Global Policy Forum

By James Wolcott*

Runaway brides, celebrity trials, Laura Bush's stand-up act—the media would rather cover anything other than the unrelenting carnage in Iraq. So, although the flow of U.S. body bags is starting to hit home, Americans are still numb to the far greater agony the war has unleashed on the Iraqi people.

They're blowin' this town all to hell. —Bo Hopkins in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).

What a weekend it was. So much happening. Streets humming with activity. On Thursday, April 28, after intense negotiation and backroom thumb-wrestling, the Iraqi interim government finally formed a Cabinet, including (or should it be "starring"?) Ahmad Chalabi, international man of intrigue, as acting oil minister. Marring that hopeful day were the combat deaths of six Iraqis and five U.S. soldiers. That was just the teaser for T.G.I.F. and a weekend of ultra-violence. The four-day death toll was 120. The bad news didn't go uncovered Stateside. Carnage that mini-volcanic couldn't.

But on Monday, as more bombs cratered across Iraq, the Washington press whistled a merry tune, tickled pink by Laura Bush's stand-up comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Association gala roast that weekend, when she "stunned and delighted" (marveled the New York Daily News) the tuxes and gowns of the Beltway elite with finely crafted hokum about her husband trying to milk a horse, conking out early for bed, leaving the First Lady sexually bereft ("Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife"), and exorcising his castration anxieties by butchering the nearest vestige of nature ("George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw—which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well"). A Freudian fiesta that walked a fine line of naughty-but-nice, Laura Bush's steel-magnolia monologue captivated the nabobs in attendance and pundits viewing at home, who crowned her the new Domestic Goddess of Comedy, the Roseanne of the Rose Garden. But as The Nation's Washington editor, David Corn, observed in his blog, there was a notable omission that lustrous night: neither she nor her husband acknowledged the presence and sacrifice of Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even at this annual roast, it is traditional for the president or his proxy to tender "a serious sentiment" at the conclusion, but not this year. It signifies because it was not an isolated oversight, Corn continued. "Two nights earlier at Bush's first primetime news conference in a year, Bush said nothing about the Americans risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not a word of thanks. Not a word of tribute for those recently killed in action." David Corn seems to have been the only reporter in the room who recognized the salience of what wasn't being said. Everyone else was too busy being bubbly for the C-SPAN cameras.

It is no doubt a reductive fallacy to anthropomorphize the media—to personalize them as an individual with a quick mind, a padded ego, a shallow depth, and a professional case of A.D.D. Yet watching the news, reading the op-ed columns, and snorkeling the Internet, one gets the impression that Mr. Media—let's not kid ourselves, the media are white-middle-aged-male-dominated at the executive level—would be much happier if Iraq would resolve itself or, better yet, go away … recede like Afghanistan into the hazy distance, reduced to three column inches on page A18. It's hard for cable-news networks to amp up the umpteenth American soldier killed by a roadside explosive or another bushel of Iraqi recruits blown to scatteration when it's so much juicier chasing the latest "Amber Alert" for an abducted white girl, choppering over a tense hostage standoff, or swarming the hot celebrity trial that's inciting Nancy Grace to spit tacks at any defense lawyer who dares defend his or her client (you know, just on the quaint off chance that the bozo might be innocent). When Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II took turns dying and eclipsing other news, Mr. Media was able to put Iraq on the back of the shelf, behind the canned peas. Once the eulogies were completed, however, Iraq re-inserted itself into the news with an intensified round of bombings marking new coordinates in chaos. So dispiriting. John Tierney, the latest subtraction by addition to the New York Times op-ed page, proposed that this bad-news hydrant burst be plugged by responsible editors exercising restraint. The shock-horror emphasis on car bombings created a distorted picture of the occupation and monopolized the energies of reporters, preventing them from covering other stories, he contended. "I'm not advocating official censorship, but there's no reason the news media can't reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world's dangers."

It's Tierney who's overplaying the car bombings. The truth is, Americans have been exposed to a diminishing picture of the human destruction in Iraq. As Sydney Schanberg wrote in The Village Voice, "Yes, some photos of such bloodshed have been published at times over the span of this war. But they have become sparser and sparser, while the casualty rate has stayed the same or, frequently, shot higher." This reticence reeks of bad faith. "If we believe that the present war in Iraq is just and necessary, why do we shrink from looking at the damage it wreaks? … And why, in response, have newspapers gone along with Washington and grown timid about showing photos of the killing and maiming?" Because, post-9/11, news editors and producers have been tiptoeing like ballerinas to avoid offending the Pentagon and the Oval Office, afraid of making a dreadful faux pas. While it's awfully decent of Tierney not to advocate official censorship (which would be like a watchdog requesting a muzzle), journalistic self-censorship may be more pernicious than government censorship. At least the latter is honestly motivated by the dishonest self-interest of our elected chiselers to deceive the citizenry and get away with grand larceny. But the pale, apprehensive, hand-wringing, soul-searching self-censorship of editors and publishers trying to measure just how much unpalatable truth can be doled out to the public without upsetting their delicate digestive system serves no one's interest, not even their own. You might as well put Charlie Brown in charge.

