Ross Mackenzie: A Diminishing Few, but Always the Greatest Americans

Town Hall ^ | May 27, 2004 | Ross Mackenzie [Tribune Media Services]

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Memorial Day, the war on terror, Bush, Kerry, a mainline press that does not so much inform as inflame: They're all intertwined, all of a piece. And the same elements, or elements like them with different names, have coalesced before. This isn't the first time.

We'll come back to Memorial Day and what it means.

First, recall these things:

In the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts, battlefield successes cast as mistakes. Genuine mistakes — Abu Ghraib, under-manning, underestimation of Iraqi (and Afghan) readiness for self-government, insufficient rhetorical rallying of the American people — played up. Defeatism. Doubts about the mission and whether the reasons for it (e.g., WMDs) were genuine or bogus. Doubts about the reliability of post-Saddam Iraqi forces. The curiously short shelf-lives of the grim deaths of Mike Spann, Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg; a sarin-filled rocket; the Chalabi betrayal; Saddam's mass graves.

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Regarding Afghanistan and Iraq we are seeing a good deal of what we saw regarding Vietnam: The manipulation of a strategic decision (to win the War on Terror or to stop communism) to achieve a domestic political outcome — and correspondingly enabling the battlefield enemy to win.

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FYI

[Tolik]

BTTT!