UPDATED - ColdType

Peter Wilson, London correspondent for the
Australian, his photographer John Feder and
their translator Stewart Innes. And let’s not forget
Marcin Firlej, a Polish journalist with news
channel TVN 24, captured south of Baghdad, or
even Jacek Kaczmarek, a journalist with Polish
public radio. I am not sure this is the whole roster
but they all deserve our support.
Memories and amnesia
EVERYONE who knows Gulf War l 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. Amnesia
seems to have taken hold because these incidents
are rarely mentioned. 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
afflicted. You also 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 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
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.
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Will we repeat history?
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.
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 stamps 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.
We lose track of what war is
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 for the “winners.”
Journalists are mourning for their own this
week as one does upon losing a member of your
family. But we can’t turn our back to all the other
families in pain and grief because of this war.
Journalism without compassion, without empathy,
and without consciousness is but stenography
by another name. ●