War Stories

by Oliver North

  So the search continues for Saddam. But as one Special Forces soldier put it, “The world’s a better place, because Uday and Qusay Hussein are in a place that makes today’s 120 degrees in Baghdad feel like a summer breeze.”

  The success of this operation was quickly obscured by protestations that “U.S. troops used excessive force,” and complaints that Uday and Qusay “should have been taken alive for their intelligence value,” and then “tried for their crimes.” But the fact that the endeavor succeeded is because Iraqi civilians felt safe in cooperating with U.S. authorities—something that was apparently missed or ignored by most commentators. Meanwhile, the young Americans in harm’s way in Iraq wonder what it is they have to do to please the critics back home.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

  If pleasing the critics at home is going to be the measure of success for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines who fought Operation Iraqi Freedom, they may have to wait a very long time for the accolades they deserve. By October 2003, support for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq was higher among Iraqis than Americans.

  Most people I talk to believe that this disparity is the consequence of four factors: the deluge of media reports in the United States that focus only on the bad news; the Blame America First crowd in Hollywood; our “love affair” with the United Nations; and a barrage of hateful, partisan political invective aimed at our commander in chief that has caught military personnel in the crossfire.

  Many who are still in Iraq wonder what kind of reception they will receive when they arrive in America. Some of them shudder at the prospect of a “welcome” like the one their fathers got when they returned from Vietnam. One young Marine wrote, “I hope they don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, like they did with Vietnam.”

  He’s far too young to remember Vietnam. But he knows the “they” of whom he writes. After just a week back in the United States from spending ten months in Kuwait and Iraq, he concluded, “We won the war. But whether we stay the course to win the peace won’t be decided in Baghdad, Basra, or Mosul. That’s going to be determined on our television screens, newspapers, and in the corridors of power of Washington. I sure hope we don’t leave it up to the media, Hollywood, the UN, or overly ambitious politicians.”

  With the exception of those cited in the introduction, nearly everyone agrees that embedding broadcast and print reporters in military units was a good idea. But it’s not really new. Ernie Pyle, Cyril O’Brien, Jeremiah O’Leary, and Edward R. Morrow were all embedded war correspondents, reporting on the units and individuals with whom they lived during World War II. But they had advantages that many in the news business today lack: they came to the task with open minds and filed their reports with objective editors and news directors.

  Part of the problem is in the way contemporary “well-trained journalists” see things around them. Since I’m not a “well-trained journalist,” I decided that when I had an option, I would report on things that are interesting to the American people—such as “Who are these folks taking our kids into battle?” So for my first report, as the Marines were making final preparations for war, I filed a profile piece on a Marine gunnery sergeant teaching young Marines how to use the .50-caliber machine gun in combat. As I finished transmitting the piece to FOX News Channel, a well-known and respected reporter for another network, also embedded with a Marine helicopter squadron, sent in a profile piece of his own: “Do U.S. Pilots Use Drugs?” He wanted the American people to know that pilots flying sixteen to twenty hours a day occasionally take Dexedrine for alertness and sleeping pills to help them get necessary rest. That they have been doing so since World War II and with the supervision of medical doctors was somehow irrelevant to his story.

  Later, while we were deep in Iraq, a very brave cameraman for CNN complained to me, “I’m shooting the same stuff you are, Colonel, but my stuff isn’t getting on the air.” I doubt he meant technical difficulties with his satellite transmissions.

  Just before we reached Baghdad, another colleague, grousing about the TVs at CENTCOM, V Corps, and I-MEF always being tuned to FOX News Channel, observed, “And you don’t even bother to interview the generals who are running this war.”

  “Right,” I replied. “I interview the people who are fighting this war.”

  There is nothing wrong with interviewing generals or colonels, but there are a whole lot more PFCs and lance corporals than there are generals. In modern war reporting, with live satellite feeds from battlefields, the American people are much more interested in knowing how their kids are doing than whether some grumpy general got enough bran flakes for breakfast. Besides, it’s been my experience that officers are so concerned about saying the wrong thing that they won’t say anything. A PFC, on the other hand, will offer the unvarnished truth.

  Shortly after the capture of Baghdad, my friend and FOX News Channel colleague Brit Hume, managing editor and Washington, D.C., bureau chief, addressed the war coverage in a speech at Hillsdale College. He quoted ABC’s Ted Koppel as saying, “I’m very cynical, and I remain very cynical, about the reasons for getting into this war.”

  “Cynical?” Hume asked. “We journalists pride ourselves, and properly so, on being skeptical. That’s our job. But I have always thought a cynic is a bad thing to be. A cynic, as I understand the term, means someone who interprets others’ actions as coming from the worst motives. It’s a knee-jerk way of thinking. A cynic, it is said, understands the price of everything and the value of nothing. So I don’t understand why Ted Koppel would say with such pride and ferocity—he said it more than once—that he is a cynic. But I think he speaks for many in the media, and I think it’s a very deep problem.”

