This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
As we think about the nightmarish war in Ukraine, let me just offer you a few figures: almost a million dead, nearly 400,000 of them civilians; at least 38 million people turned into war refugees or internally displaced; and perhaps $8 trillion in money squandered on that hell on Earth. Oh wait, sorry, that's what happens when you get old and things start to blur in your mind. Yes, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is indeed a horror of slaughtered civilians, mind-boggling numbers of refugees and internally displaced Ukrainians, and untold amounts of money already squandered on death and destruction. The figures I just gave you, however, come from the invaluable Costs of War Project's calculations about what used to be called this country's "Global War on Terror," which includes the invasions, occupations of, and disastrous conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As we face a Congress that can't agree to spend any reasonable sums on needy Americans but is racing to raise staggering billions of dollars to arm the Ukrainians (no questions asked), it's worth remembering that, in this century, when it came to invasions and horrifying wars, our leaders were functionally Vladimir Putins. Now, thanks to him, we've suddenly become the "good guys" again, a phenomenon in which Washington is, of course, reveling. If only, as the other major invader nation of this century, we had learned that making peace is so much better than making war and were putting at least some of our efforts into brokering negotiations between the warring parties in Ukraine rather than further revving up the conflict and glorying in doing so.
As far as I'm concerned, TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson embodies the antiwar spirit on this planet. She's worked for years with American military personnel who, in an up-close-and-personal fashion, turned their backs on war. She even wrote a book about them, War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built. So, as the conflict in Ukraine only intensifies, as the Russians, Americans, Europeans, and Ukrainians pour ever more into the battle there while the very possibility of peace seems to fade from view, let her explore the difficulties the antiwarriors of our world now face dealing with just such a situation. Tom
Ukraine
An Antiwar Dilemma
By Nan Levinson
I've been watching this country at war for many years now and, after 9/11, began spending time with American veterans who came to disdain and actively oppose the very conflicts they were sent to fight. The paths they followed to get there and the courage it took to turn their backs on all they had once embraced intrigued and impressed me, so I wrote a book about them. While doing so, I was often struck by a strange reality in that era of American war-making: in a land where there was no longer a draft, most Americans were paying remarkably little attention to our ongoing wars thousands of miles away. I find it even stranger today and please note that this takes nothing away from the misery of the Ukrainian people or the ruthlessness of Vladimir Putin's invasion that the public seems vastly more engaged in a war its country is not officially fighting than in the ones we did fight so brutally and unsuccessfully over the past two decades.
Here, for instance, are just a few notes I took recently while listening to NPR: A woman calls one of its talk shows, feeling guilty about celebrating her daughter's birthday in style when Ukrainians are suffering so horribly. A panel on a different NPR show discusses why Americans feel so involved and its members consider all-too-uncomfortably the rationale that the Ukrainians "look like us." The show's host does note that they don't actually look like all of us, but no one suggests that decrying atrocities is easier when they're committed by another country, especially one we never much liked to begin with.
Need more? Scott Simon, a popular NPR host, concludes an opinion piece about a 91-year-old Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust and died during the siege of Mariupol this way: "Whether in Bosnia, Rwanda, Xinjiang, Bucha, Kharkiv, or Mariupol, 'Never Again' seems to happen again and again." Note the absence from that list of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen.
And what about that people-like-us biz? "We are all Americans," Le Monde declared after the 9/11 attacks. Are we all Ukrainians now? And does that explain the amnesia and whitewashing of American war policy in this century or the implicit racism of it all? There's something odiously revealing about our tendency to divide people caught in this planet's wars into worthy and unworthy victims, the first deserving our sympathy (of course!), the second evidently deserving their fate.
So What's Our Problem?
I don't mean to dump on NPR. It hasn't been beating the drums of war any more rhythmically than most other U.S. news outlets in these last weeks. It's also true that, despite the inherent dangers, journalists have greater access to the conflict in Ukraine than they ever did to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thanks to Ukraine's proximity to established news bureaus, its communication infrastructure, and the flow of refugees to neighboring countries, the coverage there has been more like the U.S. war in Vietnam of the previous century than like the coverage of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That connection wasn't lost on Pat Scanlon who worked in military intelligence in Vietnam. As he followed reports of Russia's indiscriminate bombing and missiling of civilian targets in Ukraine, his post-traumatic stress disorder flared up badly. "I've seen what bombs do," he told me. A member of Veterans for Peace (VFP), Scanlon is a long-standing antiwar and environmental activist. "This feels very different," he said and, in response, he joined a local demonstration supporting Ukraine, even getting funding from his VFP chapter to contribute to humanitarian organizations there.
I, too, find myself appalled and saddened by the situation and frightened by the looming dangers. I, too, want to meet the needs of those more than six million refugees. And I, too, am susceptible to the way both Washington and the media are playing on my sympathies: the child with contact information written on her back in case she gets lost as her family flees Kyiv; President Zelensky in that hoodie resolutely staying put; and besieged Ukrainian soldiers flipping off Russian demands to surrender.
After all, this mix of horror and heroism catches what war is, not the gauzy all-American version with supposedly super-accurate, super-bloodless drones and those celebratory homecomings Americans were fed for 20 years. The extensive and vivid reporting on the nightmarish nature of the war in Ukraine has certainly helped bolster NATO's sense of purpose and common cause, even as it's drawn our fractured country closer together on at least one issue.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).