Two sets of figures have paramount importance in mainline U.S.
media and politics — the number of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and
the number of them dying there. Often taking cues from news media and
many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, antiwar groups have tended to buy into
the formula, emphasizing those numbers and denouncing them as
intolerably high.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis killed by Americans don’t become much of an issue
in the realms of U.S. media and politics. News coverage provides the
latest tallies of Iraqis who die from “sectarian violence” and
“terrorist attacks,” but the reportage rarely discusses how the U.S.
occupation has been an ascending catalyst for that carnage. It’s even
more rare for the coverage to focus on the magnitude of Iraqi deaths
that are direct results of American firepower.
In the United States, many advocates of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq have
focused on what the war has been doing to Americans. This approach may
seem like political pragmatism and tactical wisdom, but in the long run
it’s likely to play into the hands of White House strategists who will
try to regain domestic political ground by reducing American losses
while boosting the use of high-tech weaponry against Iraqi people.
Every night, I receive an email bulletin that’s called “U.S. Air Force
Print News.” It’s one of countless ways the Pentagon does continual
outreach to journalists with messages that encourage favorable coverage
of what the military is doing. Those messages are filled with stories
about the bravery, compassion and towering stature of — in the words of
retired Gen. Colin Powell a decade ago — “those wonderful men and women
who do such a great job.”
But journalists receive just a trickle of limited information about the
bombing runs undertaken by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The official sources have very little to say about what happens to
people at the other end of the bombs. And, overall, U.S. media outlets
don’t add much information about the human consequences.
In late May, an important challenge to those media patterns appeared on
the website TomDispatch.com (and, in shorter form, in The Nation
magazine). The in-depth article — titled “Did the U.S. Lie about
Cluster Bomb Use in Iraq?” — went beyond probing the Pentagon’s
extensive use of barbaric cluster bombs in Iraq since the spring of
2003. The piece, by journalist Nick Turse, also shined a bright light
on fundamental aspects of a U.S. air war that has seldom seen any light
of day in big American media outlets.
“Unfortunately, thanks to an utter lack of coverage by the mainstream
media, what we don’t know about the air war in Iraq so far outweighs
what we do know that anything but the most minimal picture of the
nature of destruction from the air in that country simply can’t be
painted,” Turse writes.
The article raises a key question: “Does the U.S. military keep the
numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and
helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their
use than any other type of weaponry?”
Turse, an associate editor and research director of TomDispatch.com,
has written for daily newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and
the San Francisco Chronicle. His article pulls no punches about the
press as he assesses huge gaps in media coverage of the Iraq air war
funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Sadly, he observes, “media reports on the air war are so sparse, with
reporting confined largely to reprinting U.S. military handouts and
announcements of air strikes, that much of the air war in Iraq remains
unknown — although the very fact of an occupying power regularly
conducting air strikes in and near population centers should have
raised a question or two.”
The available evidence is strong that the U.S. air war is escalating —
with a surge of resulting casualties among Iraqi civilians. Their
suffering and their deaths get very little coverage in the U.S. news
media. “Since the Bush administration’s invasion, the American air war
has been given remarkably short shrift in the media,” Turse writes. And
he cites “indications that the air war has taken an especially grievous
toll on Iraqi children.”
The combination of deceptive officials in the U.S. government and an
evasive U.S. press has been a disaster for the flow of information to
the American public. “With the military unwilling to tell the truth ––
or say anything at all, in most cases — and unable to provide the
stability necessary for [non-governmental organizations] to operate, it
falls to the mainstream media, even at this late stage of the conflict,
to begin ferreting out substantive information on the air war,” Turse
points out. “It seems, however, that until reporters begin bypassing
official U.S. military pronouncements and locating Iraqi sources, we
will remain largely in the dark with little knowledge of what can only
be described as the secret U.S. air war in Iraq.”
As the summer of 2007 gets underway, the demand to “bring the troops
home” is necessary but insufficient. The numbers of Americans fighting
and dying in Iraq are not a reliable measure of U.S. culpability in the
continuing slaughter.
The new documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” based on Norman Solomon’s book of
the same title, is being released directly to DVD in mid-June. For
information about the full-length movie, produced by the Media
Education Foundation and narrated by Sean Penn, go to:
www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org
Writings 
Three years have passed since most Americans came to the conclusion that the Iraq war was a “mistake.” Reporting the results of a Gallup poll in June 2004, USA Today declared: “It is the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake.” And public opinion continued to move in an antiwar direction. But such trends easily coexist with a war effort becoming even more horrific.
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