I guess you can consider this part of a series of ongoing reflections of 9/11 and the War on Terror.  I want old fashioned war propaganda.  If you've ever watched a real documentary on WWII, you know what I'm talking about.  I'm not talking about the "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters... I'm talking about the footage from the beaches showing men fighting and dying, and charging up that mountain.  This war we're in is being reported purely with numbers, and I'm sick of it.  Four men dying in an IED explosion, or 12 men dying during an "insurgent" attack.  And that's literally all the story says.  The implied message of course is that those men died for nothing.  Apparently we sent them there, they were just standing around in Tikrit or Bagdhad, and then they died.

The wonderful about that old fashioned war propaganda is that they told you why people fought.  I suppose war was simpler back then.  We fought battles to take ground until we got to the other guy's capital, they surrendered, baby boom's ensued.  Today we move so fast, we're at the other guy's capital before you can say "tear down that flag".  There is no ground to take anymore, but there are still battles being fought.  Those men are there for a reason.  Maybe they were in a convoy delivering food to a refugee camp somewhere, or they were helping to build a school.  Maybe they were providing security to legislators in the new Iraqi government, or they were capturing a terrorist cell.  They were doing something Goddamnit, and they deserve to have that story told.

Some might decry war propaganda as a form of deception to the people, but I don't see it that way.  The old 8 mm films I've seen never sugar coated anything.  They showed those men dying, and they showed the awfulness of war.  It seems to me, that they only thing they showed that we're not seeing today is the reason why.  So who is deceiving who?