The Wartime Generation without a War
Part One in a series on our national conversation around Iraq and Afghanistan
Programming Note: Thanks for your patience during my summer break! I’m excited to get back to this work, and have now added a Patreon for you to support me if you don’t want to become a Substack paid subscriber.
If you’re a millennial or Gen Z, you’ve grown up as a wartime generation. But if you’re like me – somebody saying that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of our life experiences. We weren’t put on rations, our moms weren’t called to factories, and for many of us the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing but background noise for two decades.
In 2016, Stanford set about trying to understand campus attitudes toward the military before bringing ROTC back to campus after decades of not having it. That study produced the 2016 Hoover Institution article, “Millennials and The Military,” and its subtitle so neatly sums up what I have experienced in millennial attitudes toward the military that I give it to you in full here:
They are not antagonistic toward the military, as past generations were, but they appear to be fundamentally ignorant about it despite growing up in an era of continuous war.
But to lay the fault at the feet of disaffected millennials is to ignore the media trends that shaped the total absence of information most of our generation experienced around the war and the military writ large during our formative years.
While I don’t think of generational descriptors as a particularly effective catch-all in every instance, for 9/11 I do think millennial is a grouping that binds us. We are a group of people for whom that day separated our childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood into a before and an after. We would all grow into adulthood in that after, a world irrevocably less innocent than the one our parents had lived in.
In fact, in 2016 86% of millennials cited 9/11 as the top historic event of their lifetime. For a group with a huge span of ages and life experiences that changed every five years or so in the boom of the information age, that kind of consensus is pretty wild (and obviously pre-pandemic).
And yet so many of us would simply outgrow news of the war. I wanted to understand why this massively important part of our history was largely out of sight as it unfolded over the course of two decades, and I found that our ignorance was really only partially are own making.
There were a few complicating factors that we’ll be diving into over the next few weeks.
The Drumbeat of War
The war in Afghanistan was a foregone conclusion almost as soon as the attacks happened. The Taliban controlled the majority of Afghanistan and had given safe harbor to Al Qaeda militants like Osama Bin Laden. That shelter gave these militants time and space to plan the 9/11 attacks and made Afghanistan’s government complicit in the largest terrorist attack in American history. An international coalition invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 and wouldn’t leave for 20 years.
Following the initial invasion, Americans were still reeling from the shock of an attack on home soil and tuned into the aftermath of those attacks through nightly news shows. In 2002, Afghanistan had moderate coverage on cable focused on Bush’s ask for the Marshall Plan, a $38 Billion aid package that would fund Afghan relief and support of their military. Hamid Karzai became president in June, and the story became one of steady state kind of victory. The lack of dramatic battles or fanfare led to less Afghanistan on those nightly news shows in 2002. But 8,000 troops remained in Afghanistan, even as coverage completely stopped on efforts in the region.
The airwaves were taken up almost exclusively by the decision to invade Iraq. The merits were debated on a national stage, as Americans picked up on acronyms like WMD and learned about the plight of the Iraqi people under Sudam Hussein. In a 60 Minutes interview with the man tasked with inspecting Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, one can sense the “dog with a bone” mentality of Americans ready for revenge.
In what I consider a very German comment, the interviewee, then-UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix responded tellingly to his interviewer’s question about aggressively pursuing the truth, “Aggression is an American quality.”
What we understand now is that the aggression portrayed in the media was based on false claims. In another 60 Minutes interview just months after the Hans Blix spot, the man in charge of analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Collin Powell’s intelligence team told Americans that there had been plenty of evidence before the invasion to suggest that weapons of mass destruction were not in Iraq.
In the interview, Greg Thielmann, at the time the Acting Director of the Office of Proliferation and Military Affairs, was asked directly if he believed that in 2003 Iraq posed an imminent threat to America. “No. No, I don’t even believe Iraq posed an imminent threat to its neighbors at the time of the war.” He and others would go on to say that evidence collected in the run up to the Iraq invasion had been significantly misrepresented to the public.
“I don’t even believe Iraq posed an imminent threat to its neighbors at the time of the war.” Greg Thielmann, former intelligence lead for the analyzing Iraq weapons’ threat for Secretary Collin Powell
But these revelations would come after the fact. At the time, 71% of Americans supported our entrance to Iraq under the belief that it would be a quick operation to stabilize the country. Dissent was widely dismissed, with less than 3% of guests representing an opposing stance against the forthcoming invasion despite a quarter of Americans harboring doubts.
In the face of this homogenous coverage, the price for disagreement was high, and would in its own way be a prelude to the right’s cries of cancel culture that are a part of the national conversation today. For me, there is an incident that perfectly captures the attitude of the country leading up to our invasion.
The Dixie Sluts
In 2002, in the lead up to the war, the Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines said while abroad in Britain, “We are ashamed to be from the same state as George W Bush.” The backlash that followed would come to define country music for a generation.
