Images of War

Yesterday I wrote a little about the images of US soldiers posing with dead bodies in Afghanistan which was published in the Los Angeles Times. I focused on some comments by Bing West, a military analyst, who said that this type of thing (posing with dead bodies) happens all the time in war. In today’s Washington Post, there is a good essay entitled “We’ve seen photos before like ones of U.S. soldiers with Afghan corpses”. Joe Heim writes:

But, however abhorrent these actions by a small group of American forces in Afghanistan are, they are in keeping with the history of conflict. Perhaps we’re surprised because we think we’re more civilized than we are. Or because most of us don’t actually understand what war is.

This war is 7,000 miles away, but its images can reach us in seconds. Many of the gory pictures are tweeted on Twitter. Or liked on Facebook. Or unliked. A great disconnect exists between the horror of the photographs and the nifty devices and platforms we can click on and off to control our access to war. War is the most antisocial of human activities, yet Afghanistan — and maybe all wars from now on — will be experienced by most of us through social media, in the palm of our hand. From a distance, we’ll see war up-close.

Heim’s essay is an important read as it highlights that in the Internet age these images of war will keep on coming and coming at us. Maybe these photos and others like it will give us pause the next time we think about going to war,