  Addressing the issue of “bad news,” Hume acknowledged that “bad stuff tends to be exceptional in our world. Reporters have a natural instinct, therefore, to look for the negative.” Pointing to the way that many in the media depicted the foreign fedayeen fighters as a serious threat to coalition forces, he observed, “Only this could explain their belief that the fedayeen—by shooting at our troops’ flanks and attacking our supply convoys—posed a serious threat. I remember when that story came out, and I thought to myself that it just didn’t seem sensible that the fedayeen were militarily significant. They were riding around in pickup trucks with machine guns, for heaven’s sake! And it turned out, contrary to all the stories, that they weren’t a serious threat, and that they succeeded only in getting themselves killed by the hundreds.”

  Unfortunately, there has been no shortage of negative, Bush-bashing newsmen. Today they point to the “never-ending stream of U.S. casualties” and talk of a “quagmire”—first on the heels of the initial operational pause, then in the aftermath of the war. It can only be hoped that their prognostications about the peace are as accurate as their discouraging forecasts before the fighting started.

  Chris Matthews of NBC warned that if the United States went to war with Iraq “[It] will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe.” His colleague at NBC, analyst Gen. Barry McCaffrey, predicted that if there were a battle for Baghdad, the U.S. would probably take “a couple to three thousand casualties.” As of April 11, the day after the battle for Baghdad, the United States reported 102 troops killed in action.

  On March 29, just nine days into the war, the New York Times boldly proclaimed, “With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made two gross military misjudgments in concluding that coalition forces could safely bypass Basra and Nasiriya and that Shi’ite Muslims in southern Iraq would rise up against Saddam Hussein.” Coalition forces safely crossed Basra and Nasiriya and the Shi’ite Muslims did rebel. Unfortunately for the Times, the CENTCOM war plan didn’t call for bypassing either city, nor did the coalition forces expect or receive an “uprising” by any Iraqis.

  Seymour Hersh, famous since Vietnam for his “investigative journalism,” wrote in t
he March 31, 2003, edition of the New Yorker: “According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. . . . ‘It’s a stalemate now,’ the former intelligence official told me.” One can only wonder who these “military men” were that Mr. Hersh “spoke to.” In the aftermath of the victory, most of the media seems to be criticizing Secretary Rumsfeld for not anticipating the consequences of a short-duration war.

  This is the kind of negative reporting Brit Hume was talking about. Now, in retrospect, Hume’s observations are dead on: “The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong. They didn’t get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong.” He adds, “This level of imperviousness to reality is remarkable. It is consistent and it continues over time. I think about this phenomenon a lot. I worry and wonder about the fact that so many people can get things so wrong, so badly, so often, so consistently, and so repeatedly. And I think that there are ideas lurking under the surface that help to explain why this happens. In brief, when it comes to the exercise of American power in the world, particularly military power, there seems to be a suspicion among those in the media—indeed, a suspicion bordering on a presumption—of illegitimacy, incompetence, and ineffectiveness.”

  The problem, of course, is that these wrong assumptions and incorrect “facts” get played prominently in the prime-time newscasts and in the front-page newspaper stories, and become part of the official record. Unfortunately, the record won’t show how many Iraqis were treated by Army and Navy doctors, medics, and corpsmen. The record doesn’t reflect how Army engineers and Seabees rebuilt water treatment plants, repaired generators, and fixed irrigation systems. And the record doesn’t include enough heartwarming stories about the compassion American warriors have for the children of Iraq.

  One such warrior is a young Marine officer I know well. Matt Grosz was just a kid when his dad and I served together at Quantico, Virginia, and at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Now Matt is a Marine captain, commanding “India” Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. I saw him in Kuwait just before the war started. His regiment endured some of the toughest fighting of the campaign on the way to the capital. After Baghdad was captured, Matt’s unit was sent to Karbala, where he was given the mission of protecting a large suburb of the city. Not content to act simply as an “occupation force,” Captain Grosz started a whole range of civic action projects that led to local elections and even the formation of a youth soccer league. His one regret: “The Iraqi kids beat my Marines.”

  But the media ignored the CENTCOM press release in June on this emblematic success story. When I asked a CENTCOM public affairs officer if the story had been picked up, she replied, “I guess their attitude was ‘not enough blood,’ so it wasn’t important.”

  According to Hume:

  •••

  The attitude of the media in times of war is all the more puzzling when considered in the context of what America has done in the world over the last century—and in particular, what the American military has done. It entered World War I toward the end, tipped the balance, and saved our friends and allies. In World War II, it led the free world to victory against genuinely monstrous evils. After that war, it gave aid and comfort to defeated enemies on a scale never before seen. Considering its actions in Japan alone, the U.S. should go down in history as one of the most benevolent victorious powers in history. Japan owes its economy and democracy to Douglas MacArthur, and to the leaders of the American government who put him there to do what he did. But it didn’t stop with Japan. There was the Marshall Plan. During the entire forty-five-year Cold War, America projected military power over Western Europe and in many far-flung outposts elsewhere, such as South Korea. It protected the people who had been our allies, and many who had been our enemies, from the next great evil, Soviet communism—an evil, I might add, which many in our media refused to recognize as such. Then, upon the victorious end of the Cold War, one of the first things the U.S. did was work feverishly to make sure that the reunification of Germany went forward in a way that would work and be effective.

