War Made Invisible
How America Hides The Human Toll of Its Military Machine
By Norman Solomon
Discussion Guide
An unflinching exposé of the hidden costs of American war-making written with “an immense and rare humanity” (Naomi Klein) by one of our premier political analysts
Every election cycle, candidates across the political spectrum repudiate what has become one of the most consequential and enduring components of American foreign policy: the forever war. Yet, once the ballots have been cast and the camera crews go home, the American war machine chugs along in almost complete obscurity.
The journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible is a “gripping and painful study” (Noam Chomsky) of the mechanisms behind our invisible, but perpetual, national state of war. From ever-compliant journalists serving as little more than stenographers for the Pentagon to futuristic military technology, horrifying in its destructive power, that makes dropping a bomb or pulling the trigger on a drone strike more of an abstraction than a moral calculation, Solomon’s “staggeringly important intervention” (Naomi Klein) exposes the profoundly human consequences at home and abroad of the bipartisan commitment to war making.
INTRODUCTION
War Made Invisible
SUMMARY
In the autumn of 2001, almost four weeks after the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11 that took nearly 3,000 lives, the U.S. government began a routine of bombing faraway countries. Political leaders and news media were enthusiastic when the Pentagon launched a military assault on Afghanistan. “The American people, despite their grief and anger, have been patient as they waited for action,” the New York Times editorialized. “Now that it has begun, they will support whatever efforts it takes to carry out this mission properly.”
By the spring of 2002, the extent of civilian deaths in Afghanistan had greatly exceeded the number of those killed on 9/11. However, American officials had given themselves absolution for the carnage among Afghan people resulting from the U.S. warfare in their country. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it this way: “We did not start this war. So understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
It was a rhetorical approach that became common during the “war on terror,” ushering in and sustaining nonstop U.S. war efforts that extended on the largest scale to Iraq, which the United States invaded in March 2003. In effect, 9/11 served as a catalyst for major U.S. military activities that occurred in at least eight countries.
As years went by, the overseas wars gradually became rather humdrum news for most U.S. media consumers. What was happening at the other end of American weaponry remained almost entirely a mystery.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• How did the U.S. government respond to the terrorist attack on the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001?
• What role did U.S. news media play as the “war on terror” got underway?
• What have been some major long-term effects of the “war on terror”?
• What was the attitude of top U.S. officials toward the civilian victims of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq?
• What effect has the transition to more reliance on air power had on the political costs of waging war?
Repetition and Omission
SUMMARY
Repetition is essential to propaganda. And so are omissions.
When routinely included in media, some types of images and themes are magnetic, drawing our attention and whatever thoughts go with it. At the opposite pole, what’s omitted pushes thoughts away, providing tacit cues as to what isn’t worth knowing or seriously considering.
Omissions—what we don’t see and hear—can be the most powerful messaging of all.
When a limited range of information and perspectives is repeated endlessly, that’s what dominates the media echo chambers. Meanwhile, the power of omissions—what’s hardly ever mentioned—is huge. Protracted silences can be extremely influential.
Key themes, rarely challenged, have continually touted U.S. military might as indispensable for the world. Early in his presidency, Joe Biden was ringing a familiar bell when he declared that America was “ready to lead the world” and “sit at the head of the table.”
The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention. Ballooning Pentagon budgets are sacrosanct. While there can be heated disagreement about how, where, and when the United States should engage in war, the prerogative of military intervention is scarcely questioned in mass media.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• Why is repetition important in the effectiveness of messaging?
• Why are omissions in media coverage significant?
• To what extent can media coverage convey to viewers, listeners, and readers the realities of war for those who experience it?
• What effect did the “war on terror” have on the proliferation of terrorist groups?
• Why did President George H.W. Bush say in 1991, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all”?
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
Over the Horizon
SUMMARY
It’s easy to feel like the United States is above it all when America’s overwhelming air power is at work.
American media concern for victims of U.S. bombing has been uncommon. And when top officials bother to address the subject, platitudes combine with stone walls. An unusually blunt twist came shortly after the six-week Gulf War in early 1991, when a reporter asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, about the death toll among Iraqi people. The question came on the same day that U.S. military sources publicly estimated the figure at 100,000. “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in,” General Powell replied.
Since then, adulation for the Pentagon’s airborne arsenal has reached new heights, with media coverage touting the first-rate attributes of the latest weapons systems. A central and persistent assumption is that the U.S. government’s military capacity should be perceived as an admirable genre of national prerogative, perhaps mistakenly used at times, yet wholly legitimate— the offspring of superior technology married to high moral purpose.
