{"id":8228,"date":"2010-11-08T00:00:30","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T23:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=8228"},"modified":"2010-11-03T22:46:21","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T21:46:21","slug":"the-new-american-isolationism-the-cost-of-turning-away-from-war%e2%80%99s-horrific-realities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/11\/the-new-american-isolationism-the-cost-of-turning-away-from-war%e2%80%99s-horrific-realities\/","title":{"rendered":"The New American Isolationism: The Cost of Turning Away from War\u2019s Horrific Realities"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic.\u00a0 At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war.\u00a0 It sees war as having analgesic qualities — as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror.\u00a0 Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it.\u00a0 Marked by a calculated estrangement from war\u2019s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns\u00a0an historic term on its head, for it keeps us\u00a0in <\/em>wars, rather than\u00a0out<\/em> of them.<\/p>\n

Old-style American isolationism had everything to do with avoiding \u201centangling alliances\u201d and conflicts abroad.\u00a0 It was tied to America\u2019s historic tradition of rejecting a large standing army — a tradition in which many Americans took pride.\u00a0 Yes, we signed on to World War I in 1917, but only after we had been \u201ctoo proud to fight.\u201d\u00a0 Even when we joined, we did so as a non-aligned power with the goal of ending major wars altogether.\u00a0 Before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans again resisted the call to arms, looking upon Hitler\u2019s rise and other unnerving events in Europe and Asia with alarm, but with little eagerness to send American boys into yet another global bloodbath.<\/p>\n

In the decades since World War II, however, \u201cisolationism\u201d has been turned inside-out and upside-down.\u00a0 Instead of seeking eternal peace, Washington elites have, by now, plunged the country into a state of eternal war, and they\u2019ve done so, in part, by isolating ordinary Americans from war\u2019s brutal realities.\u00a0 With rare exceptions (notably John F. Kennedy\u2019s call<\/a> for young Americans to pay any price and bear any burden), our elites have not sought to mobilize a new \u201cgreatest generation,\u201d but rather to keep a clueless one — clueless, that is, as to war\u2019s fatal costs and bitter realities — unmobilized (if not immobilized).<\/p>\n

Such national obliviousness has not gone unnoticed.\u00a0 In a recent New York Times<\/em> op-ed<\/a> headlined \u201cThe Wars that America Forgot About,\u201d former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw asked the obvious question: Why, in an otherwise contentious political season, have our wars gone so utterly undebated<\/a>?\u00a0 His answers — that we\u2019re in a recession in which people have more pressing concerns, and that we\u2019ve restricted the burdens of war to a tiny minority — are sensible, but don\u2019t go quite far enough.\u00a0 It\u2019s important to add that few Americans are debating, or even discussing, our wars in part because our ruling elites haven\u2019t wanted them debated — as if they don\u2019t want us to get the idea that we have any say in war-making at all.<\/p>\n

Think of it this way: the old isolationism was a peaceable urge basic to the American people; the new isolationism is little short of a government program to keep the old isolationism, or opposition of any sort to American wars, in check.<\/p>\n

Americans Express Skepticism about War\u2026 So?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re kept isolated from war\u2019s costs, it\u2019s nearly impossible to mount an effective opposition to them.\u00a0 While our elites, remembering the Vietnam years, may have sought to remove U.S. public opinion from the enemy\u2019s target list, they have also worked hard to remove the public as a constraint on their war-making powers.\u00a0 Recall former Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s dismissive<\/a> \u201cSo?\u201d when asked about opinion polls showing declining public support for the Iraq War in 2008.\u00a0 So what if the American people are uneasy?\u00a0 The elites can always call on a professional, non-draft military, augmented by<\/a> hordes of privatized hire-a-gun outfits, themselves so isolated from society at large that they\u2019ve almost become the equivalent of foreign legionnaires<\/a>.\u00a0 These same elites encourage us to \u201csupport our troops,\u201d but otherwise to look away.<\/p>\n

Mainstream media coverage of our wars has only added to the cocoon created by the new isolationism.\u00a0 After all, it rarely addresses<\/a> the full costs of those conflicts to U.S. troops (including their redeployment<\/a> to war zones, even when already traumatized), let alone to foreign non-combatants in faraway Muslim lands.\u00a0 When such civilians are killed, their deaths tend to take place under the media radar.\u00a0 \u201cIf it bleeds, it doesn\u2019t lead,\u201d could be a news motto for much of recent war coverage, especially if the bleeding is done by civilians.<\/p>\n

Only the recent release of classified documents<\/a> and videos by WikiLeaks, for instance, has forced our media to bring the mind-numbing body count we\u2019ve amassed in Iraq out of the closet.\u00a0 If nothing else, WikiLeaks has succeeded in reminding us of the impact of our vastly superior firepower, as in a now infamous video of an Apache helicopter gunship firing<\/a> on non-combatants in the streets of Baghdad.\u00a0 Such footage is, of course, all-too-personal, all-too-real.\u00a0 Small wonder it was shown in a censored form<\/a> on CNN.<\/p>\n

Where\u2019s the benefit, after all, for corporate-owned media in showcasing others\u2019 terror and pain, especially if it\u2019s inflicted by \u201cAmerica\u2019s hometown heroes<\/a>\u201d?\u00a0 Our regular export of large-scale violence (including a thriving trade in the potential for violence via our hammerlock<\/a> on the global arms trade<\/a>) is not something Americans or the American media have cared to scrutinize.<\/p>\n

