In times of violent conflict it is very common for people to think of the
other people as barbarians – that is, people of different races, cultures, nationalities, religions, skin color, you name it. It is much easier to think of
them as the barbarians, while ignoring evidence of barbarity on the part of people more like oneself – people of a race and nationality similar to oneself. Tom Engelhardt expresses this idea in his book, “
The American Way of War”:
Ordinarily in our world, the barbarians are them. They act in ways that seem unimaginably primitive and brutal to us. For instance, they kidnap or capture someone… and cut off his head.
But is the U.S. bombing of foreign cities accompanied by massive civilian casualties any less barbaric than that? Part of the reason we tend to see it that way is that our media rarely discusses it. Engelhardt explains with regard to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars:
The complete absence of coverage… is a little harder to explain… The expansion of U.S. airpower is the great missing story of the post-9/11 era. Is there no reporter out there willing to cover it? Is the repeated bombing, strafing, and missiling of heavily populated civilian urban centers and the partial or total destruction of cities such a humdrum event… that no one thinks it worth the bother? …
On our we/they planet, most groups don’t consider themselves barbarians. Nonetheless, we have largely achieved non-barbaric status in an interesting way – by removing the most essential aspect of the American way of war from the category of the barbaric. I’m talking, of course, about airpower, about raining destruction down on the earth from the skies, and about the belief – so common, so long-lasting and deep-seated – that bombing others, including civilian populations, is a “strategic” thing to do… that such a way of war is the royal path to victory.
Looking at American actions through other eyesI almost started to write, “I don’t want to belabor the point, but…” But that would not be true. I DO want to belabor the point – because until more people develop the skill of looking at issues such as this through other peoples’ eyes they will continue to support nationalistic wars, and those wars will continue to spread misery throughout the world until human civilization as we know it is destroyed (unless of course climate change destroys it first). So here are a few examples of how people other than nationalistic Americans look at our military actions:
The Global Policy Forum – a coalition of non-governmental groupsOn the
use of U.S. airpower in urban areas in prosecuting the Iraq War:
The Coalition has used overwhelming military force to attack several Iraqi cities, on grounds that they were "insurgent strongholds." These offensives, using heavy air and land bombardment, culminate in massive armored assaults. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people, caused large civilian casualties and destroyed much of the urban areas.
On the military’s treatment of Iraqi citizens in general:
The U.S. Coalition… have held a large number of Iraqi citizens in 'security detention' without charge or trial, in direct violation of international law. No Iraqi is safe from arbitrary arrest and the number of prisoners has risen greatly since 2003…
U.S. military commanders have established permissive rules of engagement, allowing troops to use deadly force against virtually any perceived threat. As a consequence, the US and its allies regularly kill Iraqi civilians at checkpoints and during military operations, on the basis of the merest suspicion…abusing and torturing large numbers of Iraqi prisoners… torture increasingly takes place in Iraqi prisons, apparently with US awareness and complicity…In addition to combat deaths, coalition forces have killed many Iraqi civilians.
The United States has established broad legal immunity in Iraq for its forces, for private security personnel, for foreign military and civilian contractors, and even for the oil companies doing business in Iraq…
Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)An article in
The Nation, titled “
Winter Soldiers Speak”, written by Laila Al-Arian, is taken from statements by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) at the March 2008 Winter Soldier summit in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Pfc. Clifton Hicks was given an order. Abu Ghraib had become a "free-fire zone," Hicks was told, and no "friendlies" or civilians remained in the area. "Game on. All weapons free," his captain said. Upon that command, Hicks's unit opened a furious fusillade, firing at people scurrying for cover, at anything that moved. Sent in to survey the damage, Hicks found the area littered with human corpses, including women and children, but he saw no military gear or weapons of any kind near the bodies. In the aftermath of the massacre, Hicks was told that his unit had killed 700-800 "enemy combatants." But he knew the dead were not terrorists or insurgents; they were innocent Iraqis. "I will agree to swear to that till the day I die," he said. "I didn't see one enemy on that operation."
Soldiers and marines at Winter Soldier described the frustration of routinely raiding the wrong homes and arresting the wrong people… "This is not an isolated incident," the testifiers uttered over and over… insisting that the atrocities they committed or witnessed were common….
