Rushing to Judgment   

Sometimes a pause is something less than a quagmire.

For all you thesis-writers in communications studies, here's an idea for you, free of charge. Go back and check the prognostications of the sports chattering classes. Because when it comes to big events, they're often clueless. And the more confident they are in their predictions, the more wrong they usually are.

Super Bowl? Conventional wisdom had Oakland in a rout over Tampa Bay, although I guess somebody forgot to tell Brad Johnson. The pundit reaction to the March Madness pairings was outrage that the nation's two top-rated teams, Kentucky and Arizona, wouldn't have the chance to meet in the championship game--and then neither school got out of its regional. If anybody had 16-year-old Sarah Hughes winning the figure-skating gold at the Salt Lake Winter Olympics, I'll do a triple salchow.

And sports aren't even that complicated. Imagine how much more difficult it is to be an armchair expert when it comes to 21st-century warfare.

As April's issue of AJR went to press, the Iraq war had just been launched. As our May issue closed in on yours truly, some three weeks later, most of Iraq was in American hands and Saddam statues were dropping like tech stocks. Whatever your view about the propriety of the war or the way the Bush administration maneuvered itself into it--and there were perfectly valid reasons to question both--it is beyond dispute that the performance of the American military was a jaw-dropping success. Shock and Awe, it turned out, wasn't the initial blow but the entire lightning enterprise.

Still, I want to take a moment to address what will turn out to be a footnote when the larger history of the war is written. This was the fixation of the American media on the so-called "pause" in the allied advance just days after convoys stormed across the deserts of southern Iraq.

You remember the pause, and all the attendant allegations: that our forces went too far too fast, exposing their rear sections to guerrilla attack and outrunning their supply lines and backup troops. The pause, in turn, gave rise to loud questions about "the plan." For several days Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his commanding general, Tommy Franks, were grilled about who had authored the war plan, who had approved it, who had micromanaged it. It was as if the plan had cooties. Where were the rest of our ground troops? Were we in the early days of another military quagmire?

National Journal media writer William Powers took note of how quickly the U.S. media, whose senior people came of age during Vietnam, were almost gleefully quick to whip out the quagmire label. But, he went on, "the quagmire has been replaced by something entirely new: instant delivery of a war's reality, followed by instant questioning of that war. You might call it quickmire. Whatever you call it, we were in one this week, with its disturbing sense of stuckness. But a quickmire is a stuckness that could be unstuck tomorrow, depending on events and how they play in the news."

Indeed, within days "the pause" was over and allied ground forces were rolling into Baghdad. The instant analysis proved about as useful and accurate as all those Super Bowl predictions. And last time I looked, few of the armchair generals had offered mea culpas.

None of which is to say the journalistic inquiry was illegitimate or out of bounds. Rumsfeld's combat theories and sandpaper management style have alienated plenty of Pentagon brass since his arrival, and the tactics of the campaign are certainly fair game at any time.

The news media had countless shining stories in this war; some are recounted elsewhere in this issue. But the "quagmire" episode was distressing on several counts. First, because there was a surreal sports-talk quality about it, albeit with infinitely more serious consequences. And second, because the media showed an almost palpable need to rush to judgment.

News consumers expect us to provide not just raw information but informed context. And how can you intelligently discuss military strategy four days into a war as complex as the invasion of Iraq? It seems to me this was another of those areas where the people, in their collective wisdom, were way ahead of the press. They implicitly understand that wars take time. While reporters were raising hell about tactics, every public survey demonstrated the American people were willing to let things play out before they made up their minds. We were the impatient ones.