Iraq war

“War is hell,” said Gen. Sherman, and everyone dutifully agrees. Yet the hell in Iraq is almost never shown. The few exceptions — the charred bodies of American contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah, the blood-spattered little girl wailing after her parents were killed next to her — only prove the rule.

Governments keep war hidden because it is hideous. To allow citizens to see its reality — the shattered bodies, the wounded children, the incomprehensible mayhem — is to risk eroding popular support for it. This is particularly true with wars that have less than overwhelming popular support to begin with. In the case of Vietnam, battlefield images played an important role in turning the tide of public opinion. And in Iraq, a war whose official justification has turned out to be false, and which a majority of the American people now believe to have been a mistake, the administration would prefer that these grim images never be seen.

But the media is also responsible for sanitizing the Iraq war, at times rendering it almost invisible. Most American publications have been reluctant to run graphic war images. Almost no photographs of the 1,868 U.S. troops who have been killed to date in Iraq have appeared in U.S. publications. In May 2005, the Los Angeles Times surveyed six major newspapers and the nation’s two leading newsmagazines, and found that over a six-month period, no images of dead American troops appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time or Newsweek. A single image of a covered body of a slain American ran in the Seattle Times. There were also comparatively few images of wounded Americans. The publications surveyed tended to run more images of dead or wounded Iraqis, but they have hardly been depicted in large numbers either.

There are a number of reasons why the media has shied away from running graphic images from Iraq. Some are simple logistics: There are very few photographers in Iraq. Freelance reporter and photographer Mitchell Prothero, a Salon contributor, estimates there are “maybe a dozen or two Western photographers” in Iraq, in addition to Iraqi and Arab stringers, who do most of the work for newswires. Ten or 20 photographers trying to cover a country the size of Sweden, under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, are unlikely to be on the scene when violence erupts.

Moreover, most photographers are embedded with U.S. troops, a situation that imposes its own limits. Military regulations prevent photographers from publishing photographs of dead or wounded soldiers until their families have been notified, which can diminish the news value of the photographs. And although embed rules allow photographers to take pictures of dead or wounded troops, the reality on the ground can be different. Soldiers do not want photographers — especially ones they aren’t comfortable with — taking pictures of their dead or wounded buddies. This is understandable, but it can result in de facto censorship.

One photographer, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his ongoing relationship with the U.S. military, told Salon, “I’ve had unit commanders tell me flat out that if anybody gets wounded on patrol, you can’t take any pictures of them. Nearly every time I’ve landed at [a medevac] scene, guys have yelled at me, ‘Get the fuck away from me. Don’t take my friend’s picture. Get back on the helicopter.’ Part of me understands that. I am a stranger to them. And they are very emotional. Their friend has been badly hurt or wounded, and they’ve probably all just been shot at 15 minutes before. I totally understand that, although it is a violation of embed rules.”

But it isn’t just the troops. Editors in the States are reluctant to run graphic photographs. There are various reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is taste: Many publications think graphic images are just too disturbing. Business considerations doubtless also play a role, although few editors would admit that; graphic images upset some readers and can scare off advertisers. (Salon pulled all advertising, except house ads, off the pages of this gallery.) And there are political considerations: Supporters of the war often accuse the media of playing up bad news at the expense of more positive developments. To run images of corpses is to risk being criticized of antiwar bias. When “Nightline” ran photographs of the faces of all the U.S. troops who had been killed in Iraq, conservative groups were enraged and accused the network of harming morale. Not every publisher is anxious to walk into this kind of trouble.

The reluctance of American publications to run shocking images contrasts with the European press. “In my experience and in conversations with other people who’ve been doing this a lot longer than me, American publications shy away from extremely graphic material, compared to European ones,” says Prothero. “I don’t know whether the American audience reacts more strongly against seeing that over the breakfast table. I do know, anecdotally, that many very talented photographers, on staff, have taken pictures that have not run in magazines or newspapers. Maybe it’s not a conscious decision but American publications very much shy away from showing casualties of U.S. troops on the ground. I think they’re afraid the American public will freak out on them for showing dead American boys.”

