WASHINGTON — Perhaps the most dubious cliche in American
history is the one intoned over and again after terrorists killed
3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. That was the cliche that
claimed that now “America has changed forever.” Well, forever
lasted about two years, maybe three. Then American solidarity in
the war against terror began to fissure, and, by the way, the
president’s favorable ratings began to sink.
Now in the press the war effort is assuming the vague dimensions
of monstrosities of yesteryear: Watergate, Iran-Contra, both being
cautionary tales from which liberals hope Americans will learn to
be better people. The time has come, they tell us, to hand this war
over to the experts, for instance, Senator John Kerry, who might
well have become president last time around if it were not for a
treacherous cabal of Vietnam veterans who, the Senator believes,
lied about his heroic service in Vietnam. If Senator Kerry is not
to your liking, there is also Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose
service during the Vietnam War was very much like Senator Kerry’s
once he returned from Vietnam. No, America has not changed forever.
Certainly American liberals have not changed.
Read the liberal press. Increasingly it reads like the press of
what during the Cold War was called a “nonaligned nation.”
Increasingly it appears that the American press “is not taking
sides” in this war, this Republican war. Over the weekend it was
reported that the Bush administration has been laying plans to bomb
Iran’s nuclear facilities. On Monday the Washington Post
reported that “The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda
campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
The Post knows this because its reporters laid hands on
“internal military documents.” So now those documents and the
controversy within the military surrounding them are known to the
public, the world public. Both news stories are out there for our
enemies to make use of.
I read the second story en route to a place called Blackwater,
USA. It is a facility in North Carolina where a private company
trains security personnel for the world we were all made aware of
on 9/11. Frankly I did not find it a happy visit. There is not much
romance in this war on terror. For a few hours I watched special
ops troops and police train in firearms, close-quarters battle,
tactical driving, and other dangerous operations. There were
mockups for training for urban warfare and for recapturing pirated
ships and hijacked airplanes. I saw heavily armed men train to
protect dignitaries from being ambushed. The place abounded with
grim soldiers and retired soldiers training for dangerous missions
against gruesome foes. Blackwater is a vast and impressive
privately owned facility that is profitable only because there are
hundreds of thousands of brutes around the globe who want to kill
civilized people. Truth be known, the world has changed forever
even if the American press has not.
In 1942, when all Americans recognized that we were at war, the
press was more disciplined. Of course, President Franklin Roosevelt
encouraged this discipline with such instruments as the Office of
Censorship, authorized under the War Powers Act. Codes of reportage
were established, and news organizations submitted thousands of
stories to the censors. Some of the self-censorship appears
preposterous today. On Palm Sunday of 1942 a blizzard dumped more
than two feet of snow on the east coast. Neither the New York
Times nor any of the Washington newspapers reported the mess
that had blanketed their cities. You would not want the Nazis to
know.
Yet now our enemies know about our propaganda in Iraq and plans
being made for bombing Iran. During World War II the Times
science writer, William Laurence, got word of our progress on
developing an atomic bomb. He was warned by the Manhattan Project’s
General Leslie Groves not to publish his knowledge. Legend has it
that Groves told Laurence he knew too much already and “I shall
have to hire you or kill you.” With the agreement of Times
editors Laurence disappeared into the Manhattan Project,
reappearing on the bomber that leveled Nagasaki. After that he
wrote a series of articles on the development of the bomb for his
newspaper and won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize.
America is at war, and it is not just the Republicans’ war.
