Smoking while Iraq burns

[CHIMO]

Iconic images inspire love and hate, and so it is with the photograph of James Blake Miller, the 20-year-old marine from Appalachia, who has been christened "the face of Falluja" by pro-war pundits, and the "the Marlboro man" by pretty much everyone else. Reprinted in more than a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times photograph shows Miller "after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop, deadly combat" in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, a bloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips.
Gazing lovingly at Miller, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather informed his viewers: "For me, this one's personal. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study it. Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if your eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I."

There was a message sent by all of this silence, and the message was that these deaths don't count. By buying the highly questionable logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone's lives but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became complicit in the dehumanisation of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that some lives are expendable, insufficiently important to risk losing votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to continue unchecked.

The real-world result of all the "strategic" thinking is the worst of both worlds: it didn't get Kerry elected and it sent a clear message to the people who were elected that they will pay no political price for committing war crimes. And this is Kerry's true gift to Bush: not just the presidency, but impunity. You can see it perhaps best of all in the Marlboro man in Falluja, and the surreal debates that swirl around him. Genuine impunity breeds a kind of delusional decadence, and this is its face: a nation bickering about smoking while Iraq burns.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1360284,00.html

[teryang]

1. Sickening

:puke:

[Voltaire99]

2. Not to blow my own horn...

But yes, I am a better man than you, Dan Rather, you war-supporting motherfucker.

[Briar]

3. She gets it

Compare and contrast with Friedman's nauseating hymn to the brave young killers (they enlist to get a better future than the Bushreich would give them, you pillock) in the NYT today. Is it because Klein is Canadian that she can see through the myth of American martial virtue embodied in "Marlboro Marine" while so many like Friedman and Rather can't? How can the Democrats oppose Bush effectively when they too buy into the myth of Amerian Exceptionalism? They're already in the enemy camp.

Brilliant article. Thanks for posting it.

(edited for punctuation)

[MISSDem]

4. How sad but true. I've heard people say

(when you complain about the thousands of innocents who've dies) that "thousands will die to save millions" or some such. I've been so depressed since the election and the news every day just adds to it.