Best of the Bag Decade: BAG Looks at the Iraq War

(The Best of the Bag Decade is our end of the year, end of the decade look at some of the best BAGnews posts and analysis.)

The Iraq War has been (and still is) a frequent subject on
BAGnews and, frankly, such a topic of government and media spin that I find it
impossible to highlight the best posts in a single entry. This is particularly true when I read through
the sharp analytic comments posted by our readership over the years. To encapsulate the coverage, I’ve restricted
myself to the year and a half following the 2004 election, a time when the Bag moved to consistent posting of photographs instead of political cartoons. It was also a time in which the war
propaganda machine played at full power to a usually compliant media.

We begin with the 2005 White House photo release of a 2003 image showing staged strategery
of the Bush Administration's “war planning” in Pizza II,

the
pro-war iconography of the Iraq “Marlboro
Man”, and propaganda aspects of Michael Yon’s
photo of a US soldier and a dying Iraqi child.

2., 3.

The
aftermath of the election saw further examples of the government and media spin
on Abu Ghraib, noted in BAG’s The Most
Obscene Pictures Taken at Abu Ghraib and the “framing” of low-level
soldiers in Lynndie Comes
Up Short.

4., 5.

The
post-US election time period also marked the first
photograph by Alan Chin posted on the site (which brought about a fascinating discussion of the embed process) and the posting of the equally
uncomfortable imagery of War As Child's
Play.

6., 7.

BAG posts covered the capture and trial of Saddam Hussein
and the media (read Murdoch's) need to denigrate and glamorize the Iraqi dictator in Bottom Drawer
Journalism and Portrait of
Evil vs. Evil Portrait.

8., 9.

BAG readers took a sharp look at the military industrial complex’s visual
stake with Unleashing
Hell, Ironically and Flare for the
Dramatic.

10, 11.

Of
course, BAG caught the unintentional tragicomedy of the Bush Administration’s ready
at the helm images in I know These
Guys Love Uniforms, But… and Bush's Rainbow.

12, 13.

Finally, we end this era of BAG Iraq War coverage with the
haunting and emotional World Press Photo contest award winner Above the Hold,
a photo taken in a time when the American public rarely saw coffins returning
from the war they supported.

14.

–Karen Hull

For more BAG posts on
the Iraq war (before and after the 2004 election), click on the following
links:

Uniform Response

Bush's Crusade

Your House Is My House

Who's Watching Who?

For the first in our
series, Best Bag Posts of the Decade, click here.

(Photo
credits: 1. Eric Draper, White House/AP, 2. Luis Sinco/LA Times, 3. Michael
Yon/Time.com, 4. Unattributed. September 2003, 5. Paul Buck/European Pressphoto
Agency, 6. Alan
Chin/The New York Times, 7. Cris Bouroncle/AFP, 8. CNN.com, 9. AFP/IST/File,
10. The
Council on American-Islamic Relations, 11. Marine
Corps Combat Camera Management and Imagery Management Unit/United States
Department of Defense, 12. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP, 13. Gerald Herbert/AP,
14. Todd Heisler/The Rocky Mountain News/Polaris, worldpressphoto.com.)

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The Best BAG Posts of the Decade

The Best of the BAG Decade: Heavies and Heroes, Pt. I

Gasho

Looking back on these images brings a real physical bodily reaction for me. I watched these things unfold right here on the Bag, and seeing the images again brings back a lot of emotion – along with the cry, “WHY AREN’T THESE BASTARDS IN JAIL OR EVEN ON TRIAL, DAMMIT!!”
I’ll never forgive or forget what Bush and his Neocon Army did to this country and the world. It is a wound that will not heal until they are tried in a serious way.
thomas

Thanks for the succinct—albeit unavoidably incomplete—recap. The Bush years were such a vast and unmitigated disaster it’s a challenge still to keep it all straight. This is a nice reminder of the amount of time, attention and effort so many people put into conceptually parsing and organizing what was going on at the time, and what is required to keep the stories alive and accurate still. Here’s hoping the Republican party as we know it continues its well-deserved downward spiral. Eternal vigilance, indeed.
mozaki@verizon.net

I concur with the above readers. Living the Bush years were like living with an alcoholic – you just never knew what the next mood was, the next rant on the telly, not to mention the arrogance and naked self-serving interest of every member of the cabal. These are painful years Michael, and I too, followed these images as they unfolded on the BAG. The book “Bush on the Couch” describes how the entire nation became AL-ANON – jiggling us with all the terror colour codes! What a farce!
karen h

I could have gone on forever and still had images to post. It reminds me of how incredible the BAG archives are. I posted a new installment on the Best of the Bag Decade this morning. It deals with “Heavies and Heroes.” Hope folks enjoy.
SEAS

When I originally commented on the #1 photo (on Iraq war planning), I did not know, but now am convinced that we are seeing an additional piece of the effort to manipulate GW Bush. It has since come out that Bush was shown Iraq war briefing documents in the run up to the war which featured patriotic pictures on the cover along with militaristic bible verses. (It’s highly likely that Bush would only glance at the actual material, and would likely see these documents as confirming God’s approval of what W was planning.) I’ll bet that’s what Cheney has at his right elbow in the three ring binder his glasses are resting on (#8). Because those papers have been shuffled, I’m guessing that during the conversation that preceded this picture, Cheney flashed those reports to W, and that the pictures and bible verses reinforced W’s impression that behind those picture there surely must be lots of important evidence to support God’s personal message to GW Bush. No doubt Cheney would explain that these documents contained all the substantiation for the statements made in the one page briefing document that W holds in his hand.