"The Television War"

An essay after my own heart, by Brendan Bernhard in The LA Weekly:

If the first 10 days of the war had been a tennis match, the score would have been 6-0, 6-1, 6-0. And yet, listening to much of the commentary about it on television and elsewhere, you’d have thought that every set had ended in a tiebreaker with the plucky Iraqi underdog pushing the pampered infidel overdog to the point of exhausted, red-faced collapse. And that was on American television. Imagine what it was like on Al-Jazeera....

The Anglo-American soldiers, most of whom have never seen battle before, are learning that they really are up to the job they trained for, and you can sense their growing pride in the realization. I think a lot of them are going to die, and the lucky who survive are going to be haunted by the amount of Iraqis they kill. The war may go on for so long that eventually we’ll tune it out and nudge it toward the periphery of our vision. But one way or another, sanitized or not, an unprecedented amount of it is going to be seen on television, and it’s going to change the way we think about the military as much as the way individual soldiers think about themselves....

(Thanks, Clyde.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/05/03 09:09:48 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

At Lex Communis & Lead and Gold

A worthy blog at Peter Sean Bradley's Lex Communis. (If the archive link doesn't work, look on the main page for the blog from Saturday, April 05, 2003, 7:36 AM.)

And another at Craig Henry's Lead and Gold.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/05/03 03:45:22 PM
Categorized as War.

Ain't That the Truth

Bill Cork blogs today a couple of articles (one by Robert Fisk, another by Scott Ritter) you have to see to believe: Unreal.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/05/03 12:45:15 PM
Categorized as Media.

Advice for George McGovern

And some for the Republicans, too.

Re: The Reason Why.

Advice for George McGovern: spend the rest of your days reading Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien. Maybe they will be able to straighten you out before you're called home to your Maker.

Advice for the Republicans: do whatever you can to get George McGovern, or a McGovernite, nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate next year.

(Thanks, Martin.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/05/03 08:43:59 AM
Categorized as Political.

Striking at Baghdad

The assault on Baghdad is well underway: the international airport is 12 miles from downtown. The invasion proceeding towards the heart of the city is in progress. Warfare this weekend will be, I think, critical to determining how, and how quickly or slowly, the rest of the war will go.

Let us pray for our leaders, and military commanders, and warriors. May their choices be wise and their steps sure. And may God be merciful to those who have been killed in action, or in accidents, and protect and heal the wounded and injured. And let us pray for the innocents who are suffering now, and for those who will be injured or killed.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 04/05/03 07:34:59 AM
Categorized as War.