The continual development of high-tech abilities to target and destroy has been supported by large majorities on both sides of the aisle in Congress. Occasional bad publicity about an air attack that kills civilians is typically portrayed as an unfortunate anomaly; if a media uproar ensues, it quickly dissipates.
For U.S. media and politicians, the overwhelming preference is for bombing from the air instead of fighting on the ground that results in U.S. casualities. In the words of foreign-policy analyst Phyllis Bennis at the Institute for Policy Studies: “The so-called ‘global war on terror’ has, from its origins, been characterized by attacks by U.S. Special Forces, by airstrikes, by armed drones, and more, that routinely kill far more civilians than the targets identified on the ‘kill lists’ prepared by presidents and top White House officials. The routine recitation of ‘there is no military solution to terrorism’ has always been an anodyne rhetorical ploy, never an actual guide to what actions might actually work to change the conditions that give rise to terrorism.”
Over the Horizon
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• How did U.S. media coverage of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 compare with U.S. media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022?
• Why did the phrase “shock and awe” gain popularity in the United States and why did it lose some of its luster as the Iraq war continued?
• What are the effects in U.S. media and politics when a U.S. air attack results in the deaths of civilians?
• Over the course of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, during how many years did the U.S. military drop bombs or fire missiles on Iraq?
• When the Pentagon has periodically vowed to do better at avoiding the killing of civilians, what has been the result?
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
Unintended Deaths
SUMMARY
When civilians die because of military actions, the reaction from responsible authorities is invariably that such tragic events were accidents of war and certainly unintended. Yet the deaths of noncombatants are often the predictable result of military policies and priorities that, in effect, view civilians as expendable.
Frequent killing of civilians has been inherent in the types of wars that the United States has waged in this century. Despite all the hype about precision weaponry, even the top-rated technologies are fallible. What’s more, they operate in flawed—and sometimes highly dysfunctional—contexts. Whether launching attacks from distant positions or directly deployed, American forces are far removed from the societies they seek to affect and win over. Key dynamics include scant knowledge of language, ignorance of cultures, and unawareness of such matters as manipulation due to local rivalries.
When U.S. officials say that civilian deaths are merely accidental outcomes of the war effort, they don’t mention that such deaths are not only predictable, they’re also virtually inevitable as results of policy priorities. Presumptions of acceptability are hot-wired into the war machine. The lives taken, injuries inflicted, traumas caused, environmental devastation wrought, social decimation imposed—all scarcely rank as of even secondary importance to the power centers in Washington.
In your local community, imagine how you would feel if police made a practice of spraying gunfire through the front windows of stores and other public buildings while chasing criminals. Such efforts would predictably take the lives of innocent bystanders—yet none of them would be considered “targeted.” And so, their wounds and deaths could always be called unfortunate accidents and mistakes.
A steady flood of lofty rhetoric from the White House and Capitol Hill has emphasized the best of intentions throughout the “war on terror.” We are encouraged to believe that, in contrast to terrorists, the U.S. government strives to safeguard rather than take the lives of civilians. Unmentioned are estimates like the one from Brown University’s meticulous Costs of War program that conservatively put the number of civilians who were, during the first two decades following 9/11, killed “directly in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars” at upwards of 364,000.
Unintended Deaths
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• Explain the implications of what a major in the Marines said when he told Time magazine in 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq: “It is hard to differentiate between people who are insurgents or civilians. You just have to go with your gut feeling.”
• What were the effects of the use of cluster bombs by NATO forces during the aerial bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999?
• How did the responses from top U.S. officials and news media differ when cluster munitions were used by Russian forces and when cluster munitions were used by American forces?
• Why did former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey say that “bombing is always politically popular, relative to sending infantry and killing our boys”?
• Why did an Air Force colonel tell Harper’s Magazine, “If you want to know what the world looks like from a drone feed, walk around for a day with one eye closed and the other looking through a soda straw”?
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
Media Boundaries
SUMMARY
Journalists, like people in other professions, must comply with guidelines and directives from higher-ups if they work for an institution. The latitude for employees of news organizations has limits. The trajectories of individual careers are apt to depend on many factors, but failure to sufficiently conform is very likely to knock a journalist’s ascending career off course. And even if not explicitly stated, the boundaries of what is permissible in reporting are usually well understood.
