This article was originally published at TomDispatch.com  

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When men first made war in the air, the imagery that accompanied them was of knights jousting in the sky.  Just check out movies like Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best Picture in 1927 (or any Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy takes on the Red Baron in a literal “dogfight”).  As late as 1986, five years after two American F-14s shot down two Soviet jets flown by Libyan pilots over the Mediterranean’s Gulf of Sidra, it was still possible to make the movie Top Gun.  In it, Tom Cruise played “Maverick,” a U.S. Naval aviator triumphantly involved in a similar incident.  (He shoots down three MiGs.) 

Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline.  In Vietnam, the U.S. had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting the south, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that U.S. patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes. 

Consider Top Gun an anomaly.  Anyway, it’s been 25 years since that film topped the box-office -- and don’t hold your breath for a repeat at your local multiplex.  After all, there’s nothing left to base such a film on. 

To put it simply, it’s time for Americans to take the “war” out of “air war.”  These days, we need a new set of terms to explain what U.S. air power actually does.

Start this way: American “air superiority” in any war the U.S. now fights is total.  In fact, the last time American jets met enemy planes of any sort in any skies was in the First Gulf War in 1991, and since Saddam Hussein’s once powerful air force didn’t offer much opposition -- most of its planes fled to Iran -- that was brief.  The last time U.S. pilots faced anything like a serious challenge in the skies was in North Vietnam in the early 1970s.  Before that, you have to go back to the Korean War in the early 1950s. 

This, in fact, is something American military types take great pride in.  Addressing the cadets of the Air Force Academy in early March, for example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated: “There hasn’t been a U.S. Air Force airplane lost in air combat in nearly 40 years, or an American soldier attacked by enemy aircraft since Korea.”

And he’s probably right, though it’s also possible that the last American plane shot down in aerial combat was U.S. Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher’s jet in the First Gulf War.  (The Navy continues to claim that the plane was felled by a surface-to-air missile.)  As an F-117A Stealth fighter was downed by a surface-to-air missile over Serbia in 1999, it’s been more than 11 years since such a plane was lost due to anything but mechanical malfunction.  Yet in those years, the U.S. has remained almost continuously at war somewhere and has used air power extensively, as in its “shock and awe” launch to the invasion of Iraq, which was meant to “decapitate” Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi leadership.  (No plane was lost, nor was an Iraqi leader of any sort taken out in those 50 decapitation attacks, but “dozens” of Iraqi civilians died.)  You might even say that air power, now ramping up again in Afghanistan, has continued to be the American way of war. 

From a military point of view, this is something worth bragging about.  It’s just that the obvious conclusions are never drawn from it. 

The Valor of Pilots 

Let’s begin with this: to be a “Top Gun” in the U.S. military today is to be in staggeringly less danger than any American who gets into a car and heads just about anywhere, given this country’s annual toll of about 34,000 fatal car crashes.  In addition, there is far less difference than you might imagine between piloting a drone aircraft from a base thousands of miles away and being inside the cockpit of a fighter jet. 

Articles are now regularly written about drone aircraft “piloted” by teams sitting at consoles in places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.  Meanwhile, their planes are loosing Hellfire missiles thousands of miles away in Afghanistan (or, in the case of CIA “pilots,” in the Pakistani tribal borderlands).  Such news accounts often focus on the eerie safety of those pilots in “wartime” and their strange detachment from the actual dangers of war -- as, for instance, in the sign those leaving Creech pass that warns them to "drive carefully" as this is “the most dangerous part of your day."  

When it comes to pilots in planes flying over Afghanistan, we imagine something quite different -- and yet we shouldn’t.  Based on the record, those pilots might as well be in Nevada, since there is no enemy that can touch them.  They are inviolate unless their own machines betray them and, with the rarest of imaginable exceptions, will remain so.

Nor does anyone here consider it an irony that the worst charge lodged by U.S. military spokespeople against their guerrilla enemies, whose recruits obviously can’t take to the skies, is that they use “human shields” as a defense.  This transgression against “the law of war” is typical of any outgunned guerrilla force which, in Mao Zedong’s dictum, sees immense benefit in “swimming” in a “sea” of civilians.  (If they didn’t do so and fought like members of a regular army, they would, of course, be slaughtered.) 