Photographer Stephanie Sinclair’s unforgettable photograph of a 6-year-old Iraqi girl killed by an American cluster bomb, which appears in the gallery, originally ran in the Chicago Tribune. Robin Daughtridge, the Tribune’s deputy director of photography, told Salon that after the photographs first came in, “the news editor was worried about running them without an accompanying story.” Others in the newsroom thought the photographs “were too graphic, and too much, because we generally don’t run tight pictures of dead bodies. We had run pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers and a dead bus driver before, so there was a precedent for running them, but we don’t take it lightly.” They ended up calling the paper’s editor in chief, Ann Marie Lipinski, who assigned a reporter to do a piece on cluster bombs and their legacy.

Ultimately, Daughtridge said, politics didn’t enter into the decision: “It was more about the fact that if we’re going to show this death up close and personal, we better have a story behind it. All of us in the newsroom are trying to tell the story and letting the readers make up their own minds.” She added, “I felt proud of what we did that day. All of this stuff that you hear about happening to families in Iraq doesn’t really hit home until you see that picture of the little girl.”

For her part, Sinclair praised the Tribune for running the photo and the story. But, she said, “some of the publications I’ve worked for didn’t run a lot of the Iraqi civilian stuff, the graphic pictures, the emotional pictures. I found that the Iraqi civilian story was really hard to get published in U.S. publications. And I worked for many. I don’t know why. I think they’re looking at their readership and they think their readers want to know about American troops, since they can relate to them more. They think that’s what the audience wants.”

Sinclair also noted that American readers and viewers get only a sanitized view of the horrific consequences of suicide bombings. “A lot of the bombing stuff that you see is really toned down. To be honest, sometimes it should be. God, it’s relentless. It’s hard to look at. People have no idea what’s happening in Iraq. You wonder, even as a photographer, if you’re being gratuitous by photographing some of this. At the same time, as horrific as it is to see, people should know how horrific it is to live it every day. We should feel some sort of responsibility to make sure we have the best possible grasp of what’s happening there.”

It is because we believe that the American people are not getting a look at the reality of the Iraq war, for Americans and Iraqis alike, that we decided to run this photo gallery. It is no secret that Salon has published many more pieces questioning and challenging the Iraq war than supporting it. But that is not why we think it is important that these images be seen. We would have run them even if we supported the war. The reason is simple: The truth should be told. People should know the truth about war. Before a nation decides to go to war, it should know what its consequences are.

There is no way for any journalist, whether reporter or photographer, to capture the multifaceted reality of Iraq. But all of the journalists I have spoken to who have worked in Iraq say that the blandly optimistic pronouncements made by the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq are completely false. A picture of a dead child only represents a fragment of the truth about Iraq — but it is one that we do not have the right to ignore. We believe we have an ethical responsibility to those who have been killed or wounded, whether Iraqis, Americans or those of other nationalities, not to simply pretend that their fate never happened. To face the bitter truth of war is painful. But it is better than hiding one’s eyes.

Additional reporting by Kevin Berger, Page Rockwell and Aaron Kinney.

Photo by MARCO DI LAURO/Getty
A U.S. Marine from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, next to the dead body of a suspected insurgent during the ground offensive Nov. 9, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq.

Photo by STEPHANIE SINCLAIR/Chicago Tribune
A mosque employee prepares the body of Lamiamh Ali, 6. Four siblings were playing outside their home in Baghdad when a U.S. cluster bomb exploded. Two of the children died that day and their brother died later as a result of his injuries. Photo taken April 26, 2003

Photo by WATHIQ KHUZAIE/Getty
An injured Iraqi man asks for help at the scene of a car bomb, on June 14, 2004, in Baghdad. A car bomb exploded at rush hour as three civilian sport utility vehicles — the kind favored by Western contractors — passed by one of Baghdad’s most heavily trafficked squares. Dozens were wounded in the blast.

