George to meet with Brit Families

But still, not one American family...
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Bush to meet bereaved British relatives

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday November 14, 2003
The Guardian

President Bush said yesterday he would meet the families of British soldiers who have been killed in Iraq during next week's state visit. He also made it clear that he would do his best to bolster the prime minister's political standing at the same time.
In an interview with British journalists, the president shrugged off the threat of huge demonstrations against his visit, insisting the trip, the first full state visit by a president since 1918, would be "a really interesting and fun experience".

He told the Press Association he would meet the families of British victims of September 11 and of the 54 British soldiers killed in Iraq, who died in a "noble cause". "There's two messages [for the families]," he said. "One, the prayers of the American people and the prayers of the president are with them as they suffer. Secondly, that I will tell them that their loved ones did not die in vain. The actions we have taken will make the world more secure and the world more peaceful in the long run."

Many of his remarks in the 40-minute interview were devoted to praise for Mr Blair and stressed his close relationship with the prime minister, with whom he said he consults weekly. "I'm really looking forward to spending time with my friend - and I emphasise 'my friend' - Tony Blair," Mr Bush said. "He's a smart, capable, trustworthy friend, and we've got a lot to talk about."

He went out of his way to deny the suggestion that Mr Blair had sacrificed Britain's independence by maintaining such a close relationship with Washington. "He's plenty independent. If he thought the policy that we have both worked on was wrong, he'd tell me," he said.

"Never once has he said to me, ever, 'gosh, I'm feeling terrible pressure'," Mr Bush said. "I have never heard him complain about the polls, or wring his hands. The relationship is a very good relationship because I admire him, and I admire somebody who stands tough." During his three-day trip, President Bush will visit Mr Blair's Sedgefield constituency, meet Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy, give a speech in Whitehall on the future of the transatlantic alliance and co-host a discussion on Aids.

He said he was also looking forward to staying with the royal family, who will privately welcome the president and his wife Laura on Tuesday night and host a state dinner on Wednesday.

"Obviously, staying at Buckingham Palace is going to be an historic moment. I never dreamt when I was living in Midland, Texas, that I would be staying in Buckingham Palace," he said, joking that he would have to rent a morning suit for the occasion. In fact, Mr Bush is no stranger to royalty. He met the Queen in Washington when his father was president.

According to an account of that 1992 encounter, the Queen asked him whether he was "the black sheep in the family". "I guess that might be true," Mr Bush said. The Queen reportedly responded by saying every family had one.

In the course of his interview, the president sought to defuse issues likely to heighten tension in the Anglo-American relationship. He insisted there could be a diplomatic solution to weapons proliferation in Iran and North Korea, the other two nations in the group he has dubbed "the axis of evil".

He also said he was open to persuasion on the issue of US tariffs on steel, which the World Trade Organisation has ruled illegal.

His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice said yesterday Mr Bush would be willing to offer any help necessary to "bolster the Good Friday accord" in Northern Ireland, and listen to British military advice in dealing with the Iraqi insurgency.

But the opposition to Mr Bush's visit will focus on Iraq. Ms Rice said the administration had "enormous confidence" in the British police, security services and intelligence, and their ability to ensure the safety of the visit. Mr Bush said he was looking forward to the opportunity to make his case for the war. He said he had ordered the invasion on two principles: to "secure America" and to promote a free society in Iraq. He said US policy was to "encourage more Iraqis to assume more responsibility" quickly in governing the country.

Jack Straw, who is in Washington for talks, said last night more British troops would be sent to Iraq if necessary.

The foreign secretary said troop levels were kept under "close review" and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and the chief of defence staff, Sir Michael Walker, were "constantly" making judgments about whether force numbers are adequate. "Both of them have made clear that if they think that these forces need to be reinforced then they will be," he said.

The Bush administration and its generals sought to play down the bleak warnings sounded over the weekend in a CIA briefing on the situation in Iraq. That report suggested that the insurgency was gathering strength and that 50,000 people were behind the guerrillas.

But the head of US Central Command, General John Abizaid, insisted there were no more than 5,000 people actively fighting the coalition.

 

Spinning in their graves

November 15, 2003

The fighting in Iraq is real. But there is a traditional aspect of war that Americans now see only in the movies - it is the solemn homecoming for the dead.

