The Ming Report

THE FACE OF WAR

April 8, 2004 - There has been a sea change in the media coverage of the war in Iraq. It began with the pictures of the roasted bodies hanging from the girders of Fallujah Bridge. It continued this morning with bleeding marines scrambling out of their burning tank. America is seeing their sons and daughters under fire and taking casualties for the first time. A still photo from Ramallah shows a marine carrying the bagged body of his comrade. Another showed us corpsmen rushing the wounded toward an evacuating helicopter. No longer are the images confined to those sanitized scenes of advancing vehicles firing at an unseen enemy that flowed from embedded journalists a year ago. America is beginning to see the ugly face of its war.

It is not Vietnam’s Five-O’clock War. The world has changed in thirty years. We no longer wait for film to be processed, edited and flown around the world to a news studio. The images come to us from Baghdad with only a seven second delay. The film from Saigon was yesterday’s news – or that of the day before. In our 24 hour saturation news cycle we are seeing today’s events within hours if not minutes.

Neither is it the embedded war of a year ago, with coverage as carefully planned as the campaign to show America the relentless advance of its armies across the desert. With television’s ravenous hunger for video to fill its hours, pictures of the chaos that is occupied Iraq flow in a continuous stream to fill our screens. In the last week Iraq has become the ultimate in Reality TV coming to you almost live and as it happens.

We see Iraqis brandishing Kalashnikovs and shouting defiance. We see relief convoys headed for Fallujah, thousands of Iraqis to support their countrymen locked in a besieged city. We see the resistance firing rocket propelled grenades toward a marine column and we see American blood and American death on our television screens. That reality emerging from our television screens is a stark contrast with the spokesmen speaking soothing words in Baghdad and Washington. We see that the events on the ground are not mere bumps in the road on the way to June 30. It is all evidence that the mission is not accomplished and the resistance is not a small coterie of Saddamist loyalists and foreign terrorists as we have been told since last May 1st. We are seeing a proud and unbowed people wanting their country back and willing to die to get it.

Each of us, depending upon our memories, our personalities, and experiences in life, take our own message from the scenes that we see. For some of us it is an eerie reminder of our youth. For others it is a mystery how, faced with the overwhelming power of the American machine, a lightly armed rabble could presume to challenge the world’s pre-eminent array of military might. Still others see a test of wills and some see a portent of failure. Whatever is the message that we take we are being shown the face of war, misshapen and distorted, inhuman and terrible. We are being shown the hell into which we have descended.