Although a democracy requires constant vigilance regarding censorship, too little attention is paid to how bad news is hidden in plain view. It often is enough to frame disclosures within a larger context of justification–the war on terror, the economy, the electoral campaign–and it certainly helps to treat them as just the daily news, page 6, nothing special. Both strategies are evident in a recent report in the New York Times that included this photo:

The report was titled “Double Bombings in an Iraqi town Kill 35 and Wound 62.” Awful, right? And that’s before you know that the attackers were targeting both a wedding caravan and the medics that arrived after the first explosion. The words “civil war” never appear in the story, however. What does appear is the photograph, but it shows the aftermath of a third bombing, one in Baghdad that killed nine Iraqis and one US soldier. So, the news about the continuing (escalating?) carnage throughout Iraq is there but not there, in print but displaced by this photograph (and another as well) about an assault on US troops. And in this photo we see not the dead or wounded but rather an able-bodied soldier working like a traffic cop after an accident. The war could be smackdown between SUVs and other vehicles, not a bloody cycle of violence killing thousands of civilians. The bad news is reported, but it becomes easy to see it as something else.

But even this photograph reveals too much, so it had to be framed with this caption: “An American soldier secured an area on Baghdad on Thursday after a car bombing killed a soldier and nine Iraqis. An American patrol seemed to be the target.” Now look at the photo, and keep in mind that you are looking at a “secure area.” Does it look secure, or would “wrecked” be closer to the truth? The cars in the background are destroyed and the shops along the street have been seriously damaged. Rubble and debris can be cleaned up, but the trauma will extend well beyond the physical wreckage. (Two Americans and 23 Iraqis were wounded.) Note also the damaged Humvee being towed away. The costs extend in every direction, which is how the US can spend $341,000,000 per day on the war. The soldier who supposedly is doing the securing seems to be following the tow truck while talking into his radio, probably to report that the mission has been accomplished. In short, securing the area means deploying troops to allow removal of the dead and wounded and any damaged equipment, then leaving again. It does not mean rebuilding Iraq.

The road in the photograph used to be called Death Road because of all the explosions, but it had been quieter lately. Secure, one might have said, until this bomb, which one shopkeeper said was the worst of the 19 bombings he has seen on the street. The news is not good and current US policy is not going to make it better, but that’s hard to see when right there in plain view.

Photograph by Moises Saman for the New York Times.

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Coverage of the war in Iraq has been showing signs of fatigue lately, and for good reason. Now into the fifth year of the war, yet another parade of generals in Washington provided little consolation amidst the steady death toll–32 US soldiers in March, 46 so far this April, as well as hundreds of Iraqi deaths–and the many, many more who are wounded, traumatized, or refugees. But how many photos can you take of troops tramping through homes or dispensing medical care or just killing time? How often will we look at another bombed out vehicle or another general on PR duty? The carnage continues, but we all know that the political situation is not getting any better, everything is on hold until after the presidential election, and everyone is getting tired. Perhaps that’s why there have been a number of images lately like this:

It may be the season for sandstorms, but you wouldn’t have known it in previous years. Now, however, the slide shows have many variations on this shot. The sand is so comprehensive that it acts like an optical filter. The soldiers seem suspended like a prehistoric bug in amber. The one on the left has become doll-like, a GI Joe figure to be moved around but incapable of changing anything. The one on the right could be lost in thought. Everything is slowed down, grinding to a halt, as if there were sand in the gears of history.

If there had been only one of the sandstorm images, I would have let it pass. But they kept appearing, and then I noticed that there was another series also being spooled out. Images like this one:

This is a photograph taken through the night vision equipment used by US troops. The fact that the photo is taken through a scope or similar instrument while on patrol gives these images some sense of action, but there still is the sense that everything is happening in slow motion. Slow probably is good when men are walking around with guns at night, but the photo creates a sense of suspended animation. The green filter is not eco-friendly green but rather something from a heavy dream. Warriors stand in archetypal tableau as if at the gates of some netherworld. The green air is noxious, miasmic. The war is not a place for action; it is a place that will never change.

Both images may be surreal–or prophetic. They also might be examples of what we could call “optical noise.” That term could refer to the visual din in images cluttered with signage, but I’m referring to something else. Each photograph is an image of the war, but one in which the visual equivalent of white noise is omnipresent. That noise doesn’t occlude the image but it does interfere with emotional response. And, of course, it is tiring.The first photograph shows a scene that could be clear at another time; the second shows something that would be invisible without the cyborg eye. In neither case are we able to see clearly. In both we have a metaphor for the present state of the war, one in which we have seen too much and yet not enough. A war in which everything seems mired in sand, trapped in a bad dream, waiting for change, for clarity.

Photographs by Alaa Al-Marjani/Associated Press and Rafiq Maqool/Associated Press. (The first is from Najaf, Iraq; the second is from Mandozi, Afghanistan. There are many night vision images from Iraq, but this was the one close at hand when putting up this post. There are differences between the two wars, but both now are subject to optical noise, which is created by the repetition of stock images while providing a metaphor for the current stalemate.)

