The first victim of every war is truth.
All the more so in the kind of nasty imperial wars represented by Vietnam and Iraq, wars that had not the least reasonable excuse or worthy purpose.
There is an entire major industry in Washington involved in manufacturing and suppressing news.
Just a few examples: the worst photos of Abu Ghraib, which involved the rape of children and murder were suppressed; the scores of pictures of children, seen by others, mutilated by American cluster bombs were never published or broadcast by major American news outlets; the disappearance of thousands of Afghan prisoners, murdered by suffocation in vans in the desert, was never investigated by American news outlets.
America's major news sources have only become more timid over the years in bringing the truth of war into American homes.
I think this in part has to do with the consolidation of news sources into media empires. These empires are all run by extremely conservative, establishment-oriented people. The saying that you only enjoy freedom of the press when you own one is very true.
These empires also, in the interests of maximizing profits, squeeze the resources of news-gathering as a cost-center to their operations.
Whatever the reasons, Americans get a very lop-sided view of their imperial wars. The fact that much of the world sees it differently is in part owing to these developments.
I feel fairly confident that only the same kind of minority of Americans still supporting the weak-minded Bush in the wake of all his destructive work would support imperial wars like Vietnam or Iraq were they aware of what those wars really look like close-up.
No, instead we get crap like the New York Times – supposedly the most liberal of major American newspapers – calling the professional military thugs in Iraq by the sentimental WWII epithet “GIs.”
