What We Did Today in Iraq
[posted by Callimachus]
The AP version. As of 11:22 p.m. Eastern tonight, a search of "Iraq" on the AP photo wire returns:
Every war exacts a terrible cost in human suffering. The MSM, as exemplified here, is eager to tell that story. I suspect, from reading and talking to some of the tens of thousands of Americans working to rebuild Iraq, there's something more going on over there. And that the people who move these pictures are not eager to show it to me.
Whether you want the troops to come home now, or at some arbitrary future date, they will come home. They will come home to a nation full of people who seem perversely proud to declare that these troops were "defeated." I suppose never having to see the soldiers' faces or their work in the papers makes it easier to talk that way. You don't have to pause for a half-second and imagine how you'll feel saying it to their faces.
The AP version. As of 11:22 p.m. Eastern tonight, a search of "Iraq" on the AP photo wire returns:
- Pictures of John Kerry: 4
- Pictures of Teddy Kennedy: 3
- Pictures of "peace activists" (scare quotes because the accompanying stories make it plain they're only concerned about violence that results from U.S. action, not in "peace" in any overarching sense): 3
- Pictures of wounded or crippled U.S. soldiers and Marines: 7
- Pictures of U.S. soldiers or Marines who have been killed recently in Iraq, or photos of their funerals, or of their surviving kin: 26 (Not counting the big year-end roundup of such photos, which goes on for pages).
- Pictures of U.S. soldiers or Marines on the streets in Iraq doing something besides being dead: 0.
Every war exacts a terrible cost in human suffering. The MSM, as exemplified here, is eager to tell that story. I suspect, from reading and talking to some of the tens of thousands of Americans working to rebuild Iraq, there's something more going on over there. And that the people who move these pictures are not eager to show it to me.
Whether you want the troops to come home now, or at some arbitrary future date, they will come home. They will come home to a nation full of people who seem perversely proud to declare that these troops were "defeated." I suppose never having to see the soldiers' faces or their work in the papers makes it easier to talk that way. You don't have to pause for a half-second and imagine how you'll feel saying it to their faces.
