Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars?

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls “the frontier myth” — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America’s sturdiest national narratives.

Personal Post

Gallery

Images of a war and its toll: The eight-year U.S. military operation in Iraq, now winding down with the withdrawal of the last U.S. forces, produced these enduring images.

Video

The base's mortuary is under investigation for mishandling soldiers' remains, including dumping their ashes in a landfill.

When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as theIndians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplanwrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, “The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.”

Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military’s code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound? It was Geronimo.

The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture’s derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put these foreigners at risk of violence. President George W. Bush, to his credit, disavowed these wars as being against Islam, as has President Obama.

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

These attitudes have consequences. Perhaps the most important one — apart from the tensions created with the host governments, which have been quite vocal in protesting civilian casualties — is that indifference provides permission to our military and political leaders to pursue more interventions.

There are costs to our global reputation as well: The United States, which should be regarded as a principal advocate of human rights, undermines its credibility when it is so dismissive of civilian casualties in its wars. Appealing for international action on Sudan, Syria and other countries may sound hypocritical when our own attitudes about civilians are so cold. Korean War historian Bruce Cumings calls this neglect the “hegemony of forgetting, in which almost everything to do with the war is buried history.”

Will we ever stop burying memories of war’s destruction? More attention to the human costs may jolt the American public into a more compassionate understanding. When we build the memorial for Operation Iraqi Freedom, let’s mention that Iraqi civilians were part of the carnage. Count them, and maybe we can start to recognize and remember the larger tolls of the wars we wage.

tirman@mit.edu

John Tirman, executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies, is the author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.”

Read more from Outlook:

End of the Iraq war is end of American supremacy

Did the Iraq war have an iconic ending?

Friend us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.