Distateful but all too real. The US needs to see what this war is doing.
3:53:54 PM  #  

To be sure, there have been deeply troubling pictures, but sometimes even they have a sentimental overlay. Perhaps the most famous battlefield photo to date, one that ran on newspaper front pages across the country, is a haunting shot of an Army doctor in full military gear squatting on the dirt and holding a young Iraqi girl in his arms just minutes after her mother had been killed in crossfire. The New York Times, Time magazine, CNN.com and others have, occasionally, run photos that featured more jarring looks at the injured and dead.

But those are exceptions. While newspapers, magazines and newscasts have overwhelmed us with stylized photographs of American soldiers either in battle, helping civilians, enjoying each other's camaraderie, or showing off the latest in war technology, the violence of war has often been treated as a danger zone, forbidden, an afterthought. Few argue that the U.S. press should follow lead of the Arab press -- Al-Jazeera in particular -- by singling out Iraqi civilian casualties and using gruesome footage to illustrate them. That, too, leads to a distorted view.

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Compared to its counterparts around the world, the American press tends to be more reluctant to use graphic images of bodily destruction and death that are the inevitable -- and intended -- byproduct of war. "It's seen as in poor taste, uncivil," says Hanson, who now teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. But in a culture that's becoming increasingly drenched in violence, it seems odd that war imagery is being treated more and more timidly. When a country goes to war, shouldn't Americans understand what's being done in their name?

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Time's picture and graphic description highlights another peculiar press standard, the reluctance to show death and severe injury. If it must be shown, the U.S. media will show foreigners first, and then, as a last resort, Americans. For instance, this week when several foreign journalists were killed after the U.S. shelled a hotel that many call home in Baghdad, virtually all the American TV news channels, and scores of print outlets, ran images of frantic friends dragging the wrapped body of a injured photographer through the halls of the hotel in search of medical help. He later died. But the war has produced no standout image of a gravely wounded or dead American.

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three weeks into the war and U.S. television coverage seems almost immune to the notion of covering, let alone caring about, civilian bombing victims. Take the most recent assassination attempt on Saddam, where a U.S. bombing attack left a 60-foot-deep crater in the Baghdad neighborhood where he was said to have been Monday night. The attack raised serious ethical questions, such as whether the U.S. military, which has insisted it's doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, should have dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on a Baghdad neighborhood, damaging 20 homes and dozens of shops, and doing so on a single eyewitness tip that Saddam may have been nearby. "When the broken body of the 20-year-old woman was brought out torso first, then her head," the AP reported, "her mother started crying uncontrollably, then collapsed."

But American talking heads, busy playing the what-if game about Saddam's whereabouts, never seemed to give the issue any thought. Certainly they did not linger on images of the hellacious human carnage left in the aftermath.

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By limiting and sanitizing the range of issues, the press may be reflexively trying to avoid charges that it is delivering antiwar propaganda in a news package.

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Today's climate raises the question whether there is now any circumstance under which the American press would show images of American soldiers killed during wartime. The answer may very well be no. Even if it wanted to, the press today can't take its traditional pictures of flag-draped military coffins, since the Pentagon has banned journalists from the airbase in Germany where bodies are flown.

A block away, about 30 people are holding up signs and American flags in support of the war. Cars driving by are honking. People are screaming and yelling. When I drove by, I noticed that one of the signs being held up was a hand drawn version of the Gadson flag and its famous "Don't Tread on Me" slogan. I have to wonder how Iraq actually tread on us. According to Bush, this was a preemptive war to protect America from weapons of mass destruction. Oh, and yes, free those poor Iraqi people. Somehow, as the lack of any WMD has played out, the spin emphasises that the war is for Iraqi freedom. Also, we mustn't forget that the administration has, through careful manipulation of the media, convinced an amazingly high percentage of the populace that Saddam is somehow linked with Al Quada.

Even if this is so, how many American and Iraqi lives was the cause worth? Many innocent people were killed. Thousands of Iraqi troops, who, unlike the US and British troops, were forced in to service, lie dead and rotting after out bombing raids. We, quite simply, decimated them. Then we need to consider the collateral damage. From misguided bombs to cars mistakenly destroyed on the highway, the death toll will affect our relations with Iraq and the rest of the world.

The other day, as I talked with another friend who is also against the war, she said that, in order to keep from becoming a reactionary like many people on the pro-war side, I need to try to see the conflict from their perspective, to consider what other alternatives there were. Of course, since these people don't think sanctions and inspections were working, those options could not be considered. I'm stymied. I don't know how to approach this.

How do I resolve the fact that there are evil people in the world who would not think twice about ending another person's life? My beliefs about murder or killing (since according to the laws of war, what happens on the battlefields between combatants is not murder) are so strong that I can't get past my feelings that what's happening in Iraq is terribly wrong. So, how are we, as a country, as a race of people, supposed to respond to the evil in the world? And how do we do it without somehow becoming evil ourselves?
2:19:17 PM  #