War’s victims can be scripted as mere extras in media dramas. During the autumn of 2001, U.S. media enthusiasm for attacking Afghanistan was never in doubt. And as the invasion of Iraq drew near, the mainstream media had less and less use for nay-saying. Only many years and uncounted deaths later did the media vocabulary for those wars widen to include words like mistake, blunder, miscalculation, error. But to probe too deeply and illuminate the human suffering—and to directly connect it with those “mistakes” and “blunders”—would have been a threat to business as usual, for careers and for media institutions.
Without a doubt, notable exceptions occur, and occasional tough, independentminded reporting via a sizable media outlet does challenge the U.S. war establishment. But the patterns are not undermined by exceptional departures from the usual boundaries, which are professionally well understood—or at least heeded—even if internalized to the point of unconsciousness. “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip,” George Orwell observed, “but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”
Coverage of the twenty-year Afghan war was a case in point. For U.S. media, during those two decades the Afghanistan Story was overwhelmingly the American Story. People living in the country were, in effect, relegated to roles of bit players in a drama with a narrative featuring efforts by Americans to do good under dangerous conditions. When the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2021, the Security Policy Reform Institute concluded that “the degree of violence experienced by Afghan civilians has never driven U.S. media coverage, particularly when the U.S. itself has been directly or indirectly responsible.”
Media Boundaries
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• What dynamics in media coverage of war are reflected in the rise and fall of Ashleigh Banfield as a star foreign correspondent for NBC News?
• What did the journalist Reese Erlich mean when he wrote, “The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, having reported from dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting”?
• How did The New Yorker retrospectively evaluate its own reporting in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to mark its tenth anniversary?
• What were some of the key themes of the blockbuster movie American Sniper?
• Describe what author Viet Thanh Nguyen was driving at when he wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
(continued)
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
“Humane” Wars
SUMMARY
The idea of a “humane” war might seem like an oxymoron, but that doesn’t stop leaders from telling the public that their wars are being fought as humanely as possible, with careful regard for the lives of noncombatants.
While some independent organizations have devoted themselves to collecting figures on civilian deaths, the U.S. government has turned away from releasing such numbers. Overall, civilian anonymity cuts against accountability. At the same time, best estimates place the proportion of civilian deaths in recent decades at between 75 and 90 percent of all war deaths.
It's easier to believe that wars are humane when their victims are glossed over in official accounts and mentioned as little more than numbers in media coverage. With extremely rare exceptions, the people killed and maimed by the U.S. military aren’t on American screens or in print, their names are unknown, and their lives remain a blank.
Whether during the Vietnam War or the war in Afghanistan several decades later, the official pretense from the commander in chief was that America’s brave troops were on a humane mission. “No American army in all of our long history has ever been so compassionate,” President Lyndon Johnson told thousands of troops who assembled to hear him at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam on October 26, 1966.
Nearly fifty years later, the themes of President Barack Obama’s oratory to troops in Afghanistan were strikingly similar. Obama was just five years old when Johnson spoke, yet the continuity between their speeches in Vietnam and Afghanistan would end up being almost seamless. They encouraged the public to believe that America’s troops engaged in warfare with exemplary benevolence.
When American forces left Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, mass starvation was on the horizon as winter approached. Before the year ended, reports of dire malnutrition were widespread. The response from the U.S. government was to maintain sanctions. As The Nation magazine explained, “Following the Taliban takeover, the Biden administration froze $9.5 billion in Afghan assets and imposed sanctions that have devastated an already fragile economy.” The U.S. government was “overseeing a sanctions regime that has pushed Afghanistan to the brink of famine.”
“Humane” Wars
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• How humane do you think wars can be?
• Why did President Lyndon Johnson tell troops at a military base in Vietnam in 1966 that “no American army in all of our long history has ever been so compassionate”?
• In 2010, in a speech at an air base in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama told U.S. service people: “All of you represent the virtues and the values that America so desperately needs right now: sacrifice and selflessness, honor and decency.” Why was it important for him to say that?
• In his memoir, President Obama wrote that he removed four-star general Stanley McChrystal from his post as commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2010 because of the general’s “air of impunity.” What was the issue that caused his removal?
• How did the U.S. government respond to concerns about famine in Afghanistan soon after all American troops withdrew from the country in 2021?
