Giving Good War
By Tom Engelhardt

Can't you feel the war already slipping away, just like Saddam Hussein or
Mullah Omar or Osama Bin Laden? How briefly triumphal it was, the Iraqis
falling before our forces, our tanks heading north, our missiles hitting
home, much of it in real time on our own private screens. There was the
heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch, the toppling of Saddam's statue, our
generals grinning behind that marble table in one of Saddam's palaces. How
victorious we were - and then came the looting and shooting, the feckless
first occupation administration, the gas lines, the angry Shiites, and the
missing weapons of mass destruction. The embedded reporters departed for who
knows where; the cameras turned away; bombs began going off in Riyadh and
Casablanca and Jerusalem, and husbands were murdering wives and wives
killing their babies right here in the USA.

For almost thirty years the Pentagon has worked its tail off organizing the
media to give us good war, the sort of "Good War" the "greatest generation"
gave us on-screen year after year, film after film; the sort of good war
American-style that George W, and Don R, and Paul W, and I once, in our
distant childhoods, sat in the dark and thrilled to, as American children
had long thrilled to American images of triumph and victory. It's funny,
back then on-screen it seemed so easy. It seemed like it would never go
away.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pidi8