Porn for Troops From Massacre to Lap-Dance

Pierre Tristam/Candide’s Notebooks

The headline is just above the fold of the Sunday Times: "Dancers Have Landed in Iraq. Marines Offer No Resistance." From the look and sound of the headline, it’s a feature. It reads as such. It shouldn’t be. What’s not said in the story is what speaks loudest of the Times’ occasional blindness for the forest fire as it covers a few burning trees (or loins in this case), but also of the American military’s corruption, its obliviousness to why it’s despised in Iraq, and the American public’s obliviousness to why its military is becoming a mercenary force increasingly difficult to defend, or to differentiate from the misguided policies putting it in harm’s way. Of all that in a moment.First, the story. It’s about somewhat risqué dancers, women all of them, traveling to Iraq to give troops a show (...) What can’t be overlooked, what the Times and the military are not overlooking so much as leaving unsaid, is the city where this little featurish lap-dance is taking place. Haditha is the location of the revenge-massacre by the Marines last year of 24 Iraqi civilians. What that has to do with a bunch of dancers giving Marines a hard-on is this: From a journalistic perspective, the least the Times could have done is find a different town from which to dateline its bit of Sunday voyeurism...

continua / continued