Today's New York Times has a good signed editorial by Andrew Rosenthal about hiding the soldiers who died or were injured in Iraq. After pointing out that the President (or anyone in his cabinet) hasn't attended any funerals for the dead or publicly addressed these slain soldiers' families, Rosenthal concludes:

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.

If you're curious to see what real war fatalities look like, try to track down a copy of Ernst Friedrich's classic 1924 Passivist manifesto War Against War!. The 261 page book features hundreds of gruesome, heartbreaking photographs of soldiers killed and injured during the First World War along with an impassioned critique of war in general.

Since this isn't Rotten.com, I didn't want to post any of these photos here, but you can find them on this site. [Warning: Not for the faint of heart, or squeamish members of the Bush cabinet.]