Pictures of War

Strange thing, this war is, and especially in America. Many Americans seem willing to back spurious presidential war efforts and "support the troops" so long as images of the effects of war don't make it home. As we've seen in several wars past - Viet Nam and Somalia especially - images may be the only way not to prolong stupid decisions and to jar the public back into their senses. This week was interesting on this front as images of flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force base were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Memory Hole. One, taken by a contractor who has since been fired for the photograph, appeared on the front page of The Seattle Times.

The Memory Hole deserves a lot of credit, and a lot of publicity, for their committment to putting information and images on the web that the government doesn't want us to see. We especially need to see images of death, which burn reality into our brains, however diffcult some of them may be to take. We should be seeing photos of the horrors from Iraq as often as those planes flying into the Twin Towers, but remind ourselves that one was done to "us" and the other "we" did.

There is no such thing as a clean war, unless of course you simply decide not to calculate civilian casualties and instead package the war at home in cute little yellow ribbons on trees. While the US has done a shit job in Iraq, it has done a great job (at least until now) desensitizing Americans to the atrocities this country is committing abroad. I'm more worried about the implications of the latter since, while we can always get out of Iraq, there are always more Iraqs around the corner.