Rembering the Dead

The Iraqi and Afghan dead, that is. Several hundred thousand Iraqis and Afghans are dead -- many more than killed on 9/11 -- and many more injured at the hands of the American military and the forces their invasion and occupation have unleashed. The Commander-in-Chief and his Iraq war planners knew it would happen ("Analysts' Warnings of Iraq Chaos Detailed"). Yet it goes on, the Democrats too impotent or cowardly to make a difference, the public complacent.

I second Arthur Silber's motion here:

Our national media remain cowed and intimidated, and they refuse, a few honorable exceptions aside, to provide details of the daily and hourly horrors in Iraq to the public. A single major newspaper could provide a noble and invaluable service: if they gave a damn at all about unnecessary death and suffering, they would select the most awful and horrifying picture they could find -- a body with its guts falling out, a bloody corpse shorn of arms and legs, a mutilated face made unrecognizable -- and fill up their entire front page with it, a new one every day. Perhaps after a month or two, enough Americans would demand that their government stop butchering people who never harmed us. [To achieve the sought-for effect, the pictures obviously should be of Iraqis, and only Iraqis. The Iraqis had no choice about our criminal war of aggression, and the endless destruction we have unleashed; the United States did -- and does, even today. We could leave, as we quickly would if we had any remaining decency and humanity, but we won't.]