Afew weeks ago, Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) blasted the news media as ‘despicable,’ during a policy debate on the war in Afghanistan. He accused them of focusing on relatively trivial subjects rather than Afghanistan itself. His rant was dramatic, but not without merit. It is true that there has been a significant drop in coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. While the media certainly ought to shoulder a large share of the blame for this, the American public hasn’t exactly been clamoring for war coverage. To an extent, the media covers news that the people want to hear, and is a reflection of their interests.
As an Iraq War veteran, the concept of a disinterested public is nothing new to me. How can anything else be expected? Unless someone voluntarily enters into military service, they can be confident they will not have to participate in either of these wars. While it is true that the war in Iraq has been protested, any potentially lasting protest movement lacks the energy to have significant effect. There is simply no egoistic reason compelling anyone not affiliated with the military to care.
This leads to questions about what the media’s purpose is in covering these wars. Is it to help the public form an informed opinion? Is it to generate some kind emotional response? Or is it merely to report statistical information and indulge the public with pictures of violence, albeit heavily censored violence? These wars, much like Vietnam, have been heavily televised (until recently). The difference however, is that the endless stream of violent imagery coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan has only desensitized a public with little or no vested interest in the conflicts; while the nightly televising of the Vietnam War influenced a public who had a direct interest in the events of the war.
Unless someone has such a direct interest in the subject, how can we expect that the information being given to him or her will carry any real meaning? The daily reporting of the number of war dead, whether they are civilians, soldiers or insurgents, is merely an abstraction of the real suffering that occurs. As an abstraction, this information is ultimately meaningless for anyone who digests it unless he or she is directly involved in the conflicts. For the larger public, war coverage is just an endless stream of noise that the mind eventually tunes out. The concept of war itself is an abstraction to those who have no emotional investment in it. This is not an altogether negative idea; I would love to eventually live in a society in which the word “war” is completely eradicated from the lexicon. However, in the meantime this lack of real interest in the subject only leads to a sense of ambivalence about the circumstances that our soldiers, Iraqi and Afghani civilians, and “enemy” combatants find themselves in.
I remember being a 19-year-old private waiting on the edge of l’Samarra, in Salahaddin province, Iraq, for orders to enter into the city, listening to the dull thuds of explosions and the pops and snaps of machine gun fire coming from the streets in front of me, and suddenly appreciating the gravity of my situation. Many of you are either in our school’s ROTC program or have friends who are. The thought of an eventual deployment looms in the back of your minds. For everyone else, I call on you to ask yourselves what the actual significance of these conflicts is to you, and whether or not our nation’s desired ends are worth the means of warfare?
