A few years back Lucian Truscott tried on a writer’s experiment, posting chapters (as he composed them) from his non-fiction novel/memoir, Dying of a Broken Heart, at a word press website (here). Your editor was doing due delving since I’d always enjoyed Truscott’s stuff when I bumped into the following piece of felt history in Heart‘s second chapter. I should probably wait for some Iraq War anniversary but reposting Truscott’s memory of “Mission Accomplished” boosterism feels urgent. I’ll allow his report seems like it belongs in First as a warning to be permanently wary of consensual wisdom. Not that I’ll cop to having been a lap-top general around the time of W.’s wargasm. Still, to the extent First countenanced power of powers-that-be back then – even as this mag busted anti-anti-Islamism – me and all y’all need to suck on Truscott’s truths (all over again). He won’t stop saying it plain, btw. After you read him below, try his substack newsletter here. B.D.
So how far back do we have to go? To that night in 2003 when you screwballed into Baghdad on another C-130 popping anti-aircraft flares, and you got lost and ended up spending your first night in a the Iraq combat zone on the 11th floor of Baghdad International’s only un-bombed office skyscraper, and the next morning you woke up and looked out the window and gazed upon a base camp that could have been lifted wholesale out of the swamps of Vietnam and slapped down in the deserts of Iraq without missing a beat, and you turned to the Lieutenant in the next bunk and said, whoa, I’m looking at Vietnam out there, aren’t I? And he drawled in this soft Virginia way…yuup. We’re doing the same damn thing we did last time aren’t we, so we’re fucked, right, Eltee? We’re just getting started and it’s already over. Yuup. We did and we were and it was, but was that it? Was that when you knew you were dying of a broken heart? Nope. Nada. Zip. Zero.
Listen, you Ambien-addled fuzz-ball. How far back are we going to go? Back to that time you were on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer? When was that? The day after President George W. Bush donned a flight suit with a big jock-strap cup to land on a carrier just off the coast of California and announce with military fanfare that insofar as the war in Iraq was concerned, our mission was accomplished. It was a Friday, and you had just flown into Dulles from L.A. on your way to Charlottesville the next day where you would for the fourth year take your Hemings cousins to the annual family reunion at Monticello. The flight was late, and they sent a car, and you made it to the studio at the last minute to appear on a panel about…well, it was about “The Lessons of the War,” now that the war was over, our Mission of course having been declared Accomplished less than 24 hours previously by The Commander in Chief. Was it an out-of-body experience, to go on live TV in the nation’s Capital to discuss a complete falsehood as if it were Received Wisdom? You damn well fucking right it was. There you were, sitting in a low-rent public television studio somewhere in deep Alexandria with Correspondent Margaret Warner and a table full of Conventional Wisdomists and one “military historian” satellited-in from Chicago, and they are all smiling and puffy-cheeked, they’re so sated from Important Lunches with Important People that very day and they’re just stuffed to exploding with the Sermon from Mount New York Times, or perhaps the Ten Commandments of the Washington Post, and Margaret does the intro and they’re already pulling their intellectual limos into Rumsfeld Place with the Rumsfeldian Lesson of the War, what we didn’t know and why we didn’t know it was because we didn’t know it before we knew it and why it doesn’t matter because stuff happens when you’re Taking Baghdad and besides we’re all fucking Mission Accomplishing here…and they’re deconombulating the double-delicious discernment of Douglas Feith and they’re peering into the massive Black Hole of Wonderfulness that is Paul Wolfowitz and they’re gesticulating wildly at the tactical genius of Tommy Franks and they’re reliving the marvelosity of the smart-bombing of the Republican Guard Headquarters…not the one on K Street, fool, the one on the River Tigris…and when one of them pauses for breath, another is breathlessly awed at the awesomeness of Shock ‘n Awe and another smartly steps in and snuggles up to the stupendousness of the strategic smartness of the smart bomb, and the chorus builds and builds, sheer stupefying Shock at the Awesomeness of the Awe, and the Awe at the Shockifyingness of the Shock…
The Lessons of the War Conventionalist were just about to run out of gas when Margaret Warner turned to you with a tight smile and asked, Lucian, what do you think? And you answered, just innocent as shit, well, Margaret, isn’t it a bit premature to be learning lessons from a war that’s not over?
Ooops.
She tightened her grim little smile. Whatever do you mean when you say the war isn’t over?
Well, you leaned back in your TV studio guest chair and opined that for one, nobody surrendered.
Shock and Awe fogged the floodlights, but nobody spoke.
And you were warming to your subject amidst icy, uncomprehending stares: Weren’t you watching TV the first night they bombed Baghdad? Didn’t you see what the cameras were catching in the foreground? Icy stares froze solid. What op-ed page did this shit come from? Well, you explained, CNN had cameras set up on the edge of what appeared to be the second floor of the Palestine Hotel, and they were using wide-angle lenses so if a smart bomb happened to bomb something smartly to the far left, followed by another smart bomb bombing something smartly to the far right, they could pick up both smart explosions in a single Smart Shot. Only thing is, wide angle lenses don’t merely pick up what’s wide left and right. They pick up what’s wide top and bottom, and didn’t you see the road down there in front of the Palestine Hotel? BMW’s and Mercedes with their headlights on were driving along the Tigris River, directly across from the Presidential Palace and the Headquarters of the Republican Guard and Saddam’s Intelligence Headquarters. Smart bombs were exploding less than a half mile away. It was 9:00 o’clock, and they were going to dinner. Didn’t look like those smart bombs left many people in Baghdad terribly shocked or awed.
If you’d been a pin, and you dropped, they’d have heard you down in the depths of the fucking Situation Room.
What are you saying? We should have killed more civilians? asked a staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee who was way past Shock and Awe and well on his way to Outrage.
As patiently as you could, which wasn’t very patient at all, you reminded the Senate staffer he said that, not you. But now that he mentioned it, yeah, the whole idea of waging war is to get people feeling so threatened and defeated that they surrender, preferably unconditionally. There had been no formal surrender, and there was no evidence whatsoever that anyone in Iraq was giving up, which left us with the possibility, if not the probability, that we were doing the same thing we did in Vietnam all over again: We were occupying an undefeated country. Big fucking mistake. If they don’t give up, they fight.
Well. the table was not happy. The Conventional Wisdom had not been parroted by an approved guest. A price would be paid. The segment came to an end, and a producer appeared to remove your mic and earpiece and whispered, Jim Lehrer wants to meet you. He led you to Mr. Lehrer’s personal set in another section of the studio, you shook hands, and the host of the News Hour cast his eyes upon you with practiced opprobrium.
You told him that you guessed that this was the last time you were going to be on his show, was that right?
Yes indeed, intoned Mr. Lehrer. And it was.