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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

"Will to win" versus "Will to save face"

"War-time President"? You want to see a war-time President?

Ran across a set of Life magazine photos, from its "100 Photographs that Changed the World." Many were familiar, but I had never seen the photograph at the right before, of three dead American GIs on a beach in New Guinea, from 1943.

Text under the photo reads:

When LIFE ran this stark, haunting photograph of a beach in Papua New Guinea on September 20, 1943, the magazine felt compelled to ask in an adjacent full-page editorial, “Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore?” Among the reasons: “words are never enough . . . words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens.” But there was more to it than that; LIFE was actually publishing in concert with government wishes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was convinced that Americans had grown too complacent about the war, so he lifted the ban on images depicting U.S. casualties. Strock’s picture and others that followed in LIFE and elsewhere had the desired effect. The public, shocked by combat’s grim realities, was instilled with yet greater resolve to win the war.
Franklin Roosevelt lifted a ban on casualty photographs to combat domestic complacency?
The "shocked public" was consequently "instilled with yet greater resolve to win the war"? Who knew? Has our psychology changed all that much? No, I don't think so.

But the nature of the war is different. The "war on terror", certainly our little adventure in Iraq, is largely a phony war.

No, not the uncounted casualties, nor the grief, nor the detriment to international relations, nor the financial costs: these are all too real. What is phony is that a small cadre of officials in The Regime cooked it up and sold it to the American public: but it was and is phony, false, unnecessary. They knew it then and they know it now.

And that is why we will not see photos of caskets (let alone casualties) or fair accountings of financial costs. Everything must be managed and handled and spun (including Abu Ghraib & Haditha-- the military is not immune), because not too far below the surface they know that there is no satisfactory reason for anybody to have given or to have lost their life for this travesty, and no reason for our soldiers to have taken the lives they have taken at the command of these contemptible liars. And they know or they fear that the vast bulk of the American public knows it too, if the superficial layer of hyper-patriotism is scratched.

There is no political "resolve" to win, because there is no necessity, strategically or morally, to win this war. The American public would indeed react badly (and now is starting to react) to the truth of the human and political and economic costs of the war because they actually get it, too.

The Official Resident of the White House wanted a "greatest generation" of his very own, I reckon, more than he wanted to make America "secure". But he resembles Mussolini (save for the lack of investment in the train system), not FDR. There is no war to win. There is only face to save. How many lives is that worth?

2 Comments:

Blogger walldon said...

Great find, ChiTom!

7:58 PM  
Blogger KISSWeb said...

Agree, excellent post!

10:10 PM  

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