Res Ipsa Loquitur

Here's my idea for a play: Embedded: the Story of Steve's Foot and Tim's Ass.

Now there's a variation on a theme.

Hows this...

Embedded... the sory of Tim Robbins finding his head buried in his ass.

"Well, I guess that explains the bad breath and my shitty outlook on life!", he exclaimed triumphantly!

Some of the foreign journalists who were embedded with U.S. forces put out stories that were a lot more disturbing and painful than anything U.S. agencies reported.

Robbins is letting the media off really easy if he's making them out to be puppets of the administration/army. It's way more incestuous than that. The U.S. media weren't "bitches" -- they were more like groupies or cheerleaders. They essentially told the most heroic, black-and-white version of events they could, not because the U.S. forced them to, but because it was more fun for everyone that way.

Some of the foreign outlets I followed told stories of civilians (families, children, etc.,) being killed right and left, utter butchery by soldiers rushing to end the official war as quickly as possible.

The fact is that more aroung three times as many Iraqi civilians have died since the war started as U.S. civilians died in the WTC attacks. Whatever horror and sadness we feel about WTC -- Iraqis have gone through three times that.

I'm not saying that makes the war in Iraq wrong, or U.S. forces evil. But how we tell the story to ourselves matters. If we pretend this was a clean, easy, just victory, when the Iraqis (and everyone else) knows it wasn't we look like arrogant, exploitive bastards. Not a good idea if you're trying to END terrorism.

If we were honest about the costs of the war; if we acknowledged the civilian casualties in Iraq as painful, but unfortunately necessary examples of the cost of freedom (instead of simply never showing them in our newscasts); if we paid tribute to the bravery of the Iraqis who today are under attack from external terrorists who are bombing THEM instead of us, taking the heat off us (instead of only paying attention when American soldiers died); if we aknowledge that there are people who MATTER dying in this war in addition to our own armed forces, people who are currently suffinging more than we are from terrorism, we'll in the long run, I think, reduce the number of people over there who are interested in being terrorists.

And who would these foreign outlets be, Aaron, hmm? Al Jazeera, maybe? The BBC? The Guardian? Any links? Any proof? Where are your sources? And who isn't paying attention to the civilians being killed by terrorists?

Never mind. I get the feeling that the source of your entire diatribe is the same sort of dank, hot, smelly place Robbins' play came from.

What proof do I need to provide? Do you not believe that about 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war so far, compared to several hundred U.S. soldiers? That's three times the WTC casualty numbers. Did you think 911 was a tragedy? Remember how much attention we paid, and still pay, to those deaths? How much attention are we paying to this tragedy three times as big?

I've supported the war since it began because I support getting rid of oppressive dictatorships. But I also support telling the truth -- and the truth is that there have been many, many many ugly, horrible deaths of innocent people in Iraq since the war began -- and many of those were at the hands of our efficient, incredibly powerful armed forces, who were, of course, doing their job to protect us. We need to face up to the price Iraqis have paid for our protection.

This cost is rarely acknowledged by Americans in more than a couple of lines in a story. We fawn over our (undeniably) impressive military might, and are shocked when a few of our soldiers die here or there, but we pay little to no attention to the thousands of Iraqi civilians who've died. The Iraqi soldiers ordered to fight our armies by that madman Hussien have been covered by our media as nothing more than the countless "bad guys" one might mow down in a video game.

These were ordinary people trapped in a horrible situation that eventually killed them. But where we spend hours on individual tributes to Americans who die in this war. This war is being fought in large part to protect our own butts. Freeing Iraqis, while laudible, is a far second on the priority list. It's always used to justify what we're doing.

But the fact is that the vast majority of the cost in human lives for freeing Iraq has been born by Iraqis. They've died in the tens of thousands, the majority at the hands of Americans acting with a primary objective of eliminating terrorism -- not of freeing Iraq.

We don't talk about them. There's an unofficial policy that holds true of almost every U.S. news organization -- we don't show dead Iraqis killed by Americans. Especially dead civilians.

Again, I support the overal effort to get rid of Saddam and create a democratic Iraq. But the media coverage of the war has played like an episode of the A-Team on the television and newspapers here. We are generally clueless. Worse, most people, like you, don't give a damn about the differece between 5,000 and 10,000 dead Iraqis if a half-dozen Americans have died.

This ambivalence to any pain that is not our pain, this desire to inflate our own accomplishments and ignore the suffering of others, is what keeps the middle east a bubbling, spitting pot of anti-American hatred. Almost nobody in the Amerian media is interested in how many Iraqis are dying right now so that we in the U.S. don't have to worry about terrorists. And that's why the terrorists may eventually start coming back to us.

"What proof do I need to provide"?

That's it. I didn't bother reading any further. Talk to the hand 'cos the face ain't listening.

Sigh. I cannot stand Tim Robbins any more. Which is a shame, because I really liked "The Shawshank Redemption". But I will never watch it again, nor anything else with him involved.