While the Winter Soldiers offered a searing critique of the military's treatment of civilians, which they described as alternately inhumane and sadistic, they also empathized with fellow soldiers thrust into a chaotic urban theater where the lines between combatants and civilians are blurred. "It's criminal to put such patriotic Americans...in a situation where their morals are at odds with their survival instincts"…
A professor at Baghdad University who joined the Iraqi resistanceJurgen Todenhofer is one of the few (if not the only) Western journalists to have interviewed several members of the Iraqi resistance – the people whom the U.S. government routinely refers to as “terrorists”. Contained in those interviews, which are described in Todenhofer’s book, “
Why Do you Kill – The Untold Story of the Iraqi Resistance”, are details that could help Americans better understand the scope of the tragedy caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Mohammed was a professor at Baghdad University before he joined the resistance. He told Todenhofer that he:
joined the resistance “in order to end the humiliation of the Iraqi people”. During their nightly raids, the occupiers so often attack families in their homes and humiliate them. They regularly take away all the men, and sometimes even the women, old people and children, and lock them up in camps for months for no apparent reasons…
The private security contractors financed by the United States… are comprised of more than 100,000 highly paid people, and have enjoyed immunity ever since the invasion in 2003 thanks to a decree by Paul Bremer… The Blackwater Army in particular… is notorious for its ruthlessness and brutality… The Western media almost completely ignore the 100-200 daily acts of violence, the bombings and the raids committed by the U.S. troops. As a rule they only report the one, two or three suicide bombings that occur each day, which are usually perpetrated by foreigners, and then claim they exemplify the violence that prevails within Iraq…
For Mohammed, terrorists are people who kill civilians for political reasons. He therefore considers Al-Qaeda, the deaths squads run by certain politicians, and the U.S. government all to be terrorists. The soldiers of the U.S. government have demonstrably killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, more than Al-Qaeda and all the militias together. “It is against this terrorism that we are fighting,” says Mohammed. He says Saddam Hussein was too harsh a dictator. But the American military dictatorship since the invasion has been much harsher, bloodier and more brutal. “If that is democracy, then you can keep it.” Nobody in Iraq could ever have imagined that in the name of democracy the West would torture, rape, mutilate and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Omar – another Iraqi resistance fighterOmar had been fighting in the Iraqi resistance since the beginning of the war. This is what he had to say to Todenhofer:
Omar… lost 10 members of his family, including his oldest son, Mazin, when the American troops invaded. Mazin was nine years old when the American troops shot him… He will never forget the look on the face of his dying son; his eyes were pleading: “Papa, help me. You always help me”. But Omar could not help this time, and Omar’s son bled to death in his arms…
He is disappointed by the coverage of Iraq in the Western media. He is astonished that no distinction is made between the Iraqi resistance to the occupation and the terrorism brought in from abroad that is directed against the civilian population. He also finds it strange that the resistance is criticized for hiding in residential neighborhoods among civilians. Where should they be? The resistance doesn’t have any barracks. Resistance fighters are freedom fighters…. Moreover, in most places the people all support the resistance.
From the blog of an “unknown Iraqi girl” People are seething with anger… Every newspaper you pick up in Baghdad has pictures of some American or British atrocity or another. It's like a nightmare that has come to life. Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, "True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…" Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained… In the New Iraq, it's "guilty until proven innocent”…
There was a time when people here felt sorry for the troops… That time has passed… And through all this, Bush gives his repulsive speeches. He makes an appearance on Arabic TV channels looking sheepish and attempting to look sincere, babbling on about how this 'incident' wasn't representative of the American people or even the army, regardless of the fact that it's been going on for so long… But when the bodies were dragged through the streets of Fallujah, the American troops took it upon themselves to punish the whole city…
So are the atrocities being committed in Abu Ghraib really not characteristic of the American army? What about the atrocities committed by Americans in Guantanamo? And Afghanistan? … It seems that torture and humiliation are common techniques used in countries blessed with the American presence…
Why is no one condemning this? … I don't understand the 'shock' Americans claim to feel at the lurid pictures. You've seen the troops break down doors and terrify women and children… curse, scream, push, pull and throw people to the ground with a boot over their head. You've seen troops shoot civilians in cold blood. You've seen them bomb cities and towns. You've seen them burn cars and humans using tanks and helicopters. Is this latest debacle so very shocking or appalling? …
I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can – while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances – just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.
A profile in cowardiceIt is probably accurate to say that the most prominent architect of the U.S. “War on Terror” is our former Vice President, Dick Cheney. Clearly, Cheney doesn’t put much value on the lives of the innocent citizens of other nations. Let’s contrast that with the value he puts on his own life. From Jane Mayer’s “
The Dark Side – The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals”:
A sense of constant danger followed Cheney everywhere… He was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its rout to foil possible attackers. On the backseat behind Cheney rested … a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit. Rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow.
Engelhardt comments on this:
When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn’t exactly a profile in courage… It was a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any war-time president, including Abraham Lincoln when Southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation’s capitol? …
On the other hand, the well-armored vice president… played a leading role… in loosing the Global War on Terror that was also a global war of terror on lands thousands of miles distant. In this new war… no price in human abasement or human life proved too high to pay – as long as it was paid by someone else.
The value placed by certain high level U.S. officials and other nationalistic Americans on innocent foreign livesEngelhardt draws a contrast between the value that many Americans – especially certain high level officials – place on American lives compared to the lives of others. Obviously this doesn’t apply to
all Americans. But let’s face it. It pervades our culture:
While Americans spent days in October 2006 riveted to TV screens following the murders of five Amish girls by a madman… a number of Afghan wedding parties and at least one Iraqi wedding party were largely wiped out from the air by American planes to hardly any news coverage at all. The message of these slaughters is that if you live in areas where the Taliban exists, which is now much of Afghanistan, you’d better not gather.