CHAPTER 6
Lives That Really Matter, Lives That Don’t
SUMMARY
More than a quarter-century after sending several hundred thousand U.S. troops into the 1991 Gulf War, former president George H.W. Bush tweeted: “Very much regret missing the Memorial Day parade today in Kennebunkport, and am forever grateful not only to those patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice for our Nation—but also the Gold Star families whose heritage is imbued with their honor and heroism.” But among those who would never be mentioned by a current or former president in connection with honor or heroism were others directly affected by the six-week Gulf War: the dead Iraqi civilians who fell victim to Pentagon firepower. According to some estimates, they numbered between 100,000 and 200,000.
“Proud veterans and families of the fallen, it is a privilege to spend this Veterans Day with you,” the second president Bush said at a 2007 ceremony. Speaking of “the young men we remember today,” Bush said: “The valor and selfless devotion of these men fills their families with immeasurable pride. Yet this pride cannot fill the hole in their loved ones’ aching hearts, or relieve the burden of grief that will remain for a lifetime.” An aspect of presidential duties is to assure one and all that sacrificed young American lives have not been squandered. As Bush put it, “In their sorrow, these families need to know, and families all across the nation of the fallen need to know, that your loved ones served a cause that is good, and just, and noble. And, as their commander in chief, I make you this promise: Their sacrifice will not be in vain.”
Commanders in chief are glad to make such facile promises. Bush was merely reading from a prepared text virtually indistinguishable from President Bill Clinton’s before him and President Barack Obama’s after. While it’s traditional to briefly acknowledge that grief will always painfully remain with loved ones of “the fallen,” no president has ever admitted that he chose to waste young lives. Such an admission would be unthinkable. What oratory like “Their sacrifice will not be in vain” really does for the families left behind is uncertain.
But certainly, presidents do not say that victims of U.S. firepower also leave behind a “hole in their loved ones’ aching hearts,” with “the burden of grief that will remain for a lifetime.” Nor do members of Congress or news media demand any such acknowledgment.
Lives That Really Matter, Lives That Don’t
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• Overall, in U.S. media and politics, how valued are the lives of civilians killed by U.S. firepower compared to the lives of American troops?
• More than a century ago, what did a character in a short story by the American writer William Dean Howells mean by saying, “What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”?
• What was the involvement of the United States in the Saudi-led war in Yemen and what were the consequences of that war for Yemeni people?
• What did President Joe Biden’s fist bump with the leader of the Saudi Arabian government symbolize?
• What could be seen as the significance of the high-profile friendships that TV star Ellen DeGeneres and former first lady Michelle Obama have maintained with former president George W. Bush?
CHAPTER 7
The Color of War
SUMMARY
The existence of systemic racism has become widely acknowledged in the United States in relation to policing, the judicial system, economic opportunities, and a wide range of other aspects of American society. But rarely does public discourse explore how racial prejudice affects media coverage of U.S. wars, or how war policies themselves are affected by such prejudice.
The history of U.S. wars in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America has included attitudes and language reflecting racial and ethnocentric biases, discounting the value of lives at the other end of U.S. bullets, bombs, and missiles. Yet racial factors in war-making decisions get very little mention in U.S. media and virtually none in the political world of officials in Washington.
The Pentagon’s bombs have not fallen on countries just because they were inhabited by people of color, but the fact that they were inhabited by people of color has made it easier to start and continue waging war in their countries. To contend otherwise would be to assert that racism does not hold significant sway over public attitudes, political institutions, and the overall power structure of the United States—a claim that would be widely dismissed as noncredible in domestic contexts.
The erasure of U.S. warfare’s victims is facilitated by layers of personal and collective racism, conscious or not, that we know or should know persist in the United States. To pretend otherwise, which mass media and the politically powerful do, is to engage in a silent form of gaslighting that sets aside people whose voices are not heard, whose faces are not seen, whose names or lives are not known—all of which makes the killing and the ignoring easier.
In effect, those who suffer from U.S. military actions overseas are relegated to a kind of psychological apartheid: separate and unequal, not of much importance. The rhetoric of the “war on terror” supplied a smokescreen that made it harder to see how militarism and racism were interwoven. Hidden in plain sight was the reality that almost every targeted or untargeted victim of U.S. warfare in the twenty-first century was a person of color.
The Color of War
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• What did human rights advocate Hassan El-Tayyab mean when he accused U.S. news outlets of “blatantly displaying racism by only adequately covering a war between white people”?
• How did U.S. media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine compare with coverage of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?
• Assess this comment by journalist Peter Beinart: “When discussing domestic policy, progressive commentators often note that American police respond more harshly to Black protesters than white ones and that the media describes opioid-addicted rural white Americans as victims but drug-addicted urban Black Americans as depraved. Why wouldn’t these racial disparities shape American foreign policy too?”
