Telling the whole story

War hawks who keep insisting that the media should start doing a better job covering The Big Picture in Iraq had better be careful what they wish for, as this disturbing piece by Lawrence F. Kaplan makes painfully clear (trial TNR subscription required).

Visiting the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a sprawling hospital complex in Northwest Washington, the first thing one notices are the young faces. Soldiers in their teens and early twenties sit in the waiting area, baseball caps on their heads, mothers at their sides. The second thing one notices about these young men evacuated from Iraq is that many of them are not whole. Where there should be arms and legs, there are too often only stumps. For all of its contemporary architecture, high-tech wards, and superb physicians, the place has the feel of a Civil War hospital.

Walter Reed is located only a few miles north of the think tanks, government offices, and, yes, magazines that pressed for war in Iraq. But it is a different country altogether. Different because, with the exception of two visits by the president, few of the war's architects have come to see the mangled 19-, 20-, and 21-year-olds on whom they rely to accomplish America's aims abroad. Neither, for that matter, have many news organizations. The New York Times has yet to devote a full article to the subject, unless you count a fictional story by Jayson Blair. Nor have any of the three major newsweeklies. This despite the fact that, nearly every evening, huge C-17 and C-141 transport planes land at Andrews Air Force Base, on the outskirts of Washington, ferrying wounded Americans from military hospitals in Europe. Unlike at Baltimore-Washington International Airport--where soldiers returning on leave navigate their way through crowds of news crews and cameras--flights at Andrews land under cover of darkness, with no TV lights to guide the wounded to waiting ambulances. Instead, their stories have been left to local newspapers in Texas, Georgia, upstate New York, and elsewhere, which convey news of the maimed to hometown readers.

The near-invisibility of the wounded has several sources. The media has always treated combat deaths as the most reliable measure of battlefield progress, while for its part the administration has been reluctant to divulge the full number of wounded. (Pentagon officials have rebuked public affairs officers who release casualty figures, and, until recently, U.S. Central Command did not regularly publicize the injured tally either.) Indeed, with so many injured from so many services being treated in so many places, the Pentagon itself does not possess an exact count. (The Army surgeon general's office has dispatched a team to come up with its own figure.) But even the rough estimates tell a sobering story. According to Central Command, in addition to the nearly 200 Americans killed in action in Iraq since the war began in March, as of last week more than 1,600 Americans have been wounded, more than 1,300 of them in combat.

The numbers tell a truth about the situation on the ground in Iraq--or at least about the Sunni triangle where most of them originate. Every day, Iraqi guerrillas wound an average of nearly ten Americans, many of them grievously. And these are just the ambushes that find their mark. Soldiers back from Iraq tell of coming under fire routinely, and, in recent weeks, about 20 separate attacks on American forces have been reported every day. As a result, the sheer number of wounded soldiers exceeds anything Americans have seen since Vietnam.

Now, I know I'm just an amateur at all this big time policy stuff, but wouldn't it be helpful at this point if the White House pulled their best strategists off slime and defend, and put them to work on a strategy to win the peace in Iraq?