May We Remind You?

In “The War That Isn’t,” his latest column in National Journal, William Powers notes, “It’s not at all unusual lately to pick up a large metropolitan newspaper and find that there is nothing — zero — on the front page about a war in which nearly 4,000 Americans have died.” (Let alone the tens of thousands wounded. Or the hundreds of thousands of dead or wounded Iraqis and the millions forced to flee.)

Not to worry. Unless you agree with George C. Wilson, whose article in Army Times and other military publications, “Vietnam Redux,” points out, “Now, as then, [the] generals are leading us down the primrose path.” But this kind of news, as Powers says, “gets lost in the noise of other news.” You know: “Obama and the Clintons. The mortgage crisis. Sports. The Hollywood writers’ strike. The Clintons. The weather. Obama. Celebrities in trouble. Obama. Your health.”
Postscript: An inherent part of genocide is to deny that people have died. Read “Counting Iraqi Casualties — and a Media Controversy,” about “the war’s exceptional human costs” and the smear campaign to deny them. It is a devastating indictment of the American press — and National Journal and The Wall Street Journal in particular — by John Tirman, the executive director and a principle research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for International Studies. Tirman commissioned the survey published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006, that concluded that 600,000 Iraqis died during the first 40 months of the war.