This is considered, however implicitly, a sign of ultimate cowardice.  On the other hand, while a drone pilot cannot (yet) get a combat award citation for “valor,” a jet fighter pilot can and no one -- here at least -- sees anything strange or cowardly about a form of warfare which guarantees the American side quite literal, godlike invulnerability.

War by its nature is often asymmetrical, as in Libya today, and sometimes hideously one-sided.  The retreat that turns into a rout that turns into a slaughter is a relative commonplace of battle.  But it cannot be war, as anyone has ever understood the word, if one side is never in danger.  And yet that is American air war as it has developed since World War II. 

It’s a long path from knightly aerial jousting to air war as... well, what?  We have no language for it, because accurate labels would prove deflating, pejorative, and exceedingly uncomfortable.  You would perhaps need to speak of cadets at the Air Force Academy being prepared for “air slaughter” or “air assassination,” depending on the circumstances. 

From those cadets to Secretary of Defense Gates to reporters covering our wars, no one here is likely to accept the taking of “war” out of air war.  And because of that, it is -- conveniently -- almost impossible for Americans to imagine how American-style war must seem to those in the lands where we fight. 

Apologies All Around 

Consider for a moment one form of war-related naming where our language changes all the time.  That’s the naming of our new generations of weaponry.  In the case of those drones, the two main ones in U.S. battle zones at the moment are the Predator (as in the sci-fi film) and the Reaper (as in Grim).  In both cases, the names imply an urge for slaughter and a sense of superiority verging on immortality.

And yet we don’t take such names seriously.  Though we’ve seen the movies (and most Afghans haven’t), we don’t imagine our form of warfare as like that of the Predator, that alien hunter of human prey, or a Terminator, that machine version of the same.  If we did, we would have quite a different picture of ourselves, which would mean quite a different way of thinking about how we make war. 

From the point of view of Afghans, Pakistanis, or other potential target peoples, those drones buzzing in the sky must seem very much like real-life versions of Predators or Terminators.  They must, that is, seem alien and implacable like so many malign gods.  After all, the weaponry from those planes is loosed without recourse; no one on the ground can do a thing to prevent it and little to defend themselves; and often enough the missiles and bombs kill the innocent along with those our warriors consider the guilty.

Take a recent eventon a distant hillside in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province where 10 boys, including two sets of brothers, were collecting wood for their families on a winter’s day when the predators -- this time American helicopters evidently looking for insurgents who had rocketed a nearby American base -- arrived.  Only one of the boys survived (with wounds) and he evidently described the experience as one of being “hunted” -- as the Predator hunts humans or human hunters stalk animals.  They “hovered over us,” he said, “scanned us, and we saw a green flash,” then the helicopters rose and began firing.

For this particular nightmare, war commander General David Petraeus apologized directly to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has for years fruitlessly denounced U.S. and NATO air operations that have killed Afghan civilians.  When an angered Karzai refused to accept his apology, Secretary of Defense Gates, on a surprise visit to the country, apologized as well, as did President Obama.  And that was that -- for the Americans.

Forget for a moment what this incident tells us about a form of warfare in which helicopter pilots, reasonably close to the ground (and modestly more vulnerable than pilots in planes), can’t tell boys with sticks from insurgents with guns.  The crucial thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how many apologies may be offered afterwards, this can’t stop.  According to the Wall Street Journal, death by helicopter is, in fact, on the rise.  It’s in the nature of this kind of warfare.  In fact, Afghan civilians have repeatedly, even repetitiously, been blown away from the air, with or without apologies, since 2001.  Over these years, Afghan participants at wedding parties, funerals, and other riteshave, for example, been wiped out with relative regularity, only sometimes with apologies to follow. 

In the weeks that preceded the killing of those boys, for instance, a “NATO” -- these are usually American -- air attack took out four Afghan security guards protecting the work of a road construction firm and wounded a fifth, according to the police chief of Helmand Province; a similar “deeply regrettable incident” took out an Afghan army soldier, his wife, and his four children in Nangarhar Province; and a third, also in Kunar Province, wiped out 65 civilians, including women and children, according to Afghan government officials.  Karzai recently visited a hospital and wept as he held a child wounded in the attack whose leg had been amputated.

