An embedded prayer

By Weekly Archive On Sep 17, 2008

By
Robert C. Koehler Read Spanish Version

The
outrage and grief push against the edge of language: "A visitor
to the village and to three graveyards within its limits on Aug. 31
counted 42 freshly dug graves," writes New York Times reporter
Carlotta Gall. "Thirteen of the graves were so small they could
hold only children."

Here’s
my standard for presidential fiber: Give me a candidate who can
imagine his or her own child in one of those graves.

George
Bush’s lack of introspection — oh, that smirk, symbolizing for eight
years now the country I live in — is a national joke. Yet he
allegedly speaks to and for the "faith community," as
though faith equals the mindless mouthing of prescribed platitudes.
What Bush’s toxic reign has taught us is that a president with no
inner dimension is a danger almost beyond calculation, considering
the destructive power he commands, to his own people and to the world
(and the world, of course, well knows this).

Do
we know yet that we must move, as a nation, to a new dimension of
discourse and understanding, not just politically but in all ways? Do
we know yet that there is no security in militarized fear? I would
wish, at least, for a president, and a media, who understand this and
have the courage (the faith) to stand up to the institutional
interests that thrive on such fear.

Without
this, we have … the war on terror.

I
don’t know if we can vote it out, but by God I insist that it not
remain unexamined: distant background noise we no longer notice even
when it generates headlines and mild controversy.

Thus,
amid the confetti of the presidential race, a U.S. air strike on the
Afghan village of Azizabad, on Aug. 22, which may have killed as many
as 90 civilians and as few as zero Taliban. It is the latest cause
for outrage in Afghanistan — from the president of the country to
the humblest villager — against the American occupiers, who have
such surpassing indifference to the lives of Afghanis.

The
controversy is over how many Afghan civilians actually died in the
assault, with the U.S. military insisting the figure was five to
seven, along with three dozen or so bad guys, which apparently is an
acceptable ratio to the average, unreflective American. Independent
observers, including a U.N. investigating team and, seemingly, Times
reporter Gall, dispute the military’s numbers and cite evidence
supporting claims of far larger civilian carnage, along with lack of
evidence that the air strike had any tactical justification at all.

To
my mind, the controversy — a discussion of which occupies about half
of Gall’s 2,600-word story in the Times, which ran on Sept. 7 —
while not without a certain significance in terms of mopping up every
last detail of the truth, also serves as a helluva red herring.

"At
the battle scene, shell craters dotted the courtyards and shrapnel
had gouged holes in the walls," Gall writes. "Rooms had
collapsed and mud bricks and torn clothing lay in uneven mounds where
people had been digging. In two places blood was splattered on a
ceiling and a wall. An old woman pushed forward with a cauldron full
of jagged metal bomb fragments.. . .

"The
smell of bodies lingered in one compound, causing villagers to start
digging with spades. They found the body of a baby, caked in dust, in
the corner of a bombed-out room."

I
find myself in awe of the determination a journalist has to have
simply to convey the war on terror to American readers as it appears
outside the managed version of U.S. military press releases. And much
as I admire such reporting — how much easier to remain embedded
within the official context — I find myself trembling with
incredulity as I read it.

The
core of this story isn’t the controversy: How many children,
precisely, did we kill this time around? This is a story of the
unspeakable immensity of death. It’s the 9/11 story still unfolding,
and the only way to tell it is to embed a prayer, a wail of parental
grief, deep within the words. Let the controversy come later, after
we’ve joined the villagers, and the world, in mourning.

And
the story is also much more than this, of course, since we’ve been
killing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq for most of the Bush
presidency. In July, we bombed another Afghan wedding:

"Oh
my God!" (the groom) was now sobbing uncontrollably. "I saw
my bride and my family members; I saw the pieces of their bodies
scattered all over the place." So writes Iqbal Sapand for
Information Clearinghouse, about a July 6 incident in Nangarhar in
which 52 people died (45 of them women and children).

This
is how we feed the endless war, the one that’s been raging for about
6,000 years now. I believe it is the American destiny to end it.

Robert
Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at
Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can
respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com
or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.