Really? Soldiers die in war zones? But... really?

Prolific Vancouver-based blogger Darren Barefoot has written an excellent summary of the recent furore over the media's right to gather at the Trenton air base every time a Canadian soldier is brought home in a coffin. The post can be read here.

But I'll have to disagree with his conclusion that in the end, the right of a free press trumps both the privacy of grieving families and our national government's ability to implement a coherent foreign policy.

Leaving aside the issue of the families, who seem to be themselves undecided on the issue, the Conservative Party's policy of not allowing media presence as the caskets are unloaded (in addition to their decision on not lowering the flag when one or a handful of Canadian soldiers are killed in action) is essentially a pragmatic one.

Most people these days would probably agree that relatively unfettered televised coverage of the brutalities of Vietnam led to the end of the American efforts to prop up the corrupt South Vietnamese regime - no doubt, a good thing.

But in our media-saturated universe, images of only a few Canadian-flag draped coffins, repeated again and again on television, radio, newspapers, magazine covers and most importantly, the Internet, can have the same impact today as 1970s-era film footage of the Mai-Lai massacre. On a slow news day, journalists will be tempted to portray the loss of even a few of our soldiers in Afghanistan as a major military defeat.

Antiwar activists would of course count this as a good thing - if only a few casualties can give us pause before sending our soldiers away to kill others and run the risk of being killed themselves, then it's unlikely that we will continue to do so. But the 2,300-strong Canadian mission seems to be one of those causes actually worth fighting for: helping to bring back a nation from the abyss, help its people recover from decades of war and ensure it will never again harbor those that would hide in its forbidding lands to prepare our destruction.

Actually, I support the right of the press to report on the progress of our Afghanistan mission, up to and including the inevitable coffins at Trenton. But if the government feels that reporters should be shooting their cameras from the mess hall rather than a few metres from the bodies, that should be their perogative.

If reporters want to provide full coverage of our mission, that's fine. I don't have to know the color of the caskets when our soldiers come home for their final rest.

tags: Canada, Canadian soldiers, Afghanistan, mission, casualties, Trenton, soldier