The U.S. military did not weep.  Instead, it rejected this claim of civilian deaths, insisting as it often does that the dead were “insurgents.”  It is now -- and this is typical -- “investigating” the incident.  General Petraeus managed to further offend Afghan officials when he visited the presidential palace in Kabul and reportedly claimed that some of the wounded children might have suffered burns not in an air attack but from their parents as punishment for bad behavior and were being counted in the casualty figures only to make them look worse.

Over the years, Afghan civilian casualties from the air have waxed and waned, depending on how much air power American commanders were willing to call in, but they have never ceased.  As history tells us, air power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound together.  They can’t be separated, no matter how much anyone talks about “surgical” strikes and precision bombing.  It’s simply the barbaric essence, the very nature of this kind of war, to kill noncombatants. 

One question sometimes raised about such casualties in Afghanistan is this: according to U.N. statistics, the Taliban (via roadside bombs and suicide bombers) kills far more civilians, including women and children, than do NATO forces, so why do the U.S.-caused deaths stick so in Afghan craws when we periodically investigate, apologize, and even pay survivors for their losses? 

New York Times reporter Alissa J. Rubin puzzled over this in a recent piece and offered the following answer: “[T]hose that are caused by NATO troops appear to reverberate more deeply because of underlying animosity about foreigners in the country.”  This seems reasonable as far as it goes, but don’t discount what air power adds to the foreignness of the situation. 

Consider what the 20-year-old brother of two of the dead boys from the Kunar helicopter attack told the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview: "The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], or a suicide vest to fight."

Whatever the Taliban may be, they remain part of Afghan society.  They are there on the ground.  They kill and they commit barbarities, but they suffer, too.  In our version of air “war,” however, the killing and the dying are perfectly and precisely, even surgically, separated.  We kill, they die.  It’s that simple.  Sometimes the ones we target to die do so; sometimes others stand in their stead.  But no matter.  We then deny, argue, investigate, apologize, and continue.  We are, in that sense, implacable.

And one more thing: since we are incapable of thinking of ourselves as either predators or Predators, no less emotionless Terminators, it becomes impossible for us to see that our air “war” on terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what we then call “terrorists.”  It is part of an American Global War for Terror.

In other words, although air power has long been held up as part of the solution to terrorism, and though the American military now regularly boasts about the enemy body counts it produces, and the precision with which it does so, all of that, even when accurate, is also a kind of delusion -- and worse yet, one that transforms us into Predators and Terminators.   It’s not a pretty sight.

So count on this: there will be no more Top Guns.  No knights of the air.  No dogfights and sky-jousts.  No valor.  Just one-sided slaughter and targeted assassinations.  That is where air power has ended up.  Live with it. 

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project , runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com .  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). To listen to a TomCast audio version of this post, read by Ralph Pochoda, click here or download it to your iPod, here. 

[Note of thanks: To Bill Astore, TomDispatch regular, for bringing his expert eye to bear on this post; to Christopher Holmes, superior copyeditor, who is now undoubtedly doing his best to get by in Japan (and is on my mind); to Jason Ditz, of the invaluable website Antwar.com, the rare person who continues to write regularly about the civilians who die in America’s wars, and to Ralph Pochoda for doing the audio version of this piece.]

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

Source: TomDispatch

Image by mashleymorgan, licensed under Creative Commons.

Though the U.S. military has helped immensely in the recovery efforts in Pakistan, with food delivery and rescue services, during the flooding in that country, Wired reports they are a bit behind in their use of tech tools used for disaster relief and aid missions:

The U.S. military’s efforts to assist the 17 million victims of the Pakistan flood are still pretty tech-lite. So a group of civilian aid workers, Pakistani and international, have home-brewed a series of social media apps to help coordinate relief work — everything from crisis Wikis to crowd-sourced maps to SMS calls for help.

These civilian aid workers include a scientist who has created a widget using Google Earth and Google Maps that monitors flooding and the destruction it causes, and a group of Pakistani technologists and American academics who started an SMS system where people can send messages about what they need and where they are.  While these “home-brewed” efforts seem to be gaining a community of users, the U.S. military’s own online effort, HARMOINEweb, does not.

