OMNI
CIVILIAN VICTIMS OF US
WARS, February 15, 2012.
NEWSLETTER/ANTHOLOGY #4
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.
(#1 Sept. 6, 2007; #2
Jan. 14, 2011; #3 March 10, 2011; #4 Feb. 15, 2012).
Contents of #1, Sept.
6, 2007
Dick: Introduction
Two Books on Terror Air War
Contents of #2, Jan.
14, 2011
Afghan Body Count 2010
Afghan 2002, 2007, 2009
Newspaper Articles
Book: Al-Arian and
Hedges, Collateral Damage
Newscasters and a Million civilians killed
Google and Body Count
Wikipedia Search
Contractors
Kucinich
Contents of #3, March
10, 2011
Japanese Civilians Killed WWII
Contents of #4 Feb.
15, 2012
New Book, John Tirman, The
Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars
Hedges and Al Arian, Iraqi
Civilians
US Air War
Grosscup, Terror Bombing
Ross, Decision to Bomb
Carrington and
The
Progressive VOL. 43
Book
Rev. “Invisible Victims”
The Deaths of
Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars
By John Tirman Oxford
UP, 2011. 416 pages.
“…indifference
to the suffering of the
natives,”
Tirman writes.
Tirman
goes on to critique strategic
bombing
in the “Good War,”
echoing
the criticisms of Howard
Zinn
and John Kenneth Galbraith.
And
he then provides a detailed dissection
of
the Korean War. According
to
Tirman, the
fervor made
even more
intense
by Mao’s triumph in
(and
linked by Tirman to
gunslinger
frontier mentality).
“The
intellectual discourse about
the
Korean War’s meaning, apart
from
predictable lamentations about
the
limits of
with
the magnitude of loss,” he
writes
about a war that was among
the
bloodiest in the post-World War
II
era. “This, too, is the apparent fate
of
the failed venture in
The
Korean toll would have been
far
worse if General MacArthur and
President
Eisenhower had made good
on
their repeated threats to use nuclear
weapons
against
reveals,
out of a fear that the Soviets
would
retaliate.
Racism played
a major part then,
as
it has done in more recent times.
“At
times of national stress,” Tirman
writes,
stereotyping
of outsiders.”
Astrength
of the book is the
way
Tirman goes through
each
war and analyzes the
many
ways that
brought
about death and destruc-
By
Amitabh Pal
The
Deaths of Others is an
incredibly
important venture.
I
know of no other book that
so
comprehensively catalogues the
victims
of
Tirman
opens with an arresting
image:
He walks to the
Korean
War memorials in
D.C.,
and becomes conscious of
a
gaping hole in both places: There
isn’t
a single mention of the millions
of
non-American civilians who were
killed
in these conflicts.
“One
of the most remarkable
aspects
of American wars is how little
we
discuss the victims who are not
Americans,”
Tirman writes. “As a
nation
that has long thought of itself
as
built on Christian ethics, even as
an
exceptionally compassionate people,
this
coldness is a puzzle.”
The
book is an attempt to solve
that
puzzle.
Tirman
begins his analysis in
earnest
with the
American
War, which set the tone for
every
war since then. “The pattern of
the
American public’s response to the
war
was repeated in every subsequent
conflict
abroad—the righteous cause,
the
brave American soldiers, the
brutish
enemy, and in the consequent
horror
of the war, the deep mourning
for
fallen Americans, and the cold
Amitabh
Pal, the managing editor of
The
Progressive, is the author of the
new
book “ ‘Islam’ Means Peace:
Understanding
the Muslim Principle
of
Nonviolence Today” (Praeger).
ERIK
RUIN - JUSTSEEDS.ORG
tion.
This makes horrifying reading,
such
as for
we
went out, I would say about 50
percent
of the villages we passed
through
would be burned to the
ground,”
he quotes one Marine.
But
all of this astonishingly did not
make
any difference to Americans,
with
one survey cited by Tirman
showing
statistically 0 percent of
the
their
opposition to the war due to
Vietnamese
casualties alone.
Tirman
has a number of perceptive
things
to say even on the
War,
a conflict I thought I had read
almost
too much about.
