You Can't Bury the Truth

By James Poniewozik

You know that war we've been fighting in Iraq? Apparently Americans have been dying in it. This treacherous revelation was made in an Internet ad by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which uses images of flag-draped American coffins to argue for tossing out the G.O.P. majority. It took the Republican leaders more than a week to notice the ad existed, but when they did, the response was fairly predictable. "To use those images to rally Democrats and raise money I think is appalling," said House majority leader John Boehner.

The ad is not exactly subtle. Images of despair flash by: the coffins, soldiers near a burning car, Katrina victims at the Superdome, a gas-price sign. A red banner appears--red evil! Red scary!--reading, THINGS HAVE TAKEN A TURN FOR THE WORSE. We see Vice President Dick Cheney baring his teeth as if to take a bite out of a baby. Then a blue banner emerges--blue good! Blue safe!--as DCCC chairman Rahm Emanuel talks to cops and a toddler smiles in a swing. The caption assures us, BUT AMERICA IS STRONG ENOUGH TO CHANGE.

O.K., the ad is a tad political. But politicizing? You can't politicize a war--because wars are political to begin with. Political leaders decide to fight them; elections determine what course they take or if they are fought at all. And Republicans have used harsh pictures in advertising too. The 2004 Bush campaign used images from the World Trade Center, including firefighters carrying off a flag-draped body--and was criticized for it by the Kerry campaign. (Indeed, Bush admaker Mark McKinnon told the New York Times he thought the Democrats' use of the coffin pictures was entirely appropriate.) After 9/11, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was one of the strongest advocates of showing horrible visuals of the attacks, to ensure that we never forget.

The fact is, contrary to the dictum that politics should stop at the water's edge, political decisions sure don't stop there. And their repercussions don't tap on the brakes when making the return trip, as the coffins starkly show. The message of the ad is simple and, in a democracy at war, legitimate: Let's get rid of the guys who signed off on this. (The fact that some of the guys who signed off were Democrats is an inconvenient subtlety the ad elides.) You can disagree with its argument, but to have that argument in an election--with plain words and, yes, images--is right and necessary.

The coffin flap is just the latest battle in a campaign to make the acknowledgment of American deaths in the war a traitorous act, as when conservatives assailed Ted Koppel for reading the names of war dead on Nightline in 2004. And it raises a question more important than a midsummer political blip: Why, after more than three years, are images of coffins returning from a war controversial at all?

Answer: Because the government has worked to make it so, and too much of the media has acquiesced. The Department of Defense, claiming the interests of families, has enforced a ban on photos and videos of coffins, and although journalists complained, it took an independent blogger (Russ Kick, at www.thememoryhole.org to find and publish military photos of the caskets at Dover Air Force Base. And unlike in the Vietnam war, images of battlefield dead, even when available, rarely make it into the American media, in part because of concerns that they would seem intrusive or distasteful. We will spend millions for pictures of Angelina Jolie's baby, but we hesitate to part with a dime of audience capital for the biggest story of the age.

Yet the public may not really be so squeamish. In a 2003 CBS News/New York Times poll, two-thirds of Americans disagreed with the ban on coffin photos. This year, when HBO aired the gory documentary Baghdad ER, about a military hospital, 3.5 million people watched, a huge number for a cable documentary. It's not clear, for that matter, that seeing the horrors of war plays against Republicans at all. Images are hard to control. Pictures of war dead could produce a rallying effect--finish the job, get those who did this to us. And there's a school of thought that, good news or bad, focusing on national security only helps the G.O.P. President George W. Bush was pulled into that briar patch in 2004 and came out with a second term.

The most affecting argument against making the coffin photos explicitly political is concern for the families of the dead. But their beliefs about the images--and about the war--are not monolithic, and their interests, sadly, are not the only ones at stake. Just as our troops fight for all of us, they also die for all of us. Families, pundits and pols can disagree on what the flag that shrouds those coffins stands for. But that flag is not, and should never be, a blindfold.