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This photograph stopped me in my tracks:

The power of an image depends on both composition and context. To explain the impact of this photograph, I need to say a few words about the moral dimension of contemporary public life.

Although some don’t like to admit it, democratic politics rightly includes a certain amount of ethical sloppiness. Instead of authoritarian enforcement of moral order, democracy encourages people to negotiate with others, overlook differences in lifestyle, and settle for agreement on outcomes rather than principles. But if the competition for votes and the enforcement of policies becomes completely separated from ethics, democracies can become corrupted.

Recent events in the news have made the this growing danger all too clear. Three items need to be connected. First, we now know that torture was not the work of rogue soldiers, but rather was discussed and approved at the highest levels of the administration. Nor was this done in a general manner, but rather through highly detailed accounts of specific methods of abuse in tandem with carefully planned strategies for institutional protection of the government. In other words, the case has been made for prosecution of the current administration as war criminals. Second, the New York Times discovered that the “independent” military analysts giving “objective” assessments on the television news channels have been dutifully relaying administration propaganda to promote the war, and doing so while also in the employ of defense industries profiting from the war. In short, an influential sector of the press has become the propaganda organ for a criminal administration. Third, there was the ABC presidential nomination debate, which seemingly was modeled on “American Idol” while avoiding all major questions of policy, save for when the questioner promoted further reduction in the capital gains tax. What should be a forum for deliberative argument became instead a lesson in how to use entertainment and ideology to avoid thinking about reality.

In this context, it will be very easy for people to lose their ethical bearings while cynicism triumphs. “All politicians are alike.” “There’s nothing we can do.” “At least we’re not fanatics.” Perhaps it was because of this background of ethical complacency or defeatism that I was shaken by the photograph above.

Let’s look at it more closely. A man is carrying an injured woman after a car bombing in Baqouba, a provincial capital northeast of Baghdad. (The bombing was part of yet another attack in the insurgency and civil war unleashed by the US invasion.) Behind the man, another woman is also being helped as she holds a cloth to her face. Behind her, a boy has been bloodied as well. The background also includes a police vehicle and personnel, and then a curb, fence, trees, and the rest of an orderly, pleasant scene like you might see in any suburban neighborhood in the US. But for the women’s garb and the beret on the soldier, they could be entering a suburban hospital. Thus, there is a declension of violence from most injured to uninjured, and, for many viewers, a declension of identification from least familiar in the foreground to most familiar in the background. Working against this tendency, the wounded are being brought into the viewer’s space, as if from a common background through a rupture created by war to further disrupt our world.

But the war is not materially disruptive for most Americans. It is easy to forget the harm being done. Until you look into his eyes. That look is what stops me from turning the page, changing the subject, and no longer caring. The rest of the scene is now a staple of world news; the victims are offered to us for our reactions, which may also become equally habitual and brief. No strong demand is made. By looking into the camera, the man activates the visual grammar of demand, but he is not demanding. This is not a call for vengeance or justice or mercy or help. It does beyond that. He stands there not as a victim but as a human being, and he asks for one thing–the most important thing–which is to look at what we have done. Facing a culture of willful blindness, he looks us in the eye and asks that we see.

The phrase that instantly came to mind was the question posed by attorney Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Finally reaching the limit of his tolerance of the Senator’s abuse of the privileges of free speech and congressional power, Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” To regain our moral center, the citizens of the US must do what the administration and too many members of the press have willfully refused to do: Ask the question this photograph is asking: How can you do this? Have you no sense of decency? No sense of shame?

Photograph by Adem Hadei/Associated Press.

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Some get light-headed at the sight of blood, others get nauseous, kids are amazed, nurses get used to it. Most of the time, we don’t see it. Despite the gallons of fake blood spilled in the movies, the sight of the real thing continues to be a shock. That will be one reason you don’t see it often in a family newspaper. The daily slide shows have more leeway, however. That’s where I found this image:

The caption stated that a number of people had been injured when a rally in Katmandu was broken up by police wielding tear gas and batons. (Why do they call them police?) Now this photo isn’t grotesque. Indeed, it’s not too far aesthetically from the more familiar tourism photos of Buddhist monks in colorful robes, or from other images that have been in the news lately from the many carnivals and similar rites of spring that are going on around the globe. And one could suggest that it’s somewhat staged: he could be propped up for the camera, and the red, white, and blue sign in English certainly is directed at the Western media. Besides, blood flows freely above the lip line; he could just be nicked as if by shaving, right?

Wrong. He’s been clubbed, and he’s being held up because he might collapse. He is not colorful. He is bearing witness to violence. If they will club him in the public square, you can imagine what can happen behind closed doors. But we don’t go there, and that is why it is important to see the blood. Stunned into silence, his body now speaks for him.

If we were to measure speech, perhaps it could be done in blood. How much has to be spilled to secure the right to speak freely? How much has to be said to stop the flow of blood in police states and failed states and war zones and ghettos around the globe? How often will we turn away rather than look, nauseous, at the blood streaming from the victims of beatings and bombings and drive-by shootings? When will we face this:

Sadr City, Baghdad, a local clinic after a firefight between US troops and militiamen. It makes me sick.

