Yet Another Movie?

You know, there are some things I'd like to believe are on the level. Seeing as the Bush presidency is illegitimate, the Iraq War was illegitimate, and the "evidence" linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and a biological and chemical weapons program was also illegitimate, I'd like to think that the rescue of Jessica Lynch, who was wounded and captured by Iraqi forces on March 23, was the real deal.

It probably wasn't.

In an article for Reuters, reporter Sue Pleming says the British Broadcasting Corporation reported in a documentary that Lynch's rescue was quite possibly exaggerated and maybe even staged to boost patriotism and support for the war at a time when the Iraqi army seemed to have the upper hand in the fighting. The BBC suggested that the "rescue" from an Iraqi hospital amounted to little more than American soldiers walking into a hospital the Army knew was unguarded and checking Lynch out on her behalf - and that blank rounds were fired by the soldiers to "make a show."

Naturally, the Pentagon finds this report "ludicrous and insulting" - their words, not mine. A spokesman for the Defense Department, Marine Lieutenant Colonel David Lapan, insisted that firefights with "irregular" (?) Iraqi forces did indeed take place. "The thing that is most insulting," he also declared, "is the suggestion that we would put U.S. service members at risk to stage such an event. This was a real rescue under a combat situation. In addition, the war was not going badly."

Maybe not, but reports about Lynch's nine days in captivity since her rescue on April 1 (April Fool's Day, by a very unsettling coincidence) have been inconsistent at best, contradictory at worst. Some reporters said she was slapped around by Iraqi guards; others have reported that sympathetic Iraqis drove her to a U.S. checkpoint, risking their lives in the process, only to be turned away. (Lapan said that the military has not yet been able to verify the latter story but says it was unlikely.) And in the Washington Post, columnist Richard Cohen, hardly a knee-jerk leftist, wrote an opinion piece in which he charged his own paper for making mistakes in its coverage of the story. The Post initially reported that Lynch was shot and stabbed as she fought off her attackers before being taken prisoner, but Cohen says none of that - not even the assertion that she was wounded - may be true.

"I take my own paper to task for the manner in which it reported the Lynch story," Cohen wrote. Maybe the Pentagon hyped [it]. Maybe in the confusion of the rescue, some honest people in the Pentagon just got things wrong. Whatever the case, The Post seemed simply unable to say so."

Oh yeah, the military is doing its own investigation of the Lynch rescue. Gee, wonder what they'll conclude?

This whole affair is yet another example of how the armchair warriors in Arlington treat combat as a staged pageant in this era of antiseptic bombing and video-game weaponry. The Lynch rescue may not have been a rescue at all, but merely yet another piece of entertainment for Karl Rove's propaganda machine. I don't deny Lynch's bravery for being there in the first place, but the outright lying that the Defense Department may have engaged in to drum up support from an unsuspecting citizenry may be a new low in how war is packaged for media consumption. If this story is fake, it only serves to show how low our elected and non-elected officials alike are willing to stoop to get Americans to follow them blindly.

P.S. Take the advice of Bob Dylan (who turns 62 today) - don't follow leaders! (And watch your parking meters!)