[S]o far, HARMONIEweb doesn’t seem to be building a community. Its chat archive is empty, as is its documents folder. The video page contains, bizarrely, four short news segments from the pro-Putin news service Russia Today. Its Wiki presents Excel spreadsheets filled with stats from the Prime Minister’s office on aid that’s been delivered. Its “Knowledge Management Collaboration” section largely consists of photos of U.S. aid — and even the U.S. relief effort’s own icons. It’s hard to see how the material on HARMONIEweb helps plan future aid missions.

Source: Wired

Image from Sohaib Khan’s Floodmaps.

Over at Miller-McCune, Lewis Beale looks at why U.S. students are hurting in foreign languages:

“Things cannot get worse. We are at the bottom of the barrel now” in terms of foreign language study in America’s schools, says Nancy Rhodes of the Center for Applied Linguistics, which surveys language study in the nation’s schools every 10 years.

The center’s most recent report shows a decrease in the last decade in school language programs, which Rhodes says can be attributed to “budget cuts, and foreign languages are among the first things that get cut. They are seen as something that’s not a necessity. And another reason is the No Child Left Behind legislation—about a third of our schools report they have been negatively affected because of the focus on math and reading scores.”

It's nothing short of cultural literacy that's at stake here—and for those who pollute every societal good with talk of national security interests, there is also this:

...according to a 2006 Department of Education study, 200 million Chinese schoolchildren were studying English, while only 24,000 of their American peers were learning Chinese. That number has increased over the past few years, but the gap is still huge.

That federal study was co-sponsored by U.S. Department of Defense and the director of National Intelligence, perhaps not surprising given the military and intelligence communities’ problems in the war on terror. In announcing the report’s accompanying National Security Language Initiative, President George W. Bush pictured the American language deficit as a security issue. “This initiative is a broad-gauged initiative that deals with the defense of the country, the diplomacy of the country, the intelligence to defend our country and the education of our people,” he told a collection of university presidents in 2006.

Me, I won't be making the national security argument when it comes time to talk my kids into a foreign language class. Sheesh.

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by the Department of Defense, and paid for with your tax dollars.

Most people forced to flee their homes in Iraq, if they haven't found a way to leave the country all together, have been taken in by sympathetic families. But 500,000 of the country's estimated 1.5 million "internally displaced persons" are living in squatter camps, according to Daniel Endres, Iraq representative for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

An Agence France-Presse story on Iraqi's forced to live in squatter camps raises the issue of US responsibility for these vicitims of America's war:

The UNHCR's figures for the numbers of IDPs living in camps are similar to those released by aid group Refugees International in a report in March.

In its report, Refugees International said the Iraqi government was doing little, if anything, to help the displaced.

It urged the United States to step in and take up the slack because it "bears special responsibility" for the looming humanitarian crisis.

Endres said that the Iraqi government has "given them (IDPs) occasionally, some stipends for six months."

"But in the last two years, IDP families have received one cycle of six-month stipends, if they were registered -- that's it."

Endres estimated that the stipends varied between 150,000 and 300,000 Iraqi dinars (130 and 260 dollars) per family per month, and noted that some stipend payments had been delayed by as much as a year.

"That's the harsh story right now," he said.

It's not just money the US ought to be providing. The Refugees International report on humanitarian issues in Iraq criticizes the US for holding United Nations and US Government aid agencies to strick "zero-risk" security policies that restrict movement outside the fortified "International Zone" (better known as the Green Zone) in Baghdad and do not reflect the current security situation in Iraq, which is much more secure than in years past, even with the recent uptick in bombings.

Refugees International staff was able to travel alone without security escorts throughout most of Baghdad and multiple locations within Diyala, Salah al-Din and Babel. Iraqis of all types and backgrounds interviewed by Refugees International expressed a strong desire to see the UN and international actors return and fully function in the country.

