I was watching the news last night and as usual it featured a report from the war in Iraq. “Boring boring boring” I thought to myself as they showed scenes of American soldiers riding in armored vehicles, guns at the ready. The reporter talked of the numbers of victims there have been since the war began five years ago. This lead me to wonder why it is we never really see those victims in reports like this. The figures were shocking, but nonetheless they’re only numbers and in that sense I wondered how connected any of us could be to the reality of the horror behind them.

Of course, we see plenty of pictures of the fallen soldiers (nearly 4000 so far), but those pictures are usually head and shoulder shots that resemble something from a high school yearbook. We never see their lifeless bodies covered in blood or scorched from a bomb blast. We also rarely see scenes of death that show any one of the vast number of civilians who have been killed or maimed in this war which seemed to lose its way some time ago.

It’s not that I want to see disturbing pictures of the horrors of war, what decent person would? But as I struggle to recall what it is we’re actually supposed to be doing out there, I find myself thinking that the lack of truth being beamed into my living room has brought me to the point where I actually consider the Iraq war news to be “boring.” That made me feel somewhat guilty. After all, there are soldiers out there getting killed and civilians dying in even higher numbers, and here I am thousands of miles away ‘bored’ with that news, almost uninterested in the fate of those involved in any significant way.

The American media isn’t allowed to show the coffins of fallen soldiers returning to the States. Such images would weigh heavy on the collective conscience of the nation, and therefore perhaps lessen the Presidents resolve to “finish the job.” However, the reason for the “job” turned out to be at best misguided, and at worst just a downright lie. And today the reason for war now seems to be a mixture of political double-talk and an obligation to stay there and at least fix what is very clearly broken.

How dare I consider the Iraq war “boring.” How dare I sit there and pay no attention to the fact that somewhere in America today a family will get a visit from military personnel to tell them their son/daughter/mother/father has been killed in Iraq. They’ll get a funeral, a flag, and “thanks from a grateful nation,” but their loved one will never return, and for what? Really, for what?

The war isn’t sexy anymore. The media grew tired of reporting the seemingly endless bad news from Iraq some time ago. That was never more evident than when Anna Nicole Smith accidentally offed herself in a hotel room last year. The whirlwind of coverage that followed eclipsed all coverage of the boring ol’ Iraq war, and for days pictures of Anna Nicole and her ample chestage lead the news cycle as if breathing a sign of relief from having to peddle out the same old boring and depressing news about how many people died that day in the far away war.

Now, of course, there are the Presidential Primaries, so once again the oh-so tediously repetitive news from Iraq can be set aside for poll numbers with whizzy graphics, lofty speeches, and lengthy debates. Heck, you might even be forgiven for forgetting that there are thousands of troops out there fighting for… something.

But what if the media started to show us something other than the militarily endorsed imagery from Iraq (and for that matter Afghanistan too)? Lets imagine that for just one week the news delivered us uncensored images. When a car bomb rips through a crowd of shoppers tearing their bodies apart, instead of just showing us men standing around the charred remains of a burned out car, we see the immediate aftermath. Horror, death, pain and misery, beamed live and uncensored into our living rooms as we sit there eating our dinner.

After a week of seeing the awful truth, would we be demanding explanations as to what we are actually doing there and how it is we came to be there in the first place? Would we be pounding on the doors of those in Washington and London demanding answers to tough questions they would really rather we didn’t ask? Or would we simply complain to the news networks for showing us ‘that’ while ate our dinner? Would advertisers threaten to pull the plug on their money if the networks didn’t stop showing images that had the masses reaching for the remote control to escape the horror?

I’m not suggesting that the media should bombard us with horrific images from Iraq, but for the war to be seen as “boring” is surely not putting the issue in its rightful place. Perhaps even the blind flag waving that was evident at the beginning of this war might have been tempered a lot faster had we seen a little more of the fact and a little less of the fiction.

Even now as I write this I find myself torn over what image I might use in this piece. I could easily choose a generic shot of soldiers with guns, or even one of the many images of planes full of coffins draped in the American flag. But I’m somewhat reluctant to pick one of the more graphic images showing the death and misery that is actually commonplace in war torn Iraq right now. I find myself considering the reaction of you, the reader, to a picture showing something you didn’t want to see.

But then that’s my point. None of us want to see these pictures do we? The media can’t and won’t show them to us, and on the whole we’re fine with that. But the flip-side of this is that I’ll sit there watching TV then change the channel from the news to something else, not because it is awful (which it often is), but because it’s boring. Boring that is, until a pop star goes mad or a heavily chested blonde celebrity dies.

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Iraq war news from the BBC
Iraq: Five years on by NPR
What President Bush said five years ago
I will be home (A soldiers wife’s story)
Beyond words
Hearts and minds
War re-branded
Will it ever end
2000 Dead
Children of the ruins
David Leeson’s photographs from Iraq