The Unseen War

24 August 2005 |permalink | email article

On Monday, President Bush hailed the sacrifice of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and vowed, in his first reference to the number of American deaths, that the nation owed it to the more than 2,000 Americans killed so far in the two wars not to end their mission prematurely.

The president never mentions the grim reality of the wounded in both wars, conservatively estimated at far more than 15,000.

Despite his premature assertion about a new Iraqi constitution that will guarantee women’s rights and freedom of religion, W.‘s message was clear: deflect rising concern about the U.S. role in the Middle East.

Republican Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, with two Purple Hearts and other honors for serving in Vietnam, reiterated his position that the U.S. must develop a strategy to leave Iraq.

Craig Mitchell, in Editor&Publisher this week, was more blunt:

“At this critical moment, it’s time for newspapers—many of whom helped get us into this war—to use their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands. Now, it’s literally do-or-die time.”

Yesterday, Salon.com illustrated the raw power of the unseen war with a chilling photo.

It shows injured U.S. soldiers, lying in stretchers on a cargo plane, its interior lights red because of an attack, before taking off to Germany from a base in Balad, Iraq, Nov. 13, 2004.

Wrote Salon’s Gary Kamiya:

“This is a war the Bush Administration does not want Americans to see. From the beginning, the U.S. government has attempted to censor information about the Iraq war, prohibiting photographs of coffins of U.S. troops returning home and refusing as a matter of policy to track the number of the number of Iraqis who have been killed. President Bush has yet to attend a single funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq.”

Body bags aside, whether one grieves with Cindy Sheehan or denounces her as aiding terrorists, it is the severely wounded in a premature rush to war who matter now - the wounded Bush is not anxious to publicly acknowledge in the unseen war.

858