What Have the Embeds Done for You Lately?

It's gratifying to see that the massacre at Haditha has become a front-page topic, forcing the pres-o-dent to respond to it two days running. And today news organizations are following reports that there are other atrocities (I'm deliberately using strong language here) under investigation by the military. There will be, we are promised, Congressional investigations. A little too little and a little too late to mitigate the failures of the war policies, but perhaps in time to recoup some national reputation. Probably not. The overseas press is a bit more into Haditha, I think. Yesterday's Aftenposten, the Norwegian equivalent of the NYT, had a two-page inside feature with a front-page teaser. Today the BBC is reporting another massacre by US troops, and it has video. Google News shows that the world's press is all over the killing of a pregnant woman at a checkpoint the other day. That, coupled with the riots in Kabul, paint a damning picture of US war policy in action. It looks doubtful that any number of investigations will restore respect for the US in the eyes of the world, but it might do the trick for the US public.

The US public is going to be far more forgiving. First, it is patriotic, and global condemnation will probably produce and equal and opposite reaction, a greater tolerance for atrocities. After all, the US public will not doubt the purity of motivation of its own troops. They are "scared kids." They are not "steely eyed killers," a term used by their own commanders, though in a more positive context. The US public has also been fed on a steady diet of "let's support our brave troops" by the administration, both parties, and the media. The media have followed that script not just because the administration wrote it for them but because they believed it reflected popular knowledge--these are boys and girls from our home towns--and because they found it writing itself through their shared experiences on the ground.

Which brings us to the embeds. There are still hundreds of embeds in Iraq, if I'm correct. As the atrocity stories dribble out, look carefully to see if a single one of them comes from an embed. So far, there have been the torture stories that came from photos our boys and girls in uniform shot and circulated themselves. There have been stories circulating on the internet through sites like Nowthat'sfuckedup.com that have also come from the troops. There have been stories derived from leaked investigations. There have been stories from the overseas press. There have been stories based on complaints by Iraqi authorities. But there hasn't been an atrocity story from an embed.

There are two possible reasons for this. Either the units the embeds join don't commit atrocities (and certainly the military officials who place the embeds would take care to keep them out of volatile situations) or the embeds just don't see them. Probably the former.

But then there are atrocities that reporters, embedded or otherwise, won't call atrocities. I'm thinking here of the air war. The Haditha massacre occurred after a roadside bomb exploded; then, the reports say, enraged Marines lined up nearby civilians and shot them. In the air war, when hostile action is detected, a plane is called in and drops a bomb. The results are likely to be the same--dead civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who may have passively supported insurgent or terrorist activity (I'll be even-handed on this wording). That's not an atrocity from the cockpit. The pilot doesn't kill innocent civilians in cold blood. It's an atrocity from the ground, though. No embed would be on the ground. It's also an atrocity from the office where the orders are issued, I'd argue. The commanders know that the air war will kill innocents. They then make a cost-benefit analysis. That is, they kill in cold blood. But this is highly abstract for reporters, and won't make the news in any case. Plus, in their defense, the commanders do what they can to minimize collateral damage.

But in any case the US press, in spite of or because of its embeds, its big investment in on-the-ground coverage, is going to be behind the rest of the world on the big story of the war these days. This will make it quite difficult for the US public and politicians to do the right thing.

The World is Flat Footed.

I'm in Norway, near the top of the world, and experiencing the sort of dissonance that William Gibson does such a good job of describing in his interesting book Pattern Recognition. The protagonist of that novel is a young woman who flies from global city to global city, and spends a lot of the book getting over jet lag and the feeling that she's in some bizarre mirror world, where people are the same as in her own world but somehow reversed, so they, for instance, drive on the wrong side of the road. I've been here for two months, and so have no jet lag to speak of, but the endless days cultivate the same feeling. The sun goes down between 10 and 11, but it doesn't go far enough down. It just tucks itself under the western horizon, then rolls around the northern horizon until it pops up again in the east. There's always light in the sky. I go to bed around 1 am and it still feels like sunset. Or sunrise.

Then there's the mirror world thing. This is mostly cultural. So, for instance, all the pop music is in English. It's festival season here, and there's free outdoor music most evenings, and good bands playing. The crowds are similar to the ones you'd see at similar events in cities of similar size in the States--middle-aged with a smattering of kids at the jazz events; high schoolers, university students, and young adults and the rock shows; old farts (and younger prefarts) at the classical music. So while the music is going you could be in Urbana or Madison or Austin. Then the music stops and someone starts talking Norsk, which I can only vanishingly decipher. Everyone except the youngest children can also speak English, however. So in the middle of a monolog, you'll get an effortless code switch.

The TV even more so. Last night we tuned in Jeopardy on a Swedish station--same set, same format, but Swedes. Repurposed pop culture is everywhere, but more usual still is unaltered imported product.

So the other night this touched close to home twice in a row. First, the original Ocean's 11 was on one of the Norwegian national channels. I have a personal connection to that movie, because a relative of mine is in it. Not much of a role, though. He is in a teller's booth next to the one that Frank Sinatra uses. My uncle Emil, aka Jelly, Wehby was a minor mob player who befriended the rat pack on stops to the Beverly Hills dinner club in northern Kentucky. He also ran money to Vegas. So on one of his trips he crashed the set of Ocean's 11, and they stuck him in the picture. For half a second.

After Ocean's 11, it was still light out so we stayed up and watched a rerun of Seinfeld. Again, a personal connection. It was the episode in which Jerry and his current girlfriend make out during Schindler's List. At the end of the episode, her father confronts and berates Jerry. The actor playing the father--he died a few years ago--was married to my wife's father's third wife and was the stepfather to our two half-sisters. I met him only once, but saw him on screen many times.

In the mediasphere these fleeting connections repeat over and over everywhere in the world. I recall watching Isabella Rosselini on a talk show one time recounting how she tried to explain to her five year old daughter that she has a famous grandmother. 'She was in movies. Let's see if any are on now.' And when she flipped on the tv, sure enough, there was a scene from an Ingrid Bergman movie. Now we can't all be Isabella Rosselini. And we can't all be Jelly Wehby. But step back just one more step, and there we are, wherever we may be.