trendymatt's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reality check I am more than a little sick and tired of the media frenzy around the U.S. soldiers who took the damned pictures of war captives. It seems that every day there is a new detail or a shocking testimonial about the soldiers involved. Call me a cold-hearted, apathetic, small-minded, uncaring, unpatriotic, half-witted son-of-a-bitch, but I honestly don't care. There must be more pressing matters going on in the world than deconstructing every pixel in a handful of 5x7 prints. Was it a stupid move on the part of all involved? Certainly. Does it warrant over two weeks of constant coverage? Hardly. Sure, this case has most likely opened up a much bigger can of worms considering that the increased scrutiny of these prisoner camps has shown that there was, in fact, some fucked-up shit going on. So, how about we dishonorably discharge the commanding officers of these camps, demote their underlings to potato-peeling duty for the remainder of their enlistment and be done with it? This is war, kids. If anybody thought we were going to go over there, liberate civilians, peacefully overthrow the Iraqi government, and sing Kum Ba Ya holding hands around a campfire with s'mores at the end, it's time to face reality. War is ugly. It's bloody and brutal and neither side is going to come out smelling like roses - especially when we have an administration that seems to change its position on exactly why we're there on a daily basis. Are we liberating Iraq? Are we instituting regime change? Are we looking for the ever-elusive WMD's? Are we hunting down Al Qaeda, even though they aren't even centralized in one location in the first place? Are we doing something that will make Daddy Bush proud? Maybe we should have gotten our story straight before shipping our boys over there. I'm a believer that war is often a necessary evil, because sometimes brute force is the only way to stop truly terrible people from carrying out horrific crimes. So, to the news media out there: how about showing the American people what's really going on in Iraq right now? Dispense with the less graphic images of smiling American grunts posing with naked foreign captors. Allow images of flag-draped caskets to be shown in broadcasts. That way, maybe the next time our administration decides it's time to play war games, we will think back to those images and wonder if the benefits of war outweighed the cost. 11:13 am - 05.19.04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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