THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Hiding behind the headlines

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, Oct. 21-27, 2007

There has been a not so subtle shift in the reporting by major press outlets on the war in Iraq. Reports of daily violence are slipping into the background. This Sunday the New York Times emphasized a U.S. army school. Its front page Week In Review featured a long article on the fate of cats in Baghdad. We are being treated to stories on golfing, the use of the internet, and soldiers calling home.

After the claims by General Petraeus that the surge is working and an analysis of the shifting figures used to record the daily level of violence in Iraq, skepticism has disappeared.

Instead a much more sinister pattern is emerging. The costs of this surge in the lives of Iraqis and Americans are being buried under the all too familiar phrase of “collateral damage.“ Or the daily violence is hidden inside other stories.

Last week a Coalition press release described an operation that this week killed 19 "Al Qaeda fighters," a term the military is using as a catch-all. It then said, "Civilian deaths in the operation were six women and nine children in addition to the injury of one woman and three children." The deaths of those 15 women and children were reported, but in a way that attracted little attention. It is a practice that has been repeated time and time again over the past four years.

On Tuesday, October 16 there were no major stories in the New York Times about Iraq. Instead we find the daily toll hidden in the end of an article entitled ‘Turkey Seeks Authority to Chase Kurdish Rebels in Iraq.” Without any indication to the reader, the story shifts to a litany of loss and death.

The statement that “An American soldier was killed in southern Baghdad and three others were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded” is followed by an announcement of the capture of four people believed to be responsible for a rocket attack on Camp Victory where two people were killed and 38 were wounded. Then Shiite forces attacked bases run by Polish, American and Iraqi forces with mortar fire. Five Iraqi civilians were killed and 27 wounded. Two American soldiers were also wounded. In Salahuddin Province a suicide bomber struck a checkpoint set up by Iraqi Police and Sunni Arab tribesmen. The bomb killed six people and wounded eight. In Baghdad a car bomb killed three people in a neighborhood and five more unidentified bodies were found.

Thus, reported as routinely as the weather, we learn that in a few days 55 Iraqis, many of them women and children, were killed, another 77 wounded. One American soldier died, as did an Iraqi journalist working for the Washington Post, and five soldiers were wounded.

Along with the shift away from reporting the horrific violence that continues every day, a new phrase had emerged to describe the insurgents. Without ever attributing specific acts to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, news accounts are beginning to suggest that they are the largest resistance force. They are usually described as “a homegrown extremist group whose leadership has foreign ties,” thus implying repeatedly that the violence in Iraq is really directed by Iran.

This shift away from reporting on the toll it is taking for us to remain an army of occupation is designed to create the illusion of control at precisely the moment when the entire region has moved to a level of instability that sets the stage for greater U.S. military engagement.

There is no such thing as winning an occupation. We cannot hide from what is being done in our name.

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