Virginia Tech: The Nauseating Spectacle of Me-Me Mourning

by max blunt
It's been a good week for death. In Iraq, 200 people were blown to bits in what witnesses called "a swimming pool of blood" with "pieces of flesh all over the place".

Remember that the dead are only part of the story: add to each of the war's hundreds of thousands of civilian corpses all those burned and crippled survivors, far beyond Iraqi medical facilities' ability to cope, breadwinners and babies lost. Few families are untouched by the sheer scale of slaughter.

But it is hard for news media to find new ways to refresh repeat tales of daily carnage.

The pictures and the thoughts tell the same dismal story day after day, raising the same terrible questions: what have we done, what have we unleashed, how can it end?

This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America's reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war. But because news needs to be new, Iraqi deaths struggle to stay on front pages.

Nor does the war find a place in the nation's top concerns: people worry about terror attacks more than the war, this despite the distrust it has engendered that is now driving our three-times prime minister from power.

Perhaps the public compassion fatigue is because these deaths are caused mainly by extremist Iraqi sects killing other Iraqis, and many fewer are at the hands of our soldiers.

For whatever reason, neither the horror nor the national shame quite comes home to roost. Yet on Wednesday morning more ordinary Iraqis died than all the British troops killed so far. LINK