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The photo, by George Strock, is mesmerizing. There is an unadorned bleakness to it that is unsettling even now, after a half-century of casual, blood-ripped Hollywood action fantasies. And it is far more potent than anything we've seen from Iraq during the first 10 days of the war. This is puzzling. We are closer to war than ever before--hardly half an hour goes by without some embedded ace breathlessly reporting, in real time, from the front. But the war we are seeing is bowdlerized, PG-rated. There are fancy explosions galore, shown from a great distance; there are retired generals wandering through giant maps with pointers and Telestrators; there are gagging doses of Oprah-like human-interest drama, the (slightly) wounded saying "Hi, Mom" and tearful families waiting for word. There are photographs of rubble and of bloodstains that could easily be mistaken for spilled wine. But there is none of the horror, none of the unimaginable sights--bodies torn apart, limbs flying--that cause combat veterans to go mute when asked about their experiences. The coverage of this war is as close to the truth of this war as reality TV is to real life. At a moment like this, the media should be an irritant--shocking us, shaking us, making sure that we're as alert and uncomfortable as possible in the comfort of our living rooms.
War is a force of primal disorder; we are a society afflicted by the illusion of orderliness. We have been so buffered by the carefully demarcated rules of television that we lack the intellectual equipment to deal with chaos (even the events of 9/11--talk about shock and awe!--were carefully groomed. The most shocking images, the bodies falling from the sky, were generally kept out of view). Afghanistan, Kosovo, the first Gulf War--each a video game played from 15,000 ft.--only added to our delusion of control. We are not so lucky this time. This is an actual war; there are unplanned events: an unruly enemy, uncooperative allies, magisterial dust storms. That doesn't necessarily mean the war is going badly. For all we know, it may be going splendidly; as I write this, Saddam Hussein may be throwing in the towel.
But we aren't very good at uncertainty; to paraphrase a frustrated American commander last week, we haven't "war-gamed" it. The President himself seemed miffed, sputtering sentence fragments when asked by reporters how long the war would last. Bush has taken to warning us about an extended struggle, but one senses he doesn't believe it. He is, after all, an exemplar of a generation for whom the purest expression of "long" is the television mini-series. He'll have to learn to tolerate the ragged rhythms of armed conflict in the weeks to come, and so will we.