[Mb-civic] Credibility as casualty - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Credibility as casualty

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  August 26, 2005

ALMOST 20 years ago I was driving south from Baghdad when I saw a 
yellow-and-white taxi coming up the Basra road with a flag-draped coffin 
on the roof. Then I saw another, and another. At the time Iraq was 
engaged in a long and bitter war with Iran, and I learned that what I 
was seeing was the war dead coming home.

In those days taxis would be summoned to military morgues and given a 
coffin along with an address and some money to deliver it. When a 
coffin-laden taxi would turn into a residential street, people would 
hold a collective breath wondering at which house the taxi would stop. 
Often families would be given no other notice. They would be asked to 
sign a receipt, and the taxi would drive away.

It was the custom in Iraq to fly a black flag outside the house of a 
fallen soldier, but by the time I got there the government had 
discouraged the practice because Saddam Hussein wanted to underplay the 
casualties so as not to harm morale for his war.

In America the flagged-draped coffins of our honored dead are escorted 
home in military planes. Relatives are routinely notified promptly in 
person by Pentagon representatives, and the coffins themselves are 
treated with impeccable and ceremonial respect.

Yet I was interested to read that only recently, under pressure from a 
Freedom of Information Act suit, would the Pentagon finally agree to 
make fully available photographs of arriving American coffins from Iraq.

President Bush had said that the ban was to protect the privacy of the 
families, but I suspect that the administration felt that photographs of 
coffins coming home might sap support for the president's war.

So far the Bush administration has been remarkably successful in 
downplaying the cost of its Iraqi adventure. Earlier on, the then deputy 
secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was unable to tell Congress what 
the number of American dead was. The war played well when it came time 
to get reelected, and dissent could be branded as unpatriotic.

The administration had predicted an easy victory. Just lop off the head 
of Saddam's regime and, bingo, a pro-American, pro-Israeli democracy 
would emerge, ready to welcome US military bases, guarantee our oil, and 
be a light unto other nations, bringing liberty and democracy to the 
region, they said. Yet none of this has come to pass. The draft 
constitution highlights the bitter differences in Iraq, not unity, 
which, in the long run, no document can paper over.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/26/credibility_as_casualty/
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