Relavent Op/Ed from New York Times
One of the most enduring memories from the funeral of my friend Michael Kelly, who was killed covering the war in Iraq for Atlantic Monthly, was standing by his open grave in a cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., watching an Army officer in dress uniform make his way through the cold, persistent drizzle and up the small hill to Michael's wife and boys. He spoke to the family quietly and then got down on one knee on the wet artificial turf that had been placed there in a vain attempt to shield the mourners from the earth. He gave the boys a flag and a medal.
Michael Kelly was not one of their own. He was brash and brave, but distinctly unmilitary. Yet the Army took pains to make this simple gesture that drove home the way the military honors death: it endows that inescapable but inescapably tragic part of their lives with a sense of moment, of ceremony and dignity, and most of all it faces death squarely and honestly.
This is a central part of the warrior's culture, but it is all too often missing from the way President Bush is running the Iraq war. As the toll nears 400, the casualties remain largely invisible. Apart from a flurry of ceremonies on Veterans Day, this White House has done everything it can to keep Mr. Bush away from the families of the dead, at least when there might be a camera around.
The wounded, thousands of them, are even more carefully screened from the public. And the Pentagon has continued its ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped coffins to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, denying the dead soldiers and their loved ones even that simple public recognition of sacrifice. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained rather lamely that the ban had been in place since 1991 ? when another President Bush wanted to avoid the juxtaposition of his face and words with pictures of soldiers' coffins.
Some Republicans say it would take up too much of the president's time to attend military funerals or meet the coffins returning from Iraq. "They're coming back continually," the conservative commentator Bay Buchanan said on CNN on Tuesday. "The president cannot be flying up there every single week."
But someone of rank from the White House could and should be at each and every military funeral. Ideally, Mr. Bush would shake the hand of someone who loved every person who dies in uniform ? a small demand on his time in a war in which the casualties are still relatively small. And he has more than enough advisers, cabinet secretaries and other officials so attending funerals should not be such an inconvenience.
The White House talks about preserving the privacy and dignity of the families of the war dead. But if this was really about the families, the president or Vice President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would be handing flags to widows and mothers in the time-honored way. And if protecting the privacy of Americans who are suffering was such a priority, the White House wouldn't call in the cameras to watch Mr. Bush embracing victims of every hurricane, earthquake or suburban California wildfire.
Along with the coverage of these casualties, the coverage of combat in Iraq has virtually ceased. The "embedded" correspondents who reported on the stunningly swift march to Baghdad during the invasion are gone. The Pentagon has ended the program. The ever-upbeat Mr. Rumsfeld likes to say that the attacks on American soldiers are brief and relatively few in number, compared with the number of men in arms in the field in Iraq. But without real news coverage, it's hard to know the truth.
Letters from American soldiers who have died in Iraq, published on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday, suggest that Mr. Rumsfeld's accounting may be highly selective. Shortly before he died on June 17, Pvt. Robert Frantz wrote this to his mother: "We've had random gunfire within a 100-meter radius all night, every night, since I have been here. It kinda scares you the first couple nights, but you tend to get used to it."
The idea of a slow, painful and bloody holding action in which gunfire is a nightly occurrence contrasts sharply, perhaps too sharply for comfort, with the display of overwhelming force, low casualties and lightning-swift conclusions that Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld put on in the spring. The administration undoubtedly feels that showing coffins on television or having the president attend funerals would undermine public support for the war. (The ban on covering the arrival of coffins at Dover was in effect during the popular Afghanistan war, but was not enforced.) That seems like more of an acknowledgment of how fragile that support is than any poll yet taken.
The Bush administration hates comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, and many are a stretch. But there is a lesson that this president seems not to have learned from Vietnam. You cannot hide casualties. Indeed, trying to do so probably does more to undermine public confidence than any display of a flag-draped coffin. And there is at least one direct parallel. Thirty-five years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon took to shipping bodies into the United States in the dead of night to avoid news coverage.
(Why hasn't the O'Reilly Bunny been all over this?) Wouldn't that be an opportunity for Bush to show how much he cares? Maybe he could squeeze in a visit between campaign fund raisers now that he has over $200 million dollars in his WAR war chest. 
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