The Return of "Rip Van Nam"

The Senate debate on Iraq a few days ago, like the arguments voiced in the House the week before, would have been familiar to anyone falling asleep in 1967 and waking up with spring 2007 underway.

The end of such a 40-year nap might bring more than a little confusion. What is "C-SPAN" anyway, and how come people can watch the congressional debates, live and in living color, on their television sets? What about all the references to "e-mail" and "websites"? And why are there so many different TV networks, including news channels that don't report much actual news?

But the political atmosphere would seem to share a lot of the same coordinates as four decades ago. The president is a Texan who launched a faraway war, based on claims that have since unraveled. Likewise, he did so with media help. And he seems impervious to changing course now that the war has become a multi-year baseline of U.S. foreign policy.

There would also be familiarity with the pro-war bombast coming out of televisions and radios, while visual sets and audio sounds are much slicker. Joe Pyne and Paul Harvey Sr. are gone, but Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are going strong. In newsprint, opinion is divided, but the Washington Post holdover David Broder symbolizes the continuity of equivocation and accommodation to war-making under the guise of judicious ponderousness.

In a media context that demands little of elected officials on Capitol Hill, what passes for debate on the war is apt to thrive with little tough scrutiny. On the legislative floor or down the hall from a historic rotunda, national legislators hold forth in front of cameras and microphones. Opinions differ, but the war goes on. And on and on.

Rip Van Nam might wonder why "Vietnam" is now "Iraq." But otherwise the discourse could seem almost seamless. The senator from Arizona helping to lead the charge for more bloodshed is named McCain now instead of Goldwater.

But he speaks of honor and patriotic valor as equivalents of staying the war course, and few in politics or media seem inclined to take him on directly.

The abstractions are, in fact, the fuel of the debate train that keeps careening along timeworn tracks under the Capitol dome. Many of the most enthusiastic about the war seem to be the oldest members of the Congress. Whether or not they ever personally went to war, this seems to be a kind of last hurrah in their own minds — perhaps their final shot at valor, however vicarious.

In the role of innocent bystanders, the reporters who cover the huffing and puffing are themselves eager to pose as incisive flies on the walls. They do so, however, evading a media legacy of involvement in the entire process of dragging the country into war. The history of this war, the sending of troops and the escalation of hostilities into protracted slaughter all become mooted by those who greased the skids to war in the first place.

The media vehicles sport foggy rearview mirrors, and — looking ahead — windshields glazed with preformed images and hazy outlooks. The real lives of people are rendered as shorthand for agendas. The politics of the moment keeps trumping the moment.

Funded and paid to kill and be killed, the soldiers of the United States of America are lionized and adulated by politicians and journalists alike; their victims are footnotes to the real-time tragedies being prolonged by the duet of tap-dancing politicians and journalists whose job performances rarely disrupt the complacency.

An awakening observer might wonder how much has changed since the last war that the United States stumbled over because it could not win — and, thrown off balance, had time and incentive to begin to discern the underpinnings of Washington's reigning deceit that made it all possible.

The Congressional Record is filled with insistence that the lessons of Vietnam must not be forgotten. But they cannot be truly remembered if they were never learned in the first place.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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