There was a time when the United States paused as the TV cameras panned over rows of coffins flown home from battle, when it was impossible not to share the sorrow of the families there to receive them, and when there was a genuine sense of shared pain when the president or very senior members of his team attended memorial services.

But George Bush has fenced off himself and his team from the cemetery, and there is a ban on cameramen entering the central military morgue at Dover, in Delaware, where hundreds who have died in Iraq are received. It is also difficult for the photographers to get past security at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, where thousands of the wounded have been treated.

So the American dead and the injured from Iraq pass through a politically imposed void, until their coffin - or stretcher or wheelchair in the case of the wounded - arrives in the back blocks of Idaho or Texas, by which time they have long ceased to be a prime-time or national story. Usually only family and friends witness the handing over of the triangulated Stars and Stripes to grieving spouses or parents.

It wasn't like this during the Vietnam War. Even in the Afghanistan war, flag-draped coffins were filmed, and during the Kosovo conflict, president Bill Clinton was on the tarmac to receive the US dead. The repatriation of the bodies of the American servicemen who died in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 was a national story - with images - and presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, respectively, attended services for the 241 Americans killed in Beirut and for the troops killed in the failed hostage-rescue in Iran.

But it was during the Panama conflict, in 1989, that the first President Bush, George snr, dropped his media guard. At the precise moment that servicemen's caskets were being offloaded at Dover, he did a goof-walk for the cameras of the White House press corps, to demonstrate the effect of pain he suffered in his neck. At least three of the national networks split their screens, showing viewers an apparently thoughtless commander-in-chief acting the fool as the bodies of men he had sent to war were removed from a military transport.

Retribution was swift. The media were banned from Dover and the traditional body receival ceremonies were ended. Over time the ban came to be ignored, but in the days before this year's Iraq war, the Pentagon ordered that it be observed to the fullest.

The media manipulation of this Bush's team borders on paranoia. They go to great lengths to set the scene - carting specially produced backdrops around the country for his public appearances and even floodlighting the usually darkened Statue of Liberty for one of his New York night-time speeches.

The words get the same care and attention - death in Iraq is bad news, so he doesn't talk about it. He has met some of the families of the dead in private and they all get a letter of condolence, but he is happier talking about the grand scheme of the war on terrorism or, better still, the economy.

Some Republican commentators are beginning to question the President's aloofness. But the spin from the White House, as told by one of his aides to The New York Times, is that Bush would seem insensitive if he publicly acknowledged some, but not all, the deaths.

Asked about the remarkable presidential silence that greeted the death of the 15 servicemen in the downing of a Chinook helicopter in Iraq early this month, Dan Bartlett, his communications director, dissembled: "If a helicopter were hit an hour later, after he came out and spoke, should he come out again? [The public] wants the commander-in-chief to have a proper perspective and to keep his eye on the big picture and on the ball. At the same time, they want their president to understand the hardship and sacrifice that many Americans are enduring at a time of war. And we believe he is striking that balance."

It is all part of the Bush Administration's ongoing war with the media: when it is not denying them access to Dover, it is attacking them for not reporting the "good news" out of Iraq; denying reports of its own cavalier prewar predictions of finding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and of a warm welcome in Iraq; and rejecting allegations from within the intelligence community that, after Iraq, it is now deliberately exaggerating the threat from weapons of mass destruction posed by Syria, Libya and Cuba.

But there is a question of how long its media management can be sustained. Increasingly, the rising disquiet is not just about Bush's refusal to acknowledge the dead or to attend their funerals, but about the things he does find time to do instead.

While families and whole communities grieve about their losses in Iraq, he storms the country with his hand out for tens of millions of dollars in donations for his forthcoming re-election campaign. While he talks about the war dead in only the most general terms, he goes on and on about signs of economic recovery.

He avoids the photo-op with the mothers of the dead from Iraq, but he had the time in his busy schedule on Thursday to wheel three judicial nominees into the Oval Office as a backdrop for his gripes about the Democrats blocking their appointments to the bench.

The pragmatism - some might call it cynicism - is understandable in terms of pure political strategy because, despite all the talk about patriotism and the defence of freedom and liberty, Americans are getting sick of this war.

For the first time since the opening attack on Baghdad on March 20, most Americans - 51 per cent - disapprove of the President's handling of the war. In a Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll taken before the Chinook helicopter disaster, 87 per cent of respondents said they feared the US would be bogged down in Iraq and 62 per cent rated the death toll as unacceptable.

