America at War Since 9/11 Reality or Reality TV? By Rebecca Gordon
“U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria killed hundreds of
civilians, U.N. panel says.” “Pentagon wants to declare more parts of world as
temporary battlefields.” “The U.S. was supposed to leave Afghanistan by 2017. Now
it might take decades.” There are so many wars and rumors of war involving our
country these days that it starts to feel a little unreal, even for the most
devoted of news watchers. And for many Americans, it’s long been that way. For
them, the meaning of war is closer to reality TV than it is to reality.
On a
June day, you could, for instance, open the New York Times and read that “airstrikes by the American-led coalition
against Islamic State targets have killed hundreds of civilians around Raqqa,
the militant group’s last Syrian stronghold, and left 160,000 people
displaced.” Or you could come across statistics two orders of magnitude larger
in learning from a variety of sources that famine is stalking 17 million people in
Yemen. That is the predictable result of a Saudi Arabian proxy war against
Iran, a campaign supported by the U.S. with weaponry and logistical
assistance, in which, according to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. may well be
complicit in torture. You could contemplate the fact that in Iraq, a country
the United States destabilized with its 2003 invasion and occupation, there are
still at least three million internally displaced people, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees; or
that more than 411,000 Iraqis remain displaced from their homes in Mosul alone since
the Iraqi army launched a U.S.-backed offensive to drive ISIS out of that city
last October.
Yes, it’s possible to
click on those links or to catch so many other Internet or TV news reports
about how such American or American-backed wars are damaging infrastructure, destroying entire health care systems, uprooting millions, and putting at
risk the education of whole generations thousands of miles away. But
none of it is real for most of us in this country. How could it be real?
Most of us no longer have any idea what war is like for the people who live
through it. No major war has been fought on U.S. territory since the Civil War
ended in 1865, and the last people who remembered that terrible time died
decades before the turn of this century. There is no one around to give us a
taste of that reality - except of course for the refugees that the Trump administration is now
doing its best to keep out.
In addition, Americans
who once were mobilized to support their country’s wars in distant lands (remember Victory Gardens or war bond drives?)
are simply told to carry on with their lives as if it were
peacetime. And the possibility of going to war in an army of citizen draftees
has long been put to rest by America’s “all-volunteer” military. As the U.S.
battlefield expands, the need becomes ever greater for people in this country
to understand the reality of war, especially now that we have a president from
the world of “reality” TV… read more:
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