The Conservative Soldier

Educators and parents carefully — sometimes overzealously — filter the books we allow our children to read, along with the television programs, films and Internet content they absorb.

We do this because children do not possess the judgment to make all of the right choices on their own, to avoid inappropriate content or to understand the nuances of messages. But in my daughter’s school district here in a Chicago suburb, the filter is not applied as rigorously when it comes to her exposure to interpretation of current events by the news media.

The status of a news digest called TIME For Kids as the District’s educational news publication of choice has concerned me for many years because of TIME’s well established reputation as a heavily biased, left-wing media entity. This is the magazine that, in 2007, made Russian President Vladimir Putin its Person of the Year, when an emerging American hero named Gen. David Petraeus was the clear and worthy choice for his masterful leadership in the war on Islamic Jihad in Iraq.

I was enraged when my daughter came home recently with a TIME For Kids issue bearing the cover story, “Still On Duty”, a review of U.S. military initiatives in Iraq since the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. The cover might have pronounced, “Progress in Iraq”, but TIME’s editors would not have allowed such optimism, even for grade school readers.

The cover featured a photo of a U.S. Army Sergeant in full combat attire, gripping an automatic weapon, his face expressing steely determination. He also looks a tad menacing (of course). In the background, we see an Iraqi girl in native dress, appearing to cower in his presence. Her image is fuzzy so that we can not be sure if she is frightened or merely curious. This is deliberate, no doubt.

It is absolutely unacceptable to send this message to our children, and it is a powerful visual message, indeed. It is wrong for our children to be given the impression that our American military service personnel are a menacing, destructive force in Iraq, or in other parts of the world where they are helping people achieve the dream all human beings desire – freedom, independence and the pursuit of happiness.

I find it abhorrent that our children are being willfully misinformed about the measurable progress that has been achieved in Iraq.

In one section of the two-page article inside the magazine, the following passage appears: “Murder, death threats and kidnappings are still commonplace in Iraq.” TIME makes no effort whatsoever to qualify this statement by pointing out that before the demise of the Hussein regime the day-to-day lives of Iraqi people encountered far more dire “commonplace” events – not murder but mass murder; not death threats but instant death; not kidnappings but brutal confinement, repeated torture and rape.

Our kids need to know what U.S. Army Reserve Staff Sergeant Anthony J. Diaz imparted in an essay recently published by The Washington Post, not exactly known for any greater balance than TIME. Diaz, stationed in Baghdad since last August, wrote, “One often reads of the chaos plaguing Iraq. Yet the media accounts only infrequently seem to grasp the successes being achieved.”

There are dozens upon dozens of independent accounts written by people of all political stripes who have visited Iraq in the past 12 months describing progress on many fronts.  Life is improving. The Chicago Tribune recently notes that there were 261,000 Internet subscribers in Iraq in 2007 compared to 4,900, four years earlier (under Hussein).

The consensus is: The U.S. military surge succeeded. That is a far different message than TIME’s foreboding cover title, “Still On Duty”.

It is in our kids’ best interest to know that the American military is fighting for their future, fighting so that one day they will not stand in an American street peering from the shadows at a uniformed enemy of our freedoms. 

Our kids need to know that if TIME was being forthright, it would publish that same photo of Sgt. Steve Stutzman on its Feb. 29 TIME For Kids cover again in the future, next to a headline reading, Person of the Year.