Another Reuter’s employee has bitten the dust that the rotting corpse of US foreign policy has decayed into. In fact another two. Employees that is (not policies).

(Reuters) “An Iraqi photographer and driver working for Reuters in Iraq were killed in Baghdad on Thursday in what police said was American military action, and which witnesses described as a helicopter attack. Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in eastern Baghdad.”

Were killed in eastern Baghdad.

Were killed. Heart stopping stuff, isn’t it? But not policy stopping. ep]

Is history staffed by idiots? Well yes, actually. And no, not really. For a start, history – or rather the historical data that we study and call history – is an amalgam of propaganda, self serving subjectivity (apologies for all alliteration), and unclothed truth. But this we know – or think. What’s harder to ascertain is whether modern news gathering networks consider it their remit to write modern history accurately. To replace subjectivity with the objectivity of the lens: To get the record straight. It’s probably safe to assume that they do – or once did.

But how much of what they do is done to oil the gossip machine and earn big bucks from advertising revenues in the process? Perhaps the further up the network hierarchies you go, the more Wanting To Do The Right Thing is replaced by Ivy League cynicism. Maybe not. But do war reporters – the guys and girls on the ground, at the blood soaked coal face – really do what they do and get risk getting killed for it because they think they are actually helping the hand of history become steadier? Less prone to hyperbolic shakes? And should, say, they manage to tell it like it is, to mine truth’s coal from the lode of in-the-moment information overload, what purpose do they think they serve - really? Do people like Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and Saeed Chmagh, 40, go into Armageddon to distil truth from confusion so that political opinion can be formed and re-forged. So that democracy can be served?

As someone who is very concerned that the reporting and broadcasting of most ‘news’ is not only nugatory but actually damaging to society, (an opinion echoed by an old friend of mine who works . . . at Reuters) as I write this I’m reminded that there may just be a grain of worth in the whole God forsaken, PC, holier than thou, touchy-feely, slicker than snot business. Imagine taking reporters – all of them – out of Iraq (‘Iraq’ used here as a generic term for any area of large scale military conflict of which the global public are aware – and boy are we unaware of an awful lot). Imagine that the world was blind to everything that went on there, not just most of it. Imagine that freaked out, burnt out grunts told to do the impossible by morons miles away could get away with anything because there was no one watching. No one at all.

Imagine Auschwitz.

So Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and Saeed Chmagh, 40, died for a good cause, right? They died putting a brake on the behaviour of often modestly educated and sometimes decent young men and women who are sent into hell, and told to behave like angels, didn’t they? And their grief strewn families know that don’t they, and that’s consolation enough.

Bullshit. The remit of war reporting is in principle the moderation of inhuman behaviour by the presence and process of the global witness. War reporters are aware of their ability – however limited it may be – to shape policy back home, to canvas for politicians, or bring them to ruin. But such nobility of cause is revoltingly irrelevant to the bereaved. Why? Because mostly, humans have a monstrous capacity for grief. Why? Because mostly, we have a titanic capacity for love. Why? Because mostly, we are nurtured in the bowels of love as children; and we apply the needs of childhood to our adulthood whether we know it or not. Mostly.

But like everything else, war reportage is in part good, and in part bad. Let’s officially abandon the need for things to be all good and all bad. Black and white. God and the devil. Let’s grow up. War reportage enables the world to lay a hand on the potential Auschwitz torturer’s shoulder and say whoa, fella: enough. No more. Never again.

And praise the Lord for that.

But war reportage may also have a slow, grinding, damaging effect on the lives of people who watch it. It may just be a kind of molecular acid that consumes the morale of billions. Because if we look around us and we see death and suffering and cruelty and barbarism, we may – if we are not perfectly anchored in perfect ethics – become that tiny bit more barbaric ourselves. Or at least a bit more jaded: A bit more void of hope and sunshine and delight in ourselves and the world. From computer game manufacturers to feature film makers the sad wonderful world over, this is a process firmly denied by the media. I’ve had this very conversation with a successful film producer, and he could not, or would not, see it. In his world, people are immune to the influence of broadcast media. They are isolated from this aspect of their environment. Their brains are perfectly able to resist these influences and embrace others. So film, in his world, is without power. It has no effect, like everything else people see broadcast, podcast or webcast or otherwise rammed down their throats.

Bullshit.

It’s awfully trendy to hate the ‘war’ in Iraq. And I like to think I’m particularly resistant to fashion (something that shepherds people directly and subliminally, Mr Successful Producer?). But when it comes to US foreign policy in the Middle East, I’m the arch fashionista - an über air kissing black wearing darling I’m oh so late will someone please pull this pickle out of my arse mincing machine.

I hate to hate anything, but I hate this thing that is aggravating a problem it may or may not have forgotten it was once there to solve, and which it probably helped create. I hate it for the same reasons you hate it, or similar. But we don’t hate it for the same reasons as the families of Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and Saeed Chmagh, 40. Their hatred is just getting started. At the moment theirs is a pain most of us can’t imagine. Because of that, their hatred will be much less rational than ours. We like to think ours is based on a detestation of hypocrisy, of corporate vandalism and cultural naiveté masquerading as a neo Christian crusade masquerading as self defence masquerading as revenge masquerading as vote catching. Or something. Theirs will be a monstrous fusion of those things and raw emotional agony.

And so hate grows.

To these families we may say that we try to believe their loved ones did not die for nothing. Their deaths may add to the momentum that is gathering against all things Bush, against ignorance of attitude and an absence of humility. We must pray that this will be the case, if we pray at all. Because the alternative – that their deaths will make not one jot of difference to anything – is unthinkable, and probably the way it is.

© N Green 2007