UPDATED - ColdType

emain in Afghanistan, and they may be
regrouping and getting stronger.
As one who covered the victory parades after
the first Gulf War, I remember the yellow ribbons
flying and the crowds chanting, “We Are
Number One!” That conflict, too, was proclaimed
a victory until it was clear that it wasn’t. Yes,
Kuwait was returned to some of the richest people
in the world who own it. But Saddam survived,
hanging on for the next 12 years.
Soon the initial media-supported image of
Desert Storm was revised. The sense of victory
was short-lived. In the aftermath, the media complained
about having been had, as atrocities
were revealed and it turned out that the smart
bombs used were not so smart. The President
who won the war would soon lose his bid for
reelection.
Fast forward to Iraq, 2003.
Who won? And who lost?
A high-tech U.S. military equipped with the
best weaponry in the world overwhelmed a second-rate,
no-tech defense force. It was no contest.
If it was a prize fight, the ref would have
called it in the first round. It was just as those
who planned it knew it would be – a bloody and
one-sided massacre. The coalition of the willing
quickly became a coalition of the killing. All the
fears of the anticipated use of bio-chemical
weapons that aroused the public and made the
war SEEM so risky never came to pass.
“I never thought Saddam would use those
weapons,” ABC’s Ted Koppel confided after the
war was over. He revealed that the general he
was embedded said he didn’t believe the
weapons would be used either.
The war’s biggest and most spectacular operations,
the shock and awe and the decapitation
WINNERS AND LOSERS
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strikes, all were pricey failures. The “collateral
damage” that we were told would be minimal
was enormous.
Warnings about the dangers of looting cultural
treasures were ignored. U.S. soldiers stood
by and watched, sometimes plunging in to pick
up a souvenir or two. A employee of Fox News
was busted and later fired for stealing two paintings,
one of which he said he wanted to give to
the head of his super-patriotic channel. They
fired him for his gesture.
“We” won, but what have we won?
There is oil of course – nothing to snipe at, at
least not in the way that those who suggested
that oil was the rationale for war were sniped at.
The successful battle plan so great at quickly
liberating territory was half-assed when it came
to liberating people. The precision bombing
somehow knocked out the lights and the water
supply. No one knows how many Iraqis died. “We
don’t do body counts” was the military commanders’
standard response to questions about
estimates of how many died. There were sure
enough casualties to overwhelm Iraq’s understocked
hospitals.
For U.S. viewers, this reality of war-as-hell was
mostly out of sight and out of mind.
It was sanitized from view, admitted Ashleigh
Banfield, the MSNBC correspondent who had
been groomed as her network’s answer to CNN’s
Christiane Amanpour. Banfield told a college
crowd at Kansas State – but not her TV audience:
“We didn’t see what happened when Marines
fired M-16s. We didn’t see what happened after
mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There
were horrors that were completely left out of
this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?”