I’ve already started seeing large numbers of wire service photographs depicting Iraqis voting. Most rely on a variation of the purple finger cliché to tell their story. We’ll be flooded with these images in the coming days.


Iraqi soldiers cheer showing ink-stained fingers after casting their vote, at a polling station held inside the Iraqi army base in Nasser wa Salam, an Arab Sunni area west of Baghdad. Hospital patients, prison detainees and security forces started voting to elect a full-term parliament set to restore full sovereignty to war-torn Iraq nearly three years after the US-led invasion.
(AFP/Mauricio Lima)

I’m all for voting – it can be a positive action. But I’m also annoyed with lazy photojournalism, and enraged that images like these are used by editors whose duty it is to inform, not mislead or pacify.

warning: graphic images of this war’s horrors, which are never shown in the U.S., and a poem, below the fold


A man clutches the bloodied clothes and shoes of a relative who was killed by a suicide car bombing in a residential part of Baghdad September 14, 2005. Police said four people were killed and 22 wounded when a suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle in Baghdad’s Shuala district, a mostly Shi’ite neighborhood. Witnesses said the bomber was targeting the nearby offices of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
REUTERS/Kareem Raheem PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2005


Two Egyptian citizens mourn next to the body of slain Egyptian contractor Ibrahim Sayed Hilali outside the hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, Sunday Dec. 11, 2005. The bullet riddled body of an Egyptian contractor, with his hands and legs bound and his mouth plastered, was found Sunday early morning by Iraqi police on a sidewalk in the city of Tikrit, police said.
(AP Photo/Bassim Daham)


A man holds the head of his brother as massacred victims are brought to Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad August 1, 2005. Twenty bodies of people who had been shot or beheaded were discovered in southwest Baghdad on Monday, a police source said. The source said witnesses told police they saw a truck dump the bodies near a school in the Om al-Ma’alif area in southwest Baghdad.
REUTERS/Ali Jasim PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2005


The lifeless body of a child killed by a car bomb is laid near dead bodies inside the morgue of Yarmouk hospital, in Baghdad, Iraq, in this Nov. 24, 2005, file photo.
(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban/FILE)

Advice to a Prophet
by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?–
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling.  What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

– – –
read Ilona’s important diary at MLW – Returning Vet PTSD – One Soldier’s Story as well the first in what she promises will be a comprehensive series on PTSD and Iraq War vets.

view the pbs newshour silent honor roll (with thanks to jimstaro at booman.)

take a private moment to light one candle among many (with thanks to TXSharon)

support Veterans for Peace
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
remember the fallen
support Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors – TAPS
support Gold Star Families for Peace
support the fallen
support the troops
support Iraq Veterans Against the War
support Military families Speak Out
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
witness every day