True Tales from the Think Tank

Fantasy tableaux of superheroic vengeance directed against demonic terrorist icons clearly offer a degree of gratification to comics readers today. But Marvel announced a title in 2005 that would follow the Bush administration's antiterrorist strategies to Iraq and would take as its heroes the non-super foot soldiers of the U.S. military campaign in the Middle East. The series concept of Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq was to shed glory on real flesh-and-blood heroes of the war on terror.

Karl Zinsmeister, the author of Combat Zone, drew on his first-hand experience of the war as one of the journalists "embedded" with American ground forces during the invasion of Iraq. In an early scene in the Tactical Operations Center of the 82nd Airborne Division, a staff officer questions the wisdom of "letting the press right into the middle of a secret combat operation." His comment is addressed to the division's commanding officer, a General Swank, who, drawn by ex-Superman artist Dan Jurgens with a stern, downturned mouth and brow-furrowed determination, responds, "When we were in Afghanistan, as soon as we'd finish a battle, Taliban sympathizers would crawl out of the woodwork and start telling newly arriving reporters how we'd carried out some atrocity or other. And we'd have no way to disprove it. With reporters right on the scene, that kind of disinformation can't take root."

The actual commanding officer of the 82nd Airborn Division in Iraq was Major General Charles Swannack Jr. Zinsmeister may have had trouble reading his notes and misspelled the name or he may have been trying to keep this intelligence from the eyes of any Marvel-reading insurgents or Taliban sympathizers, but the more likely explanation for the discrepancy is that Zinsmeister wanted to fictionalize events and characters -- even historically specific ones such as Gen. Swannack -- so that he would be free to manipulate their dialogue at will.

Some reporters would take issue with the sentiments expressed in "Gen. Swank's" dialogue. Critics of the "embedding" policy have seen it as a way of controlling the media and ensuring that reports of the campaign would be from the perspective of the American military forces with any input from the Iraqi population monitored and circumscribed. An April 2003 report by Norman Solomon of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting asserted, "Correspondents in the field have bonded with troops to the point that their language and enunciated outlooks are often indistinguishable."

Speaking on ABC's Nightline show, correspondent John Donvan explained how he was able to get a clearer view of Iraqi sentiments by refusing to remain embedded with troops: "If embeds are always moving with the troops, [unembedded] unilaterals get to see what happens after they've passed through."

That focused perspective is reflected so faithfully in the formerly embedded Zinsmeister's Combat Zone comic that Iraqis appear to have been erased from the story of the invasion of Iraq. A reader may come to the end of the 120 pages collected in the Combat Zone trade paperback released late last year wondering why no Iraqis seem to live in Iraq. In a skirmish on page 10, American GIs are confronted by a rock-throwing mob dressed in shorts and T-shirts, but a closer perusal reveals that this is a war game with both sides played by GIs. A house-to-house search of the 120 pages turns up a single panel from the point of view of Arab insurgents firing on invading American forces, and two instances in which an Iraqi is seen faintly through an American telescopic gunsight. No Iraqi civilians are visible anywhere in the book.

This is no doubt reflective of Zinsmeister's own experience of the war, as well as to the series' intended focus on the experiences of American GIs, but it tends to lend credence to critics of the embedding policy.

Zinsmeister, of course, is not one of those critics. The Bush administration could hardly have picked a more sympathetic journalist to insert into the ranks of its troops. As editor in chief of The American Enterprise, the organ of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Zinsmeister has been a consistent apologist for administration policies. The nature of his war coverage is pretty much spelled out in the headline of his June 20, 2005 report (after an embedded spell in April and May): "The War is Over, and We Won." In that article, he wrote, "I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside."

A report released that same month by the United Nations Development Program and the Iraqi government painted a much bleaker picture, reporting, "Daily living conditions in Iraq are dismal, with families suffering from intermittent water and electricity supply, chronic malnutrition among children and more illiterate young than ever before." Under the category of infrastructure, the report noted that "Compared to other countries in the Middle East, Iraq scores low on the UN Millennium Development Goals; more importantly, in comparison to earlier statistics, an alarming deterioration in the indicators is apparent."