  This is the record. It is available and known to the world. It’s not particularly controversial. Yet even within this context, ideas have somehow germinated among those in the media, as when America embarks on something like the Iraq war, there are all kinds of tremulous suspicions and fears about what we might really be doing. How many times have we heard it suggested that we’re in Iraq for the oil? Does this make any sense at all? If we are there for the oil, why didn’t we keep Kuwait’s oil after the Gulf War? The best and simplest explanation is that we’re just not that kind of country.

  •••

  If the so-called mainstream media has a hard time figuring out what kind of country we are, it must be even more difficult for the entertainment industry. There was a time when Tinseltown regarded entertaining America’s families as its primary purpose. Interestingly, during World War II, many of Hollywood’s leading actors served in the military—Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney, and Jimmy Stewart, to name a few. For decades actors and actresses such as Bo Derek, Marilyn Monroe, Ann-Margret, Connie Stevens, Jill St. John, and Raquel Welch, joined Bob Hope in freely giving of their time to entertain the troops overseas, as did musicians like Louis Armstrong. Filmmakers like John Ford and stars like John Wayne had no problem making pro-America, pro-military movies.

  That’s no longer the case. Now Hollywood actors like Robert DeNiro and Gary Sinise, and performers like Wayne Newton, are the exception rather than the rule on a USO tour. Worse still, many of today’s actors are activists against American foreign policy and use their celebrity status to try and drive a wedge between the commander in chief and the troops he leads. The Dixie Chicks alienated country music fans and many other Americans with comments made by singer Natalie Maines during a performance in London. Maines told the audience, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

  Actor-turned-political protester Sean Penn is one of the leading luminaries of this movement. He took out a $56,000 full-page ad for an “open letter” to President Bush in the Washington Post, just before the start of the Iraq war, in which he claimed, “bombing is answered by bombing, mutilation by mutilation, killing by killing.”

  Though Penn hasn’t found the time in his very successful career to support our troops with the USO, he was able to embark on a “fact-finding mission” to Baghdad, paid for by the leftist Institute for Public Advocacy, to pursue “a deeper understanding of this frightening conflict.” When he returned, Penn accused the Bush administration of “teaching a master class in the manifestation of rage into hatred.”

  He subsequently sued producer Steve Bing for dropping him from an upcoming film, claiming that his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq has made him a “blacklist” victim.

  Blacklist? Baloney! Hollywood is full of “stars” who agree with Sean Penn. Robert Redford, Julia Roberts, Woody Harrelson, Bill Cosby, the Baldwin brothers, Jessica Lange, Danny Glover, Matt Damon, Kim Basinger, Oliver Stone, and Jane Fonda have all denounced the war and President Bush. Martin Sheen, of The West Wing, dismissed Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “personal feud.” Barbra Streisand judged it “very, very frightening.”

  Filmmakers have also jumped on the bandwagon. Robert Altman opined in London that he was “embarrassed to be an American.” Michael Moore has announced that his next “documentary,” entitled Fahrenheit 9/11: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns, will “show linkages between President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden.” The Disney film subsidiary Miramax will reportedly distribute Mr. Moore’s new effort.

  Like other members of the Hollywood elite, Moore doesn’t limit his visceral political attacks to the films he makes. During monologues in Grea
t Britain, he also rebuked the dead passengers on the four hijacked September 11 aircrafts. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who writes a column for The Independent of London, “Moore went into a rant about how the passengers on the planes on 11 September were ‘scaredy-cats’ because they were mostly white. ‘If the passengers had included black men,’ he claimed, ‘those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes.’”

  Perhaps Mr. Moore would like to express those thoughts to Lisa Beamer, whose husband Todd was part of the rebellion aboard American Airlines Flight 93 before the aircraft went down in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, on September 11, denying the terrorists an opportunity to hit their intended target—the White House.

  Starting in the summer of 2002, our “allies”—the French, the Germans, and most of “Old Europe”—began employing every tactic possible in the United Nations to prevent the use of force in Iraq. Encouraged by massive anti-American protests on the streets of European capitals, President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany repeatedly urged the United States and Great Britain to delay plans for military action against Saddam Hussein until UN supersleuth Hans Blix had “completed” his search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

  By the autumn of 2002, U.S. frustration with the snail’s pace of Blix’s mission was dismissed as “saber rattling” in Paris, Berlin, and Brussels and on the UN cocktail party circuit. In 2003, with Saddam gone, the same voices that had earlier preached patience before resorting to arms are now unwilling to wait for a full and careful search for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. According to the rhetoric coming from the UN, it’s curtains for American credibility unless coalition forces immediately find significant stockpiles of nerve agents, biotoxins, and nuclear weapons.