The War in Ukraine Is/Is Not Taking Place

The war between Russia and Ukraine is the most heavily propagandized conflict in which America has been involved since World War 2. In Vietnam, the press was granted an unprecedented level of access, and Americans saw images of the carnage on the nightly news. The consensus narrative of that war among foreign policy professionals at the time was a variation on Germany’s “stab-in-the-back” theory to explain its defeat in World War 1. The war was lost, they believed, not on the battlefield, but because foreign propaganda and internal subversives joined forces to break the resolve of the home front. When we embarked to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991, lessons had been learned and the press was tamed by keeping journalists off the front line except under tightly-managed conditions, and by sending the message to journalists (and their employers) that their continued access depended on whether they did their duty to help America win the war. Many journalists objected that helping America win the war was not, in fact, their duty, but plenty of them were willing to play along and became household names as a result. Of course, it helped that the Gulf War was such a smashing success. Any journalist looking to “bring the war home” for Americans by showing them an American corpse was going to have a hard time finding one. Virtually everyone was onboard with Desert Storm, and their agreement was rewarded by a war that did not raise any of the thorny questions evoked by Vietnam or the second Iraq War. The mega-celebrities of the early ‘90s - the equivalent of Jay-Z, Beyonce, Lebron James, and Robert Downey, Jr. today - came together to film a music video, Voices That Care, that would have been simply unimaginable during Dubya’s invasion of Iraq.

Yet, as heavily-propagandized as the narrative of the Gulf War was at the time, it still did not approach the level of manipulation we’ve seen in Ukraine. As controlled as the Gulf War narrative was, there were no botnets or anonymous accounts seeding fairy tales that were taken up without hesitation by the corporate media. The press did not portray defeats as victories, or invent Marvel-style superheroes like the Ghost of Kiev. Ukrainian and Western public officials publicized a video game cutscene, claiming it was real footage of the Ghost’s exploits, and the Ukraine Ministry of Defense even posthumously decorated a downed random Ukrainian pilot and tried to pass him off as the Ghost. The current war even has its own celebrity support videos.

As a result, it is very difficult to get reliable information about the war, and sifting through the conflicting accounts to get anything close to a clear picture is a full-time job (although most of the people who do it full-time are as confused as the rest of us). The antiwar side - I hesitate to say anti-Ukraine, because I don’t think that describes most critics of the war - is almost as unreliable. People who want a different narrative than the one peddled by Lindsay Graham and CNN end up following people like former Marine and UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, or retired US Army colonel Douglas MacGregor, both of whom have predicted since nearly the beginning of the conflict that Russia would be smashing through Ukraine’s last line of defense within a week. We all know we’re being lied to by politicians and the media, so it’s very tempting to just listen to anyone saying the opposite of the mainstream narrative, but that doesn’t get you anywhere closer to the truth than watching CNN will.