House of War

A post at Abu Muqawama by ‘Kip’ reflects on the recent furore surrounding Zoriah Miller, a freelance photographer whose pictures of the aftermath of a suicide bombing were recently published by The New York Times. Miller is now banned from his Marine Corps embed after publishing pictures on his blog showing Marines killed by a suicide bomb attack. At stake is whether the public has a right to see pictures of dead soldiers, or whether the feelings of the soldiers’ families should take president. Miller has described the reaction of Multi-National Force – West, the regional command who has forbidden him from embedding with Marines again in Iraq, as “censorship”,

I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.

Kip agrees that “the public has a right to see war in all of its incarnations, including that of death, in reporting.” Furthermore, Kip thinks that,

We, that is the military, have indeed gone a long way toward sanitizing war for the average American. All that is asked of him or her is to stand with hand over the heart at the playing of the national anthem at a myriad of events and places. He is not asked to sacrifice for the war, neither from his blood nor from his pocketbook; he has, in effect, passed on the latter burden to his children. He neither understands the war nor the enemy that will continue to confront him.

Confronted with images of death, Americans will be forced to ask the question of what they ought be doing for the effort and who should be held accountable for mistakes. Faced with those images at the beginning of the war, they would be, Kip believes, more determined (not less) to win the long war.

Dave Dilegge thoughfully explains why he disagrees at CTLab.

Essentially, this argument revolves around which types of medium are acceptable for the conveying of information during war. The written word is ok when recording an event; the photograph is not. It does seem a rather questionable distinction to make. Why is one acceptable and not the other? As a citizen of states with such awesome military power, you must believe that ‘I should witness the full horrors of war, that I might better understand what is done in my name’. But let’s look at the problem from the opposite perspective – why should we stop at mere photographs? Assuming that it doesn’t ‘violate OPSEC’ or aid our enemy’s strategic assessment, why shouldn’t we watch our soldiers die on the television news? Hell, technology being what it is, we could be watching it streamed live from Afghanistan straight onto our laptops!

Obviously, when Kip says that he wants Americans to be able to see pictures of dead soldiers, he has a particular outcome in mind – he hopes that these pictures will enable civilians to better understand war and the sacrifices their troops are making. A very laudable goal, but it does not therefore follow automatically that it will be so.

Consider a possible consequence: the floodgates open, and there are lots of pictures of dead servicemen and women in the media. Perhaps this will be decisive in the way Kip envisions, but perhaps it will make no difference in either direction. I can easily imagine a time when reporting of battles was simply not allowed period, and the same argument could have been made. And yet we have the written word, and here we nevertheless are. And when we can see photos, perhaps we will need videos to understand; and when we have videos, perhaps we will need live HD feeds to understand… and so on. We should ask, in the long run, does the medium used really change things? What if we rip open grieving families’ wounds by showing pictures of the fallen, but it doesn’t alter the balance at all? (God, can you imagine the horror – having the picture of a slaughtered loved one published and readily available on the internet for posterity? I think it would be hard to survive such an ordeal). What if people get used to it, and continue to ‘go to the mall’ as before? One can even foresee a situation in which our behaviour as civilians gets worse because of our increased de-sensitivity to and distance from the subject of the photographs…