Humanitarian agencies have been hostage to US security policies since the earliest days of the occupation, when many Iraqis came to the conclusion that independent aid agencies were an organ of the occupation. It's time for the US to get out of the way and let the true advocates of Iraqi freedom and development do their work--and to be sure those advocates have the money they need to do the job right.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Refugees International

American drone warfare was the subject of a report on Public Radio International's The World on Wednesday, April 8. The subject of the story was President Obama's decision to add an American citizen to the list of people targeted for capture or assassination by the U.S. military and intelligence services. Toward the end of the report there is a rather jarring quote from the ACLU's Jonathan Manes:

"One thing that's a little bit strange is that right now we know more about when the government can get a warrant to wiretap a citizen abroad than to kill a citizen abroad."

Topsy-turvy indeed. 

Source: The World 

For anybody who doesn’t read the reliably iconoclastic TomDispatch.com, now is as good a time as any to start. At Utne.com, we often reprint the essays Tom Engelhardt posts and we’re grateful that he allows us to do so for nothing. The least I can do in return is point you to his website. I urge you to bookmark it, subscribe to his RSS feed, or signup for email notifications!

His latest post is classic Engelhardt. After publishing an Iraq op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he received a simple piece of feedback: “When was the last time you visited Iraq?” Here’s his response: 

A critique in 15 well-chosen words.  So much more effective than a long, angry email, and his point was interesting.  At least, it interested me.  After all, as I wrote back, I’m a 65-year-old guy who has never been anywhere near Iraq and undoubtedly never will be.  I have to assume that my emailer had spent time there, possibly more than once, and disagreed with my assessments.  

First-hand experience is not to be taken lightly.  What, after all, do I know about Iraq?  Only reporting I’ve been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis found on the blogs of experts like Juan Cole.  On the other hand, even from thousands of miles away, I was one of many who could see enough, by early 2003, to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people, theoretically far more knowledgeable on Iraq than any of us, considered just the cat’s meow, the “cakewalk” of the new century.  

It’s true that I’ve never strolled down a street in Baghdad or Ramadi or Basra, armed or not, and that’s a deficit, if you want to write about the American experience in Iraq.  It’s also true that I haven’t spent hours sipping tea with Iraqi tribal leaders, or been inside the Green Zone, or set foot on even one of the vast American bases that the Pentagon’s private contractors have built in that country.  (Nor did that stop me from writing regularly about “America’s ziggurats” when most of the people who visited those bases didn’t consider places with 15-20 mile perimeters, multiple bus lines, PXs, familiar fast-food franchises, Ugandan mercenary guards, and who knows what else, to be particularly noteworthy structures on the Iraqi landscape and so, with rare exceptions, worth commenting on.)  

I’m certainly no expert on Shiites and Sunnis.  I’m probably a little foggy on my Iraqi geography.  And I’ve never even seen the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  On the other hand, it does occur to me that a whole raft of American pundits, government officials, and military types, who have done all of the above, who have spent time up close and personal in Iraq (or, at least, in the American version of the same), couldn’t have arrived at dumber conclusions over these last many years.  

Read the rest of When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq? 

Source: TomDispatch.com 

The design studio Big Ant International earned themselves a big award for their antiwar poster series “What Goes Around Comes Around,” designed for the Global Coalition for Peace.

The message ain’t too difficult to grasp. Here it is:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
(Thanks, The Inspiration Room.)

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Afghans have watched their loved ones and neighbors die. They've seen Afghan fighters die, too. Being so close to violence and death is a trauma we don't talk about enough. And there’s one kind of trauma that we never talk about at all: What it is like to watch a foreign soldier die on the street in front of your house? Golnar Motevalli—a Reuters reporter covering the Afghanistan war—filed a chilling report this week from Marjah called Witness: Battlefield dead haunt U.S. Marines and Afghans alike. In it, she reports the death of Corporal Jacob Turbett, killed by a Taliban bullet that entered his heart.

Medics had carried Turbett from the bank of dirt he was standing on, where the bullet ricocheted and entered his chest, laid him out on the dusty ground of a small Afghan home, and frantically tried to resuscitate him. Above them T-shirts and woolen sweaters on washing lines flapped in the breeze.

Eventually a tiny girl in a pink dress stepped out from behind a rickety wooden door which was draped in a dirty black curtain, her wizened, bearded father clutching her hand and ushering her to the toilet.

The girl retreated back into the room, oblivious to Turbett's losing battle for his life. Moments later, the 21-year-old from Canton, Michigan, was dead.

