Back Pages: Two milestones passed on road to nowhere

The United States recently passed two milestones along the long, hard road that is the war in Iraq. The first was a marker of time indicating that five years have passed since the war began, and the second was a marker of life and death tallying the war’s casualties at 4,000. What does it say that at this place and time that so few newspapers were willing to mention either of these particular milestones?

The lives of 59 Minnesota soldiers have been lost and 492 have been injured, and our National Guard members have served some of the longest tours of duty during the war. But few newspapers devoted local reporting resources, or even editorial space, to what 20 percent of Minnesotans believe is the most pressing issue facing this country.

When the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion came and went on March 19, and when the US death toll in Iraq passed 4,000 a few days later, the Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial board did not deem the passing milestones worthy fodder for commentary. A few locally reported pieces appeared on local demonstrations and memorials, but the vast majority of stories on the war in Iraq came from news services and other major newspapers.

The Pioneer Press acknowledge the five-year anniversary of the war in an editorial, but only in passing as it moved on to other, more pressing issues:

This week, the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq, the expected presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Sen. John McCain, is in Iraq to argue for a continued U.S. role. The two Democratic contenders, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, also planned events to highlight their position on the war, which is that the U.S. must get out.

But while these three candidates were worrying about the war – and rightly so – another issue erupted closer to home. An icon of Wall Street was sold for a pittance to a competitor, raising fears of a wider economic collapse.

The editorial board of the Pioneer Press not only missed the milestone while searching for loose change in the seats, it also raised pertinent questions:

To go even deeper, we should ask: What is the candidate’s idea of the limits of government?

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Perhaps news media are purposefully avoiding these milestones because they do not want to be reminded of where they are, how long it took to get there, and how far they have to go. Or perhaps they wish not to be reminded that we still have no exact idea what our destination is.

That’s not to say the significance was lost on all. The Rochester Post-Bulletin and the Marshall Independent ran two of the few pieces of original reporting. MinnPost also devoted talent and resources to covering the milestones.

In an editorial in the Marshall Independent editor Dana Yost laments the lack of interest from the American public:

We still have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them putting their lives on the line almost daily. Has the war become such a routine piece of news, have we tired of it after five years, that continued loss of life just slips past us like another line on the CNN screen crawl?