An observer of current election news in the United States might be forgiven for thinking that "Iraq" is the name of a political poker chip rather than a country or a war.

In all the back-and-forth rhetoric and media coverage of the presidential race, precious little deals with the human suffering of the Iraq War. And we don't hear much about transgressions against international law that are inherent in the ongoing occupation made possible by an invasion which — as the UN's then-secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said at the time — was a violation of the United Nations Charter.

Instead, the media fixation in 2008 largely zeroes in on how Iraq is playing out as an "issue" on the campaign road to the White House. So, in late February, major candidates raised media eyebrows in those terms.

Sen. John McCain said "that he needed to convince the American people that the troop escalation in Iraq was working and that American casualties there would continue to decline," The New York Times reported on Feb. 26. "If he did not, he said, 'I lose' the election."

Even after McCain backtracked a bit from his statement — saying, "If I may, I'd like to retract 'I'll lose'" — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee acknowledged that Iraq would be central to election politics. "I don't think there's any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me," McCain declared.

A day later, Sen. Hillary Clinton caused a stir when she answered a question about Iraq during a debate on MSNBC. Asked to name "any words or vote that you'd like to take back," Clinton cited her vote for the October 2002 war resolution that gave a green light for the invasion of Iraq: "I would not have voted that way again."

The statements by McCain and Clinton were certainly newsworthy. But the breathless quality of reporting on them is a tip-off on just how isolated into a political bubble the U.S.

media coverage of the Iraq war has gotten. More than being an actual country where hundreds of thousands of people have died and many are dying now, the word "Iraq" — in the world of U.S. political journalism — has come to mostly signify a rhetorical piece on America's political chessboard.

In war reporting, abstraction is a constant hazard that often undermines journalism. Usually we see, hear and read coverage that tells us plenty but not much about what is the essence of war — anguish, extreme fear, suffering, death. And in the general realms of political news about war, the standard phrases and images take war out of its human realities and into the obscuring zones of hair-splitting, rhetorical gambits and tactical maneuvers of politics.

During this presidential race, the abstracting forces of news media seem to be reaching new heights. In discussions about the Iraq War, the injuries and deaths central to the military conflict are anything but aptly described when the entire war is largely reduced to a political football that's covered as such in standard news accounts.

Underlying the abstraction, these days, is the emergent conventional media wisdom that "the surge" is a success and "violence" is subsiding. Easy for reporters and pundits to say as they focus on how the Iraq War will figure into the U.S. presidential race this year. Along the way, we learn almost nothing about the deaths from the scarcely reported U.S. air war in Iraq.

That's a big part of the journalistic problem: We keep hearing ponderous analysis of the war as if its main significance has to do with its prospective impact on the race for the White House. Rarely does U.S. media coverage flip the conventional question to ask: What effects are the current political machinations of American politics likely to have on the life and death realities inside Iraq? Genuine answers should be explored — and not just as an afterthought.

Norman Solomon's is the author of "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State." For information about Norman Solomon, go to www.normansolomon.com, or visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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