• Discuss the statement by scholar Duncan Bell that “the intertwined histories of race and empire haunt the present.”
• Speaking in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “There are three urgent and indeed great problems that we face not only in the United States of America but all over the world today. That is the problem of racism, the problem of poverty, and the problem of war.” How relevant is his statement to our current era?
SUMMARY
Costs of War CHAPTER
While war causes immense suffering, it also results in immense rewards— advancing careers, boosting wealth, fattening profit margins. Even when the United States has ultimately lost a war in military and geopolitical terms, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, enormous financial benefits have accrued to Pentagon contractors.
Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman have never lost a war. Nor do they lose power. Huge budgets for advertising, public relations, and lobbying always fortify images of civic responsibility and patriotism, while campaign contributions grease the big wheels.
Twenty years after 9/11, policy researcher William Hartung reported: “The arms industry has ample tools at its disposal to influence decisions over Pentagon spending going forward. The industry has spent $285 million in campaign contributions since 2001, with a special focus on presidential candidates, congressional leadership, and members of the armed services and appropriations committees in the House and Senate—the people with the most power over how much the country will spend for military purposes.” Hartung’s report documented that “weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years, more than one for every member of Congress.”
Such financial costs—along with the much larger expenditures by the Pentagon itself—are ultimately borne by taxpayers, at the expense of resources for health care, education, housing, public transportation, and other human needs.
When members of the armed forces die because of war or continue their lives with physical injuries, the tragic human costs are apparent. Along with frequent emotional traumas, some of the injuries are hidden from view.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) often afflicts Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were violently jolted by explosions and other wartime events. Dozens of symptoms include painful, disorienting, and debilitating ordeals. According to the Mayo Clinic, serious TBI “can result in bruising, torn tissues, bleeding, and other physical damage to the brain. These injuries can result in long-term
Costs of War
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• The poet William Stafford wrote that “every war has two losers.” What does that mean?
• What is traumatic brain injury and how widely has it affected veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?
• The New York Times reported in 2021: “For decades, sexual assault and harassment have festered through the ranks of the armed forces, with military leaders repeatedly promising reform and then failing to live up to those promises.” Why do such problems continue on a large scale?
• What is PTSD and how prevalent is it among war veterans?
• As U.S. military budgets have increased, who has benefitted?
CHAPTER 9
Now It Can Be Told
SUMMARY
For those paying attention, the U.S. government’s credibility had badly corroded after two decades of the “war on terror.” After incalculable damage had been done, the belated telling of partial truths by politicians and media outlets frequently involved not only convenient amnesia about the extent of previous pro-war deceptions but also fatuous claims about the past (for example, the enduring U.S. media myth that everyone thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion).
Such revisionism is more than just reluctance to admit terrible mistakes of judgment and advocacy. It also has an effect of continuing to sequester and marginalize, in the shadows, antiwar voices—thus making warfare’s carnage seem akin to unavoidable, as if the war had not been a choice as much as merely an honest mistake.
Timing is crucial in media and politics, and never more so than when war is at stake. Routinely, journalists toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect: Now it can be told—years too late.
Virtually the entire U.S. media establishment gave full-throated support to the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in early October 2001. Twenty years later, many of the same outlets were saying the war was ill-conceived and doomed from the start. Immediately after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, even the mainstream news organizations that had been expressing trepidation or opposition swung into line, with very few exceptions, to support the war effort. Two decades later, many of the same media outlets were calling the invasion of Iraq the worst U.S. foreign-policy blunder in history.
But such framing evades the patterns of deception that remain built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings. War is so normalized that its casualties are routinely viewed as victims without victimizers, as if struck by acts of God, perhaps no more aggrieved than people suffering the consequences of bad weather. What American policy makers call mistakes and errors are, for others, more aptly described with words like catastrophes and atrocities. Attributing the U.S. wars to faulty judgment—not premeditated and hugely profitable aggression—is expedient, setting the policy table for supposed resolve to use better judgment next time rather than challenging the presumed prerogative to attack another country at will.
Now It Can Be Told
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• Why did top management at MSNBC cancel the nightly Donahue program, hosted by Phil Donahue, in early 2003 during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion?
• During the two decades after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, what happened to the credibility of the Pentagon and the White House as they defended war operations?
• Why did so many media outlets that supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 end up calling it the worst foreign policy blunder in American history?
