Not the people’s war

By Patricia Hunt
Published: July 4, 2008

Reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan are frustrated that the television networks and even print media are cutting back on their coverage of events. I would be frustrated, too, if day after day my reports from a war zone were being ignored. Are Americans so self-absorbed that they no longer care what is going on in the world? Has our celebrity-obsessed culture finally succeeded in making headlines of the trivial while relegating real news to the back pages? What is going on?
I have to confess that I am guilty of skipping over war news. I don’t say that with any pride, but I think I understand why people are doing it.
When the Iraq war was in the planning stages, I wrote my elected representatives to tell them of my deep skepticism. My opposition was rooted in history. I know that firing on Fort Sumter had been thought a splendid idea by a lot of Southerners. It took 100 years to recover from that splendid idea. I know that twice in the 20th century Germany thought starting a war was a good move. War is a very unpredictable undertaking. It should be your very last option. That was my reasoning. But no one in Washington was the least bit interested in what I thought. I was wasting my time. The decision to go to war was made long before anyone would admit that it had been made.
As far as I can tell, little has changed. I don’t see that my knowing how many people died on any particular day has any effect on the course of the Iraq war. And usually it is only American deaths that are deemed newsworthy. The war drags on year after year after year, and it is hard to imagine how my mastering the details has any bearing whatsoever on what happens.
In World War II people listened to the news on the radio. They had maps and could track troop movements and battles. But there are no such markers one can follow in Iraq. The news seems very much the same on any given day. If I heard a report and didn’t know when it came from, it would be hard to tell. The networks have cut back on the number of reporters covering both wars, and there were never all that many when you consider what they were asked to do.
At least in Iraq, Americans have grown weary of a war that is never won and never lost and never even has a decent story line with direction. The narrative ended with “Mission Accomplished,” but the war did not. The one time we are interested is when we can hear about what is going on from the soldier down the street or in our church or the third cousin who has been there. Then we want to know. Badly. Tell us everything. How do things look to you?
Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent for CBS News, said on “The Daily Show” that the soldiers feel forgotten. I do not think they have been forgotten. I think that we are having a hard time figuring out where we, the American people, fit into the grand schemes of our leaders, other than paying the bills they are racking up on this misadventure.
We have not been asked to save scrap metal or grow a Victory Garden. We’ve been asked to shop. We’ve been asked to trust that our leaders know what they are doing. We’ve been asked to pay for it. And we have been asked to nurse thousands of veterans back to mental and physical health once they have been damaged by combat.
I suspect that no one in Washington cares much what we think despite endless polling. It never really felt like our war. It felt like their war. From the beginning of the war in Iraq, I have felt like a child who was told where “we” were going, and what “we” were going to do when we got there. All decisions were made without the slightest input from me. We did not decide together as American citizens what to do. We were simply sold a product that we knew next to nothing about.
We need to become a democracy again.
Patricia Hunt is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.