Though the UN/Iraqi report and Zinsmeister's article were released the same month, Zinsmeister was able to comment on more recent experiences than the UN/Iraqi report, which was based on data gathered from some 22,000 Iraqis during the previous year. One might conclude then that Zinsmeister had been witness to a rapid and happy turnaround in Iraq's fortunes, except that the United States Agency for International Development reported in January 2006 that Iraq was in the midst of a "social breakdown" and "criminal elements within Iraqi society have had almost free reign." Medact, the British charitable organization, reported in a March 2006 update, that "The disastrous security situation has paralyzed the Iraqi health sector," noting that the death rate continues to rise and the "health crisis" is deepening with more than 50 percent of Iraqi children suffering from malnutrition.

Zinsmeister, therefore, speaks for a particular perspective that is not necessarily shared by others on the ground in Iraq. He speaks avowedly for the GIs with whom his Iraq experiences are so closely wedded, he speaks for the administration that put him to "bed" within those ranks, and he speaks for the American Enterprise Institute.

The notion of a "think tank" suggests a large container into which the world's foremost academics and experts have been poured and left to ponder until they come up with nonpartisan solutions to the world's problems. In fact, many of them exist primarily for the purpose of constructing and certifying "experts" who are then made available to the media to represent very partisan viewpoints. Think tanks can be conservative (like Zinsmeister's American Enterprise Institute), left-leaning (like the Urban Institute) or centrist (as the Brookings Institute is reputed to be), but studies reported in 1997 and 2000 and based on Lexis Nexis database searches of major newspapers and radio and TV transcripts showed "experts" from conservative or right-leaning think tanks were cited more than four times as often in the media as "experts" from progressive or left-leaning think tanks. The American Enterprise Institute was the second-most-cited conservative think tank, and the fourth-most cited think tank of any persuasion, with the centrist Brookings Institute being the most cited.

Far from being composed of dispassionate, objective scientists, think tanks are often funded by corporate interests and expected to represent those interests in the media. An illustration of the way they work can be seen in the late '90s publicity war over the government-approved introduction of the fat-substitute Olestra into grocery stores. One think tank, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, spoke out against the use of Olestra on the grounds that it depleted important nutrients and could cause cramps and diarrhea symptoms. Other think tanks, such as the Hoover Institute -- heavily funded by food giant and Olestra proponent Proctor & Gamble -- were mobilized to attack the CSPI and defend consumers' right to choose Olestra.

The American Enterprise Institute welcomes corporate interests with open arms, promising a big, wet kiss on the tax-deductible-contributions page of its website: "National and multinational corporations who support AEI maintain close relationships with the Institute's scholars and regularly receive top-level research and analysis on specific policy interests and priorities. In addition, corporations provide important input to AEI on a wide variety of issues. Corporate involvement with AEI includes special invitations to public and private events; AEI's full slate of research studies, articles, books and other publications; access to our scholars, fellows and senior management and more."

For news media, which typically exercise their journalistic objectivity by quoting an expert from each side of every issue, think tanks are a boon, ready-made expert-quote machines. In this manner, every issue gets represented to the public as: Some experts say this, and some experts say that. Thus the international consensus of scientists about the dangers of global warming gets represented on shows like Nightline as one expert from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning the public of coming hazards and one expert from the Competitive Enterprise Institute assuring the public it has nothing to worry about.

Zinsmeister has done his part as an American Enterprise Institute expert, having appeared on numerous TV and radio shows, testified before Congressional and Presidential committees, written articles for Reader's Digest, Atlantic Monthly, National Review and several newspapers, and authored two books about the battle for Iraq. And now he has brought his message to Marvel comics readers. The question that arises is: To what extent is Marvel Comics complicit in expressing Zinsmeister/the American Enterprise Institute/the Bush administration's agenda with regard to the war in Iraq? Did conservative interests, unbeknownst to Marvel editors, conspire to plant Zinsmeister -- embed him, as it were -- in the midst of the country's most popular comics publisher in order to influence young comics readers about the war in Iraq? Or did Marvel editors consider his political views to be unimportant to what was meant to be an accurate but apolitical account of GI experiences in Iraq? Or did Marvel specifically go looking for a writer who was sympathetic to U.S. military actions in Iraq in order to produce a comic that would be supportive of American GIs and their military efforts? Combat Zone was originally announced as a series, but when it finally came out, it was a one-shot trade-paperback collection dropped into the market with little fanfare. Did Marvel abort the series and replace it with the trade paperback after realizing Zinsmeister's politically loaded agenda? Unfortunately, when the question was put to him, Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada declined to talk to the Journal for this article. The same question, and others, e-mailed to Zinsmeister met with silence from the normally very communicative expert.

[To read the rest of this story, please see The Comics Journal #276.]