Others: Their Deaths and Their Shoes

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John Tirman, the author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, wrote an very interesting and incredibly sad opinion piece for the Washington Post recently called "Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars?".

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers.

Our lack of acknowledgment is less oversight than habit, a self-reflective reaction to the horrors of war and an American tradition that goes back decades. We consider ourselves a generous and compassionate nation, and often we are. From the Asian tsunami in 2004 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Americans have been quick to open their pocketbooks and their hearts.

However, when it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops.

Tirman gives a couple of explanations for this. First is that Americans are good people who go out and kill savages. The second is the "'just world' theory" which says that people assume the world is an orderly place and get mad at people that demonstrate it to be anything but. Civilian deaths in war time don't jibe with the idea that Americans only kill bad guys.

The piece concludes with a plea: "More attention to the human costs may jolt the American public into a more compassionate understanding."

I thought of Tirman's article when I read this one. It describes the outrage felt by many Iraqis in the city of Haditha after Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich received a slap on the wrist for his part in the slaughter of Iraqi civilians there. In November of 2005 a roadside bomb went off killing one of Wuterich's squad and the Marines went on a rampage.

In all, 24 Iraqi civilians were killed – 19 in several houses along with five men who pulled up in a car where the marines were on patrol in Haditha on November 19, 2005.

The victims included 10 women and children killed at point-blank range. Six people were killed in one house, most shot in the head, including women and children huddled in a bedroom.

At first the military said that the Iraqis were killed by an IED and then the truth emerged. Eight Marines were charged but it came down to Wuterich after one Marine was acquitted and the rest had the charges against them dropped. For his part in the massacre, Wuterich agreed to a plea deal which saw him demoted to private, had his pay docked, and was given a 90-day confinement which he won't have to serve. The judge decided not to dock his pay the full amount because Wuterich has sole custody of his three daughters. If only such compassion was shown to the Iraqi children in Haditha on that day.

The upshot is that there are a lot of people in Haditha who are angry because they see American Marines getting away with shooting Iraqi children at point-blank range. I can only imagine the ill-will this judgment generated in the Middle East and in other Islamic areas when the news reached them.

Like that old Rare Bird song goes, sympathy is what we need. (Or perhaps empathy, more correctly.) As Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler wrote in his pamphlet War Is a Racket:

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

I won't be voting for Ron Paul this autumn but this video, which I take to have been made by a PAC that supports him, has the right idea. Put yourself in the shoes of the people who have American soldiers and contractors occupying their homelands; put yourself in the shoes of someone who has American drones flying overhead that could send missiles down at any time; put yourself in the shoes of those unfortunate people in Haditha who had their friends and family members gunned down by American Marines.

The United States is ready to sanction certain banks that deal with Iran's central bank; the EU and Australia are boycotting Iranian oil; Iran, meanwhile, is getting ready to formally tell the EU to fuck off and is threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz.

In his State of the Union address last night, Obama noted that "America is a Pacific power". Our "defense strategy" for the near future is to keep spending more money and focus on the China. As I learned from reading Michael Klare's Resource Wars, "Over at the South China Sea, the region's powerhouse, China, is making waves by claiming an ever larger swath of the sea as its own much to the chagrin of other countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, etc. Japan has an interest here as well as tankers that supply it with oil sail through the area."

Plenty of warmongering to be had.

So the next time you're in a voting booth or listening to some politico lecturing you on the necessity of invading another country, put yourself in the shoes of those at the other end of the barrel of American guns or standing beneath American drones.