With the bomb-and-blood part of the war now well underway, retired military generals are as hotly sought after by the TV networks as an attractive desert backdrop for their studio sets.

War is always disorienting, but with this war we seem to have entered a particularly strange sort of twilight zone.

I mean, there we all were watching the ongoing international weapons inspection of Iraq proceeding day by day, with the chief inspector reporting progress, when the whole orderly process was forcibly shut down so that Washington could begin dropping lethal bombs on a city of 5 million people — an attack that U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised on Thursday would be “of a force and scope and scale that is beyond what has been seen before.”

Without a trace of irony, U.S. President George Bush explained that he was dropping these bombs “to make the world more peaceful.” (Imagine what he might do if he were trying to make the world more violent).

So now, instead of nightly footage of Iraq destroying its Al-Samoud missiles under the authority of the United Nations, our TV screens are filled with images of explosions and buildings burning in Baghdad.

And the TV-commentating generals — equipped with coloured pens to draw troop movements on maps like TV weathermen showing an approaching cold front or sportscasters explaining a particularly good play in the backfield — have taken over the airwaves.

Every station has its own war logo (&#0147Target Iraq,” “Attack on Iraq,” “Strike Against Iraq.”) A more appropriate logo for CNN might be “The Joy of War.” With a CNN reporter describing an American tank rushing towards Baghdad Thursday night as “the most lethal killing machine on Earth,” CNN anchor Aaron Brown could hardly conceal his excitement.

“Are you dazzled by what you see?” he asked, turning to CNN in-house general Wesley Clark. Together the two men marvelled at the American killing machines visible speeding across the sand.

Everywhere, generals were being asked: Why were the Iraqis offering so little resistance? Various explanations were offered (poor morale, low pay, a communications breakdown), but rarely the obvious — that Iraq is a desperately poor country with virtually no weapons left with which to defend itself, let alone to threaten the world.

This, of course, explains why Iraq is a suitable country to invade the year before the U.S. presidential election. Victory and minimal U.S. casualties are a foregone conclusion. Attempts to compare this Iraq adventure to stopping Hitler don’t take account of this crucial difference — Hitler actually had lots of weapons capable of mass destruction. Accordingly, the U.S. took more time before taking him on.

This, on the other hand, is a war safe enough for American prime-time viewing. With the blood and dying edited out and mostly confined to Iraqis anyway, this war coverage can be flipped to between episodes of Boston Public and Will and Grace. Perhaps Shania Twain will be asked to do the half-time show. Or maybe not, now that Canada has had the guts to refuse to be part of what Washington likes to portray as a bulging coalition of countries supporting its war effort, including some friends who choose to remain secret. (Exxonistan? Enronistan? Disneylandistan?)

Then there was Rumsfeld’s vow that setting oil fields on fire would be punished as a “war crime.” Those Iraqi barbarians! Clearly, it’s one thing to drop mega-bombs on people, quite another to do something really evil — like destroy a perfectly good oil well. Let’s not allow things to get out of control.

One thing absent from the U.S. network coverage was dissent (although the Canadian networks had both dissent and critical commentary.) Many in the U.S. media seem to have trouble with the very concept of dissent. As one MSNBC host asked, in all seriousness, “Why do the Democrats continue to whine and attack the president?”

Among the whiners — besides the Pope, Jimmy Carter, Walter Cronkite and most people around the world — was the longest-serving member of the U.S. Congress, Senator Robert Byrd, first elected to the House in 1952. Speaking to an almost empty Senate hours before hostilities began, the 85-year-old Byrd said, “Today I weep for my country … After war has ended we will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America’s image around the globe.”

But there was no time for this sort of whining, with a whole host of retired generals ready to bring the excitement of real-live war to living rooms everywhere.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...