For
one, he shrewdly recognizes
the
enormous toll taken by the sanctions
placed
on
1991
Gulf War and the
combines
all three into what he calls
a
“twenty-year foreign venture for the
for
the Iraqis.”
For
another, he points out that the
the
2003 invasion should not be limited
to
the direct toll
exacted;
instead, the
deserves
a good deal of the blame for
overall
fatalities due to its failure to
provide
adequate security.
Tirman
tallies the different ways
that
Iraqis were killed, maimed, and
made
refugees during the
And,
yet, among the American
public,
there was no recognition
of
the bloodbath that had been
wrought.
“When
in February 2007, the
American
people were asked, for the
first
and only time, how many Iraqis
they
thought had died in the war, the
response
was both disheartening and
unsurprising:
9,890 was the median
answer,
a figure that was likely low by
several
hundred thousands,” Tirman
writes.
“The lack of knowledge or
concern
about the war’s victims was
an
outcome of several reinforcing
tendencies
in American political culture:
news
media that only occasionally
reported
the costs of the war to
Iraqis,
the Bush Administration’s
insistence
on how the war effort was
benefitting
of
the war’s consequences apart from
the
tendency
to view the
‘enemy’
population as a dispensable
side
effect of the American global
mission.”
Tirman
devotes a chapter to the
“Based
on reports of the U.N.,
Human
Rights Watch, and a few others,
the
total for civilian deaths ranges
from
15,000 to 35,000, including
nonviolent,
‘excess’ deaths, with about
9,000
directly from
action,
through the first half of 2010,”
writes
Tirman. “The number of
deaths
of those not considered
civilians
or
official Afghan soldiers is unknown
but
is likely to be three or four times
higher.”
(Emphasis in the original.)
The
Bush Administration’s response
was
sheer callousness. “We did not
start
this war,” exclaimed Donald
Rumsfeld.
“So understand, responsibility
for
every single casualty in this
war,
whether they’re innocent civilians
or
innocent Americans, rests at the feet
of
the Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
Tirman
has an insightfully detailed
analysis
toward the end of the book of
three
major
Lai
in the Vietnam War, and Haditha
during
the
underlying
similarities.
“The
Haditha massacre followed
the
pattern from the earlier wars—
initial
shock at the revelations, military
lying
and cover-up, investigations
in
response to the media
coverage,
rightwing backlash against
prosecuting
or blaming soldiers, very
little
legal culpability achieved, and
ultimate
public indifference,” Tirman
writes.
Why
such indifference? Tirman
offers
a number of reasons:
racism,
the frontier
mentality,
and something he calls “just
world
theory”—the delusional denial
that
everything is right with the world.
“The
combination of these three
explanations
forms a structure, an
architecture
of indifference, accounting
for
the silence and the animus the
American
public displays toward the
civilian
victims of
writes.
“It is a sturdy forbidding
structure,
a fortress that protects its
denizens
from the chaos outside.”
This
indifference leads to the
absence
of necessary checks on
atrocities.
An added consequence is
the
anti-American sentiment this attitude
inflames
in the rest of the world.
Where
Tirman ventures into dubious
territory
is in his assertion that
the
constant American penchant for
wars
(and its perfervid anti-communism)
is
in good part a result of a
frontier
mentality deeply embedded
in
the American psyche.
“Especially
after 1945, the ‘Indians’
were
Soviet communists and
their
allies,” writes Tirman. “The
‘wilderness’
was any country under
the
sway of Marxism-Leninism and
the
global south generally, just then
released
from European colonialism
and
hence reverting to a kind of
political
and moral wildness to match
its
physical and demographic
attributes.
The ‘bonanza’ of the frontier
was
domination of the world economic
system
itself.”
All
through the book, Tirman
hammers
this thesis home, which
imbues
his analysis of every conflict
from
Arab
Muslim, according to him, acting
as
a modern stand-in for the
Native
American).
To
me, the analogy seems a bit of
a
stretch. Is the cowboy-and-Indian
mentality
a part of the American psyche?
Yes.
