who spent years covering DC and especially the military, his last job being at The Washington Post. He has also written a number of books, and occasionally appears as an expert on cable tv shows.
The piece is titled Babylon Revisited: Melancholy Thoughts After a Short Trip to Washington, D.C. There is a subtitle taken from early in the text:
As a young reporter in political Washington in the late 1980s, I noticed that there was a type of person who thrived in the driven, transactional environment of the capital.
That along with the title may give you a sense of the thrust of the piece, although I think it a bit unfair to try to reduce it to a general sense.
Ricks talks about the enjoyment he got from the early part of his career, for example
Even the boring times could be fun. I was once in Seoul to cover a fairly routine meeting between South Korean and American officials. Not much was going on, so while I waited for the concluding press conference, I sat in my five-star hotel room, drank good tea, and finished writing a novel. This was life on a global carousel.
But after 9/11 things changed. In part he was dead tired from working non-stop. But then comes three paragraphs which in reading them is like being awakened with a splash of cold water across one’s face:
But mainly I think it was the invasion of Iraq, and what followed there. The Iraq War broke my heart. I never thought my country would invade a country so recklessly, with so little understanding of the culture of the place or the politics of the region. Why did not we see that taking over Iraq and insisting on American-style voting inevitably would empower Iran? Plus, we went to war on false premises. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the unknowables. But I think that we didn’t want to know what we should have known.
On top of that, I was powerfully disappointed by the U.S. military I saw in Iraq. I had covered it for years, both in Washington and on the ground in operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. I covered the armed forces objectively, but I generally had been impressed by the character and competence of our soldiers.
So, I wondered, how could our military then operate so clumsily, so counter-productively, and at times so cruelly, in Iraq? How could the army that I had seen deal so well with the tortuous problems of the Balkans operate so stupidly as to allow soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison to taunt, torture, and humiliate their captives? Didn’t American leaders see that this angered Iraqis and inflamed the insurgency? Most of all, the fact that something so wrong occurred showed how misbegotten the whole American enterprise in Iraq was.
He left what he had been doing, wrote several books, but was still somewhat connected to his previous life, especially when friends would come to visit him and his wife at their new location in Maine.
Then came Trump. Now, I feel like we got out just in time, before the slow-motion train crash began. Even from here, I find Trump disorienting and disgusting. I don’t know how I would be able to stand being in the same city with him. It is a great time for journalism, but it wouldn’t be for me. I admire people like Peter Baker, an old colleague now at the New York Times, for their stamina and persistence. I would not be able to do it.
OUCH.
And remember, Ricks was considered as good as any journalist covering the military, perhaps as good as any journalist ever.
This brief piece makes clear how much what he saw of the military in Iraq under Bush disoriented him, disappointed him.
And yet, it is the mere presence of Trump in DC now, with what hedescribes as “the slow-motion train crash” to which those of us who live in and around DC find ourselves regularly engulfed.
Read the piece. It is worth the time.