass calling the latest activities Operation Peninsula Strike and Operation Desert Scorpion and the like, they're not pretending that all's quiet on the Iraqi front -- even if they are suggesting that Peninsula Strike and Desert Scorpion are separate from, and no more than distant cousins of, the big (and done) one, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mission accomplished and all that. Except that it's not accomplished. Not completely, not yet. Or as the striped-pants set likes to say, "It ain't over till it's over." Call it Operation Still Dying. Posted 6/17/03. Get
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Rick Horowitz
