May 9, 2008 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
People Can Handle the Truth About War
by Helen Thomas
Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated
Press photograph of a
critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in
Baghdad’s Sadr City
“after a U.S. airstrike.”
Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital.
As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it
showed the true horrors
of this war.
Neither side is immune from killing Iraqi civilians. But Americans should
be aware of their own
responsibility for inflicting death and pain on the innocent.
The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said about 20 readers complained
about the photo, while a
few readers praised The Post for publishing the stark picture on Page 1.
Some mothers said they were offended that their children might see the
picture, though one
wonders whether their youngsters watch television and play with violent
videos in a pretend world.
From the start of the unprovoked U.S. “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in
March 2003, the
government tried to bar the news media from photographing flag-draped
coffins of American
soldiers returning from Iraq. A Freedom of Information lawsuit forced the
government to release
pictures of returning coffins.
Howell said some readers felt the photo of the Iraqi boy was “an anti-war
statement; some
thought it was in poor taste.” Well, so is war.
Howell said her boss, Executive Editor Len Downie, “is cautious about such
photos.”
“We have seldom been able to show the human impact of the fighting on
Iraqis,” Downie was
quoted as saying. “We decided this was a rare instance in which we had a
powerful image with
which to do so.”
It’s unclear to me why this was deemed to be “rare.” After five years of
war, there is finally
one photo that is supposed to say it all?
Howell said she checked hundreds of U.S. front pages on the Internet but
saw the AP photo
nowhere else.
That makes me wonder why the media have shied away from telling the story
about Iraqi civilian
casualties. News people and editors were more courageous during the
Vietnam War. What are they
afraid of now?
Who can forget the shocking picture of the little Vietnamese girl running
down a road, aflame
from a napalm attack?
And who can forget the picture of South Vietnamese Police Chief Nguyen
Ngoc Loan putting a gun
to the temple of a young member of the Viet Cong and executing him on a
Saigon street?
I don’t remember any American outcry against the media for showing the
horror of war when those
photographs were published. Were we braver then? Or maybe more conscience
stricken?
Of course, the Pentagon did not enjoy such images coming out of Saigon in
that era. Most
Americans found them appalling, as further evidence of our misbegotten
venture in Vietnam.
Americans rallied to the streets in protest and eventually persuaded
President Lyndon Johnson
to give up his dreams of re-election in 1968.
Some Americans believe the media were to blame for the U.S. defeat in
Vietnam. Nonsense.
Johnson knew the war was unwinnable, especially after the 1968 Tet
offensive and the request by
Army Gen. William Westmoreland for 200,000 more troops, in addition to the
500,000 already in
Vietnam.
The Pentagon made a command decision after the Vietnam War to get better
control of the
dissemination of information in future wars. That led then-Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld
to create an office of disinformation at the start of the Iraqi war. It
was later disbanded
after howls from the media.
More recently, we have seen the Pentagon’s propaganda efforts take the
form of carefully
coaching retired generals about how to spin the Iraq war when they appear
on television as
alleged military experts. The New York Times’ revelations about those pet
generals have cast a
pall over their reputations.
Too often in this war, the news media seem to have tried to shield the
public from the
suffering this war has brought to Americans and Iraqis.
It’s not the job of the media to protect the nation from the reality of
war. Rather, it is up
to the media to tell the people the truth. They can handle it.
Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/362350_thomas09.html
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