Letters to the Editor
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You ALMOST got it, Gary . . .
Initially, my gut reaction to the exploitation of the Virginia Tech tragedy as rhetorical ammunition against the President and his failed Iraq War policy was one of disgust and resentment. I grew up not far from Blacksburg, and I've been sickened by the media's behavior in the past two weeks--Salon included. You all have always been a bit tabloid in your approach to garnering readers, but some of the blows you have dealt--from Joan Walsh's typically myopic, prissy eye-rolling over Bush's great sin of going to Virginia to attend the memorial service at Tech to the haste with which you started to lay blame for the tragedy on the University administration--have been inappropriate and unfair to those grieving the Tech tragedy, who have neither asked nor deserve to be used to further your arguments.
But last week I had a long conversation with two young men who are recent veterans of the Iraq conflict about this very subject, and their feelings about the media's reporting of both the Tech tragedy and the Iraq War were very revealing, and suggest to me that your argument, in this case, is useful. Both of these young men--one a former Marine corporal, the other a former Army sergeant--convinced me that comparing these tragedies is a worthwhile pursuit, though not merely for the purposes of hyperbolic rhetoric. Rather, they were interested in understanding how and why the major news media outlets have made it so easy for Americans to ignore the war in Iraq, when we can't seem to turn our eyes away from Blacksburg and the inner workings of Mr. Cho's twisted psyche. There are no easy answers to that one, though you and others seem ready to supply them, ad nauseum.
Here, however, you present a fairly reasonable and balanced approach to the art of comparing unrelated events and our responses to them. Though driven by madness rather than by political or religious fervor, Mr. Cho's act was, essentially, an act of terrorism, and can be fairly compared to the methods currently being employed in Iraq and their consequences. I find it particularly ironic that, while the major news media outlets have no qualms about running endless loops of the cell phone video that captured the sound of gunshots outside Norris Hall or the grieving students congregated on the quad or the images of Mr. Cho in his bizarre manifesto package, they have been universally unwilling to publish or broadcast the many images of dead and maimed Iraqi children or even the caskets of dead American servicemen and women literally snuck off of the planes under cover of darkness. Americans who wonder why we are so resented and often hated around the world might understand better if we were more bluntly confronted with the horrors of our war.
Where you err is in the suggestion that America--and Americans--are directly culpable for the ongoing conflict in Iraq. We have failed miserably in our efforts over there, but, as far as I can tell, for the last four years, the conflict has been driven by the competing sects and ethnic groups who refuse to compromise and form a stable government in post-Saddam Iraq. We may have facilitated this conflict, and I have no doubt that it is our responsibility to deal with it, but our soldiers are not the ones blowing themselves up in crowds or setting car bombs, etc. And while I opposed the war and continue to oppose Bush's failing policy in Iraq, I just can't accept that the Iraqi people would have been better off living indefinitely under the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein.
You can say with some certainty that the world is less safe in the wake of Saddam's regime, but you can't say that the Iraq region and the people who occupy it would have preferred life under the continued rule of Saddam and one or both of his psychopathic sons. Bush the 1st's decision to leave Saddam in power was utilitarian, not moral: he simply recognized that the best interests of the USA would not be served by taking on the job of resolving the inevitable tug-of-war that would result from deposing the tyrant who kept the region managable and served as a buffer against Iran, the region's greatest real threat to the West. I know Bush's motives were more driven by greed than altruism, but any argument against the war should acknowledge that a vicious dictator was deposed, and the violence that has since ensued has not been primarily driven by the conflict between the US Army and Al Qaeda, but, rather, by the Iraqi people themselves. There is an inherent logical fallacy in suggesting that this should have been avoided by continuing to let Saddam Hussein torture and murder his own people.
Furthermore, what exactly could Americans now do to end the suffering of the people of Iraq? We have already done the one thing we can do--we voted the opposition into power. So far, they have achieved squat. Last time I checked, we lived in a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. We can't influence Iraq policy--most of us don't understand it anyway. Maybe if the media had reported the War more responsibly before the '04 election things would be different, but that's in the past now. We have done everything we can do. It's up to Pelosi and Reid and (sigh) Bush now. Perhaps we should all feel every day the way we felt last week, but it wouldn't change anything--only our leaders can do that.
I'm still waiting.
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The Bush Administration's Real Message
Gary Kamiya's article is, as always, well-written and thought provoking. That said, I wish I could be as charitable to Bush and Cheney and chalk the "mess-o-potamia" up to incompetence, arrogance, or even a messianic complex.
I'm afraid, though, that the real message is much more simple, sinister and destructive. To the Bush Administration, Iraqis just aren't worth as much as people in this country. And it's a view that's unfortunately shared by the Mainstream Media.
I know this because on the day after the killlings at Virginia Tech, FIVE TIMES the number of people executed in Blacksburg were blown up by car bombs in Baghdad alone. The nightly news broadcasts extended to an hour an STILL they couldn't seem to find time to talk about 150 dead Iraqis.
And on the day after that, when the president went to the campus at Virginia Tech, SIX TIMES the number of people executed by Cho were blown up by car bombs in Baghdad. But did the MSM report that? No, for there was far too much video of Cho from Cho to play.
Will Virgia Tech "awaken us" to the nightmare of suffering we have caused in Iraq? Again, the answer must be no, for that presumes we have been asleep. We haven't. Instead, we've been in a coma, a self-induced coma, one we have no chance of escaping from until at least January 20, 2009.