The Continuum of War

Virtually every war I've covered has been a guerrilla war, not a big conventional war the way Vietnam was or the Gulf War. They've always been wars of liberation, or ethnic conflicts, wars in developing countries—Central America, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda, South Africa. At the time I was photographing the wars in Lebanon, the war in Afghanistan against the Russians, the Afghan civil war, and both Palestinian uprisings, I thought I was covering separate stories. But on September 11, 2001, I realized that I had actually been photographing one story, and this was just the latest phase of it. That event crystallized the past twenty years of history as I had experienced it.

The job of the press is to create awareness about the consequences of policy, about cause and effect, about the results of action or the failure to act. In a way, September 11 underlined the failure of journalism. I don't think individual journalists have failed to do their jobs well. On the contrary, journalists in the field have performed remarkably well, often at great risk, in harrowing conditions, and at great sacrifice. But there's more to it than that. The matrix of perception in which the work of journalists is understood is deeply influenced by governments, business, and culture. September 11 also underlined the failure of our political leadership, our foreign policy and our society to properly comprehend what now seems obvious—that we are part of the world; that what we do and don't do, what we see and don't see, has serious repercussions. Only now are we trying to unravel it in our minds, when it’s been happening for decades, just as journalists have been telling us.