Photo by MITCHELL PROTHERO/ WpN
Ali Abbas, 6, cries in pain from wounds sustained in fighting between U.S. troops and fighters loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Sept. 5, 2004. “I want the American people to see the face of the terrorists they fight,” said his father, Abbas.

Photo by EPA/STEFAN ZAKLIN/Landov
A U.S. soldier lies dead on the kitchen floor of a house used as a base by insurgent fighters in Fallujah, on Saturday, Nov. 13, 2004. The soldier was shot and killed by insurgent fighters when he entered the room. Two other U.S. military personnel were wounded by the insurgents, who escaped.

Photo by EPA/MOHAMMED MESSARA/Landov
Iraqis carry the dead body of a baby killed during U.S. airstrikes against the western city of Fallujah on Thursday, Sept. 9, 2004. At least five Iraqis were killed during the overnight bombardment.

Photo by KARIM SAHIB/Getty
Iraqi soldiers and policemen gather near the remains of an alleged suicide bomber, who blew himself up inside a restaurant in Baghdad on June 19, 2005. Ten Iraqis, including five policemen, died in the attack, an interior ministry source said.

Photo by AP Photo/JOHN MOORE
Army Chaplain Capt. Daoud Agbere, right, a Muslim cleric, prays for an American soldier after he was pronounced dead upon arrival at a military hospital in Baghdad, on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, despite the efforts of Army Nurse supervisor Patrick McAndrew, left, to revive him. The soldier was fatally wounded in a Baghdad firefight with insurgents.

Photo by GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD/Getty
A critically wounded Iraqi civilian lies next to a dead civilian on Sept. 12, 2004, in Haifa Street, in Baghdad. After a U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle was attacked and disabled by a car bomb, a crowd of Iraqi civilians gathered around, including three Arab journalists. A U.S. helicopter then fired a missile into the crowd, killing 13 civilians — including a TV journalist who had just signed off on his report — and wounding as many as 100. Controversy persists over why the helicopter fired: The U.S. military first claimed it was a routine operation to destroy the vehicle, then that the helicopter had come under small-arms fire. Eyewitnesses disputed that claim.

Photo by GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD/Getty
In a photograph taken minutes later, the wounded Iraqi civilian has collapsed. The Bradley fighting vehicle burns in the background.

Photo by BENJAMIN LOWY/Corbis
The unattended bodies of unclaimed Iraqi dead, killed as violence and insecurity lay siege to Baghdad, lie on the floor of a Baghdad hospital morgue, on July 21, 2003.

His death is not just a terrible loss to journalism: it is a loss to America. Even though the United States is at war with two Middle Eastern countries, and stands on the brink of war with a third, most Americans, including our politicians and many so-called “experts,” know almost nothing about it – which is one of the reasons we embarked upon the disastrous Iraq war. Like all great reporters, Shadid penetrated the darkness. He took us not just into streets and cafes, but into hearts and minds. He showed the impact of decisions made by politicians and generals in far-away lands on housewives and young girls and street vendors, on small human beings just trying to live decent lives. He was our eyes.

In his extraordinary 2005 book “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” Shadid wrote about one of those small people, a woman named Karima Salman, and her family. This is from my Salon review of the book:

“Karima, a desperately poor mother of eight, lived in a squalid, cockroach-infested apartment in Baghdad. The first story Shadid tells about her takes place before the war. Most of her family and friends had already fled Baghdad. She was exhausted, lonely, unable to pay the rent, faced with skyrocketing food prices. Her 21-year-old son, Ali, who had been working as a plumber, had been sent north days earlier to man an antiaircraft battery.

