John Tirman, Civilians Killed in US Wars

The Progressive

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Books

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 U.S. intervention in

Korea was mainly a product of anticommunist

fervor made even more

intense by Mao’s triumph in China

(and linked by Tirman to America’s

gunslinger frontier mentality).

“The intellectual discourse about

the Korean War’s meaning, apart

from predictable lamentations about

the limits of U.S. power, never grappled

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 Iraq.”

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 China and North

Korea. They chose not to, Tirman

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, America reverts to “the malevolent

stereotyping of outsiders.”

A

way Tirman goes through

each war and analyzes the

many ways that U.S. tactics

brought about death and destruc-

strength of the book is the

Invisible Victims

The Deaths of Others: The Fate of

Civilians in America’s Wars

By John Tirman

Oxford University Press. 416 pages.

$29.95.

By Amitabh Pal

T

incredibly important venture.

I know of no other book that

so comprehensively catalogues the

victims of U.S. wars.

Tirman opens with an arresting

image: He walks to the Vietnam and

Korean War memorials in Washington,

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 U.S. conquest of the

Philippines during the Spanish-

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

he Deaths of Others is an

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 Vietnam. “When

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 U.S. population motivated in

their opposition to the war due to

Vietnamese casualties alone.

Tirman has a number of perceptive

things to say even on the Iraq

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 Iraq in between the

1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War. He

combines all three into what he calls

a “twenty-year foreign venture for the

United States and a devastating reality

for the Iraqis.”

For another, he points out that the

U.S. culpability in the aftermath of

the 2003 invasion should not be limited

to the direct toll U.S. forces

exacted; instead, the United States

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 U.S. occupation.

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 Iraq, a general avoidance

of the war’s consequences apart from

the U.S. casualty rate, and the longstanding

tendency to view the

‘enemy’ population as a dispensable

side effect of the American global

mission.”

Tirman devotes a chapter to the

Afghanistan intervention, too.

“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 U.S. military

action, through the first half of 2010,”

writes Tirman. “The number of

deaths of those

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 U.S. war atrocities: No

Gun Ri during the Korean War, My

Lai in the Vietnam War, and Haditha

during the Iraq War. They reveal

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.

not considered civilians

W

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 U.S. wars,” Tirman

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 U.S.

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 Korea to Iraq (with even the

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 U.S. foreign policy?

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 U.S. policy on

people in all corners of the world.hy such indifference? Tirman