Are we making too much of a few casualties?

Lawrence Martin, Globe & Mail, 13 Jul 06

'What do you guys in the media expect? A war without deaths?"

"Uh, no. What's your point?"

The point, a senior Conservative was saying, is that if the media keep giving massive coverage to every single death of every single Canadian soldier, support for the Afghanistan mission will be undermined.

The public can only take so many stories about the life of some heroic lad or valorous young woman being taken. Why, he wondered, does every single one of them merit Titanic-scale coverage?

By comparison, in the two world wars and in Korea, our men died daily, sometimes by the dozens, sometimes more -- and they barely got agate type.

But today's Canadians are babes in the woods as far as war goes. We haven't had a good-sized war in half a century. So every fallen soldier is worth many thousands of words.

The problem, the Conservative was saying, is that you don't win wars that way. You lose them because you sap the hell out of public morale.

The tiny numbers of casualties, in fact, are a more persuasive argument that the war is going well as opposed to vice versa. But you'd never get that impression. Many Conservatives are wondering, and many in the military as well, if the gusher-coverage is ever going to stop. When will the media give as much prominence to the numbers of the enemy dead as our own?

News is defined by the degree of novelty. Some day, maybe soon, editors will decide that one soldier being struck down isn't such big news any more. It's war. It happens all the time. The young enlist with the risk.

At the same time, no one can be callous enough to deny the fallen their special standing. Most are kids. They have been indoctrinated -- as soldiers are everywhere -- into total faith in their mission and have not had the time in life to draw a sophisticated understanding of what it is really all about. They are, in a sense, sacrificial lambs.

The media judgment in regard to them is subjective. There are few standards or set rules or formulas. War being so unusual for modern Canada, the public appetite for the big spread on every killed corporal is there. One of the recent losses was a woman. A unique story. Another, this week, was a soldier who didn't appear to buy completely into the military party line.

But, at the same time, there is a big responsibility not to oversell small numbers of deaths. In terror, and in war, if you overreact to losses, the enemy wins.

The Harper government is right to be concerned about the coverage and right, if it is excessive, to want it limited. It is the one policy area in which the Conservatives are most vulnerable. Mr. Harper has one great fear. It is that Afghanistan, in all its hopelessness, becomes the defining issue of his stewardship.

The Conservatives made a snap decision, politically motivated, to extend the mission and force an early vote in Parliament. There was no necessity for that rush to judgment. They closed off alternative paths. They set a potential trap for themselves.

Mr. Harper is a realist, an independent thinker. He is one of the least likely of leaders to be bulldozed by propaganda and locked in a fantasy world. We observed this last week in the adroit way he handled George W. Bush on his visit to Washington. No public happy birthday wish, no Georgie to match the "Steve," and a sizable public rebuke of the President. He told the U.S. leader that by introducing passports at the border, his government risked building a closed society and playing right into the terrorists' hands. It's not often that a Canadian leader has stood in the White House and been that bold.

Mr. Harper knows the scale of the calamity in Iraq. He can see far enough beyond the predictably Pollyannaish assessments of Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier to know that the chances of winning in Afghanistan are increasingly bleak.

He can appreciate that if a handful of deaths can cause such a media outburst, imagine what might happen if the numbers become truly serious.

He's too smart, too aware, too strategically minded to let his government get dragged down by Afghanistan. But staring him in the face are his own celebrated words: "We're not going to cut and run." It doesn't leave him with much in the option box.