For peace and antiwar activists overwhelmed by images of civilian deaths and the decimation of homes, schools, and hospitals in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza, war is now frightfully visible. But Norman Solomon challenges us to ask, what of the 387,000 civilians killed and the 38 million people displaced by U.S. post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines – virtually all of them people of color? In his wide-ranging but tightly argued book, “War Made Invisible,” Solomon analyzes the complex interplay of the factors that have contributed to our “selective empathy” concerning victims of U.S. hostilities.
Solomon describes post-9/11 wars’ invisibility as a product of high-tech weaponry, “precision” bombing, and drone warfare, all of which keep American boots off the ground. (Such weaponry also drives huge military budgets with huge profits for military contractors.) Simultaneously, the political establishment relies on strategic messaging — frequent repetition of the barbaric inhumanity of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, while omitting discussion of the humanity of the civilian victims of our bombing, who are dismissed as “collateral damage.”
In all this, the media play a crucial role as an echo chamber for that messaging, celebrating U.S. military might and providing shockingly meager coverage of distant conflicts that continue for too long. Invisibility has been compounded by staging wars from foreign bases, a vast increase in the use of private military contractors, and the proliferation of “special operations” that circumvent the need for Congressional approval of hostilities and the political debate it provokes.
I read “War Made Invisible” with my own deep concerns about the innocent civilians the U.S. has killed over the last 22 years, as my sister, Laura Rockefeller, was a victim of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My memories of the grief-stricken days after her death are also of days filled with deep foreboding that we would seek revenge rather than justice. And, that revenge would only provoke future cycles of violence and more terrorist acts.
Over the next two decades, the United States multiplied the theaters of war and the deaths of civilians. Yet, as Solomon bitterly writes, when the U.S. finally withdrew from Afghanistan, many of the same politicians, pundits, and journalists who had supported the initial attacks pronounced the war as “ill- conceived and doomed from the start.” Our invasion of Iraq is now labeled “the worst U.S. foreign policy blunder in history.”
Solomon argues that we ignore this reversal of thought over the first two decades of the 21st century at our peril:
Despite all that has happened since President George W. Bush vowed in mid-September 2001 to “rid the world of the evildoers,” pivotal issues have been largely dodged by dominant U.S. media and political leaders. The toll that red-white-and-blue militarism takes on other countries is not only a matter of moral principles. The United States is also in jeopardy.
If Solomon could have written just one more chapter, I would have appreciated his analysis of the U.S. government’s total failure to deliver judicial justice and accountability for the crimes of 9/11. When September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was founded, we argued that a nonviolent response to the terrorist attacks was possible if the U.S. supported “a multilateral, collaborative effort to bring those responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to justice in accordance with the principles of international law.”
Instead, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other men who have been charged with planning and supporting the attacks were captured, they were taken to CIA black sites, tortured, and then ultimately arraigned in a fundamentally flawed military commission at the Guantanamo Naval Base. There, after 11 years, no trial has yet begun. Like the failures of the U.S. “war on terror,” that too has been made largely invisible.