Originally published in Little Village issue 10, December 2001.
Editor’s note: The following story by former Icon editor Brendan Wolfe appeared in the Nov. 15 [2001] issue of the Maine Times, a statewide alternative newspaper for which Wolfe serves as deputy editor. Upon publication of the piece — a story outlining the mainstream media’s squeamishness over tackling some of the tougher questions associated with America’s “War on Terrorism” — Wolfe was promptly fired by the paper’s owner. Although he was eventually rehired, Wolfe is unsure of his future at the paper. [Update: Maine Times folded in 2002. Read more writing by Wolfe, a Davenport native and 1999 graduate of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing program, on his website and family history blog, The Lost Nation.]
Why Afghanistan?
In a world full of such banal euphemisms as “collateral damage,” the polemics of Arundhati Roy are like lightning bolts. “Governments … first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples’ minds and suffocate real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the willing dead,” she writes in her essay “War is Peace.” “President Bush can no more ‘rid the world of evil-doers’ than he can stock it with saints,” she asserts in another piece, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice.”
“What is Osama bin Laden?” she asks. “He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by American foreign policy.”
Roy, who lives in her native India, is no stranger to American audiences. Her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, has sold more than 6 million copies. But if you weren’t familiar with her views on the war against terrorism, it’s because every major American newspaper and magazine has rejected her essays. The New York Times reported on this fact Nov. 3 and quoted briefly from her writing, thus providing its readers with only a glimpse of her arguments — a shadow, but not the weight of something tangible and, because of its fearless and prickly dissent, threatening.
Are Americans, still traumatized by the awful explosions of Sept. 11, too afraid to confront those who might disagree with the U.S. military response? Burton Hatlen of Bangor has reason to think so. When he wondered, on the op-ed page of the Bangor Daily News last month, whether there might not be some way to fight terrorism besides dropping bombs, a reader suggested he be stripped of his citizenship and exiled to Afghanistan.
“There is a reluctance to talk about the causes of what happened,” the University of Maine English professor told Maine Times with some understatement. “It’s considered unpatriotic to ask what might have motivated those people to act on Sept. 11. We are told simply that they are evil.”
“It’s true that polls show overwhelming support for the president’s policies,” pointed out Nancy Galland of the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine. “But there’s also been a huge effort by the administration to silence opposition by using words like, ‘You’re either for us or against us.’ The lines have been drawn.”
“What happened to us and why? Where are we going from here?” According to Mahmoud El-Begearmi, a UMaine professor of Nutrition and Food Safety, these are questions both print and broadcast journalism have failed to adequately address in the last two months.
Instead, the mainstream media, by and large, have wrapped themselves in the flag — the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News, like many dailies across the nation, actually printed flags for display — and ignored dissent altogether, making informed discussion nearly impossible. The New York Times has been particularly dismissive. Atop its Sept. 29 report on an anti-war march — where participants advocated bringing Osama bin Laden to justice through non-military means — the paper affixed the headline, “Protesters in Washington Urge Peace with Terrorists.”
According to Roy’s surgical prose, the mainstream media “has more or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with press handouts from military men and government officials.”
The bottom line, argues El-Begearmi, is that “we need to make room for more discussion and understanding of what is going on.” Toward that end, we present five questions, along with analysis, that we hope will assist Little Village readers in better understanding the new war. As President Bush insists on maintaining that the terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedom, we would do well to exercise that freedom — by daring to confront difficult issues and alien points of view.
Is the U.S. justified in killing Afghan civilians?
Like many questions, this one seems straightforward. Of course the U.S. is justified so long as civilian deaths are accidental and all care is taken to minimize those deaths.
The Bush Administration is working hard to convince Americans it is doing just that.
While Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been, on occasion, publicly dismissive of the concern, using terms like “collateral damage” instead of “civilian deaths,” it’s no accident the Pakistani government has said publicly that no military campaign in history has been more concerned about the lives of innocents than the current one. (Pakistan’s citizens, by the way, are much more likely to oppose the bombing.)
Meanwhile, news reports surrounding the landing of special-forces troops in Afghanistan never fail to mention that part of their role is to help pinpoint air strikes for greater accuracy and so less “collateral damage.”
Add to this the long history of “total war,” which in U.S. history commenced with Sherman’s infamous march to the sea at the end of the Civil War and continued through the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Those campaigns, which claimed mostly civilian lives, were justified, weren’t they? Judging by the highly publicized controversy surrounding a Smithsonian exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, that seems to be an open question for many Americans.
