The United States media, through past omission and inaction, helped kill four Iraqi children yesterday. The media did not do the killing directly. Nor did the U.S. military directly kill these particular children. A suicide bomber killed the four children. But the U.S. media holds a specific responsibility for letting it happen. And with their continued inaction, more children will die.
Yesterday – Thanksgiving Day, 2005 – U.S. soldiers handed out toys to Iraqi children in front of Mahmudiyah Hospital. Some people in Iraq are trying to kill U.S. troops, and even U.S. military commanders may have noticed that anti-occupation forces are killing U.S. soldiers at the rate of three a day this month. Handing out toys, predictably and apparently intentionally, attracted children around these combatants in what most people call a war zone. And, indeed, an attack on the U.S. soldiers killed four Iraqi children and 29 other people.
The whole sequence raises several questions, such as 'What kind of sick person, regardless of his or her cause, carries through with an attack on soldiers when there are civilians and children present?'
The dead suicide bomber could not be reached for comment, which doesn't entirely excuse Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder Newspapers, whose article this column is based on, for not bringing up this question. But a more readily answered question is 'Who gave the order for soldiers to distribute toys to children, and what the hell were they thinking?'
This isn't one sadistic commander. It appears to be military policy:
"Civil affairs soldiers often bring toys for children when meeting with the community," Yousseff paraphrased Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, whom she described only as a military spokesman.
What motivates such an idiotic policy? The U.S. gets credit for giving out toys, and if insurgents attack U.S. soldiers they get blame for killing kids. It's win-win! Except that children get killed.
My brother said the military was using the kids as human shields. I feel this policy of putting Iraqi children (and U.S. soldiers) in danger is more a tactic to turn Iraqis against the insurgency. Whatever reasoning behind putting children between soldiers and the insurgents, if the media were not willing propagandists in the United States, it wouldn't happen annymore.
Your humble columnist is writing about this because the same U.S. soldiers, toys, insurgents, and dead Iraqi children combination made a headline months ago. At the time, I said to my family and anyone else around, this only happened because the military knew the media would not ask them the obvious question about why they were putting children at risk. There have probably been more instances of Iraqi children getting killed while getting toys from U.S. soldiers, but this is the headline I saw. Four dead children worth of vindication. Feels great.
And I have to write now because the coverage of this particular predictable tragedy (as opposed to the predictable tragedy of the entire war on Iraq) is just as bad as ever.
The Knight Ridder article, as published on the front page of the Cape Cod Times, carried the headline "Suicide attack targets youths." Illogical, but it's just a headline. The third sentence, though, helps seal the fate of the next set of children surrounding soldiers to get toys:
"In one of the attacks, a suicide bomber targeted a crowd of children who were receiving toys from U.S. soldiers."
That's it. No questioning of what the hell soldiers were doing handing out toys in the middle of a war. Let's run through this again. Iraqi insurgents are killing U.S. soldiers. U.S. soldiers surround themselves with children. An Iraqi insurgent trying to kill U.S. soldiers kills Iraqi children. This is not only predictable, it has happened before.
And the potential involvement of the military's sadistic Santa Claus policy in the children's deaths goes completely unquestioned.
This is in the context of a news story that the remaining supporters of the war would characterize, reasonably, as focusing on the negative: "The third Thanksgiving Day since U.S. troops entered Iraq was a grim one yesterday," the article began, and proceeded to list grim things, including the tragic failure of any U.S. politicians to make surprise visits to U.S. troops.
Nowhere did the grim reality of a policy so cynical it couldn't stand thirty seconds of scrutiny get a mention. Plenty of facts, none of the obvious questions.
The first attack came in Mahmudiyah, in an area called the "triangle of death," as U.S. civil affairs specialists were inspecting the Mahmudiyah Hospital at around 10:30 a.m. in preparation for making improvements, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman.
Then comes the paragraph where Barry Johnson explains that soldiers giving out toys is routine. Then this:
As the soldiers stood outside the main entrance and began handing out the toys to children who had gathered around them, a suicide bomber approached the hospital and blew himself up..
Jay Leno could draw out the key points in this one: U.S. soldiers handing out toys in the triangle of death.
The question the media need to ask is 'Why?'
The article closes with a section called "Explosive Toys." Youssef reported spokesman Liath Kubba of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government saying that Iraqi forces have found toys like the kind the U.S. gives out with explosives in them.
In this columnists opinion, this is either an invention of the U.S. to claim insurgents are trying to kill children or it is a horrific attempt by insurgents to make it look like U.S. forces are giving out exploding toys. The one clear thing is that it speaks to the crucial need for independent reporting, because discovery and wide dissemination of the truth could prevent these propaganda wars from turning deadly. Please support independent news: The Fund for Authentic Journalism - http://authenticjournalism.org/ - and The NewStandard - http://newstandardnews.net/ - (the latter is in need of 375 more sustainers).
Instead, even in cases where all the relevant facts are known and reported, the U.S. media and military are accessories to murder that could be stopped– stopped by a media that asked the military why they are putting children and soldiers together in places they can be shot at and blown up.
The last line of the article came from the same Lieutenant Colonel who explained that U.S. soldiers frequently gave out toys.
"The insurgents will stop at nothing to draw children into the violence," Johnson said. "It's reprehensible."
Involving children in the violence certainly is reprehensible. Does anyone in the media agree?