Review: Evaluating our militant empire
(iStock)“If we take an examination of what is understood by happiness…it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.”
-Jonathan Swift
Norman Solomon is a distinguished media critic and the author or co-author of more than a dozen books. In his latest work, War Made Invisible, he examines the variety of ways we are so often uninformed or misinformed by our mass media’s coverage (and non-coverage) of wars and their legacy of destruction. Since 9/11, the problem has only worsened.
Solomon takes as his starting point a line from Joan Didion written in 2003, two months before the United States invaded Iraq: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.” He comments that in this one sentence, she captured “a calcified set of assumptions that few mainstream journalists were willing to question.”
Norman Solomon: “The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention.”
Perennial complaints about our mainstream media fall short of what Solomon identifies as their repeated support of U.S. militarism and war, “yet news reporting guides public outlooks.” Defense spending, he writes, falsely “equates military operations with defense.” The United States spends more on its military than the next 10 ranking countries combined and has 750 military bases around the world, “compared to no more than three dozen for Russia and five for China,” and these inconvenient facts point to something more than defense: “The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention.” Consequently, aggressive American intervention in various countries is rarely questioned.
When reporting on U.S. wars, the mass media tends to underreport or omit details. “What we don’t see and hear,” Solomon writes, “might be the most pernicious messages of all.” Peacemaking becomes difficult when “U.S. troops and their commanding officers loom large, while the people they kill and wound have no stature.” The carnage of the Gulf War in 1991, for example, became “mass entertainment back home, with unpleasant aspects tastefully omitted.”
It might seem naïve to expect the media not to focus on U.S. military success or to pay more attention to opposition casualties, but as Solomon shows, the fawning over successes that involve mass slaughter of civilians reveals a lopsided sense of reality. He notes that Katie Couric of the “Today” show praised Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as “virtually flawless” just days after an American missile struck a civilian shelter, killing over 400 people, most of whom were burned alive. Most often, the media complacently accepts such horrors, echoing the Pentagon euphemism “collateral damage.”Media consumers are trained not to expect coverage of U.S.-inflicted damage and casualties, even if occasional images make it through, like the horrifying 1972 photo of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl who had survived being burned by American napalm.
Occasionally a reporter raises questions that disrupt the media’s near-unanimous war support. On Feb. 3, 2022, a Washington Post report of a successful “counterterrorism strike” in Syria added that it killed 13 people, including six children and four women. But “by midmorning, the focus had changed dramatically,” Solomon writes, reporting instead that “This horrible terrorist leader [the head of the Islamic State] is no more.”
Further downplaying the earlier report, “throughout the day, administration officials only talked about two children” and blamed their deaths on terrorists. Solomon cites the pointed observation of Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies that the “so-called ‘global war on terror’ has, from its origins, been characterized by attacks by U.S. Special Forces, by airstrikes, by armed drones and more that routinely kill far more civilians than the targets identified on the ‘kill lists’ prepared by presidents and top White House officials.”
War coverage makes it “easy to forget that people are really burning.” This forgetting is assisted by news organizations that “often resemble a fourth branch of government.” A departure from the standard war coverage may occasionally appear, yet “the impacts of propaganda are not undermined by exceptional departures from the usual boundaries,” Solomon writes.
Solomon traveled to Baghdad at one point with the foreign correspondent Reese Erlich, who subsequently wrote, “I didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the U.S. and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” When he raised the “issue of sovereignty...they look as if I’ve arrived from Mars.” Erlich commented further, “The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, from having reported in dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting.”
Americans are likely to find little in mass media about conditions in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan after U.S. troops leave, even though war’s “enduring effects are just getting started.” For example, Solomon notes, when asked “if he felt ‘any moral obligation to help rebuild [Vietnam],’” President Carter dismissed the idea: “Well, the destruction was mutual.” In Afghanistan, the United States showed the same disinclination “to resuscitate or rebuild it.” Sanctions remained in place even as starvation set in. When the government finally donated $308 million “in humanitarian aid,” it meant, as Solomon points out, “eight dollars per person in a country already beset by widespread starvation...way too little and too late.”
When 48 Democratic representatives urged President Biden to do more in the face of the famine in Afghanistan, he unfroze $7 billion in Afghan assets but diverted half of it for “relatives of 9/11 victims,” even though, as a commentator wryly observed, there was not a single Afghan on any of the 9/11 planes. While U.S. media outlets generally took the government’s response to the famine in stride, one online news and investigative source, The Intercept,headlined its coverage as “Biden’s Decision on Frozen Afghanistan Money Is Tantamount to Mass Murder.” Solomon makes judicious use of such alternative information sites.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were more than faulty judgment calls; they were “premeditated and hugely profitable aggression,” Solomon writes.
After 20 years of the “war on terror,” “for those paying attention, the U.S. government’s credibility had badly eroded,” he writes. It will not do “for journalists to toe the war line for years and then finally report, in effect, Now it can be told—years too late.” Even when mainstream news organizations eventually called the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 “a gross foreign policy blunder,” it had little effect, because “such framing evades the structural mendacity that remains built into the military-industrial complex, with its corporate media and political wings.”
The American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq consisted of more than faulty judgment calls; they were “premeditated and hugely profitable aggression,” Solomon writes, adding that “there is little evidence that the underlying repetition compulsion disorder has been exorcized from America’s foreign policy leadership or mass media, let alone its political economy.”
In the book’s closing pages, Solomon recounts a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg, the protagonist of the story of the “Pentagon Papers,” in 2021. Sitting outside his house on a balmy autumn day, Ellsberg wondered if things would suddenly change if Americans were better informed. He said he “was not optimistic” and pointed to something beyond the problem of mass media and war. What Americans don’t realize, he said, “is that they are citizens of an empire, they are in the core of an empire that feels itself as having the right to determine who governs other countries, and if we don’t approve of them because of their effect on corporate interests, or their refusal to give us bases...we feel absolutely right and capable of removing them, of regime change.”
Solomon seems somewhat more optimistic. Still, he ends with a blunt quotation from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Militant Empire,” in the February 2024, issue.
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