Our Short Attention Span for War

Polls show 60 percent of Americans do not favor the war in Afghanistan so it is not surprising war coverage has been limited. When the war in Iraq was popular in its “Shock and Awe” days, war coverage came at us from every network and every angle. We saw planes flying, statues falling, Saddam on trial and burning oil fields. Collectively, we were so bloody proud weren’t we?
As the body count began to mount and we learned about Abu Ghraib, public interest in the conflict began to fall, and so did the news coverage. The same is happening in Afghanistan today; coverage is spiraling downward. I’m not usually big on conspiracy theories, but to some extent, there is a conspiracy here, a conspiracy to turn our attention elsewhere. Yet, as American news consumers we are also to blame.
The government plays the news media like a fiddle; there are a few exceptions like National Public Radio and some smaller out-of-network outlets, but for the most part our government has the cooperation of the news media when it comes to war coverage. They would like us to forget about Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. (Notice how those names represent something noble?) Walter Cronkite once said, in paraphrase, that networks need to tell people what they need to know, not what they want to hear. It seems we would rather hear about cash for clunkers, Michael Jackson’s children and hang on to every detail about the deranged individual who killed and wounded a few people in a Pennsylvania gym instead of the millions that have been killed in the so called war on terror.
The Bush administration would not allow photographs of flagged draped coffins because it would endanger public opinion. The Obama Administration urged the pentagon the use the phrase “Overseas Contingency Operation,” instead of the Global War on Terror. Both administrations have down played the carnage. Since we’ve entered these conflicts our government and the news media has made every effort to make it sound more like a righteous strategically placed police action rather than the bloody conflicts they are.
Why we are not clamoring for better war coverage I can only hazard to guess. My guess is we don’t want to feel like our hands are dirty or have our minds occupied with the unpleasantries of war, and would rather turn our heads the other way. (Out of sight out of mind.) Turning our heads or turning a deaf ear is an outrageous disservice to the men and women fighting. It is a disservice to the civilians who have lost their lives in a war they did not create. It is a disservice to our veterans and it is a disservice to our nation and to the other nations involved in our coalition.
War Update
Iraqi War Casualties = 4,317 US Troops, and 380 Coalition deaths, of those deaths 140 were British. Civilian deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom are estimated to be from 750,000 to 1.3 million people.

Afghanistan War Casualties = 773 US Troops and 520 NATO or Coalition forces, which include: 192 British Troops, 128 Canadian Troops, 33 German Troops and 28 from France. The civilian death toll is said to be in the thousands, more than 2,000 in that last year alone.

Among the dead are 136 journalists and the number of enemy combatants killed is unknown. Estimates on enemy combatant deaths go from about 20,000 to 100,000. I’m guessing the body count is much higher.
It easy to estimate from here that at least 2 million lives have been lost in these conflicts and the number of wounded would be many times greater.
The financial cost to us and the rest of the world is in more than a trillion dollars, and the Iraqi infrastructure still needs to be revitalized.
To this we can add the mental and emotional costs to all involved and to that we have no price tag or estimate.
The latest news coming out of Afghanistan tells us the US /NATO force there is likely to be involved for a few more years. A counterinsurgency advisor with the NATO-led force, estimates it will take at least two more years to get the insurgency under control and at least 3 years after that before Afghanistan can defend itself. This is only an estimate, and it assumes NATO forces will win.
When we have heard the last shot and watched the last flagged Draped coffin loaded on to the plane, will we feel a since of relief and accomplishment, or will we be left with haunting questions for the rest of our lives? As I imagine this final scene I will see the shop keepers that will killed, the children with burns and limbs blown off, the beheaded journalists, soldiers lying face down in the sand with body parts missing, most of them dead, some still alive. In the quiet nights ahead I may hear those screams in my sleep, I may hear them for evermore and ask myself, “Just exactly what did we win?”