Norman SolomonWar Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine

We have heard the term “war on terror.” What the author shows us is that the White House, Pentagon, and Congress can simply use this as “a political license to kill and displace people on a large scale in at least eight countries, rarely seen, much less understood.” For example, the humanity of the people who died on 9/11 “loomed so large that the humanity of Iraqi people would be rendered invisible.” UNICEF estimated that 500,000 children died as a result of sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s. Since 9/11, the Cost of War project at Brown University estimated the death toll from wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere to be between 987,000 and 929,000. What most don’t realize is that during this century, the “Pentagon has killed far more civilians than al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have.”In the next chapter, the author makes an interesting analysis. Thousands of American outlets devoted news coverage to Russia’s war in Ukraine that would have been unthinkable while reporting U.S. warfare. To probe too deeply and illuminate human suffering would be too much of a threat to the careers of reporters and for the media institutions. It is noted that the business of war and the business of news are thoroughly intertwined. There is a name for this: the military-industrial-media complex. The author has observed that the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting. Let’s take Afghanistan. The total coverage “amounted to an average of twenty-four minutes per network, per year, for a conflict on which the U.S. has spent $2.3 trillion of the public’s funds.” This statement sums it quite nicely: “The warfare state of the United States maintains its grip at home while militarism is euphemized, accepted, and internalized, and honored with silence if not praise.” And take the Iraq war. There were 4484 U.S. dead and a whopping 32,200 wounded. The cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom is pegged at $806 billion. The author made another interesting observation that “just about every targeted or untargeted victim of U.S. warfare in the twenty-first century was a person of color.”After two decades of the “war on terror,” at least 929,000 lives have been sacrificed on all sides, mostly on the other side. This includes 387,000 civilian deaths and 7,050 American soldier deaths. As the author notes, what we have here is a strong “willingness of Americans to want to feel good about the American Dream and their reluctance to confront the American Nightmare.”

In a searing indictment of the US war machine, author Norman Solomon lays much of the blame for decades of carnage–from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia–at the door of the media: ABC, NBC, CBS, the cable news networks, the New York Times and Washington Post-all stenographers for the Pentagon, which has yet to pass an audit because, hey, money is missing.“U.S. media support for the “war on terror” has been as perpetual as the “war on terror” itself,’ writes Solomon, who in one of the most chilling passages, describes how he traveled to Iraq three times shortly before the US invasion left an estimated one million Iraqis dead and wounded, their country’s landscape littered with depleted uranium dust from coated US tanks. “Eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant along the Tigris River, under the same stars that might be seen anywhere on Earth, couples and small groups of diners sat at a dozen candlelit tables; the dusk filled with laughter; I stared and thought about how terribly fragile it all was.”The fragility of a starlit night turned to bomb-lit horror–be it in Kosovo, Baghdad or Beirut--can be blamed not only on the media–which fires journalists who ask too many probing questions–or on successive presidential administrations, from Clinton to Obama to Trump to Biden–but on an underlying belief in US exceptionalism.Toward the end of Solomon’s meticulously detailed look at the invisibility of US wars, he turns to Daniel Ellsberg, the great Pentagon Papers whistleblower, for insight. “... it’s not difficult to deceive them (US public) … you’re often telling them what they want to believe–that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality.”As Solomon’s critique of propaganda suggests, the first step in making war visible, in resisting an empire with 800 military bases and an endless “war on terror,” is to tell the truth, to show the face of war, to face the truth of a war-mad empire, and then act in defiance.

When I say it was difficult I refer to the to the over all message about the complicitness of the pentagon and the "legacy media" in covering up the reality of the so called war on terror. For those of us who follow this, nothing was really a surprise. The US has about 170 military bases in 80 countries in the world and had small deployments of 173,000 troops in 159 different countries as of July 2021. Iraq and Afghanistan are only the tip of this spear. So when we include drone attacks we are killing people all over the globe that the American public is unaware. For every innocent noncombatant we kill "by mistake" we make another America hating potential terrorist not to mention the grief and suffering of families.

A brilliant and devastating dissection of how mainstream U.S. news media have glamorized American militarism and concealed the crushing human costs of our forever wars. Solomon forces us to confront the delusion-driven propaganda narratives that have enabled the hyper-militarization of U.S. foreign policy, short-circuited basic human empathy for the innocent victims of our wars, and pushed us ever closer to self-immolation and nuclear annihilation. An incisive, beautifully written corrective to our longstanding national infatuation with war and weaponry, and a bracing antidote to what Dr. King called "the madness of militarism."

We must understand the economic underpinnings of our continual wars and the media's role is supporting what results in killing civilians "over there" and ruining families "over here".Also, please take the online course Ending War 101 offered by the Rotary Action Group for Peace and World Beyond War.

Excellent ; well researched and articulated essay. Writing is punchy. I was pleasently surprised by this book.