The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  So, while President Bush carefully avoided making public appearances at Dover Air Force Base as the coffins were being unloaded (lest someone confuse him with Vietnam-era president Lyndon Johnson), much publicity was given to the way he met privately and emotionally—theoretically beyond the view of the media—with the families of the dead.

  In a sense, whatever proscriptions were placed on imagery of the dead, the American dead were all over. For one thing, no sooner did the Bush administration shut down those images than war critics, following their own Vietnam “lessons,” began complaining about his doing so. And even if they hadn’t, every newspaper seemed to have its own “wall of heroes,” those spreads filled with tiny images of the faces of the American dead, while their names were repeatedly read in somber tones on television. Similarly, antiwar activists toured the country with displays of empty combat boots or set up little cemeteries honoring the war dead, even while making the point that they should never have died.

  No less significantly, dying Americans were actually news. I mean front-page news. If American troops died in a firefight or because of a suicide bomber or went down in a helicopter, it was often in the headlines. Whatever else you knew, you did know that Americans were dying in the wars Washington was fighting in distant lands.

  A Premature Graveyard of American Inattention

  Well, that was Iraq, this is Afghanistan. That was the Bush era, these are the Obama years. And, with rare exceptions, the dead seldom make much news anymore.

  Now, except in small towns and local communities where the news of a local death or the funeral of a dead soldier is dealt with as a major event, American deaths, often dribbling in one or two at a time, are generally acknowledged in the last paragraphs of summary war pieces buried deep inside papers (or far into the TV news). The American dead have, it seems, like the war they are now fighting, generally gone into the dustbin of news coverage.

  Take the month of November 2010 in Afghanistan. You might have thought that American deaths would make headline news. After all, according to the website icasualties.org, there were fifty-eight allied deaths in that thirty-day period, fifty-three of them American. While those numbers were undoubtedly small if compared to, say, fatal traffic accidents, they were distinctly on the rise. Along with much other news coming out of the planet’s number one narco-state, ranging from raging corruption to a rise in Taliban attacks, they trended terribly.

  In understanding how this relative lack of attention was possible, it’s worth noting that the American dead tend to come disproportionately from easy-to-ignore, tough-luck regions of the country, and disproportionately as well from small town and rural America, where service in the armed forces may be more valued, but times are also rougher, unemployment rates higher, and opportunities fewer. In this context, consider those November dead. If you look through the minimalist announcements released by the Pentagon, you discover that they were almost all men in their twenties, and that none of them seem to have come from our giant metropolises. Among the hometowns of the dead there was no Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, or Houston. There were a range of second-level cities including Flagstaff (Arizona), Rochester (New York), San Jose (California), Tallahassee (Florida), and Tucson (Arizona).

  For the rest of the hometown names the Pentagon lists, from Aroostook, Maine, to Mesquite, Texas, whether they represent rural areas, small towns, parts of suburbs, or modest-sized cities, they read like a dirge for places you’ve never heard of unless you yourself were born there or lived in the vicinity. Here, for instance, are the hometowns of the six U.S. trainers who died in a single incident in late November when a “trusted” Afghan policeman opened fire on them: Athens, Ohio (pop. 21,909), Beaver Dam, Wisconsin (pop. 15,169), Mexico, Maine (pop. 2,959), Quartz Hill, California (pop. 9,890), Senoia, Georgia (pop. 3,720), Tell City, Indiana (pop. 7,845). Here, as well, are some, but hardly all, of the other hometowns of the November dead: Chesterfield, Michigan, Chittenango, New York, Conroe, Texas, Dalzell, South Carolina, Davie, Florida, Fort Smith, Arkansas, Freeman, Missouri, Frostburg, Maryland, Greenfield, Wisconsin, Greenwood, Louisiana, Mills River, North Carolina, Pago Pago, American Samoa, Sierra Vista, Arizona, Thomasville, Georgia, and Wyomissing, Pennsylvania.

  Back in early 2007, demographer William O’Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, which specializes in the overlooked rural areas of our country, crunched the numbers on the rural dead from America’s recent wars. According to their study, the death rate “for rural soldiers (twenty-four per million adults aged eighteen to fifty-nine) is 60 percent higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs (fifteen deaths per million).” More recently, sociologist Katherine Curtis arrived at similar conclusions in a study using data on U.S. troop deaths in Iraq through 2007. There’s no reason to believe that much has changed in the last few years.

  Keep in mind that a number of the soldiers who died in November 2010 had undoubtedly been in Afghanistan before, probably more than once, and had they lived (and stayed in the military), they would surely have been there again. The reason is simple enough: the full weight of the American war state and its seemingly eternal state of war lands squarely on the relatively modest numbers of “volunteers,” often from out-of-the-way places, who make up the American fighting force. Multiple tours of duty are now the norm.

  Given the modest attention focused on American deaths here in the United States, you might almost imagine that, from the Washington elite on down, Americans preferred not to know the price being paid for a war, already in its tenth year—and which the Obama administration has officially extended through 2014 for U.S. “combat troops” and possibly years beyond for tens of thousands of noncombat trainers and other forces who will be in no less danger.

  In October 2009, six months after the Pentagon rescinded its ban on coverage of the arrival of the war dead, in an obvious rebuke to his predecessor, President Obama traveled to Dover Air Base. There, inside the plane that brought the dead home, he reportedly prayed over the coffins and was later photographed offering a salute as one of them was carried off the plane. (Eighteen were unloaded that day, including three containing dead agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration.) It was a moving ceremony and, as Byron York, columnist for the conservative Washington Times, pointed out not long after, the president wasn’t alone. Thirty-five media outlets were there to cover him. Like so much in the Obama era, as York also noted, this particular post-Bush version of a sunshine policy didn’t last long in practice.

  Now that the dead can be covered, with rare exceptions few seem to care. For those who want to keep a significant American presence in Iraq, continue our war in Afghanistan until hell freezes over, and expand the Global War on Terror (stripped of its name in the Obama years but bolstered in reality), it’s undoubtedly more convenient if the dead, like their war, remain in those shadows. In the Bush years, the dead, despite bans, seemed to be everywhere. In the Obama years, except to the spouses and children, parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors they leave behind, they seem to have disappeared into the netherworld like the “shadows” we sometimes imagine them to be. In this, they have followed the war in which they fought to a premature graveyard of American inattention.

  Top Guns No More

  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 MiGs 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 United States had used its air sup
eriority 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 twenty-five 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.

  American “air superiority” in any war the United States 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 March 2011, for example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated: “There hasn’t been a U.S. Air Force airplane lost in air combat in nearly forty 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 eleven years since such a plane was lost due to anything but mechanical malfunction. Yet in those years, the U.S. military has remained almost continuously at war somewhere and has used air power extensively, as in its “shock and awe” launching of 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 fifty decapitation attacks, though 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

  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). 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 that, 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 that guarantees the American side quite literal, godlike invulnerability.

  War by its nature is often asymmetrical. 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 the secretary of defense to reporters covering our wars, no one here is likely to accept the taking of the “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. 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 the Predator, that sci-fi alien hunter of human prey, or a Terminator, that machine version of the same. 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.

  To take one example, among many, consider the story behind this New York Times headline: “Nine Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Killed by NATO Helicopters.” On March 1, 2011, in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, ten boys, including two sets of brothers, were collecting wood for their families 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. He 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.

  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. Visiting a hospital afterward, Karzai wept as he held a child whose leg had been amputated after being wounded in the attack.

  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 simply announced—and this is typical—that it was “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 UN statistics, Taliban fighters (via roadside bombs and suicide bombers) kill 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, puzzling over this, 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.