By Bill Wetzel
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday January 24, 2003
The year is 1989. Let us Harken, oops I mean, hearken back to the days of yore when a strapping George W. Bush was still a political Shrubling and the head Bush in charge went by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush. A time of change. The Berlin Wall was crumbling. The mullet was still somewhat fashionable. "Rain Man" would win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The execrable "Death To Smoochy" was but an intermittent gleam of the future still years away from scarring millions of film watchers for life. Yes. 1989. The year of ·
The American Invasion of Panama.
It was called Operation Just Cause. (Was it a "Just Cause" or was it "Just Cause We Can And Nobody Can Stop Us?")
On Dec. 20, the United States broke both international law and its own governmental policies by invading Panama. Doing so in order to bring to justice Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking, corruption and declaring a state of war with the United States that led to the shooting of a U.S. Marine. After a short-lived slaughter in Panama City, Noriega surrendered on Jan. 3, 1990.
Bush then held a news conference to gloat over the histrionic assault on the depraved Central American leader. Bush was animated and in lively spirits, cracking jokes and reveling in victory.
Then a little invention the ancient Greeks like to call "Split-Screen" television entered the equation.
While Bush continued his antics with reporters, two major networks shifted coverage to a ceremony honoring American soldiers killed in Panama. Oblivious, Bush jocularly bantered on one half of a TV screen while millions of viewers watched flag-draped coffins being carried off Air Force planes by honor guards.
Like the commercial says: "Wanna Get Away?"
Ever since that debacle, Bush, and later Clinton, banned honor guard ceremonies for the dead from network coverage. The art of bloodless war had begun.
Fast forward to Feb. 25, 1991.
Combat correspondent Leon Daniel was perplexed by the absence of corpses at the apex of the Neutral Zone between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In covering Vietnam in the Î60s, Daniel knew firsthand the horrors of combat. Only one day before, the First Infantry Division started the Desert Storm ground war by hammering through 8,000 Iraqi troops. The press pool had been prohibited from witnessing the carnage, but observed enough artillery barrages to cause a major slaughter. Then, on the afternoon of the 25th, they were allowed to see where the attack had taken place.
No bodies.
No arms and legs.
Nothing like the grotesque battlefields of Vietnam.
Months later, the press was allowed to know why no signs of atrocity were visible on the field that day. Over 70 miles of bunkers and trenches were attacked, then packed and smoothed over by massive machines called Armored Combat Earth Movers. Nice and neat.
Fast forward to the present.
Think back to the Gulf War. What is the lasting impression of Desert Storm? When one thinks of Vietnam, you get images of bodies strewn everywhere. Blood. Guts. My Lai. In Desert Storm there was none of that. The imagery was sanitized. Not a single picture or video of someone being killed. Not even a single eyewitness account turned up when an estimated 600,000 allied and Iraqi troops mixed it up. How did this all happen?
Enter Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
In order to allow the elder Bush's approval rating to skyrocket in a time of war, human casualties had to be distorted. Cheney was quoted as saying, "I did not look on the press as an asset. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed." Welcome military escorts for all journalists. Blackouts on distributing battlefield press reports. Every interview, picture, strip of film, and line of copy had to be monitored, approved, and even censored. Cheney's rules were ruthlessly enforced.
In short, we saw what the first Bush Administration wanted us to see. On the cusp of another invasion of Iraq we will be forced to see a war that will not look anything like reality to us back home. Expect even more of Cheney's rules this time.
Fast forward to Gulf War Part Two.
Reality does not come in split-screen format anymore.