Medic David Walden stood up and walked away. As the child cried from inside the room, Walden wept in silence outside. His cheeks were damp with tears and gleamed under the early afternoon sun. His eyes were hidden behind ballistic sunglasses.

(Thanks, @afghanmania.)

Source: Reuters

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This quote is lifted from an article by New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins, writing in The New Republic. Filkins dismisses the unnamed official's dismal take on Afghanistan war policy: “Things aren't that desperate.” After reading his piece, The American Awakening, I'm having a hard time locating the source of his optimism.

The image above is part of the new Thousand Yard Stare war postcard series. If you want to turn it in to a postcard you can do so from the Utne Reader Flickr page.

Source: The New Republic 

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Image by the Department of Defense and funded by your tax dollars.

The good people at Virginia Quarterly Review have posted an Election Day diary from embedded reporter Dimiter Kenarov in Baghdad. For most of the day Kenarov was stuck on a military base and his frustration at this makes for an illustrative behind-the-blast-walls portrait of the occupation:

4:00 AM

Under the quarter moon, in the high beams of their armored vehicles, US soldiers are gearing up for the most important day of the Iraq War.

11:00 AM

Hurry up and wait. The Army’s unofficial motto. We are waiting for the Special Representative of the United Nation’s Secretary-General for Iraq, Adrianus Petrus Wilhelmus Ad Melkert, to arrive at the Baghdad Airport on the Victory Base Complex, so we can escort him to polling stations around the city and then to a press conference at the Al Rasheed hotel in the International Zone. Engines are idling. We have all sloughed off our body armor, Kevlars carelessly scattered on the gravel lot like empty seashells. Though the March sun is still merciful, everyone is cowering in the iron shade of their vehicles. Soldiers are taking a nap, or reading, or playing around with their iPods.

… I decide to walk around a bit and talk to some of the soldiers. What do you think about the elections? Boom. Do you think the Iraqi security forces will be able to take over? Boom. What do you think about the future of Iraq? BOOM.

4:00 PM

We are still waiting and I’m getting antsy. By now, half of the world knows more about what is happening in Baghdad than I do. Ad Melkert, the UN representative, has arrived, but his personal security detail and the US commanders are trying to agree on the safest route into downtown Baghdad. There have been no explosions in the last hour or so, but our large convoy would certainly draw a lot of attention. “If he doesn’t go into Baghdad, what does that say to the Iraqis,” one soldier muses. “And if he gets killed on the way, what does that say,” another counters.

Source: Virginia Quarterly Review

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Over at the Change.org War and Peace blog, Jake Horowitz writes about the New America Foundation’s report on drone warfare:

At last, someone is breaking the near-unanimous silence in Washington over the utility of unmanned predator drone strikes on suspected militants in the tribal regions of Pakistan. While international law experts have long cried foul over the legality of America's use of targeted assassinations, Washington insiders and senior members of the Obama administration have continued to maintain that the use of missile strikes from unmanned drone airplanes are not only in compliance with international law, but also indispensable to America's effort to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in the AfPak region.

That is, until now. The New America Foundation, an influential public policy think-tank based in Washington, D.C. has just released an explosive report that raises critical questions about the effectiveness of U.S. drone attacks. Not only does the report suggest that drone strikes may very well violate the principle of proportionality under international law, but it also questions the efficacy of the attacks as a counter terrorism tool altogether.

Source: Change.org, New America Foundation

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When I started thumbing through the special “War Torn” issue of New Youth Connections (“the magazine written by and for youth”), I fully expected to find blog fodder. After reading the issue, I can't decide on just one article to single out. If only the “adult” press (get your mind out of the gutter, dirtbag) had the courage to approach the issue of war from so many angles and so unapologetically. The issue feels like one long, really important conversation.

There's the young woman writing about eavesdropping on her brother's late night calls to mom from the Iraq war and the guide to helping friends and family members with PTSD. There’s a full page fact sheet on resisting military recruiters (“If you come from a troubled home, you already have an idea of the psychological damage that an environment like that can have on you,” writes a teen who organizes against recruiters, “and it’s probably going to do even more harm to be in a war.”). Then there’s a full page dedicated to the testimonies of teens who have enlisted already or are leaning towards it (“I'm worried that what [the recruiters] say is bulls--t,” writes one teen. “That’s why I ask the soldiers what the military is really like.”).