Or take this example from a daily newspaper in Orange County, California, that two weeks ago published photos of damage to civilian homes allegedly caused by U.S. bombs. Readers were so incensed by the coverage, the paper’s ombudsman felt compelled to write a column defending the photos. Readers who want to prevent coverage of possible civilian deaths are readers who are uncomfortable with “collateral damage.” Finally, there is this provocative argument made by Robert Wright in Slate, an online magazine. He claims U.S. military actions imply the following strategy: “It’s better to kill numerous Afghan civilians than to lose a single American in uniform.”
American bomber pilots fly high, Wright says, keeping them out of harm’s way but also reducing their strike accuracy. Also, ultra-close air support from helicopters has not been employed. Even though it would bring the war to a close sooner, it is seen as too risky.
Wright argues too that special-operations troops haven’t been deployed in a risky enough fashion.
“We, unlike bin Laden, never deliver a bomb with the intention of killing a civilian. That’s a valid distinction,” Wright maintains. “Still, Rumsfeld has said some collateral damage is bound to happen. So, like bin Laden, we launched a war knowing that it entailed civilian deaths; the deaths were inseparable from a strategy justified by a goal we deemed good, so we proceeded to cause them.”
Is U.S. humanitarian aid to Afghanistan helpful?
Many activists who oppose the bombing report that their number one reason for doing so is that the bombing is preventing real food aid from getting to 7.5 million starving Afghans before winter.
By now, most TV watchers are familiar with the packets of food being dropped from the sky by American planes. Reports have focused on the military’s efforts to ensure that these packets are picked up by civilians and not stolen by the Taliban. We have been told the packets are equipped with drawings meant to serve as user instructions and an American flag to indicate the identity of their donor.
Sen. John Warner told CNN’s Larry King: “This, I think, is the first time in contemporary military history where a military operation is being conducted against the government of a country, and simultaneously, with the troops carrying out their mission, other troops are trying to take care of the innocent victims who all too often are caught in harm’s way.”
What the networks have failed to adequately address, however, is that these packets of food are coming at the expense of substantive aid missions that have been interrupted by the bombing. According to the Nobel Prize-winning French organization Doctors Without Borders, the food-from-the-sky effort is “virtually useless and may even be dangerous.”
According to Jim Jennings, president of an aid organization called Conscience International (as reported by the liberal group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting): In the western Afghan city of Herat, “there are 600,000 people on the verge of starvation. If you provide one pound of food per day, the minimum for bare survival, it would take 500 planeloads a month to supply the one camp in Herat alone, and Afghanistan is the size of Texas. The administration has stated that two aircraft are being used for food relief so far — for all of Afghanistan.”
There is a fundamental moral question at stake here, closely related to the issue of whether we are justified in killing civilians: Is it justified to wage war against the Taliban if the price of that war is mass starvation? It’s a question that has been steadfastly avoided by the mainstream media. Meanwhile, Bill O’Reilly, a popular Fox News Channel pundit, has opined: “We should not target civilians. But if they don’t rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.”
What is the nature of anti-war dissent here and abroad?
The bottom line here is that an overwhelming majority of Americans support the war on terrorism and the current bombing of Afghanistan. What dissent does exist, however, is being systematically played down by the media. FAIR, the liberal media watchdog group, reported that a Sept. 21 story in The New York Times about protests being held at 150 college campuses nationwide failed to report the actual arguments being made by those protesters. Instead, the article was dominated by students who support the bombing, as well as those who could not recall seeing any anti-war sentiment on campus.
When daily newspapers have engaged in dissent, it’s been accompanied by trouble.
For instance, The Arizona Republic‘s staff political cartoonist, Steve Benson, is staunchly anti-war. Even though polls indicate that his sentiments are a tiny minority, and newspaper coverage rarely gives voice to them — in fact, a Republic editor describes the paper as “relatively hawkish” — readers have protested, forcing from the editor a defense of the cartoons. In upstate New York, The Oneida Daily Dispatch ran a provocative staff editorial concerning the causes behind the World Trade Center bombing and the role of Israel in the Middle East. The paper’s two top editors were subsequently fired.
