The uproar over Bob Woodward’s new book has intensified the media focus on a basic controversy that’s summed up this way: Is Iraq a quagmire?
Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong — because the question bypasses human realities.
Most obviously, Iraq is not a swamp; it’s a place where real people live and die. They are not metaphors, and neither is their country. Iraqi people exist quite apart from the roles imputed to them by politicians and journalists in Washington.
But “quagmire” serves as a kind of mental framework for where most U.S. media coverage has remained.
Forget the American Century. This is the American Narcissism…
Read the full column.