It’s not all about America's wars. A young man from the Ivory Coast writes about the ways “a civil war divided my crew.” Elsewhere in the magazine a young Palestinian defends Al Jazeera: “I never watch Al Jazeera without my eyes getting teary.”

Want to see the staff of New Youth Connections in action? Here you go:

Source: New Youth Connections 

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Every month, social psychologist Arie Kruglanski sends a research report to the Department of Homeland Security from his National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (better known, mercifully, as START). In a Miller-McCune interview with Kruglanski, he talks about what he’s learned about suicide attackers and the people who support them. “Many people think of terrorists, especially suicide bombers, as not quite human,” says Tom Jacobs in his first question to Kruglanski, “presumably because they’ve set aside that basic human motivation of self-preservation. But your research suggests their motivations are quite recognizably human.” Here’s some of what Kruglanski had to say...

On the “quite recognizably human” motivations of suicide attackers:

Personal significance is a motivation that has been recognized by psychological theorists as a major driving force of human behavior. Terrorists feel that through suicide, their lives will achieve tremendous significance. They will become heroes, martyrs. In many cases, their decision is a response to a great loss of significance, which can occur through humiliation, discrimination, or personal problems that have nothing to do with the conflict in which their group is engaged.

On America’s martyrs:

Even in our country, we venerate our heroes.—our soldiers who are willing to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of ideals we hold dear.

More on significance as a motivator:

According to terror management theory, we are alone among all species in that we are aware of our impending demise. As a consequence, we have this nightmare of ending up as an insignificant speck of dust in an uncaring universe.

Source: Miller-McCune (article not yet available online) 

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Image by Jeff Severns Guntzel.

Occasionally, I troll video websites like Vimeo and YouTube for soldier footage from Iraq. Today I stumbled upon a short highway clip filmed by what I can only guess is a member of the U.S. military riding atop an armored vehicle. The video is shaky and the engine noise overwhelms everything. So why watch this when you could be watching the gripping Restrepo trailer I just posted? Because I think we forget what the American occupation of Iraq looks like—less visible though it may be these days.

At one point, the camera pans past the other occupants of the vehicle. They look like alien invaders. They are masked and their guns point in all directions. Americans often struggle to think of Iraqis as fully human. How hard must Iraqis have to struggle to see the humanity of our masked, motoring ambassadors?

A trite observation? Perhaps. But I've watched tanks crush curbs with their treads and I've felt the rumble of an armored vehicle passing by me. I've struggled myself in those situations—though I know the men behind the guns speak my language and come from my country—to see them as anything other than extraterrestrial. Watch the Restrepo trailer for the war as the soldiers experience it. Sit through this one for a peek—however slight and incomplete—at what it's like to live among occupiers.

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The winner of the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Restrepo, a feature-length documentary that chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. From the filmmakers: “This is an entirely experiential film. Our cameras never leave the valley, we don’t interview generals or diplomats. Our only goal is to make you feel as though you have just done a 90-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves.”

Here’s the trailer…

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The American Society of Magazine editors created a video called Covering the Decade: The Story of the Century's First 10 Years as Told Through Magazine Covers. It's a bit of a disappointment. The magazines chosen to tell the story of the decade are mostly the kind of glossy fare you find in airport newsstands. Mostly, the alternative press is left out of the mix (there are a few exceptions, most notably the inclusion of an Utne Reader cover).

What is more frustrating is their handling of the Iraq war. There are two covers chosen to tell the story of Iraq. First, there's the Tales of the Tyrant cover from the Atlantic Monthly.  You ought to have an easy time divining which tyrant is on display. Next is Time's "We got him!" cover. It's Saddam Hussein again, fresh from his hole. The story of the Iraq war, it would seem, is a simple one: There was a tyrant and we got him.

