JUST when you've persuaded yourself yet again that this isn't Vietnam, you are hit by another acid flashback. Last weekend that flashback was to 1969. It was in June 1969 that Life magazine ran its cover story "The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week's Toll," the acknowledged prototype for Ted Koppel's photographic roll-call of the American dead in Iraq on "Nightline." It was in November 1969 that a little-known reporter, Seymour Hersh, broke the story of the 1968 massacre at My Lai, the horrific scoop that has now found its match 35 years later in Mr. Hersh's New Yorker revelation of a 53-page Army report detailing "numerous instances of `sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses' at Abu Ghraib." No doubt some future edition of the Pentagon Papers will explain just why we restored Saddam Hussein's hellhole to its original use, torture rooms included, even as we allowed Baghdad's National Library, a repository of Mesopotamia's glorious pre-Baath history, to be looted and burned.
The Vietnam parallels are, as always, not quite exact. We didn't "withdraw" for another four years after 1969 and didn't flee Saigon for another two years after that. We're on a faster track this time. News travels at a higher velocity now than it did then and saturates the culture more completely; the stray, silent images from the TV set at the gym or the p.c. on someone else's desk lodge in our brains even when we are trying to tune them out. Last weekend, the first anniversary of the end of the war's "major combat operations," was a Perfect Storm of such inescapable images. The dense 48-hour cloud of bad news marked the beginning of the real, involuntary end of America's major combat operations in Iraq, come hell or June 30.
The first sign was the uproar over "Nightline" from the war's cheerleaders. You have to wonder: if this country is so firm in its support of this war, by what logic would photographs of its selfless soldiers, either their faces or their flag-draped coffins, undermine public opinion? The practical effect of all the clamor was only to increase hunger for "Nightline" — its ratings went up as much as 30 percent — and ensure that the fallen's faces would be seen on many more channels as well. Those faces then bled into the pictures from Abu Ghraib, which, after their original display on "60 Minutes II," metastasized by the hour on other networks and Web sites: graphic intimations of rape, with Americans cast as the rapists and Iraqis as the victims, that needed no commentary to be understood in any culture. (The word "reprimand" — the punishment we first doled out for these crimes — may lose something in translation to the Arabic, however.)
Then there were the pictures of marines retreating from Fallujah and of that city's citizens dancing in the streets to celebrate their victory over the American liberators they were supposed to be welcoming with flowers. And perhaps most bizarre of all, there was the image that negated the war's one unambiguous accomplishment, the toppling of Saddam. Now, less than 13 months after that victory, we could see a man in Republican Guard gear take command in Fallujah. He could have been one of those Saddam doubles we kept hearing about before "Shock and Awe." But instead of toppling this Saddam stand-in we were resurrecting him and returning him to power.
more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/arts/09RICH.html?ex=1084680000&en=2a0a9c8a5c0a1f75&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
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