Self-Indulgence as Strategy
American Lives, Iraqi Props
Pierre Tristam/Candide’s Notebooks, June 20, 2006
It’s one of those stories that took on a life of its own with outlandish, and ultimately offensive, disproportion. Two American soldiers go missing last Friday. The military in Iraq devotes the equivalent of 6 percent of American ground troops to the manhunt. The press in the United States devotes what looks like a fifth of every front page to trailing the story. (Television’s focus is by nature disproportionate, so no surprise that that the networks go Geraldo on the story, camouflaging the Natalee Holloway script for Iraq .) The rest of the world’s press is next-to-mute about it all, for a fair reason: it would be strange if non-American newspapers were to hydroplane over the fate of two missing Americans when thirty-five Iraqis are kidnapped every day, and fifty are killed every day. What exactly would be the justification of a paper in Canada or Laos or Argentina to highlight the fate of two Americans over that of countless Iraqis? But then why not pose the same question regarding the American press?
Before we go on, the numbers are instructive. Nina Kamp and Michael O’Hanlon at the Brookings Institution have been keeping track of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s collaterals since the war began. In May 2003, the month of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, their numbers show that two Iraqis went missing every day, and about eight were killed per day. A year later, kidnappings were up to 10 per day, civilian deaths up to 35 per day. In May 2005, kidnappings were up to 25 per day, and this May, up to 35. For precision’s sake, let’s also note that as of now Iraq body count has the death toll somewhere between 34,000 and 43,000, which means that the year-over-year kill ratio in Iraq during the American occupation has matched or perhaps slightly exceeded that of the Saddam years. U.S. military losses are up to 18,300 wounded and 2,507 killed, 2,733 including other coalition deaths.
So two Americans go missing. It’s not that the U.S. press shouldn’t react, or that the military shouldn’t have done all it could to recover the missing men. That only speaks honorably of both: caring is not a bad thing, even when it’s disproportionate. The question is, disproportionate at whose expense? There’s no objection when the story of two missing Americans should displace stories about summer beach bums, toe-ring fashion, some of the half dozen daily dispatches from the war on fat, most of what Bush is up to and all of what that powder-puff sorority once known as Congress is up to. (Newsweek’s current cover story? “The Pirate in Johnny Depp.”) Except when the disproportion in this case implicitly reveals something less honorable and quite telling about why America is losing the war in Iraq, and why Iraqis despise the American presence regardless of their dependence on it for survival (dependence isn’t love, as any jailbird can say of his warden): Americans don’t give a crab's beard about Iraqis, neither at home nor in Iraq. A kidnapped Iraqi is sand in the wind, a dead Iraqi as valueless as the nano-weight of newsprint it takes to record the nameless figure. If it’s recorded.
Read the complete piece at:
http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/Archives/CN062006.htm Candide's Notebooks has great (liberal) writing ... and incidentally, a section devoted to World Cup Soccer scores...
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