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The Bodies Come Home
Administration sweeps American casualties in Iraq under the rug
By Sydney H. Schanberg
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- A member of an honor guard holds an American flag as he waits for the funeral of US Army Sergeant First Class Wilbert Davis at Arlington National Cemetery. Davis was an early casualty of the war in Iraq.
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If that's the concern Bush has, he could select another approach. He could go to funerals as he chooses, to honor the dead properly -- but do it privately, with security but without the press. That's probably how he should have handled his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, to avoid the media bickering that ensued over which reporters were chosen for the trip and other matters of grave national security. If he wished, he could have taken the White House photographer instead and distributed a few pictures to the press afterward.
The president has already employed the no-press route on some occasions. On November 24, at Fort Carson, Colorado, he met privately with the families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq. We have been told also that he has made phone calls and written to other families who have suffered losses. A Knight Ridder story by Joseph Galloway in August reported that Bush had made a couple of private visits to the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
My guess about the Thanksgiving trip is that his handlers wanted the press along because it was an upbeat, emotional occasion and good for the president's approval rating. In other words, it wasn't a funeral.
When other countries with troops there, such as Spain or Italy, lose soldiers or diplomats or intelligence officers in explosions or suicide bombings or ambushes, the bodies go home to state funerals attended by monarchs and prime ministers. But then it's not really Italy's or Spain's war. And the rise or fall of their regimes is not likely to pivot on casualties in Iraq.
But in the United States of America, no matter from what vantage you examine the Iraq war, you are drawn inexorably back to the casualties. The numbers don't compare to the tolls in Vietnam or Korea, but clearly, the Bush White House did not expect fatalities in the hundreds after "major combat" was declared over on May 1. The "planners" simply did not anticipate an insurgency this fierce. They did not prepare. In fact, it's worth recalling that some of them said things before the war that made the aftermath of the invasion and military victory sound almost like a walk in the park. Now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges it will be "a long, hard slog."
As the slog continues, so will the combat deaths and the wounds that maim, changing lives and families forever. And though the statistics don't rival those from earlier wars, technology and globalization have sucked us into a 24-hour news cycle. So the spilled blood in each incident will be repeated over and over during a single cycle. And then comes the next day and another cycle with a new session of rocket-propelled grenades or remote-controlled IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) -- and more casualties. It's news, because it's happening to real people, and, regardless of President Bush's religious sincerity or the merit of his war arguments, these deaths and maimings should not be relegated to the back pages of our newspapers.
The president should try to keep in mind that a year ago, when he was selling this war, he and his coterie, in their certitude about the necessity of invading Iraq, felt they had to do a lot of fact-spinning and distortion to persuade Congress and the voters to get behind it. Now those who answered their commander in chief's call to war are dying. He should go to the funerals.
Sydney H. Schanberg is a staff writer at The Village Voice, where this story originally appeared. In 1976, Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his reporting on the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge.
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