"No two wars are identical"
About this Quote
“No two wars are identical” is the kind of line a veteran correspondent drops with the calm authority of someone who’s watched pundits flatten catastrophe into templates. Kate Adie isn’t offering a comforting truism; she’s warning against the industry of analogy. Every conflict arrives with its own weather system: different grievances, propaganda ecosystems, lines on maps drawn by old empires, and technologies that tilt the balance between soldiers and civilians. The sentence is spare because the point is restraint.
The intent reads as professional ethics disguised as plain speech. Journalists, policymakers, and audiences all crave the shortcut: Vietnam as the lens for Iraq, Bosnia for Syria, WWII for everything. Adie’s subtext is that those comparisons can become a kind of moral narcotic. If you already “know what this is,” you stop looking. You stop listening to local histories and start casting characters: dictator, rebel, liberator, terrorist. The story writes itself, and reality gets edited out.
Context matters here because Adie’s career spans the postwar media age: from limited broadcast windows to 24/7 coverage, from state-controlled narratives to algorithmic feeds. Wars now come packaged with instant metaphors and ready-made footage. Her line pushes back against that velocity. It’s also a quiet rebuke to political language that repeats itself on purpose - “surgical strikes,” “mission accomplished,” “red lines” - as if recycling phrases could recycle outcomes.
It works because it’s deceptively modest. By refusing the grand theory of war, Adie insists on the reporting that war most resists: specificity.
The intent reads as professional ethics disguised as plain speech. Journalists, policymakers, and audiences all crave the shortcut: Vietnam as the lens for Iraq, Bosnia for Syria, WWII for everything. Adie’s subtext is that those comparisons can become a kind of moral narcotic. If you already “know what this is,” you stop looking. You stop listening to local histories and start casting characters: dictator, rebel, liberator, terrorist. The story writes itself, and reality gets edited out.
Context matters here because Adie’s career spans the postwar media age: from limited broadcast windows to 24/7 coverage, from state-controlled narratives to algorithmic feeds. Wars now come packaged with instant metaphors and ready-made footage. Her line pushes back against that velocity. It’s also a quiet rebuke to political language that repeats itself on purpose - “surgical strikes,” “mission accomplished,” “red lines” - as if recycling phrases could recycle outcomes.
It works because it’s deceptively modest. By refusing the grand theory of war, Adie insists on the reporting that war most resists: specificity.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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