Disappearing the Dead

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When planning war, one of the most important targets for military officials is public opinion. "This holds true especially in a democracy, when one is fighting a war of choice - as in invading another country - instead of fighting a war of national survival," observes David Isenberg. "In such wars, issues like human rights and civilian casualties loom larger. Since such casualties are inevitable, special pains must be taken to explain them away. But how to do so? In a word, spin." This is the topic of a recently-released study,"Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Idea of a New Warfare" by Carl Conetta of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA). Conetta looks at the "public information battlespace" and shows how the military and the media framed events such as marketplace bombings in Baghdad, coining misleading phrases such as "precision warfare" and using "casualty agnosticism" to avoid counting civilian deaths.