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Collateral Damage— Expansion of a Concept
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Don Irish, W A M M
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Truth is the first “collateral damage” in the build-up to war. Wartime conduct and the “factual” historical record of events afterward are perceived differently by contending parties. For example, the International Gulf Peace Team in January 1991, situated on the Iraq-Saudi border, included persons from about 25 countries, diverse in faiths, races, and cultures. The Iraqis evacuated the encampment to Baghdad. When the U.S. government contended that a large building bombed by their forces was a military target; the Iraqis said it was a milk-processing plant. The peace team went to the site, and indeed, it was/had been a milk-processing factory.
Especially in wartime, citizens should be very hesitant to assume that their government’s contentions are necessarily true, though they may be. Contrariwise, the statements of one’s opponents should not be readily rejected as necessarily false, though they may be. Saddam Hussein’s claim that Iraq (in 2003) did not have WMD was demonstrated to be true by the UN inspectors. There are times when leaders are provided with false information, which they announce—for example, Adlai Stevenson in 1962, and Colin Powell in 2003 —both before the UN Security Council. Calling them liars implies intent, however they both made statements that were later were found to be untrue.
During the Gulf War of 1991, General Colin Powell was asked about the number of civilian Iraqis killed and wounded. To paraphrase, he responded that those numbers were not of much interest to him. In 2004 the administration reports only the number of U.S. military personnel who are killed in Iraq, rarely providing data on the injured (thousands in German and U.S. hospitals). Flag draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base are not to be shown.
The number of Iraqi casualties is even more difficult to determine, even when sought. Some investigators have indicated 10,000—15,000 civilian deaths from the war, while a John Hopkins medical team has reported 100,000. Whose lives are valued?
The 1991 Gulf War never really ended. U.S. and British “fly zones,” not authorized by the United Nations, continued until 2003, with bombings of sewage treatment plants, electrical power stations, and water treatment facilities. Attacks on infrastructure that civilian lives depend upon are in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The United Nations and other agencies estimate that 500,000 children under age five (and perhaps an equal number of youth, adults, the aged) died, for lack of medical attention. These millions of deaths, and the responsibility for them are officially “not remembered.”
Perhaps no human behavior is more destructive of “family values” than warfare. Besides the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in the past century by war, many more were wounded (often for life) with shattered hopes and dreams. The lives of their spouses, partners, children and siblings were drastically altered, their hoped-for family life shattered. Long separation of spouses place severe strains on relationships; those returning find that the one they loved is no longer the same person.
Militarization often breeds exploitation and abuse of foreign women; abandoned children who come out of their interactions, prostitution, and the spread of Aids are all wartime consequences. Persons under battle stress, or left at home, suffer breakdowns, suicides, drug addiction and homelessness. The occupations of all those involved, and their employers, are inconvenienced, interrupted. In some areas, child soldiers are recruited, trained and used. Those who support war and advocate “family values” need to recognize these inconsistencies.
Modern warfare of the high-tech sort, as William Safire has said, enables militaries of wealthy countries to kill more people at a greater distance with less feelings of guilt. Still, remember that nonviolence is the norm in daily living. Nonviolence has been increasingly utilized in labor, education, family life, prisons, mental hospitals, sports and international law, with frequent success in varied situations bringing it greater legitimacy.
Humanity has yet to recognize that warfare as a practice is obsolete, and needs to be abandoned. But another world is possible. Meanwhile, we cannot let the “psychic numbing” (a term used by Robert jay Lifton, a Yale psychiatrist) from the horrendous tragedies dim our hopes.
Excerpted from a 12/04 article in the North Country Peace Builder, a publication of the Minnesota Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Don Irish, professor emeritus, Hamline University has been an activist since high school. He joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1940 and was a conscientious objector during WWII. He has been active opposing nuclear weaponry, the Vietnam War and the Gulf wars. He served as a long-term team member with Witness for Peace in Nicaragua monitoring an election, observing the demobilization of the Contras, and leading delegations. He served with Peace Brigades International in Guatemala. Don was the recipient of the Twin Cities International Citizen Award (1998) and Vincent L. Hawkins Peace and Justice Award (2004). |
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Word Up!
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. . . . the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. . . . They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.
—Eugene V. Debs
The point of public relations slogans like “Support our troops” is that they don’t mean anything. . . . That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about.
—Noam Chomsky
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© 2005 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete May 2005 Index - click here
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