(The Dispatch editorial took up the question of the word “terrorism” and what it means. This is another question Americans don’t want asked or discussed because it provokes an uncomfortable examination of the civilian deaths caused by United States policies and the policies of its allies, such as Israel. When an Irish Times columnist broached the subject, one American e-mailed him: “We’ll be waiting to dispatch you to whatever afterlife you believe in.”)
Abroad, “the level of anti-Americanism sweeping the world is stunning,” and not just among Muslims. This is according to Anita Pratap, writing in Outlook India, the same magazine that publishes Arundhati Roy. “Images of shattered homes, fleeing refugees and fathers sobbing over the remains of their bombed children” — images not seen in the United States — “emblazoned American hypocrisy,” writes Pratap.
Although she calls the war a “justifiable crusade,” she blames American journalists for not engaging in the kind of discussion that might persuade others of that fact. “One has to turn to the Indian media to get the multiplicity of viewpoints that a contentious war like this provokes,” she bemoans.
Her point underscores something important: Dissent ought to be reported not because it is necessarily the correct position, but because the conversation it provokes is invaluable to our collective understanding of the war.
You maybe can’t argue with a crazy person, but does that mean we should ignore bin Laden’s message?
The fact that Osama bin Laden’s crazy is a no-brainer if ever there was one. Any man who would justify the horrible murder of 5,000 innocent civilians is certifiable. The problem is that the United States government and a complicit media have spent so much time and energy demonizing the man — a mission that is hardly necessary, under the circumstances — that his message to the world’s Muslims, a message that is, to many of them, quite persuasive, is being lost. With it is lost any opportunity to respond and so convince the world of the righteousness of U.S. policy.
“The White House seems to think that if it ignores bin Laden’s message, the message will go away,” writes William Saletan in Slate. “In the war for Muslim public opinion, we’ve become pacifists.”
Saletan argues that Bush’s summary of bin Laden’s motives are too selective and simplistic. While it is true that bin Laden and his cronies do not support American democracy (or, in Bush’s words, they “hate our freedom”), while also wanting to drive Israel out of the Middle East, it is also true that bin Laden makes other, more moderate, claims. In fact, bin Laden raises many of the concerns noted above, notably the killing of civilians during World War II, in Iraq and now in Afghanistan. Hypocritical? Sure. But when Osama bin Laden positions himself as the victim, he becomes very sympathetic to millions of the world’s Muslims.
Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets have complied with a Bush Administration request to not release bin Laden statements. And administration spokesman Ari Fleischer had this to say about one tape in particular: “The president saw the tape yesterday and his reaction to it is mostly that this is really not about Osama bin Laden; this is much broader.” Isn’t that a funny thing for the administration to admit to, especially one that has so demonized bin Laden, calling for his capture “dead or alive”?
“To say, as senators on television always do, that ‘the message is not getting out’ is a pathetic understatement of an extraordinary failure,” according to David Denby, writing in Slate. “The ‘message’ is completely in the hands of the fanatics … with nothing but tight-lipped or bland remarks offered in rebuttal from American officials, who act as if articulateness or eloquence were some weakness to be avoided.”
What are the ramifications of the Patriot Act?
To watch the nightly news is to be hardly aware of what the Patriot Act is. This antiterrorism legislation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, could “deny meaningful hearings to immigrants, minimize judicial supervision of electronic surveillance by law enforcement authorities and vastly expand the government’s ability to conduct secret searches.” So little has been written about the Patriot Act that it’s difficult to even research its precise provisions. What is clear, however, is that the media are quick to suggest that Americans aren’t — and, implied by a lack of coverage, shouldn’t — be worried.
FAIR pointed out one report on ABC where, “after reporting poll numbers indicating that many Americans fear losing their liberties to ‘the fight against terror,’ World News Tonight reporter Dean Reynolds managed to conclude just the opposite — that right now the calls for action are drowning out the second thoughts. As one veteran of World War II put it today, “if you have to violate freedom to protect the masses, go ahead and do it.'”
Ultimately, the ramifications of the Patriot Act could be the same as the ramifications of the current media coverage of the war: the loss of our freedom. Without proper discussion, we leave ourselves vulnerable to an unchecked government.
“The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can’t very well return without having fought one,” Arundhati Roy writes in “The Algebra of Infinite Justice.” “If it doesn’t find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.”
Leave it to an Indian to explain our freedoms to us. And sadly, leave it to The New York Times, et al., to deny her a voice.