With the passing of each week, the war touches thousands more American family circles in the most direct way. The Pentagon talks of a 20 per cent reduction in total US numbers in Iraq by next northern spring, but in the past two weeks 85,000 army and marine forces have been told they will be going to Iraq so that others can be rotated home. That's more worry and anxiety to feed into the next batch of opinion polls.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/14/1068674378831.html

 

Accounting for the Invisible Casualties of War Shouldn't Be a Matter of Politics
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

ne of the most enduring memories from the funeral of my friend Michael Kelly, who was killed covering the war in Iraq for Atlantic Monthly, was standing by his open grave in a cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., watching an Army officer in dress uniform make his way through the cold, persistent drizzle and up the small hill to Michael's wife and boys. He spoke to the family quietly and then got down on one knee on the wet artificial turf that had been placed there in a vain attempt to shield the mourners from the earth. He gave the boys a flag and a medal.

Michael Kelly was not one of their own. He was brash and brave, but distinctly unmilitary. Yet the Army took pains to make this simple gesture that drove home the way the military honors death: it endows that inescapable but inescapably tragic part of their lives with a sense of moment, of ceremony and dignity, and most of all it faces death squarely and honestly.

This is a central part of the warrior's culture, but it is all too often missing from the way President Bush is running the Iraq war. As the toll nears 400, the casualties remain largely invisible. Apart from a flurry of ceremonies on Veterans Day, this White House has done everything it can to keep Mr. Bush away from the families of the dead, at least when there might be a camera around.

The wounded, thousands of them, are even more carefully screened from the public. And the Pentagon has continued its ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped coffins to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, denying the dead soldiers and their loved ones even that simple public recognition of sacrifice. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained rather lamely that the ban had been in place since 1991 — when another President Bush wanted to avoid the juxtaposition of his face and words with pictures of soldiers' coffins.

Some Republicans say it would take up too much of the president's time to attend military funerals or meet the coffins returning from Iraq. "They're coming back continually," the conservative commentator Bay Buchanan said on CNN on Tuesday. "The president cannot be flying up there every single week."

But someone of rank from the White House could and should be at each and every military funeral. Ideally, Mr. Bush would shake the hand of someone who loved every person who dies in uniform — a small demand on his time in a war in which the casualties are still relatively small. And he has more than enough advisers, cabinet secretaries and other officials so attending funerals should not be such an inconvenience.

The White House talks about preserving the privacy and dignity of the families of the war dead. But if this was really about the families, the president or Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would be handing flags to widows and mothers in the time-honored way. And if protecting the privacy of Americans who are suffering was such a priority, the White House wouldn't call in the cameras to watch Mr. Bush embracing victims of every hurricane, earthquake or suburban California wildfire.

Along with the coverage of these casualties, the coverage of combat in Iraq has virtually ceased. The "embedded" correspondents who reported on the stunningly swift march to Baghdad during the invasion are gone. The Pentagon has ended the program. The ever-upbeat Mr. Rumsfeld likes to say that the attacks on American soldiers are brief and relatively few in number, compared with the number of men in arms in the field in Iraq. But without real news coverage, it's hard to know the truth.

Letters from American soldiers who have died in Iraq, published on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday, suggest that Mr. Rumsfeld's accounting may be highly selective. Shortly before he died on June 17, Pvt. Robert Frantz wrote this to his mother: "We've had random gunfire within a 100-meter radius all night, every night, since I have been here. It kinda scares you the first couple nights, but you tend to get used to it."

The idea of a slow, painful and bloody holding action in which gunfire is a nightly occurrence contrasts sharply, perhaps too sharply for comfort, with the display of overwhelming force, low casualties and lightning-swift conclusions that Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld put on in the spring. The administration undoubtedly feels that showing coffins on television or having the president attend funerals would undermine public support for the war. (The ban on covering the arrival of coffins at Dover was in effect during the popular Afghanistan war, but was not enforced.) That seems like more of an acknowledgment of how fragile that support is than any poll yet taken.

The Bush administration hates comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, and many are a stretch. But there is a lesson that this president seems not to have learned from Vietnam. You cannot hide casualties. Indeed, trying to do so probably does more to undermine public confidence than any display of a flag-draped coffin. And there is at least one direct parallel. Thirty-five years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon took to shipping bodies into the United States in the dead of night to avoid news coverage.