The story is a bit more complicated than that—and less tidy. So I made my own video. I ravaged the Utne Reader library looking for covers from the alternative press that helped to tell the complex and terrible story of our war in Iraq. Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti and art director Stephanie Glaros helped me. Here's what we came up with:

The covers create a powerful narrative, but there is still something missing. We struggled to come up with covers that represented civilian suffering in Iraq, which has prompted a second library hunt. I'm looking through the archives of every notable political magazine in our library for cover stories on civilian suffering in Iraq. I'll let you know what I find. If you can remember a cover, tell me about it in the comments section!

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See more Utne Reader videos at our Vimeo page

Did you know that half the population of Yemen is under the age of 15? I didn’t. There’s a lot I don’t know about Yemen, which is striking given how much I am hearing and reading about it. But I’m not really hearing and reading about Yemen at all, am I? I know that a man who tried to blow up a plane bound for Detroit had been in Yemen. I know that there is an organization in Yemen that is tied to Al-Qaeda. I know that Yemeni men favor ornamental daggers.

What do Yemenis know about America? They know what we’ve done in Iraq and Afghanistan. They know we are willing to travel with artillery and deadly aircraft to countries we know precious little about. In short: they know they should be worried.

Heather Murdock captures some of that worry in a piece she filed from Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city, for Global Post.

The people of Sanaa, Murdock writes, are already “facing a Shiite insurgency, a secessionist movement in the south, a looming water crisis and crushing poverty. And now the government is shifting its focus to fighting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s organization.”

For weeks now, the chatter on the streets of Sanaa has focused on just how far the U.S. intends to go in this fight.

In December, U.S.-ordered air strikes killed at least 60 suspected Al Qaeda militants, Yemeni officials said. And since a Nigerian born radical, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up a plane over Detroit after living in Yemen, it has become clear that the U.S. intends to retaliate.

…Yemenis insisted that reports are overblown about the dangers of life in their country.

In Sanaa’s medieval Old City, on the serene rooftop of Center for Arabic Language and Eastern Studies, Administrative Director Mohammad Saleh Risk said the media scares people away by only presenting one aspect of the country.

…“There are other things that could kill terrorism,” he said. “Young people have no jobs, and the government should fix it.”

All of this is quite striking. But what stuck with me long after I had read the piece was the charming understatement of a 17-year-old girl Murdock interviews in a market: “Everybody should stay in his own country.”

Source: Global Post

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In 1940, eight pacifists studying at Union Theological Seminary refused the exemption from military service granted them as seminarians and flat out refused conscription into World War II. In a statement released shortly before the young men were sent to jail, they wrote: “If we register, even as conscientious objectors, we are becoming part of the act.”

Seventy years later Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, is calling on the military to allow enlisted women and men who do not reject war outright the freedom to refuse a particular war on grounds of religion or conscience. Jones, in the statement she co-authored with Rita Nakashima-Brock and Gabriella Lettini and published at Religion Dispatches, first skewers Obama's Nobel acceptance speech:

Most debates about both Iraq and Afghanistan have focused on whether or not they are winnable. The president’s speech in Oslo, however, raised the bar to moral grounds. He tried to defend his decision to escalate Afghanistan by contrasting the nonviolent principles of previous Nobel laureates, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., with the principles of just war that have informed the Nuremberg Principles and Geneva Conventions, the current gold standards for leaders of nations conducting wars. His defense in the abstract was eloquent. In its practical application to Afghanistan, it was shallow and inept.

Meanwhile, members of the military awaiting deployment to one of America's wars must go or face punishment. “Soldiers now deploying to both wars are denied the choice of conscience that the president articulated in accepting his Peace Prize,” Jones and her co-authors write. “The rights of Conscientious Objection are currently too narrow to protect the moral conscience of soldiers. To claim this formal status, you have to show that, on religious or ethical grounds, you object to ‘war in any form.’”

It's not just the moral integrity of our soldiers at stake: “When we punish soldiers who heed their moral compasses, we deny them religious freedom, and our democracy is threatened. Not only is the integrity of our military compromised; we break the moral backbone of our servicemen and women. When this happens, the international just peace community, which the president so eloquently valorized in Oslo, is weakened. And we trivialize our broader commitment to morally responsible public life.”

The image above is of pacifist David Dellinger, one of the Union Theological students who refused to serve in World War II.

Source: Religion Dispatches 

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