• How might the saying “What goes around comes around” apply to U.S. war making?
• What did James Baldwin mean when he wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced”?
Afterword: The Gaza War
SUMMARY
Hamas forces, based in the small enclave of Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, causing the deaths of 1,200 civilians and military personnel while taking 240 hostages. Israel quickly started bombing Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians lived.
By early March 2024, Israel’s military had directly killed upward of 30,000 people, mostly children and women, while injuring more than 70,000 others. In addition, the United Nations said, “an unknown number of people lie under rubble.” Israeli firepower put most of Gaza’s hospitals out of service and the rest in dire condition, while Israel blocked all but a small fraction of desperately needed food, water, medical supplies, and medicine. Extreme hunger and disease increased steadily.
The bombs that kept exploding in Gaza were mainly supplied by the U.S. government, which accounted for 80 percent of Israel’s weapons imports. The two countries were most of the way through a ten-year deal guaranteeing $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid. And as the killing escalated, so did extra military assistance. The continuous and massive flow of weapons, ammunition, and much else made Israeli forces an adjunct to the U.S. military machine.
At the same time, most of the key dynamics described in this book were operative in American media and politics. For instance:
• Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
• The U.S. ally Israel usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
• Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
• Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
• Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
• Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mind-set that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.
Afterword: The Gaza War
The Gaza war received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much that attention actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The words and images reaching listeners, readers, and viewers were a far cry from the actual experiences of being in the war zone.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
• What happened on October 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza, and how many Israelis were killed or taken hostage on that day?
• During the months that followed, what were the results of the war for civilians in Gaza?
• How did dynamics described in War Made Invisible apply to what happened in U.S. media and politics as the Gaza war continued?
• How vigorously did the U.S. government seek to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza?
• The day after October 7, 2023, the Israeli ambassadors to the United Nations and the United States each described it as “our 9/11.” In retrospect, what were the parallels and differences?
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
Afterword: The Gaza War
COMPARE AND DISCUSS U.S. MEDIA COVERAGE
One of the best ways to analyze coverage of war-related news is to compare how various media outlets cover the same story. Such comparisons can shed light on overt or subtle differences in the values and biases that affect reporting and commentary. By seeing who gets quoted, whose perspectives are in the spotlight -- and who is not quoted and whose perspectives are left out -- we can perceive how media stories provide us with a window on the world.
To compare reporting which includes video, look for stories on CNN or CNN.com and contrast them with the coverage on Democracy Now! and DemocracyNow.org.
To compare written reporting, read the news accounts of a daily newspaper and see how they contrast with coverage on CommonDreams.org. Read opinion articles that are provided by daily newspapers, in print or online, related to foreign policy and war. Then read articles about foreign policy and war that appear on Truthout.org and TheIntercept.com.
COMPARE AND DISCUSS PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES TO U.S. TROOPS IN WAR ZONES
• President Lyndon Johnson, speaking to members of the U.S. armed forces at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam
October 26, 1966
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-members-the-armedforces-cam-ranh-bay-vietnam
• President Barack Obama, speaking to members of the U.S. armed forces at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
March 28, 2010
www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/ barackobamatroopsafghanistan
CONCLUSION
SUMMARY
Nonstop war has been a reality of U.S. foreign policy since October 2001. Responding to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States the previous month, the George W. Bush administration set the nation on a course in search of enemies to defeat. Now in its third decade, that course of action has evolved while retaining reliance on continual warfare.
For many years, most of all in Afghanistan and Iraq, “boots on the ground” were key to U.S. military activities. Combat resulted in thousands of American deaths. Many veterans returned to civilian life with physical wounds, including unseen traumatic brain injury, as well as PTSD.
With some exceptions, media coverage and political discourse have done little to illuminate the true effects of U.S. firepower on people in countries where the United States has waged war. The suffering and grief of “others” have routinely gotten little or no attention, in contrast to the focus on how war has had an impact on American troops and their families.
During the past two decades, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on air power, with missiles and bombers central to U.S. warfare while relatively few troops are engaged in battlefield conflicts. The results have included far less media coverage of the warfare and far less political pushback, with few American casualties and more acceptance of engaging in war while being “above it all.” Such factors have made U.S. warfare even more invisible as far as the U.S. public is concerned.
While routinely hidden from public view or discussion, the negative effects of reliance on a war economy at home and military might abroad are massive and far-reaching. Only by facing the realities of those effects can we realistically hope to create a better future.