To cite two more willful blind spots: Can the average American say roughly how many Iraqis were killed or wounded in our \u201cliberation\u201d of their country and the mayhem that followed?\u00a0 In mid-October, U.S. Central Command quietly released<\/a> a distinctly lowball estimate of 200,000 Iraqi casualties (including 77,000 killed) from January 2004 to August 2008.\u00a0 That estimate (lower by 30,000 than the one compiled by official Iraqi sources) did not include casualties from major combat operations in 2003, nor of course did it have any place for the millions of refugees driven from their homes in the sectarian violence that followed.\u00a0 The recent WikiLeaks document dump on Iraq held at least another 15,000<\/a> unacknowledged Iraqi dead, and serious studies<\/a> of the casualty toll often suggest the real numbers are hundreds of thousands higher.<\/p>\n

Or how about the attitudes of those living in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan subject to the recent upsurge<\/a> of U.S. drone strikes<\/a>?\u00a0 Given the way our robotic wars are written about here, could most Americans imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end<\/a> of Zeus-like lightning bolts?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what one farmer in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal borderlands had to say<\/a>: \u201cI blame the government of Pakistan and the USA\u2026 they are responsible for destroying my family. We were living a happy life and I didn\u2019t have any links with the Taliban. My family members were innocent\u2026 I wonder, why was I victimized?\u201d<\/p>\n

Would an American farmer wonder anything different?\u00a0 Would he not seek vengeance<\/a> if errant missiles obliterated his family?\u00a0 It\u2019s hard, however, for Americans to grasp the nature of the wars being fought in their name, no less to express sympathy for their victims when they are kept in a state of striking isolation from war\u2019s horrors.<\/p>\n

Analgesic War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once upon a time, America\u2019s Global War on Terror was an analgesic.\u00a0 Recall those \u201cshock and awe\u201d images of explosions that marked the opening days of Iraqi combat operations in 2003.\u00a0 Recall as well all the colorful maps, the glamorous weapons systems, and the glowering faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein interpreted and explained to us on our TV screens by retired U.S. military officers<\/a> in mufti.\u00a0 In this curiously sanitized version of war, weapons and other military arcana were to serve to ease our pain at the tragedy we had suffered on 9\/11, while obscuring the \u201ctowers\u201d of dead we were creating in other lands.<\/p>\n

In fostering analgesic war and insisting on information control, our elites have, yet again, drawn a mistaken lesson from the Vietnam War.\u00a0 In Vietnam, even if it took years, free-to-roam and often skeptical reporters finally began to question the official story of the war.\u00a0 Violent images came home to roost in American living rooms at dinnertime.\u00a0 Such coverage may not have stopped the killing, at least not right away, but it did contribute to a gutsy antiwar movement, as well as to a restive \u201csilent majority\u201d that increasingly rejected official rhetoric of falling dominoes and lights at the end of tunnels.<\/p>\n

Iraq and Afghanistan, by way of contrast, have been characterized by embedded (mostly cheerleading) reporters and banal images of U.S. troops on patrol or firing weapons at unseen targets.\u00a0 Clear admissions that our firepower-intensive form of warfare leads to the violent deaths of many more of \u201cthem\u201d than of \u201cus\u201d — and that many of them<\/a> aren\u2019t, by any stretch of the imagination, our enemies — are seldom forthcoming. \u00a0(An exception was former Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal\u2019s uncommonly harsh assessment of checkpoint casualties: “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t do body counts on other people,\u201d said<\/a> a cocky Donald Rumsfeld late in 2003 and, even though it wasn\u2019t true (the Pentagon just kept its body counts to itself), an obliging Pentagon press corps generally fell into line and generally stayed there long after our new wars had lost their feel-good sheen.\u00a0 Clearly, military and political elites learned it\u2019s better (for them, at least) to keep vivid images of death and destruction off America\u2019s screens.\u00a0 Ironically, even as Americans seek more lifelike and visceral representations from ever bigger, brighter, high-def TVs, war is presented in carefully sanitized low-def form, largely drained of blood and violence.<\/p>\n

The result?\u00a0 Uncomfortable questions about our wars rarely get asked, let alone aired.\u00a0 A boon to those who want to continue those wars unmolested by public opposition, even if a bust when it comes to pursuing a sensible global strategy that\u2019s truly in the national interest.\u00a0 In seeking to isolate the public from any sense of significant sacrifice, active participation in, or even understanding of America\u2019s wars, these same elites have ensured that the conflicts they pursued would be strategically unsound and morally untenable.<\/p>\n

Today, Americans are again an isolationist people, but with a twist.\u00a0 Even as we expand our military bases overseas and spend trillions on national security and wars, we\u2019ve isolated ourselves from war\u2019s passions, its savagery, its heartrending sacrifices.\u00a0 Such isolation comforts some and seemingly allows others free rein to act as they wish, but it\u2019s a false comfort, a false freedom, purchased at the price of prolonging our wars, increasing their casualties, abridging our freedoms, and eroding our country\u2019s standing in the world.<\/p>\n

To end our wars, we must first endure their Gorgon stare.<\/p>\n

_______________________<\/p>\n

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular<\/a>.\u00a0 His books and articles focus mainly on the military, technology, and society.\u00a0 Listen to a Timothy MacBain TomDispatch audio interview with Astore on what it felt like to come out of the military and learn how to write honestly about wars by clicking here<\/a> or download it to your iPod, here<\/a>. <\/em>
\nHe welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2010 William J. Astore<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities — as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war\u2019s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}