Photographs by Brian Sokol/New York Times and Ahmed Al-Rubaye/AFP-Getty Images.

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This one is heartbreaking.

I can’t help but think of a small bird lying in the dirt. Small yet once throbbing with life and song, now lifeless, soon to disappear entirely. Perhaps it’s the bright yellow–so unusual for a shroud yet somehow appropriate for a child–or the shape of a broken wing with the telltale blood, or the feet sticking out birdlike from beneath the body. Such a small, innocent thing. Do not speak here of the grandeur of war, or of forging character and testing national resolve.

There is a companion photograph, this one of the boy’s parents grieving outside the morgue.

In the first photo, the body is both there but not there. Here the body is not there but there–signified by the open coffin that will be used to put him away forever. Even the parents are both there and not there: physically present, but hopelessly distracted, lost in their grief, separate from each other, from anyone else, from themselves. The mother could be a wounded bird, flopping awkwardly in the dirt, not yet killed but crippled by the blow.

In the first photo, the bare feet evoke the vulnerability of a small animal but also are the one sure mark of a human body. Likewise, the hand extending into the second picture may be the one sign of human compassion in the scene. I don’t know, but it seems as if someone is cautioning the photographer to not get too close or otherwise intrude on the grieving parents. That small gesture holds out the promise that others could recognize their pain and respect their need to mourn. Thus the hand cues response to the photograph as a whole, suggesting that others might care for those being harmed by the war. The question remains whether that is a plausible hope or an empty gesture.

Photographs by Michale Kamber and Joao Silva for the New York Times.

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Several days ago we talked about the “faces of death” in Iraq. Today I want to talk about the costs of that war. The obvious costs are astonishing. Over 4,000 American personnel dead with at least seven times that number injured—and this doesn’t include those inflicted with some version of PTSD—and an additional 90,000 Iraqi deaths plus who knows how many injuries. Some media outlets have scandalously reported that this is far few casualties than in comparable wars in the past, but the number remains stunning, all the more so for a war fought under false pretenses. Locating the costs in dollars and cents is no less stunning. Through 2007 the war has cost 522 billion dollars; that’s $1,800 for every resident of the U.S. and it doesn’t take into account the 70 billion dollars already allocated for 2008 with no end in sight. But as I say above, these are the obvious costs.

But there are other costs, no less shocking or troubling, even if words to describe them are harder to come by and if we have to look harder to see them.

I came across this picture in the Guardian while meeting with some friends at the coffee shop in my local Borders Bookstore. It looked like just one more of the numerous pictures of destruction that we see quite regularly coming out of Iraq and to which, if you are like me, you have become somewhat anesthetized. And then I read the caption: “A man stands in the Mutanabi books market [Baghdad], once a thriving intellectual hangout.” Sitting in a book store where I regularly meet with friends and colleagues to discuss the events of the day I was struck by the irony that what I was looking at was not just the tragic destruction of an ancient and majestic city, but the obliteration and erasure of civil society itself. With enough money and manpower cities can be rebuilt, but without the obligations and social capital generated by the relationships cultivated by civil society they are barren places; totally devoid of affiliation with friends and strangers alike, they are little more than political and economic facades that ultimately leave us alienated and alone, rather like the old man in the photograph, searching in vein for some sense of meaning lost amidst the wreckage of history.

But the cost of war exceeds even the destruction of civil society.

I have seen many photographs of the war in the past five years that have had a strong effect upon me, but few have been as poignant or as troubling as this AP image of an Iraqi girl who “checks out the damage” of a suicide car bomber that killed 7 and wounded 14 more. The girl cannot be more than nine or ten years old. Her smock and blouse are neat and clean, and her hair is carefullly braided and adorned with yellow ribbons. And, of course, she is eating ice cream, surely one of life’s simplest pleasures, especially for children. She belongs in a park playing with friends, or perhaps in a schoolroom somewhere. But here, instead, she is framed by the remains of an insane act of destruction. What makes the picture so deeply troubling is that I cannot avoid the conclusion that what I am looking at is not the picture of innocence but a horrifying portrait of the utter normalization of war. She “checks out” the damage of a suicide bomber with the same nonchalant curiosity that my own young daughter would display when noticing a simple car crash for the umpteenth time: Interesting to be sure, but nothing she hadn’t seen before or didn’t anticipate seeing again—a mere fact of life, something to “check out” in passing, but certainly nothing to disrupt the pleasures of eating ice cream. One can only imagine with dismay how the young girl in the photograph will “see” the world as an adult.

No more tragic than the loss of lives, the scenes on display in these two photographs are no less tragic either, and perhaps all the more so because we so seldom include such scenarios in the ledger when we calculate war’s bottom line. But if we look real closely we can surely see the devastating effects of war’s silent costs. And we should mourn. And we should be horrified.

Photo Credits: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and AP

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