Meeting the Enemy

On September 10, 1813, after defeating the British Navy at the battle of Lake Erie, US Navy Captain Oliver Hazard Perry wrote these famous words in a letter to then General William Henry Harrison – “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” On Earth Day in 1970 Walt Kelly had his satirical cartoon character Pogo saying “We have met the enemy and they is us.” Pogo was right. America’s statesmen and generals would do well to remember that as they plan and conduct our wars. An internal enemy produced a catastrophe in Vietnam and very nearly repeated it in Iraq. The American media turned against the Vietnam War during the infamous Tet Offensive of 1968 and the war was lost. We would never recover. The campaign was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese. Their army in the south was destroyed. But they weren’t the real enemy. The press were. They made a collective editorial decision that the war was un-winnable and repeated that message in headlines and TV news clips day after day and night after night for the next seven years. Lyndon Johnson left office in disgrace. Richard Nixon declared victory and came home. Congress withdrew aid from the South Vietnamese and on April 30, 1975 Saigon fell, forever memorialized in a photograph of a helicopter evacuating the US Embassy. The word quagmire entered the political lexicon. A rag tag third world army had defeated a super power. The American military if not its politicians learned from the Vietnam experience and in future wars would handle the media better. News conferences from forward headquarters are today conducted professionally by senior officers who understand the power of a sound bite, and of the verbal faux pas. Embedding journalists with combat units during the invasion of Iraq was a master stroke, easily trumping journalistic hacks who, as they did in Vietnam, preferred to cluster around hotel bars and get their news from each other. But that only worked for a while. We hadn’t learned enough. The media were determined to regain control and peer pressure soon discouraged most journalists from embedding, even though it meant confining themselves to fortified hotel rooms with Iraqi stringers practically their only source of news, modern versions of the old Turkish dragomans. As they had in Vietnam they made their editorial decision that the war was un-winnable and sent out their stringers to report back the only message they wanted to hear. They might as well have done all their reporting from New York and Washington. Many of them did. A lesser man in the White House would have withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2006, leaving Iraqi’s to their fate and a rejuvenated Jihad to his successor. Mr. Bush didn’t withdraw. He doubled down instead in a move that had the smell of desperation from where I sat. I am happy to say I was wrong. Iraqi’s saw an increase in troop levels as renewed commitment. The prospect of an abrupt American departure had been their only real fear, and insurgents’ only real hope. 2007 appears to have been a turning point. Sunni Arabs realized their campaign to produce chaos was having a disastrous effect on their own community, and that only George Bush stood between them and genocide. The Shi’a too realized they were at the edge of a precipice and decided to get their own radicals under control. The media are quiet for now but they haven’t given up. They have an enormous emotional investment in producing a debacle. They are still there, still ready to pounce on any sign of trouble. They will be there next time too. We had better be ready. Not even nuts with nukes can ever defeat us but we can beat ourselves.