A blog that is not for the faint-at-heart depicting a war that is also not for the faint-at-heart

Departing for a moment from the light-and-airy posts, I want to signal a WashPost article from today discussing the emergent prominence of one part-time blogger. He lives in New York, apparently works for an Internet company and in his spare time, he posts photos of the human cost of war, photos that are deliberately left out of the presentations put forth by official government and news sources. [He has issued a statement saying that he is not intending to make an antiwar statement. He asserts that the American soldiers are also victims. He does feel anger at the American people for supporting the war without a hard look at the costs involved.]

His blog has generated enough attention to be of concern to the US government. In response to the disconcerting images, the US military has taken the time to put together a website with its own slide show, intended to generate support for the military intervention in Iraq.

Still, the authors of the news article interviewed a number of military experts who claimed that the blogger’s site is the more compelling of the two.

"As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest," said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. … An Army soldier who fought in the Sunni Triangle last year and maintains a blog himself agreed. "The winner has to be the blog," he said. "There's something all too visceral about seeing the pictures of the dead and wounded, on both sides, which overwhelms static displays of weaponry" in the military presentation.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraqi affairs … came to a similar but broader conclusion: "What the two presentations show us is that the U.S. military is full of brave and skilled warriors who can defeat their foes, but is still no good at counterinsurgency operations, and is wretched at winning hearts and minds."

I’ll list the two sites, with a note that the blogger’s site is indeed very graphic. Here’s what the WashPost says about it:

In the version of the Web site that was up last week, the first image on the site showed a malnourished Iraqi baby, wide-eyed and screaming in pain, under the sarcastic headline, "another grateful Iraqi civilian."

Many of the photographs are far more graphic than are usually carried in newspapers, showing headless bodies, bloodied troops, wounded women, and bandaged babies missing limbs. One added recently shows a U.S. soldier with part of his face blown away by a bomb.

The “Soldiers for the Truth” site, supported by the US military can be reached here: http://www.sftt.org

The private blogger’s site can be viewed at: http://www.fallujahinpictures.com