Where are the dead Iraqis to be seen?

Instapundit links to this stirring piece in the Mirror by Tony Parsons, with which I almost wholly agree. Wow, says Instapundit. Indeed. But here’s the one bit I have a problem with.

Yes, there have been deeply disturbing images of dead and burned Iraqi children. But do we honestly imagine that Allied forces, fighting a war unrestrained by political concerns, didn’t kill and maim countless numbers of innocent French, Dutch and Belgian children in the Second World War, never mind the babies we burned alive in Japan and Germany.

We just didn’t see pictures of them.

But I haven’t seen any pictures of dead Iraqis either. Not at any rate on television, which is the news source I’ve been relying on.

Neither has James Lileks. I really like Lileks, to the point where one of the things I most dislike about Saturday morning now is that there’ll be no Bleating from him until Monday. But, I find his archives hard to navigate, and I don’t know how to get to this Bleat once it has stopped being today’s Bleat. This link just goes to the latest one. Meanwhile, here’s a big chunk of what he says today (as I write this) on the pictures of dead Iraqis issue. He’s talking dead Iraqi soldiers, rather than civilians, but the principle is the same because I haven’t seen any pictures of them either.

But I’m serious. Where are the bodies? Or, more to the point, why aren’t we seeing them? One of the most remarkable shots I saw Friday was a slow roll down a broad modern highway; on the verge, a truck with some sort of machine gun fastened to its bed. It was just charred metal – but still, you’d think that if anyone had been manning the gun or sitting behind the driver’s seat, there would have some human remains visible. Then you saw a long black patch blasted in the road. The truck had been hit by a missile and knocked back with such force that anyone inside may have been thrown out, or just plain converted to something that burned without leaving a recognizable shape. That’s just something the camera caught while passing by. Imagine what it would see if it went looking.

I think we should see the casualties, but not to serve any particular pedagogical purpose. I get irritated when told that we should see the dead so we understand what war is really like – as if the idea that people die in horrible means would be a surprise. You mean they don’t freeze up, shout AIIEEE, or grimace and crumple over? I saw a T-72 take a hit the other day, and it was one of those classic examples of the flaws of Soviet design – an armor-piercing round set off the munitions, blowing the turret high in the air. If there was anyone inside, the end was fast. But you can imagine the nature of that quarter-second between life and death- and you should. Men died. In the time it takes you to wink the irreplaceable worlds these men held in their heads vanished. One shell, four men, eight parents, 20 siblings, a hundred friends, a thousand details lost for good. One second in war echoes for a decade.

Show the carnage. Rope it off, show it in the late-night hours when the kids are in bed, but show it. I feel the same way about the 9/11 footage. Show it. Don’t presume we can’t take it or must be shielded, like children, from the truth of the thing we have unleashed. I’m not suggesting that the news should be nothing but Death on Parade, or linger with unwholesome glee on the injuries done to our soldiers or theirs. But you cannot edit death out of war; to do so defames those experience it. How can we understand the soldiers who return home without understanding not just what they saw, but what they did?

The Americans have learned many things from Gulf War I, including many good things. Don’t start popular uprisings you don’t then join in and support. Smart bombs good dumb bombs bad. Kill as few of the enemy as you can. Good stuff like that. But they have also learned this: Don’t show scary pictures of dead enemy bodies you do kill to the civilians because they can’t handle it.

Remember those gruesome images form Gulf War I of the retreating Iraqis spit-roasted on the Road of Death? Okay, there’s not actually been anything quite like that this time. But no incinerated and disfigured dead bad guy bodies? Come on.

But as I say, I’ve been relying on TV – plus this blogosphere internet stuff of course. Have the old paper media had pictures like this? Or have they been scrubbed clean of such horrors also?

At this point in the writing of this I abandoned my desk in my kitchen and I went out and bought copies of the Guardian, the Independent, and the Mirror. There were many references to dead Iraqis, including in the headlines. If ever there going to be gruesome dead Iraqi pictures in the papers, this was when, and this was where. But there was just one very small picture, a very blurry one off the telly, in the Independent of a few of the dead bodies in the John Simpson friendly fire catastrophe that killed a bunch of Kurd commanders.

Apart from that, none. I call this kind of thing SFGO: something funny going on.

Is the deal that the colour magazines can print all the gore they like, once the war is good and over, but not before? Or will these pictures never be seen? (I assume that they have at least been taken.)

I support this war. I thought it was winnable, quickly, and it is being won, almost as quickly as I had hoped. So this is not me saying that this is evil and fascist. I’m just saying that it is happening.

Maybe we civilians really can’t handle such pictures. In terms of boosting civilian support it may have been a very smart move indeed to stop us seeing such things, and at the very least this was perhaps a wise precaution, to delay the moment when the civilians might have turned against a longer campaign than actually happened.

It makes you wonder, as I’m sure the peaceniks are already wondering very loudly: What else are they not allowing us to see?