----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 1:24 PM
Subject: [unioNews] Bush can't hide from the casualties of the war


<H3>Bush can't hide from the casualties of the war</H3>
Andrew Rosenthal
Saturday, November 15, 2003

NEW YORK
One of the most enduring memories from the funeral of my friend
Michael Kelly, who was killed covering the war in Iraq for Atlantic
Monthly, was standing by his open grave in a cemetery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, watching an army officer in dress uniform make his way
through the cold, persistent drizzle and up the small hill to
Michael's wife and boys.

He spoke to the family quietly and then got down on one knee on the
wet artificial turf that had been placed there in a vain attempt to
shield the mourners from the earth. He gave the boys a flag and a
medal.

Michael Kelly was brash and brave, but distinctly unmilitary. Yet the
army took pains to make this simple gesture that drove home the way
the military honors death: It endows that inescapable but inescapably
tragic part of their lives with a sense of moment, of ceremony and
dignity, and most of all it faces death squarely and honestly.

This is a central part of the warrior's culture, but it is all too
often missing from the way President George W. Bush is running the
Iraq war. As the toll nears 400, the casualties remain largely
invisible. Apart from a flurry of ceremonies on Veterans Day, this
White House has done everything it can to keep Bush away from the
families of the dead, at least when there might be a camera around.

The wounded, thousands of them, are even more carefully screened from
the public. And the Pentagon has continued its ban on media coverage
of the return of flag-draped coffins to Dover Air Force Base in
Delaware, denying the dead soldiers and their loved ones even that
simple public recognition of sacrifice. General Richard Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained rather lamely that
the ban had been in place since 1991 - when another President Bush
wanted to avoid the juxtaposition of his face and words with pictures
of soldiers' coffins.

Some Republicans say it would take up too much of the president's
time to attend funerals or meet the coffins returning from
Iraq. "They're coming back continually," the conservative commentator
Bay Buchanan said on CNN on Tuesday. "The president cannot be flying
up there every single week."

But someone of rank from the White House could and should be at each
and every military funeral. Ideally, Bush would shake the hand of
someone who loved every person who dies in uniform - a small demand
on his time in a war in which the casualties are still relatively
small. And he has more than enough advisers, Cabinet secretaries and
other officials so attending funerals should not be such an
inconvenience.

The White House talks about preserving the privacy and dignity of the
families of the war dead. But if this was really about the families,
the president or Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld would be handing flags to widows and mothers in the
time-honored way. And if protecting the privacy of Americans who are
suffering was such a priority, the White House wouldn't call in the
cameras to watch Bush embracing victims of every hurricane,
earthquake or suburban California wildfire.

Along with the coverage of these casualties, the coverage of combat
in Iraq has virtually ceased. The "embedded" correspondents who
reported on the stunningly swift march to Baghdad during the invasion
are gone. The Pentagon has ended the program. The ever-upbeat
Rumsfeld likes to say that the attacks on American soldiers are brief
and relatively few in number, compared with the number of men in arms
in the field in Iraq. But without real news coverage, it's hard to
know the truth.

Letters from American soldiers who have died in Iraq, published
Tuesday on The New York Times Op-Ed page, suggest that Rumsfeld's
accounting may be highly selective. Shortly before he died on June
17, Private Robert Frantz wrote this to his mother: "We've had random
gunfire within a 100-meter radius all night, every night, since I
have been here. It kinda scares you the first couple nights, but you
tend to get used to it."

The idea of a slow, painful and bloody holding action in which
gunfire is a nightly occurrence contrasts sharply, perhaps too
sharply for comfort, with the display of overwhelming force, low
casualties and swift conclusions that Bush and Rumsfeld put on in the
spring. The administration undoubtedly feels that showing coffins on
television or having the president attend funerals would undermine
public support for the war. (The ban on covering the arrival of
coffins at Dover was in effect during the popular Afghanistan war,
but was not enforced.) That seems like more of an acknowledgment of
how fragile that support is than any poll yet taken.

The Bush administration hates comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam,
and many are a stretch. But there is a lesson that this president
seems not to have learned from Vietnam. You cannot hide casualties.
Indeed, trying to do so probably does more to undermine public
confidence than any display of a flag-draped coffin. And there is at
least one direct parallel. Thirty-five years ago, at the height of
the Vietnam War, the Pentagon took to shipping bodies into the United
States in the dead of night to avoid news coverage.

***
The writer is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times.

 Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune






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