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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
The context of the moment
Apparently Pentagon Spokewoman and Fashion Tragedy, Victoria Clarke just isn't doing her job. Why else would Kathleen Parker, the Oriana Fallaci of South Carolina, step into the breech to 'splain away some of those media misconceptions:
Over the weekend, the media played the meme game to perfection, taking a single quote and spreading it around like a germ, infecting other minds along the way so that by now the homeless hitchhiker "knows" that coalition forces misgauged Iraqi resistance.
The quote du jour, attributed to Lt. Gen. William Wallace, commander of U.S. Army ground forces, and simultaneously repeated in Time magazine, The New York Times (compliments of columnist Maureen Dowd), and a scattering of other newspapers that picked up the original wire story, went like this:
"The enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against," he reportedly said. Well, yes, that seems true enough. So what? Soldiers train to fight other soldiers, not children or disguise artists or cowards strapped with bombs. But that's not how Wallace's purloined statement is meant to be understood.
As framed by Dowd, it was intended to bolster the position that the United States is simply clueless in this war, the implication being that since we were wrong about "Iraqi resistance," we're wrong about everything else. Dowd's parenthetical -"No doubt, that truthful heads up will earn General Wallace a slap down" -is surely unlikely.
I suspect Wallace's military footing is secure. Moreover, his statement, while true within the context of the moment, is hardly the sum total of his thoughts. Here's what else he said several days earlier:
"I don't think we'll know until we get in contact with them," he said when asked whether Iraqi soldiers would fight or surrender. And this: "We've got no business to underestimate this enemy. He's cagey, he's foxy, and he's going to fight."
That doesn't sound like a man who is going to be shocked or surprised. Rather only certain members of the media seem to be. Other Americans, notably soldiers and their families, seem to have far greater equilibrium in the face of war than do their interviewers.
See? Context is everything, even when the statement is "purloined" from someone that it is "attributed" to....
Everything is fine...nothing to see here. Hey look! It's Buster the Dog of War.
Ahhhhhhhhh...
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