The wars

Bob Herbert had an excellent column yesterday about how Americans have seemingly put out of mind the gruesome reality of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Near the end, though, he makes a point that I've been thinking about lately:

If we had a draft — or merely the threat of a draft — we would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan. But we don’t have a draft so it’s safe for most of the nation to be mindless about waging war. Other people’s children are going to the slaughter.

My intuition is that there is a lot of truth to this. War has been decoupled from its awful costs: no one's child will be forced to die overseas, and no one has even paid any extra taxes to keep the war effort going. More than that: news about the wars isn't very prevalent in the press. And even when there is a story concerning the war, it is presented in a detached, sanitized manner, with graphic images and human grief left out of the story. Instead of melted bodies and panicked civilians running for cover we get video game stuff: military men making decisions, maps with arrows, footage of jets taking off.

Since the costs of the wars aren't registering with the American people, there is no real effort to get serious about evaluating their benefits. The common American is afforded the craven luxury of cheerleader nationalism: fighting wars just to win them, chalking up more victories for our big nifty war machine, shaming the hell out of any hippy killjoy who questions or protests what is going on. Pundits get to thoughtfully frown and discuss Serious Issues, politicians get to solemnly pledge to Defend the Nation. But it's all so terribly gruesome, and all being borne on the backs of so terribly few.

(Photo used without permission from this site, which contains many extremely graphic images from the Iraq war.)