Each of these events was marked by… the uniformity of the U.S. response: initial claims that U.S. forces had been fired on first and that those killed were the enemy; a dismissal of the slaughters as the unavoidable “collateral damage” of wartime; and, above all, an unwillingness to genuinely apologize for, or take real responsibility for, having wiped out groups of celebrating locals…
Since the Afghan War began in 2001, such “incidents’ have occurred again and again. The Global War on Terror is premised on an unspoken belief that the lives of others – civilians going about their business in distant lands – are essentially of no importance when placed against American needs and desires.
Thoughts on the Nuremberg Trials and international justiceThe Nuremberg trials of 1945-46, following the conclusion of World War II, represented an international effort to criminalize unjustified war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, in order to prevent future occurrences. U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, whose father Thomas J. Dodd,
played a leading role in the Nuremburg trials, discusses this effort in his book, “
Letters from Nuremburg – My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice”. Dodd speaks of the importance of the Nuremburg trials in establishing the rule of law as an international concept:
The argument that eventually prevailed was based on two powerful ideas. By trying those who carried out a criminal war, a complete record of their actions could be shown to the world, therefore announcing once and for all that such behavior would not be tolerated by the community of civilized nations. And, in giving the defendants a chance to… defend themselves, the Allies would take the moral high ground…
People like my father set a clear and binding standard, saying, in effect, that here precisely is what happened as a result of tyranny and that any attempt to repeat such behavior would be seen for what it is. We were naïve, of course, in this view. Since Nuremberg, the world has demonstrated time and again its capacity to stun us with outrage and inhumanity… Yet there is no doubt that Nuremberg remains more than an event of historical significance – it has become a word in the language that reminds us of ultimate collective responsibility for aggression, racism, and crimes against humanity…
They understood that the ability of the United States to help bring about a world of peace and justice was rooted not in our military might alone but our moral authority… Our ability to succeed in spreading values of freedom and democracy and human rights would only be as effective as our own willingness to uphold them…
The
main trial, referred to officially as “Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal”, involved 23 defendants. This was the trial of high level Nazi functionaries accused of some of the worst crimes ever committed in human history, including the crimes of “aggressive war”, “war crimes”, and “crimes against humanity”. Of these 23 defendants, one was judged medically unfit for trial, 3 were acquitted, 12 were sentenced to death, and 7 were sentenced to prison terms of various lengths.
Dodd goes into detail on how actions of the United States, during the Bush years especially, undermined its moral authority to judge the actions of others with respect to the worst crimes addressed at Nuremberg. And he describes the consequences of that:
How can we expect developing nations around the world to give credence to the rule of law when our own leaders choose to ignore it? On what moral authority can we tell other countries not to detain unlawfully and torture American citizens when we fail to abide by the same rules? …. Increasingly, our country is abandoning the moral high ground … Thus I fear that each step we take from presenting ourselves as unambiguously dedicated to preserving the rule of law is a step in the direction of a less secure United States. What good is the information gained from torturing one Iraqi insurgent if doing so causes us to be despised by a million Iraqi children?
Why?I wonder how many of the people who place so little importance on the lives of innocent civilians who happen to be on the wrong side of an American war consider themselves to be “pro-life”. I’m sure there are quite a few. But how can those who consider themselves to be “pro-life”, or who justify our invasion of sovereign nations on the grounds of “spreading freedom and democracy”, be so unconcerned with the massive numbers of casualties that we inflict upon the people of countries that we presume to protect and liberate?
Various related answers come to mind: 1) They don’t know about those casualties; 2) they don’t consider the inhabitants of various “inferior” nations to be fully human; 3) they don’t consider it relevant to their own lives; 4) they refuse to believe anything bad about their own country because they’ve been told all their lives that the United States of America is the “greatest force for good” in the world; 5) their sense of identity is threatened by the thought that their own country perpetrates barbaric policies and actions.
With regard to answer # 5, the humanist psychologist Erich Fromm discusses the psychology behind this way of thinking, in his book, “
The Sane Society”:
(Humans) are driven to do almost anything to acquire this sense (of identity). Behind the intense passion for status and conformity is this very need, and it is sometimes even stronger than the need for physical survival. What could be more obvious than the fact that people are willing to risk their lives, to give up their love, to surrender their freedom, to sacrifice their own thoughts, for the sake of being one of the herd… and thus of acquiring a sense of identity, even though it is an illusory one.
I find this kind of attitude so tragic that it is very difficult to find the right words to counter it. So I’ll just end this post with a quote from Ton Engelhardt, commenting on the U.S. slaughter through aerial bombardment of nearly a hundred Afghanis attending a wedding party:
This sort of “collateral damage” is an ongoing modern nightmare which, unlike dead Amish girls or school shootings, does not fascinate either our media or, evidently, Americans generally. It seems we largely don’t want to know what happened, and generally speaking, that’s lucky because the media isn’t particularly interested in telling us. This is one reason the often absurd accounts offered by the U.S. military go relatively unchallenged…
The sixty or so children slaughtered in Azizabad, each of whom belonged to some family, did not matter to them (Bush and Cheney). But those children do matter. And when you kill them, and so many others like them, you surely play with fire.
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