Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated
Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from
the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.”
Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital.
As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it showed the true horrors of this war.
Neither side is immune from the killing of Iraqi civilians. But
Americans should be aware of their own responsibility for inflicting
death and pain on the innocent.
The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said about 20 readers complained
about the photo, while a few readers praised the Post for publishing
the stark picture on Page One.
Some mothers said they were offended that their children might see the
picture, though one wonders whether their youngsters watch television
and play with violent videogames in a pretend world.
From the start of the unprovoked U.S. “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq
on March 20, 2003, the government tried to bar the news media from
photographing flag-draped coffins of American soldiers returning from
Iraq. A Freedom of Information lawsuit forced the government to release
pictures of returning coffins.
Howell said some readers felt the photo of the Iraqi boy was “an
anti-war statement; some thought it was in poor taste.” Well, so is war.
Howell said her boss, executive editor Len Downie, “is cautious about
such photos.” “We have seldom been able to show the human impact of the
fighting on Iraqis,” Downie was quoted as saying. “We decided this was
a rare instance in which we had a powerful image with which to do so.”
It’s unclear to me why this was deemed to be “rare.” After five years
of war, there is finally one photo that is supposed to say it all?
Howell said she checked hundreds of U.S. front pages on the Internet, but saw the AP photo nowhere else.
This makes me wonder why the media have shied away from telling the
story about Iraqi civilian casualties. Journalists and editors were
more courageous during the Vietnam War. What are they afraid of now?
Who can forget the shocking picture of the little Vietnamese girl running down a road, aflame from a napalm attack?
And who can forget the picture of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen
Ngoc Loan putting a gun to the temple of a young member of the Viet
Cong and executing him on a Saigon street?
I don’t remember any American outcry against the press for showing the
horror of war when these photographs were published. Were we braver
then? Or maybe more conscience-stricken?
Of course, the Pentagon did not enjoy such images’ coming out of Saigon
in that era. Most Americans found them appalling, as further evidence
of our misbegotten venture in Vietnam. Americans rallied to the streets
in protest, and eventually persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to give
up his dreams of re-election in 1968.
Some Americans believe the media were to blame for the U.S. defeat in
Vietnam. Nonsense. Johnson knew the war was unwinnable, especially
after the 1968 Tet Offensive and the request by Army Gen. William
Westmoreland for 200,000 more troops in addition to the 500,000 already
in Vietnam.
The Pentagon made a command decision after the Vietnam War to get
better control of the dissemination of information in future wars. This
led then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to create an office of
disinformation at the start of the Iraqi War. It was later disbanded
after howls from the media.
More recently we have seen the Pentagon’s propaganda efforts take the
form of carefully coaching retired generals about how to spin the Iraq
War when they appear on television as alleged military experts. The New
York Times’ revelations about these pet generals have cast a pall over
their reputations.
Too often in this war, the news media seem to have tried to shield the
public from the suffering it has brought to Americans and Iraqis.
It’s not the job of the media to protect the nation from the reality of
war. Rather, it is up to the media to tell the people the truth. They
can handle it.
Helen Thomas can be reached at 202-263-6400 or at the e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com.
