Here’s one of my patented I-don’t-agree-with-everything-in-this-post-but-it’s-too-damn-good-to-ignore posts. Captain KJ is an American serving in Iraq, and this is her post about the way the American MSM reports on American deaths, doesn’t report on Iraqi deaths, and gives a bad impression of America to Iraqis in multiple ways.

But where she says that exercising their freedom of speech is one of those ways, that is where she and I diverge. This is an excerpt, of course, but I encourage you to read the whole post, because she makes several complex points.

…What does it say to the Iraqis that we yell and scream (or our visible press does) about 20 American deaths when, in this ongoing conflict, a “light casualty day” for civilians in Baghdad is a day when there are less than 50 deaths? What are we saying about our relative valuing of American and Iraqi lives? Perhaps we should consider the messages that we’re carrying around the world when we have hysterics in the press the way we do. Granted, no nation or people can escape a certain amount of ethnocentrism, but it looks really bad to the people here when we obsess continually about American lives lost (which are, after all, lives lost who had volunteered to put themselves in the path of danger), and remain dismissively mute about the Iraqi lives lost, except as an underscore to continually harping about American deaths…

and my comment:

A good post. Respect for American lives does not require the negation of the personhood of any other nationalities, and I haven’t seen it put as well as it is here. But do you think that anyone Stateside gives a moment’s thought to how the US appears to Iraqis? I don’t: your post is the single most humanistic thing I’ve read about the Iraqis since…yes, since the last time I read Al Jazeera.

I have to strongly disagree, however, that parroting the party line strengthens the country. The Iraqis already know the US is divided: the US really is divided. Opposition and debate are inherent in the democratic process and certainly the Founding Fathers of the United States knew and valued this. It’s messy. It’s complicated. But it is the mark of an advanced nation that it tolerates ambiguity and difference, and venerates freedom of speech. There is no point in your being there, trying to bring democracy to Iraq, if they don’t know that this is how it works; they already know how totalitarianism and government censorship work. They know it all too well.