But is it a significant determinant
of
The
other place where the book
doesn’t
quite work is that it becomes
too
statistically rigorous for a lay audience.
Regardless,
Tirman has given us
the definitive study
of an extremely
important
but neglected subject. It’s a
must-read
for anyone concerned with
the
lethal impact of
people in all corners of the world.
REVIEW IN THE CATHOLIC WORKER BY Bill Griffin
(Jan.-Feb. 2012). High praise
for this book on the “poison” of “
--Hedges, Chris and Laila
Al-Arian. Collateral Damage:
|
Chris
Hedges - Collateral Damage:
America's War Against Iraqi ... |
|
|
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHqYOuK84iA
Apr 24, 2011 - 65 min - Uploaded
by pdxjustice |
|
1.
|
Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian on "Collateral Damage: America's ... |
|
|
www.democracynow.org/.../chris_hedges_and_laila_al...
Jun 10, 2008 |
|
2.
|
Hedges
- Collateral Damage: America's War
on Iraqi Civilians ... |
|
|
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL3ToWgtfDA
Jul 1, 2008 - 10 min - Uploaded
by pdxjustice |
|
3. More videos for Chris Hedges Collateral
Damage »
4. Tomgram:
Chris Hedges, War
and Occupation, American-style ...
www.tomdispatch.com/post/174939/chris_hedges_collateral_damageCached
Jun 3, 2008 – Collateral Damage What
It Really Means When
Strategic terror: the politics and ethics of aerial bombardment
By Beau Grosscup
|
|
|
HISTORY OF US BOMBING CIVILIANS
Sherwood Ross. “How the
May Is Deadliest Month for Afghan Civilians Since 2007: U.N.
The UN says May was the deadliest month for civilians in
"Pro - government forces", including Nato, caused 45 of the
deaths. The news came as several deadly insurgent attacks killed at least 18
people, most of them civilians, in the volatile south and east of the country.
Fifteen
people, including eight children and four women, were killed when a bomb blast
hit their vehicle in the southern
Afghan Civilians Dying in
Record Numbers
Laura King,
Intro: "Buried bombs killed 30 Afghan civilians in a
48-hour span in the latest grim illustration of the dangers faced by
noncombatants as the season's fighting heats up. Insurgents routinely seed
roads and pathways with IEDs, or improvised explosive devices - their favored
weapon against Western troops. But most often, those killed and injured by the
hidden bombs are civilians."
READ MORE http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/309-13/6471-afghan-civilians-dying-in-record-numbers
“May Is Deadliest Month for Afghan Civilians Since 2007: U.N.”
The UN says May was the deadliest month for civilians in
"Pro - government forces", including Nato, caused 45 of the
deaths. The news came as several deadly insurgent attacks killed at least 18
people, most of them civilians, in the volatile south and east of the country.
Fifteen
people, including eight children and four women, were killed when a bomb blast
hit their vehicle in the southern
Transforming Terror:
Remembering
the Soul of the World
Karin Lofthus Carrington and
Susan Griffin, eds.
Paperback, 392 pages June
2011
From the publisher: This
inspired collection offers a new paradigm for moving the world beyond violence as the first, and often only,
response to violence. Through essays and poetry, prayers and mediations, Transforming
Terror powerfully demonstrates that terrorist
violence—defined here as any attack on unarmed civilians—can never be stopped
by a return to the thinking that created it. A diverse array of
contributors—writers, healers, spiritual and political leaders, scientists, and
activists, including Desmond Tutu, Huston Smith, Riane Eisler, Daniel Ellsberg,
Amos Oz, Fatema Mernissi, Fritjof Capra, George Lakoff, Mahmoud Darwish, Terry
Tempest Williams, and Jack Kornfield—considers how we might transform the
conditions that produce terrorist acts and bring true healing to the victims of
these acts. Broadly encompassing both the Islamic and Western worlds, the book
explores the nature of consciousness and offers a blueprint for change that
makes peace possible. From unforgettable firsthand accounts of terrorism, the
book draws us into awareness of our ecological and economic interdependence,
the need for connectedness, and the innate human capacity for compassion
END CIVILIAN
VICTIMS #4
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