UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
the Dubai Arabic TV station al-Arabiya and his
partner Talal Fawzi al-Masri, a Lebanese cameraman
and Ali Hassan Safa, a technician.
Add the captured to the list including: Peter
Wilson, London correspondent for The Australian,
his photographer John Feder and their
translator Stewart Innes. And let’s not forget
Marcin Firlej, Polish journalist with news channel
TVN 24, captured south of Baghdad, or Jacek
Kaczmarek, journalist with Polish public radio.
I am not sure this is whole roster but they all
deserve our support. Unfortunately, protecting
journalists is higher on the media agenda than
protecting journalism. And journalism is rarely
as equally outraged by the deaths of civilians and
even the massacring of combatants.
Everyone who knows Gulf War I remembers
the “turkey shoot” on the road out of Kuwait
when US jets strafed and slaughtered fleeing soldiers.
Many remember the bulldozers that were
used to bury “enemy” soldiers alive. We won the
war but lost the peace. When the parades ended,
Saddam was left standing. Could it happen
again? Don’t bet against it. Let us not forget that
the war we fight today has been underway for at
least a decade. This is only the latest phase.
What will be its legacy?
Will there be a resurgence of Gulf War syndrome
that was denied for years by the Pentagon
but caused so much pain and misery for all those
who were inflicted? You barely hear any reference
made to the sanctions that went on for ten
years, robbing so many Iraqi children of their
futures, even if the regime was complicit as well
in their deaths.
Remember, too, the use of depleted uranium in
“coalition” weapons that defiled a land that is the
cradle of western civilization. Remember also
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how the gassing of the Kurds, so widely cited as
grounds for invasion today, barely rated a condemnation
in its immediate aftermath, even by a
Republican Administration.
We forget this history at our peril.
We didn’t see many of Iraq’s faces then, and we
are not seeing them now. Iraq became a geopolitical
abstraction for most Americans until this
Administration decided to wage war there. Before
shock and awe, only 13% of the young people now
fighting could even find it on a world map, according
to a National Geographic survey.
War may kill but it also desensitizes. When we
get into them, they get into us. We may escape
alive or even prevail but the images and the
experience stamp our lives forever. For many, the
trauma will lead to sleepless nights for the rest
of their lives. And that goes for journalists too, as
hard-nosed as many of us believe we are.
As NY Times journalist Chris Hedges
explained to Editor and Publisher: “The real
‘shock and awe’ may be that we’ve been lulled
into a belief that we can wage war cost-free. We
feel we can fight wars and others will die and we
won’t. We lose track of what war is and what it
can do to a society. The military had a great disquiet
about the war plans, as far back as last fall.
The press did not chase down that story.”
I cite all of this not to score some cheap political
points because war is always a tragedy, usually
a lose-lose proposition even when you “win.”
Journalists are mourning for their own this
week as you do when you lose a member of your
family. But we can’t turn our back on all the
other families in pain and in grief because of this
war. Journalism without compassion, without
empathy, and without consciousness is but stenography
by another name. ●