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February 12, 2007
An open letter from a cartoonist in Iraq
[Editor's note: the following was submitted to the Notebook by a cartoonist
currently deployed in the Operation Iraqi Freedom theater. For security reasons
-- and restrictions regarding active military -- they have asked that they
not be identified.]
Is image worth a thousand hurts?
What comes to mind when you see a flag-draped coffin?
Some, including myself, see the mortal remains of someone who has nothing left to give in service to their community or nation.
Others may see a tragic waste of a promising life, or a forever-more empty place at a family's dinner table.
No matter how your political persuasion distills this image, a flag-draped coffin is due a certain amount of dignity worthy of last respects.
But in many political cartoons, a flag-draped coffin is quickly becoming nothing more than a visual prop, a metaphor.
Cartoonists live and die by the metaphor, and flag-draped coffins ought not to be out of bounds.
But use that image with care.
Some cartoons have depicted flag-draped coffins stacked like Jenga blocks in a grotesque salute to the body count from Operation Iraqi Freedom. Another, by a recent Pulitzer Prize-winner, showed President Bush running a treadmill made of -- you guessed it -- flag-draped caskets. That particular cartoon made such an impression with Editor and Publisher magazine that it was chosen as its cartoon of the month for February's print issue.
However, I suggest that if that cartoon instead showed a national syndicator running a treadmill made of unemployed editorial cartoonists, the cartooning industry -- such as it is -- would cry foul and perhaps stage a multi-cartoon "show of farce" in protest.
Cartoonists lately tend to show U.S. troops in one of two scenarios: cowering
behind a crumbling wall as insurgents spray bullets in their direction, or
as casualties covered by Old Glory.
May I suggest that these images are inaccurate and, in fact, reckless?
Those who assume that soldiers who are deployed to Iraq are condemned to a pine box fate have a serious misunderstanding of the training these troops bring to theater as well as the conditions on the ground.
As most cartoonists are not actually in the Iraqi theater of operations and rely on news reports for their information, this misunderstanding is perhaps inevitable. But let me share parts of a letter, written by a chief warrant officer stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq, published in the Feb. 5 issue of the Mideast Edition of Stars and Stripes: "We recently completed a successful military operation in Najaf, Iraq, by killing hundreds of insurgents. We foiled their plot to kill leading Shiite clerics, to be carried out by group members disguising themselves as pilgrims on the way to Karbala, Iraq.
"It's a huge story illustrating the cooperation between the Iraqi military and coalition forces.
"Would you like to hear Stars and Stripes' headline on this story? 'U.S. Helo Downed in Najaf Fight, Killing 2 Troops' (Jan. 29). How about the New York Times' headline? 'Missteps by Iraqi Forces In Battle Raise Questions.'
"By some accounts we killed or captured 600 terrorists in this battle, and yet we get these types of headlines -- and the daily U.S. death count.
"In other news, 125 people died in automobile accidents today in America; 37 died from falling off something; 35 died of poisoning; 11 drowned; 10 died in a fire; and two Americans died in Iraq.
"Can somebody please explain to me what our exit strategy is for the U.S. highway system?"
Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines rightfully complain that the media at large ignores the great things being done here in Iraq. We are seemingly nothing more than a death toll that has yet to be tallied, a traumatic injury that has yet to be airlifted from the battlefield.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have served in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and the death toll in that amount of time -- now longer than that spend by U.S. forces in World War II, as we have been recently reminded by the media -- is perhaps at one or two percent. And this against an enemy that employs roadside bombs, dresses like and hides among civilians.
U.S. troops are trained to go into harm's way. That is their job. Fatalities are inevitable, though always tragic. The death of a soldier -- or 3,000 troops for that matter -- in and of itself is hardly an effective measure of the success or failure of military strategy, and it is an unfair example to use in painting the president as uncaring.
If anything, it is the cartoonists who are callous to our troops by their continued negative depiction in American op-ed pages.
Admittedly, not every cartoonist deserves this critique. There are some cartoonists who do not playfully and irreverently use flag-draped coffins as figurative Legos to build yet another indictment against President Bush. But those cartoonists are vastly outnumbered.
Political cartoonists have every right to use that image as they see fit. That right is guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, part of the same Constitution that U.S. troops have taken an oath to uphold and defend. But it may be useful to know that the insensitive use of those images upsets many troops and their families.
At least, that is the opinion of just one of those troops, currently serving in the Iraqi theater. But it also is the opinion of a professional editorial cartoonist, who is on leave from his job to serve his nation in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
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