At their parting, movingly recounted by Shadid, Karima and Ali simply exchanged the basic phrases of Islam. “There is no God but God,” she told Ali as he boarded a bus. “Muhammad is the messenger of God,” Ali replied, completing the phrase. Her final words to him were prayers of farewell: “God be with you. God protect you.” As she recounted their parting, tears ran down her cheeks. “A mother’s heart rests on her son’s heart,’ she told Shadid. ‘Every hour, I cry for him.”

“Faith for Karima and her family was not a matter of religious zealotry,” Shadid writes. “It was not even piety, really. It gave their lives cadence … It spoke with clarity, offered simplicity, and served as a familiar refuge in troubled times.” As Karima sat with her five daughters on old mattresses on a tile floor and waited for the war to begin, ‘in her voice was the hopelessness that forced so many in the once-proud city to put their faith and future in God’s hands. ‘We only have God,’ she told me. ‘Thanks be to him’ … To Karima, the war that had begun was a play; on its grand stage, people were mere actors. ‘Life’s not good, it’s not bad,’ she told me, as we sipped the bitter coffee. ‘It’s just a play.’”

The fate of small people like Karima and her family, unknown, of no political consequence, is easy to forget as nations rush to war and powerful men plan and redraw maps. “Ordinary people are, as Karima recognized, only pawns on a giant board; if one or one thousand of them are swept off, no one notices.” It is one of the functions of journalism, perhaps the noblest, simply to bear witness to these forgotten ones.

Anthony Shadid bore that witness. He died at the age of 43 on the front lines of his profession, of an asthma attack while reporting inside violence-ravaged Syria. He joins the honored list of reporters who gave their lives to give the world the truth. Every journalist, and every American who cares not just the consequences of American wars, but about humanity, owes him a debt. His loss is incalculable.

Also in Salon, the story of Shadid’s last book: Anthony Shadid yearned for home. 

Any time someone who was the best at something dies, the world shrinks a little bit. It feels smaller today. One part of it especially feels smaller — the world of words. For Christopher Hitchens was a virtuoso of language. As a baby, Mozart supposedly could tell if a violin was microscopically out of tune. I imagine Hitchens lying in his crib, wailing because his mother did not use a subordinate clause in exactly the right way to modulate to her conclusion. He was a rhetorical freak.

Hitchens was one of the great contemporary masters of argumentative prose. He had an unerring sense of logical structure, a maniacally precise gift for the mot juste, a huge frame of intellectual reference, and – this is what really pissed me off as a fellow toiler in the syntactical groves – a seemingly automatic ability to write transitions. He could practically do it in his sleep. A pal of mine once saw him drink an entire bottle of scotch at a dinner party, excuse himself, go upstairs, and come down 45 minutes later having filed a letter-perfect piece. At the absolute top of my game, I might briefly be able to keep up that pace on a stretch of level argumentative ground. But at the first transition, the first time a new idea loomed up like a mountain that had to be navigated around, I would be broken down in the ditch while Hitchens would be speeding off at 100 miles an hour, as debonair as James Bond.

Hitchens was not only virtuoso, he was a fearless virtuoso with a mean streak. This is a scary combination. When he attacked someone, there would not usually be a lot of them left for their next of kin to pick up. But if his combative style was his trademark, he was also capable of writing meandering, discursive, thoughtful essays, pieces driven not just by animus or the desire to dominate but carried on their own imaginative and logical momentum. There was a lot of Mencken, Swift and Orwell in Hitchens, but a little Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne as well. The man had a very large mind, and by all accounts a very large heart as well.

One large question mark hangs over Hitchens’ career. For 10 years, whenever his name comes up, people have asked the same question: Why on earth did Hitchens support the Iraq War? And why did he never recant, even after it had become obvious to all but blind ideologues that the whole thing had been a disaster?

I do not have any personal insight into these questions. I met Hitchens a few times, but did not know him. But it appears that it was precisely Hitchens’ big heart, combined with certain eccentricities of judgment peculiar to those former Marxists that Isaac Deutscher called “inverted Stalinists,” that may have led him to go ideologically off the tracks.

