Morality, War, and Journalism

When the US and its allies decided to bomb Afghanistan in response to the September 11th attacks, some interesting ideas about war coverage were voiced by the media. According to the Washington Post, CNN Chair Walter Isaacson "ordered his staff to balance images of civilian devastation in Afghan cities with reminders that the Taliban harbors murderous terrorists, saying it 'seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.'" Other prominent media figures chimed in, explaining why a focus on civilian casualties was not desirable or relevant.

"Civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war."

"War is about killing people; civilian casualties are unavoidable."

"The fact is that [civilian casualties] accompany wars."

(Quoting Fox anchor Brit Hume, National Public Radio's Mara Liasson, and US News & World Report columnist Michael Barone, respectively.)

CNN decided to show footage of WTC wreckage immediately after a report on innocent Afghan victims, and many newspapers and media outlets "toned down" or suppressed coverage of civilian casualties, for fear of flak from readers and interest groups. Even though the actions taken based on a desire to avoid redundant reporting are inconsistent (i.e. bombing is a part of war, is that redundant too?), the rationale behind this self-censorship raises an interesting issue.

Isaacson, Hume, Liasson and Barone are right: civilian casualties, along with untold devastation, necessarily result from any war, no matter how just the cause. If you wage war, you inevitably kill innocent people, lots of them, and in gruesome and unspeakable ways. What could be less obvious?

But the understanding of inevitable civilian casualties in war was irrelevant, because the implications were and are not taken into consideration. Before it was decided that the US and its coalition were to go to war, there were no estimates of civilian casualties grounding public debate about military action. There was no way for citizens to decide whether those inevitable human costs of the war were unacceptable. Very few commentators publicly considered whether starvation, ruined lives, increased infant mortality, depressed economies, and the more countable civilian deaths were an acceptable cost of war.

Very few mainstream US politicians or journalists asked the question: is the likely human cost of this war acceptable? Not only did they not pose the question, but they did not provide the information necessary for anyone else to pose the question. It seems that to be a public expert or commentator on foreign policy, one must meticulously avoid the moral consequences of "collateral damage".

Since the question is not asked, there is no answer that we can give. Is a war in Afghanistan (or Iraq) still an acceptable course of action if 1,000 innocents die as a result? What about 10,000? One million? Ten million? There is no publicly acknowledged limit.

An even more troublesome question: how does the acceptable number of innocent foreign people killed relate to the number of combatant casualties Canadians or Americans are willing to accept? Vietnam showed that there are only so many of our boys that we can stand losing, even if they were mostly working class or non-white. Conversely, Vietnam, as well as Hiroshima, Nagasaki and countless bombings and terror campaigns taken up by the US since then, show that the tolerable number of foreign civilian deaths tends to not be easily reachable, if there is a limit at all.

A recent Gallup poll showed that "a majority of Americans would oppose invading Iraq with U.S. ground troops" if casualties numbered over 5,000. A question about civilian casualties on the other side is, one must assume, not worth including in such a poll, either because there is no limit, or because no one is interested in hearing about such a limit.

To be fair, there has been some accounting of what is an acceptable loss on the "other side". Then US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, responding to a question about UNICEF's estimate that "in excess" of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions against Iraq, said "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it." Unfortunately, Albright didn't say exactly what benefit was worth this price, or how many children would have to die before the price would be too dear.

If war has unacceptable moral consequences, and one is not fighting or even expecting a last battle for survival, there are still other choices. Indeed, they are the same choices available to countries which do not have the ability to mobilize a military force anywhere in the world without answering to anyone.

If it is conceivable that war is in some or almost all cases unacceptable, then there are alternatives, even for journalists like Isaacson who believe that civilian casualties are inevitable and redundant. First, since there are ways of estimating the inevitable consequences of war, this information could be provided while the decision is being made to go to war. For example, before the bombing started the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that 7.6 million Afghans were "very vulnerable" to starvation and that massive food shipments were needed right away. The warning was hardly covered by the media. Second, peaceful ways of achieving the stated goals of the war (we must believe that these, too, exist) should be explored and documented. Perhaps we could begin with the possibility of upholding and following international law; something which didn't happen in Afghanistan, yet would allow for the capture of terrorists without a vigilante-style terror campaign.

Informing an audience about civilian casualties and alternatives to war doesn't make a journalist "biased"; rather, it makes her merely responsible to a readership who is entitled to make their own informed moral and political decisions. Many politicians and some journalists warn that providing the whole story without patriotic cues can undermine the unity essential for a successful war effort. They would be right. But glossing over the "details" and unifying the public behind an simplistic world view is a task best left to politicians. Journalists can do what they do best when they manage to do it at all: their age-old duty of telling the truth, all of it.