Our report's revelations were, I thought, dramatic, largely unknown to the American public, and another reason to demand a conclusion to our never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were also a significant black mark against the private contracting companies that, for years now, have profited so greatly from those wars. Nonetheless, the report got next to no coverage, as has often been the case when it comes to human suffering in those war zones (at least when the sufferers are not U.S. soldiers).
Do Americans really not care? That, at least, seems to have been the judgment of the many journalists who received our press release about the report.
In truth, this has become something like a fact of life in America today, one that's only been made more extreme by the media's full-time fascination with President Donald Trump -- from his tweets to his insults to his ever-wilder statements. He -- or rather the media obsession with his every twitch -- poses just the latest challenge to getting attention of any sort for the true costs to us (and everyone else) of our country's wars.
One small way we've found of getting around this media vortex is by tapping into pre-existing communities of interest like veterans' groups. In June 2017, for instance, we issued a report on the injustices faced by post-9/11 veterans released from the military with "bad paper" or other-than-honorable discharges, usually thanks to minor forms of misconduct, acts that often stem from trauma sustained during military service. Such bad papers leave veterans ineligible for healthcare, education, and housing assistance from the Department of Veterans Affairs. While the report got little press attention, news of it traveled along the circuits of veterans-oriented blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds, generating far more interest and commentary. It was even, we later learned, used by such groups in attempts to influence veteran-related legislation.
War to the Horizon and a Demobilized Public and Congress
At heart, though, whatever our small successes, we continue to face a grim reality of this twenty-first-century moment, one that long preceded the presidency of Donald Trump: the lack of connection between the American public (myself once included) and the wars being fought in our names in distant lands. Not surprisingly, this goes hand-in-hand with another reality: you have to be a total war jockey, someone who follows what's happening more or less full time, to have a shot at knowing what's really going on in the conflicts that now extend from Pakistan into the heart of Africa.
After all, in this era, secrecy is the essence of the world of Washington, invariably invoked in the name of American "security." As a researcher on the subject, I repeatedly confront the murkiness of government information about the war on terror. Recently, for instance, we released a project I had worked on for several months: a map of all the places where, in one fashion or another, the U.S. military is now taking some sort of action against terrorism -- a staggering 76 nations, or 40% of the countries on the planet.
Of course, it's hardly surprising these days that our government is far from transparent about so many things, but doing original research on the war on terror has brought this into stark relief for me. I was stunned at how difficult it can be to find the most basic information, scattered at so many different websites, often hidden, sometimes impossible to locate. One obscure but key source for the map we did, for example, proved to be a Pentagon list labeled "Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medals Approved Areas of Eligibility." From it, my team and I were able to learn of places like Ethiopia and Greece that the military deems part of that "War on Terrorism." We were then able to crosscheck these with the State Department's "Country Reports on Terrorism," which officially document terrorist incidents, country by country, and what each country's government is doing to counter terrorism.
This research process brought home to me that the detachment many Americans feel in relation to those post-9/11 wars is matched -- even fed -- by the opacity of government information about them. This no doubt stems, at least in part, from a cultural trend: the demobilization of the American people. The government demands nothing of the public, not even minimalist acts like buying war bonds (as in World War II), which would not only help offset the country's growing debt from its war-making, but might also generate actual concern and interest in those wars. (Even if the government didn't spend another dollar on its wars, our research shows that we will still have to pay a breathtaking $8 trillion extra in interest on past war borrowing by the 2050s.)
Our map of the war on terror did, in fact, get some media attention, but as is so often the case when we reach out to even theoretically sympathetic congressional representatives, we heard nothing back from our outreach. Not a peep. That's hardly surprising, of course, since like the American people, Congress has largely been demobilized when it comes to America's wars (though not when it comes to pouring ever more federal dollars into the U.S. military).
Last October, when news came out about four Green Berets killed by an Islamic State affiliate in the West African nation of Niger, congressional debates revealed that American lawmakers had little idea where in the world our troops were stationed, what they were doing there, or even the extent of counterterrorism activity among the Pentagon's various commands. Yet the majority of those representatives remain all too quick to grant blank checks to President Trump's requests for ever greater military spending (as was also true of requests from presidents Bush and Obama).
After visiting some congressional offices in November, my colleagues and I were struck that even the most progressive among them were talking only about allocating slightly -- and I mean slightly -- less money to the Pentagon budget, or supporting slightly fewer of the hundreds of military bases with which Washington garrisons the globe. The idea that it might be possible to work toward ending this country's "forever wars" was essentially unmentionable.
Such a conversation could only come about if Americans -- particularly young Americans -- were to become passionate about stopping the spread of the war on terror, now considered little short of a "generational struggle" by the U.S. military. For any of this to change, President Trump's enthusiastic support for expanding the military and its budget, and the fear-based inertia that leads lawmakers to unquestioningly support any American military campaign, would have to be met by a strong counterforce. Through the engagement of significant numbers of concerned citizens, the status quo of war making might be reversed, and the rising tide of the U.S. counterterror wars stemmed.
Toward that end, the Costs of War Project will continue to tell whoever will listen what the longest war(s) in U.S. history are costing Americans and others around the world.
Stephanie Savell is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. An anthropologist, she has conducted research on security and civic engagement in the U.S. and in Brazil. She co-authored The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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