American Views Abroad

 
The Iraqi War is now in its third year . Tom at www.tomdispatch.com has the most complete and depressing round-up of the last two years in Deconstructing Iraq: Year Three Begins. There under The Killing Fields what was barely reported on in the US press is the estimate, made public last year just before the US elections in November, of somewhere around 100,000 Iraqi civilians, a majority of them women and children, who have died due to the invasion and occupation. Tom reports on how an article in the Columbia Journalism Review considers that figure to be 'probably conservative.' So what was in the lead article online at The New York Times this morning?

'The fevered Congressional intervention in a single individual's health crisis is being driven in significant part by powerful political forces that have converged at the bedside of Terri Schiavo.'

Schiavo is a critically brain-damaged woman who has been in a coma for 15 years now. The country, at least from press reports, appears to be in a frenzy over a seven year fight between her husband who wants her to die and her parents who reject court findings that she would not want to be kept alive.

Why is there such a sense of moral outrage over removing feeding tubes from Schiavo but a chilling, harsh, almost damning, silence about the Iraqi dead and injured? Add to that the utterly incomprehensible spin about how Bush might have been right after all. Whatever happened to the end never justifies the means?
- posted by Gloria @ 7:32 PM