{"id":15493,"date":"2008-05-10T09:35:11","date_gmt":"2008-05-10T13:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15493.html"},"modified":"2008-05-10T09:35:11","modified_gmt":"2008-05-10T13:35:11","slug":"the-face-of-death-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-face-of-death-in-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"The face of death in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Morbo<\/a><\/p>\n

No one likes to see photographs of dying 2-year-old children. But when those children are dying because of a war your country started without justification, a war that has since gone horribly awry, sometimes it’s necessary to see photos like that — so you understand the gravity of the situation.<\/p>\n

On April 30, The Washington Post ran, on page 1 above the fold, a photo of Ali Hussein, 2, being pulled from the rubble of a house in Sadr City. The house had been hit by U.S. missiles during an air strike. The boy was taken to a hospital but died.<\/p>\n

The photo, taken by an Associated Press photographer, is not easy to look at it. I felt a lump in my throat as I unfolded the paper that morning. As a father, I could only think of my own children at that age, of their vulnerabilities. Every parent strives to protect their children — but how do you do that when bombs rain out of the sky?<\/p>\n

It took some courage for The Post, which has been relentlessly pro-war on its Editorial page, to publish the photo. And of course it didn’t take long for the right-wingers to start complaining. One asserted that images like this only help the enemy.<\/p>\n

Deborah Howell, the Post’s ombudsman, asked a Post editor to explain the decision to publish the photo. Bonnie Jo Mount, deputy assistant managing editor\/photos, said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We often publish images of war in the form of inanimate objects: blown-up vehicles, piles of debris, missiles in the air. The injured child reflected the civilian toll and related directly to the news of the day. We have a responsibility to inform our readership; sometimes that means publishing images that might make people uncomfortable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed we do need to feel uncomfortable. And we need to understand that it isn’t just trucks that are being blown up in Iraq, or even our own soldiers for that matter.
\n
\nShortly after the invasion, I searched American newspapers in vain for information on Iraqi civilian casualties. I found very little. By contrast, European newspapers and the BBC did a much better job talking about the death toll among non-combatants. Americans, it seemed, would rather not know.<\/p>\n

Even now, the primary organization attempting to keep a tally of civilian deaths in Iraq is British. (That number, by the way, has been documented to be somewhere between 83,000-91,000<\/a>.) <\/p>\n

Here’s a link<\/a> to the photo. As I said, it’s not easy to look at. Do it anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Morbo No one likes to see photographs of dying 2-year-old children. But when those children are dying because of a war your country started without justification, a war that has since gone horribly awry, sometimes it’s necessary to see photos like that — so you understand the gravity of the situation. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}