Brave voice of dissent, my ass.

"Talk to the hand 'cos the face ain't listening."

You didn't need to tell me that. Your ignorance demonstrates you aren't listening.

That's too bad -- he actually did his best work ever in Mystic River.

Besides, by that logic you should't be watching anything the U.S. military itself says, after the Jessica Lynch fiasco. If misleading dramatic retellings of the war make you so mad, that is.

Rita, you've picked up a wordy twit!

Y'all just had a party without me didn't you?

Andrea, I'm delighted you stopped by. You're one of the few people I know that has a lower tolerance for fools than I do. I admire that.

Aaron, you can't expect to throw out figures like that without being asking to back them up. I have yet to see any reliable figures of Iraqi casualties from anywhere, primarily I think because no one really knows. At any rate, even at the number you cite, they are significantly less than those murdered by Saddam in one year...and miniscule when compared to the civilians killed in WWII. People die in wars. Doesn't make their deaths any less tragic, but it happens despite all best efforts to prevent it.

And you're wrong. Terrorists are going to keep "coming back to us" because we ain't them. This isn't going to end in Iraq, no matter how successful we are or aren't there. Iraq is just a battle, not the war. It will not end until one side annihilates the other....their terms of war, not ours.

Keith, me either. I despise close-minded bigotry whether it's on the left or right.

"People die in wars. Doesn't make their deaths any less tragic, but it happens despite all best efforts to prevent it."

This is what I'm arguing the media screws up. From reading our media, I wouldn't have any clue what sorts of tragic things are happening right now to Iraqis. All I hear about is when American soldiers die.

It's made war seem less tragic. Which is great for us, here. It's fun to watch the drama. But it's also misleading. Because the effort to make Iraq a democracy isn't going to stand or fall on U.S. casualties. It will succeed or fail based on the experience of the Iraqi people under our invasion and occupation.

One short example of this distortion will suffice, since I admit I am being wordy. During the opening weeks of the conflict, we used a bunker-piercing bomb to hit where we thought Saddam was. There was much speculation for a day or two as to whether we'd actually gotten him. In the American coverage there was also a couple of throwaway lines on the fact that the "bunker" had been cleverly buried under some homes, and neccessary collateral damage had caused a half-dozen deaths. One story mentioned a mother mourning as rescue workers pulled one half of her sister/daughter (I don't remember which) out of the massive crater, and then the other half.

Turns out there wasn't even a bunker there. Big bomb; eager generals; dead Iraqis. That was the story. But nobody in America wanted to hear it. Instead, when it turned out the U.S. had simply dropped a bomb on a bunch of poor people, tearing families apart, the headline was something like "we missed Saddam."

I'm not criticizing the military for their actions. You're right, war is hell. What I'm criticizing is the media turning the tragic, painful, incredibly unfair experience of the Iraqi people as we attempt to liberate them into some sort of black-and-white action movie in which we shoot Very Bad Guys and rescue all the Good People. We aren't doing that. Pretending we are makes it look like we don't care about Iraqi deaths. We're in the middle of a messy, bloody conflict where many innocent people are dying. If we ignore them, their neighbors aren't going to want to participate in any government/society we try to build for them. They're going to be disgusted by us.

When we pretend we are fighting a bloodless war, where the only cost is American lives, the whole world watches. They think we're arrogant goons who don't care about blowing a young woman in half if she might be living near our targets.

How do you think Saddam's party is able to pay $500 to Iraqi teenagers to kill foreigners? Because those teenagers see us blow a neighborhood girl in half and then saw our media run the story titled "bomb misses Saddam."

Aaron: brevity is the soul of wit.

Just a suggestion.

Steve,
To say something succinctly requires that one understands the subject.

'nuff said...

You guys want sound bites. That's the whole problem. Ultimately, I guess that means we are the jerks the terrorist recruits think we are -- We don't care to hear what's actually happening.

There, that short enough?

Not sound bites Aaron. What they're trying to tell you is that you would make your arguments more clearly if you were more succinct....which would also be more considerate of my limited storage space for comments.

And you're missing the point. No one is disagreeing that civilian deaths are happening in Iraq & are probably underreported by the US media. We're only disagreeing about the effects.

OK, well, the underreporting has always grated on me more than most people, in part because of something similar to what you said -- "Terrorists are going to keep 'coming back to us' because we ain't them."

I say we're going to continue to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis and not care because "they ain't us." If we did care, maybe I'd be more inclined to buy the argument that this terrorism thing is a product of the muslim tendancy to think that everyone else in the world can die and it's OK as long as their way of life survives.

My point is that, as proven by the complete American disregard for Iraqi casualties, we are the same way -- we don't care if we have to annihilate all the muslims, because "they ain't us."

But it's bull. We're lining up to kill each other and neither side cares about the fact that the other side IS us.