By the time of Vietnam, the romance was dead. By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the widespread presence of TV cameras beaming live images back to the civilian world almost certainly helped to constrain the destruction by making it transparent to the rest of the world. It was President Bush's fear of what the scenes of destruction of Iraqi troops would do in Arab capitals that caused him to shut down Operation Desert Storm after 100 hours. It was images of Kurds dying in the highlands of northern Iraq that prompted the former British prime minister, John Major, to push for a major relief mission. A few years ago in Shanghai, a Chinese military strategist, Ding Xinghao, said that the Chinese officers he knew who watched CNN coverage of the Gulf War were shocked by what they saw and were rethinking their whole modernization effort.
TV has short-circuited both military thinking and diplomatic maneuvering.
OK, we can see virtually everything on the Earth, but that doesn't mean we understand it. The world beyond the TV screen remains a place of great diversity and mystery. And that makes something of a difference. So take a little comfort in the comfort of your TV crib. The next time you watch those night-vision images and brace yourself for what passes for war these days, you are closer to the battlefield than American civilians have been since the days of the Civil War.