Identifying Barbarians
Here's a question: Why don't the dead of our foreign wars register on us, particularly the civilians killed in numbers that, if attributed to our enemies or past imperial armies, would be seen as the acts of barbarians? After all, when a Taliban suicide bomber kills 17 Afghans and wounds 23 in a bathhouse, including a senior police border-control officer, we know just what to think. It wouldn't matter if those who sent the bomber claimed that he had made a "mistake" in targeting, or if they declared the other deaths regrettable "collateral damage." When we attack with similar results, we hardly think about it at all.
I can imagine at least three factors involved:
Tribalism: Yes, we consider them the tribal ones, but we have our own tribal qualities, including a deep-seated feeling that what's close at hand (us) is more valuable than what's far away (them). The valorizing of your own group and the devaluing of those outside it undoubtedly couldn't be more human. Who doesn't know, for instance, that when it comes to media coverage, one blond American child kidnapped and murdered is worth 500 Indonesians drowned on a ferry?
Racism/The Superiority Factor: This subject is no longer raised in connection with American wars, and yet it's obviously of importance. If 16 Americans had been killed and 13 wounded in six mistaken-targeting incidents even in distant Afghanistan, we would be outraged. There would be news coverage, Congressional hearings, who knows what. If there had been the same number of dead Canadians or Germans, there would still have been an outcry. But Afghans? Dark-skinned peoples from an alien culture in the backlands of the planet? No way. Our condolences every now and then are the best we have on tap.
The American Way of War: Once upon a time, we Americans responded to air war, especially against civilian populations, as barbaric and, shocked by its effects in Guernica, Shanghai, London, and elsewhere, denounced it. That, of course, was before air war became such an integral part of the American way of war. In recent years, American military spokespeople have regularly boasted of the increasingly "surgical" and "precise" nature of air power. The most impressively surgical thing about air war, however, is the way it has been excised from the category of barbarism in our American world. The suicide bomber or car bomber is a monster, a barbarian. Drones, planes, helicopters? No such thing, despite the stream of innocents they kill.
No wonder when we look in the mirror, we don't see the grinning face of a maniac; sometimes we see no face at all, quite literally in the case of the Pakistani tribal borderlands where hundreds have died (always "militants" or "suspected militants") thanks to pilotless drones and video-game-style war.
Blown Away
In a safe in Jared Loughner's parents' house, investigators from the Pima County Sheriff's Department found documents with the words "I planned ahead," "My assassination," and "Giffords." The words of a madman. When a Taliban suicide bomber strikes, we know that we are staring off-the-charts brutality in the face. When it comes to our killings, it's always another matter.
And yet, even if every one of those Afghan deaths was "mistaken," there was nothing innocent about the killings. If something happens often enough to be a predictable horror, then those who commit the acts (and those who send them to do so, as well as those who have the luxury of looking the other way) are responsible, and should be accountable.
After all, week after week, month after month, year after year since September 11, 2001, the deaths have piled up relentlessly. Towers and towers of deaths. Barely reported, seldom named, hardly noted, almost never grieved over in our world, those dead Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis had parents who assumedly loved them, friends who cared about them, enemies who might have wanted to target them, colleagues and associates who knew their quirks. We're talking so many Safeways' worth of them that it's beyond reckoning.
Civilians repeatedly killed at checkpoints; 12 Afghans including a four-year-old girl, a one-year-old boy, and three elderly villagers shot down near the city of Jalalabad when Marine Special Operations forces, attacked by a suicide bomber, fired wildly along a ten-mile stretch of road in April 2007; at least 12 Iraqi civilians (including two employees of Reuters) slaughtered by an Apache helicopter on a street in Baghdad in July 2007; at least 17 Iraqi civilians murdered by Blackwater contractors protecting a convoy of State Department vehicles in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in September 2007.
Any recent year has such "highlights": a popular Kabul Imam shot to death in his car from a passing NATO convoy with his 7-year-old son in the back seat in January 2010; at least 21 Afghan civilians killed when U.S. jets mistakenly fired on three mini-buses in Uruzgan Province in February 2010; five civilians killed and up to 18 wounded when U.S. troops raked a passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in April 2010; and 10 Afghan election workers killed and two wounded last September in a "precision air strike" on a "militant's vehicle."
And that, of course, is just to scratch the surface of such incidents. Wedding parties have repeatedly been obliterated (at least seven in Afghanistan and Iraq), naming ceremonies for children wiped out, and funerals blown away.
Bodies and more bodies. All "mistakes." And yet, knowing the mistakes that have happened and assured of the mistakes to come, our leaders are still talking about U.S. "combat troops" staying in Afghanistan through 2014; our vice-president is pledging us to remain "well beyond" that year; one of our senators is calling for "permanent bases" there; our trainers are expecting to conduct training exercises in 2016; and in the meantime, our Afghan war commander is calling in more air power, more night raids, and more destruction.
Nowhere do we see the face of a madman grinning, but the toll across the years is that of a cold-blooded killer. It's the mark of barbarism, even if we're not fanatics.
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