Mr. Media's inclination to avert his eyes involves more than protecting the precious sensibilities of American viewers and denying the terrorists free publicity. Mr. Media prefers packaging conflicts as if they followed the classical unities of drama with a linear beginning, middle, end, and coda. The occupation of Iraq refuses to follow the playbook. "The shooting script" (to quote from Tamara Lipper and Howard Fineman's Newsweek story) that Bush put into production with the invasion of Iraq has gone wildly overbudget and out of control. No matter how dutifully the Bush Tabernacle Choir recites the "Democracy on the March" catechism, the story line for Iraq has broken down, centrifugally spun off, splintered. With Iraq, there's no end in sight, no off-ramp from the killer highway, not even a coherent middle to sustain the narrative until a new ending can be cobbled together. Where's the payoff, where are the upbeat stories? Fox News nearly herniates itself straining for a silver lining to each bolt of bad news (watching Ollie North interview the troops makes North Korean propaganda look sophisticated) and seizing upon each climactic episode from the siege of Fallujah to Operation Matador as a possible turning point in the war. They and their cable rivals trot out the same glue-factory stable of retired officers to do their "we're taking it to the enemy" General Patton impression. Yet each turning point proves as illusory as the last. How many turning points does it take before it becomes clear you're trapped in a maze?

Optimists had cause to sigh with relief following the January elections, when Iraqis braved the slaughterhouse of the streets to anoint their fingers with purple ink and exercise the right to vote. The subsequent "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, which brought People Power into the plazas of Beirut, inspired some headline writers and Rodin thinkers to mutter the musical question "Was Bush right?," to which Charles Krauthammer crowed, Yea. "The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush doctrine. First, that the will to freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. And second, that American intentions were sincere. Contrary to the cynics, Arab and European and American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony, after all, but for liberation—a truth that on Jan. 31 even al-Jazeera had to televise." Doubting Thomases shed their doubts. National Review published a cover story by editor Rich Lowry—who earlier had composed a gloomy sonata called "What Went Wrong?"—where he reversed his original verdict and proclaimed, "We're winning." What had gone wrong had been heroically righted. "It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq," Lowry declared, his apostasy based upon interviews with "administration officials and key combatant commanders" who shared their hard-won wisdom and impeccable objectivity on the lessons they had learned from their early mistakes, and how they successfully adjusted.

Seconding Lowry's battlefield assessment with a bit more hem and haw were a pair of American reporters just back from Iraq, who likewise saw the sky brightening above the smoke plumes. On Meet the Press, Dexter Filkins, of The New York Times, and NBC's Jim Miklaszewski briefed Tim Russert with a progress report. "I think it's better," Filkins told Russert. "The level of violence, the number of attacks against American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers is down. The number of Iraqi recruits into the security services is way up. So at the moment, things are feeling a little better." Miklaszewski lamented the lag in reconstruction, but relayed that American troop morale was high and the insurgents had suffered major setbacks in Fallujah and Baghdad. Less blue-sky in his outlook was Patrick Cockburn of Britain's The Independent, who in an interview with the leftist newsletter CounterPunch claimed that the U.S. had lost the trust of the Iraqis—"antipathy" to the occupation was, apart from the Kurds, "universal." By Cockburn's count, 38 different organizations had claimed credit for attacks in Iraq, but U.S. authorities insisted on attributing super-villain powers to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the region's terrorist mastermind and kingpin. Cockburn: "Why is there a water shortage? It's Zarqawi. Why does my toothpaste taste different? Zarqawi strikes again!" (Zarqawi promotes tooth decay.)

Even when I have traveled in the Shi'a areas, often after a bomb directed at say police recruits, people I speak to around the site say, "Why are they attacking Iraqis like this, why don't they kill Americans instead?" The first part of the sentence often appears on American television. The second part, very seldom, is ever mentioned. —Patrick Cockburn, interviewed in CounterPunch (April 1–15, 2005).

