War Made Invisible: Exposing the Human Cost of US Military Operations | Book on Modern Warfare & Hidden Casualties | For Political Science Students & Peace Activists
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SKU:17357014
Product Description
An unflinching exposé of the hidden costs of American war-making written with “an immense and rare humanity” (Naomi Klein) by one of our premier political analysts“[War Made Invisible is] an antidote to twenty years of U.S. media malpractice and should be required reading for journalists and all those who long to live in peace.”—Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINKMore than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible, by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and what its consequences are, from military and civilian casualties to drained resources at home.From Iraq through Afghanistan and Syria and on to little-known deployments in a range of countries around the globe, the United States has been at perpetual war for at least the past two decades. Yet many of these forays remain off the radar of average Americans. Compliant journalists add to the smokescreen by providing narrow coverage of military engagements and by repeating the military’s talking points. Meanwhile, the increased use of high technology, air power, and remote drones has put distance between soldiers and the civilians who die. Back at home, Solomon argues, the cloak of invisibility masks massive Pentagon budgets that receive bipartisan approval even as policy makers struggle to fund the domestic agenda.Necessary, timely, and unflinching, War Made Invisible is an eloquent moral call for counting the true costs of war.
Customer Reviews
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.”
