Kosovo: Is it saving Private Stone?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "We are pretty much in a state of shock," said Jim Stone, father of one of the three American soldiers taken prisoner by Serbs last Wednesday on the Kosovo-Macedonian border. "This is not the sort of thing you expect."

It isn't? U.S. planes are bombing Serbia, a full-scale Serbian genocide is underway against the Albanians of Kosovo, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people are being killed each night, and you didn't expect anything to happen to American soldiers who were within reach of the Serbs?

My apologies to Stone, whose shock is understandable. You are never prepared for bad things to happen to your own family. But for the past few days the entire American media have been devoting as much attention to these three unlucky young men -- who didn't look that much worse on television than I have looked myself a couple of times after saying the wrong thing in the wrong bar -- as they have to all the rest of the war.

The United States is at war with Serbia, for all practical purposes, as are Britain, and Germany, and Canada, and Belgium, and all the other members of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In wars, people get killed, and even more get hurt. (That is why most countries try very hard to avoid them.)

Yet the American media pretend to be astonished at the fact that three American soldiers have been not killed, not even wounded, but just captured. That just about sums up what is wrong with the current Western approach to war.

Imagine, for a moment, that it's 1943 again, but with today's media. Thousands of Russian and German soldiers are dying daily in titanic battles on the Eastern Front, and thousands of Jews (plus hundreds of gypsies, homosexuals, and other "undesirables") are being murdered daily in Nazi death camps. But the Western allies do not yet have any troops fighting on the ground in Europe, though their bombers are pounding Germany day and night.

It's March 30, 1943, and an American B-17 gets shot down over Germany -- not ten or twenty bombers, as often happened in real raids, but just one. The crew bail out, or maybe some of them go down with the plane.

And what happens next?

Well, the major networks all interrupt their schedules to run specials about it, complete with biographies of the aircrew, interviews with their distraught families, and pundits wondering whether President Roosevelt's opinion poll figures will survive this tragedy. After all, his popularity is already down four points on last week. Popular support for the war might collapse if the number of dead Americans goes into double digits.

Wolf Blitzer's predecessor and a hundred other "analysts", all propped up outside the Pentagon or the White House like so many birds on a wire, wonder for the cameras whether the U.S. Eighth Air Force can go on bombing Europe if this sort of thing happens again. It's been weeks already, and Hitler still hasn't given up.

Then comes the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, publicly questioning whether the crew of the downed B- 17 should have been sent into such a dangerous environment. His committee will be looking carefully into the circumstances in which these American airmen were sent into an area where Germans might shoot back.

Finally, at the end of another hectic media day, the president goes on television and warns Hitler that he will be held personally responsible for the safety of the downed American airmen. Unspecified but dreadful things will be done to him if he harms a hair on their heads.

But the president also repeats his long-standing promise that U.S. troops will not be committed to ground combat in Europe. The bombing campaign will continue, hopefully without any more American losses, until Hitler comes to his senses and surrenders to the war crimes tribunal.

Perhaps I am belaboring the point, but let me hit it over the head one more time. Since NATO began bombing Serbia, around half- a-dozen policemen have been killed in the line of duty in the United States alone, protecting the communities they live in.

Everybody (or almost everybody) honors their sacrifice, and is deeply grateful that they do their jobs as well and bravely as most of them do. But we don't know their names. CNN is not doing specials on them. Senators are not questioning whether they should have been sent into such dangerous situations.

Nobody interviews the families of murdered police officers on national television, and the rent-a-pundit mob do not publicly ponder on what their deaths imply for the future of law enforcement. It is treated, sadly but rightly, as part of the price that we (or rather, some of us) routinely pay for living in a reasonably safe and civilized society.

Soldiers who have been deployed to stop a horror like the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo are doing essentially the same job, except on the international scene, and the goal is the same: to ensure that people can live in a reasonably safe and civilized society. You may argue with the legality of NATO's military intervention in Kosovo/Serbia, but I have yet to see anybody argue convincingly that it is being done for self-interested motives. There was oil in Kuwait, but there is certainly none in Kosovo.

So why are the lives of the soldiers sent to do that job being treated as so much more precious than those of the police who do the same job at home? That is simply and purely a media phenomenon, exclusive to developed, media-saturated societies where the television networks, as part of the struggle for ratings, have increasingly turned news into soap opera.

Wars are particularly susceptible to this treatment, since they usually happen in locations that seem exotic to the target audience -- and you can get your cameras there beforehand, since you know roughly where it will happen. It's Hollywood: every casualty becomes Saving Private Ryan, and every individual soldier's life a thousand times more newsworthy than the lives of those who die at home from car smashes or gunfire or just from poverty and despair.

It is good that the motives and conduct of every war be questioned every day. It is also good that societies have learned to care more about the lives of at least some individuals. But this is a gross distortion of humanitarianism, in which the bruises and blood on Private Stone's face matter more than the thousands of other young men, not Americans but Albanian Kosovars, who were dumped into shallow graves by Serbian executioners this week.

And it causes equally great distortions in strategy. "No ground troops" is the mantra of people for whom the media truly is the message.

They have lost sight of the real world.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles appear in 45 countries. He was trained as a military historian, has served in three navies, and has reported on many wars.