Able to view events in Iraq only in flashes and snapshots, neither optimists nor pessimists are able to present a wide-screen montage of the unfolding saga. Interpretation becomes artful piecemeal work. But one thing upon which optimists and pessimists agree is that it's chancy getting from Point A to Point B in Iraq without Point C being a slab in the morgue. Cockburn described sitting in the back of an unwashed car with grimy windows obscuring the identities of those seated inside, and even that provides no guarantee against gunfire. "You see people being killed merely because they don't understand American hand signals for directing traffic, which look like somebody giving signals to the deaf. But it's not obvious to Iraqis, nor is it obvious to someone like me, as to what the American soldiers are directing you to do. But you get it wrong and you get shot." Loitering also can get you bushwhacked. Miklaszewski: "Even when you're accompanied by large numbers of American troops, if you're in one place for longer than 10 minutes, they start to get nervous, and they say, 'Let's get this over with and move on,' because word gets out very quickly who's where and how vulnerable they may be." The most dangerous move-on, according to Filkins, is the drive to the Baghdad airport on "the Road of Death," a no-man's strip so Mad Max that the fare can run $35,000, though presumably the tip is included. Beyond Baghdad, Iraq is badland country, apart from the Kurdish provinces. Every visiting American dignitary establishes land-speed records getting in and out of their destinations for fear the Iraqi Welcome Wagon will be loaded with R.P.G.'s. When Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick toured Fallujah, where the insurgency had been supposedly squashed, he had to retract his head into his turtle shell, according to The Washington Post. "Zoellick, who wore body armor under his suit jacket, was told by military commanders that he could not leave his armored Humvee because of security concerns during the lightning tour of the shattered downtown. His heavily armored motorcade briefly paused so that he and others could gaze at a revived water treatment plant—within view of the bridge over the Euphrates River where the charred bodies of American civilian contractors were hung after they were ambushed a year ago. The motorcade then moved so quickly past an open-air bakery reopened with a U.S.-provided micro-loan that workers tossing dough could be glanced only in the blink of an eye."

"I swear to God nothing has changed," complains Kheir Allah, selling soft drinks on a nearby, garbage-strewn street.… A despondent female customer interrupts: "There's just a river of blood and we walk on it." —Andrew England, "Iraqis Wait for Better Days That Never Come," Financial Times (May 3, 2005).

At least American soldiers stationed in Iraq have been seen, heard, and shown fleetingly in combat on the news, and had their travails witnessed in print by exemplary reporters such as Ellen Knickmeyer of The Washington Post. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, the cable newsers make a big heart-shaped fuss over holiday greetings exchanged through video linkups from troops in the field and the families gathered in the living room back home. But of the liberated, occupied, afflicted, battered-to-despair Iraqi people, Americans see and hear and, worst of all, care almost nothing. The Iraqis might as well be digitized extras in a Hollywood epic, scurrying in the wide-screen background and being massacred en masse as some tanned specimen of all-American man-steak is heroically positioned in the foreground, giving orders to the lesser-paid stars in his squad as if he had just teleported in from the Battle of Thermopylae. Apart from an occasional dispatch (such as a CNN report on May 13), the ongoing agony of the Iraqi people is the huge, tragic unmentionable in the televised war coverage. Sydney Schanberg again: "Can you recall the last time your hometown newspaper ran a picture spread of these human beings lying crumpled at the scene of the slaughter?" It doesn't seem to dawn on our pundits and leaders that when two dozen Iraqi police recruits are murdered by a car bomb it sends a shock wave through entire communities, leaving untold grieving widows, parents, siblings, children, friends, and co-workers behind to nurse their pain and rage. Imagine the impact it would have if 50 police or army recruits were wiped out over the course of a week in this country. Now imagine 50 dying every single week with no relief in sight and tell me the U.S. wouldn't be suffering a national nervous breakdown. But the Iraqi dead are discounted as the Price of Democracy. If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice harbored any semblance of shame beneath their aluminum-foil Vulcan armor, they would fall to their knees to express sorrow and beg forgiveness from the Iraqi people, even though Cheney might need help rising to his feet again. But of course they never will. They will continue to brazen it out, abetted by a milquetoast Mr. Media.

