Embedding reporters won't work.

Four more Soldiers died yesterday/today in another bombing in Iraq and another six were wounded. In the coverage, I came across the second photo, and it got me thinking.

Despite all the attempts of the DoD to lock down reporters in an "embedded" status to control what action they see, and now with them effectively confined to the Green Zone, the story will still come out. It will come out it trickles and probably not in the highest resolution, but over time, we will truly see the horror of this occupation because of the digital camera.

The military thinkers blamed, in part, the pictures and stories out of Vietnam for the loss of support for that war. Leaving aside the obvious blind spot, that it wasn't the pictures that were unpopular but the policies, the military set a course to never allow that to happen again.

The US military has tried all sorts of press limitations since Vietnam, the total lockdown of Grenada and Panama, the "pool reporter" experiments in the first Iraq war, and the complete comedy of the troops trying to sneak in on the Somalia beaches only to find camera crews and lights waiting there for them.

Today's version is the embedde reporter.

But information can flow like water, and with the presence of thousands of digital cameras in the hands of the soldiers in Iraq, all of those snapshots and memories that seemed of importance at the time will slowly trickle home. Shots with buddies, shots after battles, trophy shots of the dead and captured, shots of locals, will all come home with these soldiers, and over time will slowly come into the public sphere. Abu Ghraib was the first case.

It will be unique, first, because these shots are not being taken for their "news quality" they will probably be much more poignant and be packed with more individual emotion. Second, unlike WWII and Vietnam, where although press photographers had relatively free reign but were limited by their numbers, in Iraq there is probably a camera in almost every unit so the span, the coverage will be far broader. Very few incidents will take place without a camera present.

I would wager that as these photographs come out in public in 5, 10, 20 years time, they will rewrite the history of this conflict in an unprecedented way. I'm sure there will be collectors, and shows, and whatever passes for websites in twenty years giving us true pictures of what this war really did.

And I would guess that all of this will negatively alter the public's perception of this war. It is fairly simple to rally support for war on an idealized level, but that idealized level doesn't really involve the true horrors of war, the horrific injuries, the moral degradations, and the impact upon those poor people who just happen to live where someone started a war.

I would wager that this war will not be allowed to pass into mythic history the way the first gulf war has, but instead, will be remembered as a series of amateur snapshots of broken bodies and dirty sad soldiers.

Just riffing. Mike