"The war was a spectacle; it aroused emotions in the intense but shallow way that sports do. The events in question were as remote from their essential concerns as a football game… and even though the game was in deadly earnest, the deaths were mostly hidden, and above all, they were someone else’s."
– Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (2000)
Anyone following the current invasion of Iraq would do well to read Michael Ignatieff’s account of the war in Kosovo four years ago. Everything he says about the conditions and expectations under which the western allies fought that war apply equally to the present U.S. mission, only more so.
Above all, Ignatieff challenges the new conventional wisdom that wars should be fought with the aim of reducing casualties to a minimum, preferably zero. "If Western nations can employ violence with impunity," he asks, "will they not be tempted to use it more often?"
It was watching the western media coverage of the current war that reminded me of Ignatieff’s book. Where are all the bodies? Where’s all the blood? For a war involving well over a million combat soldiers all told, scenes of human carnage and slaughter have been conspicuously absent from our screens. The "embedded media" may well be accompanying the forward wave of coalition forces, but their cameras seem to be conveniently pointing the wrong way. What we’re left with, as a result, is a sanitized vision of war restricted to the apparent bloodless bombing of palaces and the peaceful surrender of Iraqi troops in the desert.
Ignatieff’s notion of a "virtual war" is even more evident in the media’s coverage of coalition casualties. Each individual soldier killed or captured becomes an instant story – a celebrity whose life, loves and other passions are dutifully described by the likes of CNN and America Today, as if their fate were somehow tragic or unexpected rather than the inevitable result of going to war. Thus, even as war itself becomes ever more remote from our own everyday lives, so the casualties of war become "known" to us in unprecedented and intimate detail.
How far can this go on? As Josef Stalin crudely put it, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. As coalition losses mount – and they surely will before the war is over – will the media be able to pursue its "personalization" of casualties? Should it?
Consider that in the First World War, more than 100,000 American soldiers were killed, while in the Second World War, the figure was closer to 300,000. Would the U.S. have remained committed to victory in either war had the human face of such horrific losses been reported to the nation on a daily basis? The experience of Vietnam suggests not.
But this is, after all, a war, and deaths – lots of them – are inevitable. To wish otherwise, to think that such phrases as "bunker buster" or "shock and awe" could ever imply anything other than twisted, charred corpses, is to sterilize all meaning out of the notion of war. And here lies the real threat of Ignatieff’s "virtual war." "If war becomes unreal to the citizens of modern democracies," he writes, "will they care enough to restrain and control the violence exercised in their name?"
In other words, if the cause of a war is good and just, then we should not shrink from the violence and bloodshed that fighting it will inevitably entail. The horrors of war should not be hidden from us by a compliant media, but rather be exposed in full as a constant reminder of the cost to be paid.
This is not our war – not yet, anyway – but our own news coverage has been complicit in helping to "sanitize" the impact of the conflict. This should change. "We need to stay away from… self-righteous invulnerability," concludes Michael Ignatieff in Virtual War. "Only then can we get our hands dirty. Only then can we do what is right." |
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