“Traitors. The Dixie Sluts. Anti-American.” Diane Sawyer repeated coolly in the prelude to her interview with the Dixie Chicks in 2003 (if you want to be reminded of how insanely we talked to women in the early 2000s I suggest just giving the whole interview a skim). In her talk with the sisters, Sawyer pushes over and over again for Maines to disown what she said more forcefully. “Won’t you be shattered if everything you’ve built is ruined by this?”
But in many ways that damage had already been done. Heinous calls into radio stations painted the Dixie Chicks as terrorists that should be banned from the airwaves. Truckers held rallies where they ran over the group’s CDs. Leading the bluegrass revival and return to roots of country, the Dixie Chicks had led the pop and country charts for years. Standing in the wake of anti-war sentiments, they were victims of the pro-war rhetoric and fear mongering that had come to pervade the national conversation on Iraq.
The country music scene had once been a place in American culture where Loretta Lynn could both write and sing The Pill, an anthem about female reproductive freedom, and be a republican kingmaker who told a crowd about George H.W. Bush: “I know country and this guy is country” (as an east coast, Ivy League educated lawyer, Bush looked appropriately confused by the sentiment until the crowd went wild). But those kinds of politics were gone by the time the Dixie Chicks controversy took root.
Toby Keith would go on to perform with a Photoshopped picture of Natalie Maines and Osama Bin Laden behind him as Maines performed in an FTK shirt that no one in the Dixie Chicks audience misunderstood. But Keith, and his brand of good ol’ boy country would come out ahead in this contest. Today Nashville is filled with bars owned by ultra-conservative acts like Jason Aldean, and the sound has come to define the country that gets played on the radio.
In a really great recent New Yorker article called “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville,” Emily Nussbaum teases apart the fissures that have widen since the original Dixie Chicks sin. In fear of being ostracized, many country artists decided silence was the best answer. Those who remained quiet remained alive. Those embraced a jingoistic patriotism in their music became winners.
Hits like “Only in America,” “This Ain’t No Rag It’s a Flag”, and more titles filled stacked with USAs and Americas and God Bless the USAs ruled the charts for years. Artists behind those patriotic hits then went on to define “Americanness” as a country boy sensibility with guns, beer, and women filling in for any substance once enjoyed by country fans. As Nussbaum points out in her article, artists who wanted to pursue any agenda but a decidedly far-right one, like Taylor Swift and Kasey Musgraves, were pushed out of country and into pop.
Breaking up with the Dixie Chicks (as they were known then), was the beginning of a new country music and intolerance of ideas in that community, and it was a cascade started by the fatal sin of disagreeing with George W. Bush about his decision to invade Iraq.
The Invasion and the Media
In March of 2003, we did invade Iraq and topple Sudam Hussein’s regime. The coverage was unprecedented and tailor made for the new 24 hour news cycle. In a time capsule clip, Anderson Cooper and his co-host are at a CNN desk at two in the morning, talking live with Christiane Amanpour as she watches attacks in Northern Iraq. The idea of news coverage taking place throughout the entire day became solidified as a part of the full court press started in Iraq.
More than 600 reporters were invited to join the invasion because the administration was so certain that this campaign would be limited. They wanted an audience to their success, and they wanted that audience to only have access that they granted. Unlike the Vietnam War, which had been largely covered by veterans, the leading correspondents for the initial attack were new to war and war coverage.
All of this naivete and misunderstanding of the situation on the ground led to the idea that Iraq’s invasion was over as soon as Baghdad fell. In a now infamous speech, George W. reflected the ignorance of a nation who had never had the real facts of the conflict. Years before troops would come home he addressed the American people with a haunting phrase, “Mission accomplished.”
The press followed the lead of the Bush administration unquestioningly. The New York Times echoed this sentiment in their coverage, saying “as the war winds down” in as early as April of 2003.
The war was not over, but the full force coverage on the ground had to stop sometime. The withdrawal of the initial flood of journalists led to a decline in constant coverage that would never truly elevate the conversation to a national level again.
In 2004, as Fallujah became an international embarrassment for our government and Abu Ghraib started the torture trend that would launch a thousand TV scenes, coverage of the war turned from a rallying cry to an act in reining in military misconduct.
That year, confidence that we could win in Iraq fell below 50% and would never recover. Until 2007, the coverage of the war was essentially a check-in on status quo that never broke through the mainstream. Even more dismally, coverage of the Afghanistan war totaled less than two hours total on all of the major news networks for each year from 2003 to 2007. Coverage of the Iraq war would decline steadily from its 2003 peak over the next few years as well.
What had been a heated national debate strong enough to ruin careers and divide households became a steady background frequency that very few people were tuning into with any regularity. How did the aftermath of the most important historical event in our history fade out of the nation’s consciousness?
In the next newsletter we’ll talk about the demographic and education shifts that led to the war coverage of the early 2000s. Make sure to subscribe to get the rest of this series delivered to your inbox!