An insightful piece about Hitchens by Salon’s Washington bureau chief Jefferson Morley makes clear that Hitchens’ disenchantment with Marxism, and his increasingly (and ultimately problematic) tendency to see politics in deeply personal terms, were closely related. Like many former Marxists, Hitchens had grown weary of the mental contortions (aka the “dialectic”) required to justify Stalinist/Communist tyranny. Morley points out that for Hitchens, flying in the face of left-liberal orthodoxy to embrace victims of injustice, no matter who their oppressors were, became a touchstone for his own intellectual integrity and honesty. Thus, Hitchens – to the dismay of his colleagues at the Nation, but correctly in my view – agreed with Ronald Reagan that the Soviet Union was an “Evil Empire.” For Hitchens, just because the despised Reagan said something did not mean that it was wrong.

Hitchens’ insistence on taking principled stands, as in his ringing defense of his friend Salman Rushdie against the death sentence handed down by Ayatollah Khomeini, is admirable as far as it goes. The problem is that he took his principled stands to self-defeating extremes. He was so idealistic, so black and white, so Manichaean in his moral judgments, that he ended up supporting political positions antithetical to his own deeply held convictions. For the world of politics and power cannot be negotiated or defined or dealt with purely in ethical terms. It is a world of grays, of compromises, of ugly regimes that must be tolerated because the alternative is worse. Hitchens was so obsessed with moral principle that it distorted his judgment.

Hence his misguided support for the war in Iraq. On the most crucial political and moral issue of our time, Hitchens took the wrong side. His friend Tom Luddy once told me that Hitchens supported the war simply because he was passionately opposed to fascism, no matter what form it took or where it was found. No one could argue with this. Hitchens also had many Iraqi and Kurdish friends who had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and whom he stood up for. Again, no one would argue that he was not right to do so.

But, of course, there is a world of difference between being opposed to Saddam’s fascism (and contrary to Hitchens’ specious neologism, there was nothing “Islamo” about Saddam’s fascism – he was just your garden-variety Stalinist monster) and supporting an unprovoked invasion that was likely to make things much worse.

I covered two debates between Hitchens and the journalist Mark Danner – one just before the war, one nine months after it began. In both debates Danner argued that war was too risky, while Hitchens asserted that war was both necessary and morally justified because Saddam was evil and dangerous. What was striking to me, particularly in the second debate, was both Hitchens’ moral fervor, and the weakness of his substantive arguments about the threat Saddam posed. Twice, he made flat assertions about the link between Saddam and al-Qaida-like jihadists (“There was and there is a Hitler-Stalin pact between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathist totalitarianism”) that were simply false.

How could someone as knowledgeable as Hitchens embrace such sophistical arguments? And even if we give him a pass for supporting the war in its early days, after it turned into a bloody nightmare, why didn’t he acknowledge he had been wrong?

I suspect the answer has to do with Hitchens’ earlier Marxism. It is hard to escape the conclusion that at some level, Hitchens was indeed an “inverted Stalinist”: a former True Believer who simply transferred the rigid idealism of his old cause into an equally rigid insistence on seeing all politics as a matter of personal morality. As Ian Buruma wrote in the New York Review of Books, for Hitchens, “politics is essentially a matter of character … Politicians do bad things because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.” There is much to admire in Hitchens’ moral stance, but it led him into some corners he found himself unable or unwilling to extricate himself from.

But it would be wrong to end this appraisal there – and not just because de mortuis nil nisi bonum (a phrase Hitchens would not have had to Google, as I just did.) He may have made mistakes, as we all have, but his life and work should not be reduced to his sometime political misjudgments. In all ways, Christopher Hitchens was a force to be reckoned with. He was a powerful thinker, a courageous journalist and a superb stylist. In a monochrome world, he was a true original. Somewhere in a heaven he did not believe in, they’re emptying a bottle of the good stuff tonight, and writing an angelic obit on deadline.