America can handle the coffins - Los Angeles Times
From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
America can handle the coffins
A ban on showing the return of our military dead is a disservice to them and to us. Obama should lift it.
Tim Rutten
February 18, 2009
Last week, President Obama said he was weighing whether to lift the 18-year ban on photo and video coverage at Dover Air Force Base, the Delaware facility where the bodies of America's military dead are received back into the United States.
It is a step the new president ought to take -- not only because the American people deserve the fullest and most complete accounting possible of the policies pursued in their name, but because the prohibition on the news media flows from a profound misapprehension on the part of the government.
The ban was imposed during the Persian Gulf War by President George H.W. Bush, who -- along with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney -- became convinced that if Americans saw photos and television footage of the caskets of dead servicemen and servicewomen being unloaded at Dover, it would undermine support for the war. In part, this was a reflection of the aversion to openness and the antipathy toward the media that seem imprinted on the Bush/Cheney DNA.
In larger measure, though, it was a distortion of one of the so-called lessons of Vietnam. Yes, there's a line of conventional wisdom that says media coverage of the war in Southeast Asia, particularly television, fatally undercut public support for the war. According to that version of events, nightly network news footage of coffins rolling down conveyor belts from Air Force planes at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii pushed popular approval of the war into the basement.
That perception was, in fact, a distortion of the military's own definitive appraisal of the Vietnam War debacle, which was published in 1972 in a small book called "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War" by Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., then a professor at the Army War College. Summers, an up-from-the-ranks officer who had commanded troops in Vietnam and had been on the last helicopter to leave the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, was a prototype of the warrior/intellectual who has come to dominate much of our military's strategic thinking in the years since then.
He undertook an examination of what had gone wrong in Southeast Asia by applying the rigorous, now classic standards of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz to America's conduct of the Vietnam War. Summers concluded that the Johnson and Nixon administrations had forfeited public support not because they had allowed the media access to the battlefield, but because the American people saw their sons dying in a conflict with no clear goals or exit strategy. His work was immensely influential within the armed services and is the genesis of the so-called Powell doctrine, which holds that when America decides to act militarily, it should deploy overwhelming force in the service of clear and politically explicable goals.
Summers made it clear that Americans did not lose faith in the Vietnam War because they abhor sacrifice, but because they were unwilling to suffer enormous losses in the service of a mistake.
Later, President George W. Bush's administration would graft onto the initial misperception a notion that the families of fallen soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen and women are entitled to privacy in their grief. Certainly, their loss is a particular and intimate one, but it also is a loss that belongs to the nation as a whole and in whose consequences the entire American polity needs to share. It is possible to protect the privacy of individual family members while also allowing the nation to witness the sacrifices made in its name.
Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq began, more than 5,000 flag-draped coffins have arrived at Dover to be greeted only by a military chaplain and an eight-member military honor guard. That won't do; the nation, through the witness of a respectful media, needs to share in this accounting.
To continue to pretend otherwise infantilizes the American people. Summers, who was a career Army officer first, last and always and the furthest thing from sentimental, utterly rejected such an approach.
As he told an audience in Berkeley in 1996, "I think the American public has learned the lessons of the Vietnam War fairly well. ... And all of the comments made about how we can't stand casualties [are] baloney. If the American people are convinced of the worth of what we're doing, they will spend, as we did in World War II, a million casualties in pursuing it. There is nothing wrong with the backbone of the American character."
That's advice President Obama should heed.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
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The Bulletin - Philadelphia's Family Newspaper > Archives > Commentary > Op-eds > Obama Flubs Dover Question
Obama Flubs Dover Question
By Frank Diamond, For The Bulletin
Published: Wednesday, February 18, 2009
I didn't realize that my brother's body went through Dover Air Force Base until years later when I decided to write about his getting killed in Vietnam. I was a kid when it happened. All I knew was that he was dead and my life had changed forever.
Only later did I find out that Dover houses the largest military mortuary in the nation, processing the bodies of our fallen men and women. I don't know if my personal experience with Dover is all that much different than yours. I would venture that sometime between World War II, when Dover opened, and now, you or your parents or your grandparents have known somebody who's died fighting for this country.
Dover Air Force Base nudges its way into your life even if the only thing you know about war is that you can't help but mist up whenever you hear "Taps." Dover is there in the slight embarrassment you feel when, after buying a poppy from an old veteran, you say, "Happy Memorial Day" and he responds with a sad smile.
Last week at his press conference, President Obama was asked what he intended to do about Dover. News organizations have been banned from filming the arrival of the flag-draped coffins at the air base since the administration of President George H. W. Bush. President Clinton and then the second President Bush maintained that policy. The radical left had accused Bush No. 43 of wanting to shield the American people from the horrors of war. Bush administration officials countered that the ceremony welcoming the fallen home should be reserved for family members. They should not be troubled in their grief.
At the press conference, President Obama responded that, "we are in the process of reviewing those policies in conversations with the Department of Defense, so I don't want to give you an answer now before I've evaluated that review and understand all the implications involved."
Yeah, you do that, Mr. President. I take no comfort from such a response. I didn't vote for Mr. Obama, don't like his policies. I believe he's a phony whose ascent to power was ensured by a corruptly activist media. His background, what we've been allowed to see of it, suggests a man all too comfortable with the most radical, anti-American sentiments of academia. Still, some things should be beyond politics.
President Obama should have responded as any decent human being would. He should have said something like, "You know that I was one of a handful of elected officials who stood up and said that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. We went in their because of weapons of mass destruction. There were no WMDs. It's been a horrifying drain of blood and treasure. That said, we're talking about families whose lives have been shattered. I don't believe that it serves anyone's interest to intrude upon that grief. So, no, the ban stays."
This would be the sort of response that you could expect from a liberal. There's much about it that I disagree with. WMDs was not the only reason we invaded Iraq. The drain of blood and treasure is indeed horrifying, yet with it we've liberated a people as the recent orderly Iraqi elections underscore.
Yet, I would have applauded President Obama's conclusion. That, of course, was why he did not respond as he should have. It would have meant angering some of those on the left fringe, the people who donated money early, and often, to the Obama campaign.
Which leads to another question. Any discussion about what goes on at Dover tracks to the incredible and unimaginable courage it takes for somebody to sacrifice everything.
Does President Obama have a spine? His great victory last week, Congressional passage of the $800 billion stimulus bill, does not bode well. This political colossus appeared unwilling or unable to stand up to liberals in Congress who came up with the outrageous price tag. The legislation should have been crafted in the president's office.
I can only hope that this continuing triumph of style over substance might eventually work to the favor of the families who must take that dreadful trip to Dover Air Force Base.
Leadership means inheriting certain responsibilities, whether you want them or not. Mr. Bush's war has now become Mr. Obama's war. As President Bush recedes, film taken at Dover will reflect upon the sitting president. That's probably very much part of Team Obama's calculation.
Frank Diamond can be reached at
fpdiamond@yahoo.com.
DonaldN
Semper Fi
America can handle the coffins
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