Show Me The Body Bags

In four days, George W. Bush will leave office. I predict his leaving will be a quiet affair with few laudatory comments and, somewhat paradoxically, little celebration. The reasons it will garner little attention are manifest: all attention will be on Barack Obama and his dawning of a new era. There are also more powerful personal issues today than the American presidency to tax our thoughts, and, put simply, many of us just want to see the back of George W. Bush. We want him gone—gone and forgotten.
He won’t be though. He won’t be forgotten. George W. Bush will likely remain in our minds and in history as the most reviled President of all time, while his election and re-election will remain as two of the few occasions that the world said they knew better than America. We told ya so.
I cannot bring myself to be forgiving and gracious about President George W. Bush or his presidency. Both were disasters for the world and will stay so, particularly in Afghanistan and on Wall Street. But these to me are not his greatest sins. Nor are his many examples of idiocy, so wonderfully exposed by Letterman and everybody else outside the Fox Network. Nor is his shameless evoking of God and the way in which the religious zeal, fervour and influence of his born-again Christianity governed his decisions. I will forget his reading books upside down and his (lack of) response to Katrina. I will consign to memory the cronyism and shameless exploitation, by vested interests, of the American people, the American system and, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the lives of young Americans. These are all matters that, whilst some are tragic, will be best left in the past.
But what I will never forget or forgive is the question of the body bags. Soon after the Iraq War began, George W. Bush decided and dictated that the world’s media would not be allowed to film the arrival in America of body bags from Iraq. He cited the effect the broadcast of such footage would have on grieving families. That comment, more than any other to my mind, was the most fatuous, the most mendacious and most despicable of any during his presidency.
My reason for that is this. George W. Bush knew, or had at least been told, that footage of body bags from Vietnam and Somalia was among the most powerful factors in galvanising public opinion against American military involvement in those areas.* With Vietnam, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all could and did ignore the plaintive cries of “peaceniks.” But when American television started showing body bags coming back from Vietnam, Middle America also turned against the war. And the war ended. It smaller scale, in Somalia.
So why did George W. Bush, for the first time ever in the television age, dictate that body bags would not be filmed? Simple. He wanted and needed the war to continue. And if that meant the full effect, the poignancy and the tragic personal cost to families of his dirty war were hidden from the American public so be it. He would do it.
To me the true obscenity of the Bush presidency is not the upside down books, the idiocy, the stupidity, the posturing, the bravado. It was his cowardly reaction to and treatment of the one enemy he knew he could never combat--the boys in the bags.

Bush will be back. For one more Fryday, next week. Then that’s it.

* Citation: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p70237_index.html

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