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Today’s Dallas Morning News editorial page says, “We’re tired of Jessica Lynch” — which we at the DMN explain does not mean the actual Jessica Lynch, but the hyped-up creation of the Pentagon, publicists and the press. We praise her for her courageous spirit, but lament that the old-fashioned heroism of so many soldiers in that war is going unnoticed, while our culture celebrates Jessica as victim. As a military historian told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, “We want to fight wars but we don’t want any of our people to die and we don’t really want to hurt anybody else. So Pvt. Lynch, who suffers, is a hero even if she doesn’t do much. She suffered for us.” The DMN editorial concludes:
That she did, and God bless that brave woman. But to paraphrase Gen. George S. Patton, wars are not won by suffering for your country; wars are won by making the enemy suffer for his country. It is dismaying to see soldiers who do the “dirty work” of war shunted to the side, while we immortalize a noble victim. A culture that lacks the stomach to honor its blood-stained warriors, men who do the killing necessary to defend it, is in trouble.
I think one could argue that we’re celebrating her willingness to risk that suffering, rather than the suffering itself, but I suspect that on the whole this editorial has it right.
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President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night [at his American Enterprise Institute speech] of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a ‘free and peaceful Iraq’ that would serve as a ‘dramatic and inspiring example’ to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time.
— NY Times, 27 Feb 2003
The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq.
— NY Times, 13 Nov 2003