One of my sons was giving me crap this week when I said I wasn’t interested in seeing the video footage of the dead American soldiers with bullet holes in their heads. Actually, I hadn’t thought much about it, other than a kneejerk reaction — I didn’t want to be a voyeur and figured that most people were just gawking at them for entertainment value. But he convinced me that we should be seeing how war is hell, and that the American public isn’t served well if the media withholds the graphic images. So I watched the video clips on the Net and then saw this blurb in Utne’s Web Watch: This is Gulf War II. It links to a web site with pictures of dead and injured Iraqi children, as well as dead, injured, and captive Iraqi and US soldiers.
But as Gary Kamiya wrote in Salon: “In morally evaluating the U.S. assault on Iraq, hawks and doves alike must consider not only the Iraqi girl torn apart by an errant shell fragment, but the grandmother greeting American soldiers with tears of joy.”