Ignoring our own dead is a trickier proposition. Despite the Bush administration's strenuous sanitation campaign to keep the war Over There, sealed off behind news blackouts of flag-draped coffins and military funerals, the truth is slowly seeping in Over Here, drop by bloody drop. There has been a slow saturation effect of the impact of the fatalities and severely wounded on families and friends, and the seepage of bad news from Iraq through soldiers' e-mails; growing anger over the poor planning of the occupation, lack of armor, and extended misuse of National Guard reserve units; mounting worry over where it will all end. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, half of the country now believes that the Bush administration deliberately misled—shorter word, lied—about the danger of Iraq's W.M.D. And according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 57 percent also believe that the war wasn't worth it, a damning statistic. Blowback from Afghanistan and Iraq is already dropping dead bodies on the doorstep at home. A startling front-page story in USA Today revealed an epidemic of fatal collisions involving returning soldiers moonlighting as reckless drivers. "From October 2003 to September 2004, when troops first returned in large numbers from Iraq, 132 soldiers died in vehicle accidents—a 28% jump from the previous 12 months. Two-thirds of them were veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan." And the roadkill was accumulating. "In the past seven months, 80 soldiers died in vehicle accidents—a 23% increase from the same period a year earlier. Four out of five were veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars." One psychiatrist attributed this daredevil driving to a testosterone infusion of invincibility feeding a need for speed in young men who dodged the Grim Reaper overseas and feel that nothing can harm them now—they've acquired Survivor-challenge immunity. So they buy "crotch rocket" motorbikes and muscle cars and straighten out curved roads like Steve McQueen in Bullitt until the odds catch up with them and a trail of burned rubber leads to a J. G. Ballard impact site of twisted metal, shattered glass, mangled flesh. This mode of obliteration is of no small psychological portent. Having come home from a convulsive theater of war exploding with car bombs, scores of American soldiers are flooring the gas pedal as if converting their own cars into mobile bombs. Their deaths here are a macabre mimickry of the terrorists' tactic. Some of the ghoulish crashes sound more like a death wish on adrenaline than euphoric abandon, as if the drivers were being pursued by furies—or seeing them charging toward them. One army staff sergeant, a veteran of Afghanistan undergoing a nasty divorce and being treated with antidepressants, may have reached the snapping point when he was set to be shipped to Iraq, which would have meant missing the birth of the child he had fathered with his girlfriend. He hopped into the girlfriend's S.U.V. and smashed into a parking lot of new cars at nearly 90 miles an hour, dying instantly. "He didn't lose control," a local detective said. "He just went right straight through."

Everyone's in a hurry, even those who have had enough. Iraq has been called "Vietnam on crack," and the similarities are plentiful, down to the buffed-up premises for war (the Gulf of Tonkin then, W.M.D. now), the body counts, the peekaboo enemy ("'Where the [expletive] are these guys?' Maj. Kei Braun exclaimed in frustration"—Ellen Knickmeyer, reporting on Operation Matador), and the stale vocabulary ("quagmire," "winning hearts and minds," "cut and run"). But emotionally Iraq doesn't feel like Vietnam. It doesn't feel like anything. It's like a phantom limb that doesn't ache. There's little of the anguish and anger that boiled in the 60s, few protest marches, only minor agitation in Congress (which approves every supplemental-funding bill for a war that was supposed to be self-financing), no social fissures opening up between opponents and supporters; everyone inhabits the same gray zone of resignation to whatever the outcome may be.

When someone addresses the war with candor and outrage, it seems to violate the Geneva Conventions of the mind of which George Orwell wrote. On May 17, George Galloway, British member of Parliament and a ferocious opponent of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, used the witness chair at Senator Norm Coleman's subcommittee investigating the oil-for-food scandal to turn the tables and hold in contempt Coleman, Rumsfeld, and the Beltway's war-hawk lobby. He railed with such eloquent, unrelenting, unwavering, concentrated, righteous magnum force that the senators were reduced to ashen figures by his flesh-and-blood intensity. So unprepared and unaccustomed were they to hearing a hot serving of unadulterated disrespect and mocking irony that they didn't know how to respond other than to sit there and hope their heads didn't fall off. Even more fascinating than the post-electroshock daze on the senators' mugs was the discomfort of our demure press corps afterward. It seemed to make them queasy, hearing the safety lock taken off the truth. On Charlie Rose that evening, Warren Hoge of The New York Times sensed misgivings among the Americans with whom he had watched the show over Galloway's bite and vitriol. Hoge's gauzy manner made it evident that these were qualms he shared. "There is a certain tradition in American politics and also with the American press, where we are very polite to public figures. And here was a guy, George Galloway, insulting a U.S. senator." I'm trying to recall how tactfully polite the press was to Bill Clinton and am drawing a blank, so it must be a fairly recent tradition. Praise Allah that we have Mr. Media around to hush those with the poor taste to raise their voices over a war fought under false pretenses—lest they cry bloody murder.

James Wolcott, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, monitors the Zeitgeist on his popular blog, jameswolcott.com. His most recent book is Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants (Miramax).