If it quacks like a quagmire…
Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:
| In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory. |
That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.
The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era.
Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:
| “You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.” |
Something tells me this serviceman — unlike the armchair warriors who stoked this war with bloated rhetoric and false evidence — might not find the word “quagmire” so objectionable.
Bringing up the rear
SIDE NOTE: My jaw dropped to read that word “asses” on the Times front page, given the paper’s tightlaced history. My own, now-ancient experience as a freelancer with the Times had led me to believe the paper was much more careful about such posterior references.
Back in the mid-’80s I’d interviewed Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo and written it up for the Times Arts and Leisure section. In the course of the article I needed to refer to a particular scene from Fo’s signature work, “Mistero Buffo,” a solo comic performance drawn from the iconoclastic commedia dell’arte tradition. There is a moment in which Fo plays a Pope who gets a kick to his, if you’ll pardon me, butt. I knew “butt” was out of the question for the Times, so I wrote “rear,” figuring it was sufficiently innocuous. But I got a call from the Times copy desk: “rear” didn’t pass muster. Hmm, I thought, OK; er, how about “behind” — who could possibly object to that? The copy editor sounded only partially mollified but we left it there.
When the article was published, if I remember correctly, the Pope’s bottom had become a “backside.” I could only marvel at an institution whose sense of propriety had such infinitesimal gradations.
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July 21st, 2006 at 2:31 pm
[...] Back in 2003 my jaw dropped to find the word “asses” on the New York Times’ front page. Today, it dropped again: There, in Tom Friedman’s column, was the full quotation from President Bush’s now notorious open-mike moment at the summit in Russia in all its barnyard epithet glory. The Times hadn’t published Bush’s “shit” in its news columns, which bowdlerized the president, referring to his choice word as “a vulgarity.” But Friedman boldly seized the four-letter moment in his op-ed column. I assume this is some by-product of the bureaucratic Maginot Line that separates the Times’ news department from its editorial and op-ed pages. [...]