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Why Americans Believe Only American Deaths Count in Iraq

Nationalism can be a vicious disease, and an infectious one, too. It can take all sorts of forms, and its most destructive strains can surely sneak up on any country. Just think of the tens of thousands of German Jews--German nationals--who refused to believe what was happening, even after Kristallnacht and the ghettos, until the trains arrived at Dachau. We know well from this past century what sentiments intense nationalist fervor can ignite among a country's people, but we have yet to learn deeply those lessons after two "great" wars, hundreds of so-called conflicts and countless millions of young men, women, and children dead. It's striking how rarely we talk about the most recent abuses of nationalism as well as the genocides--attempted eliminations of groups considered impure or unwelcome in a society--they engendered, in Bosnia or Rwanda, for example. Shouldn't the ones we read about firsthand logically instill the most compassion, the most closeness? We say never again while it happens under our knowing gaze. And yet Americans are not fully immune. Think of the violent attacks on, and illegal detainment of, thousands of Arabs and Muslims after September 11, 2001. Never again?

The U.S. government, harking back to some mythologized splendor of the revolutionary era, has long favored using the rhetoric of patriotism over that of nationalism--often to deem who, and what, is and isn't "American"--even though historically and today those in power define the two concepts as one and the same. While dissenters have been identifying this sly manipulation of terms since the colonial days, somehow most of us fall back on the government's chosen meaning, wishing upon its version, albeit foolishly and romantically, what it meant to a Sam Adams or a Thomas Paine. But the differences between patriotism and nationalism are significant, and we must not conflate the terms if we wish to make the world less brutalized by war, our society less open to the kind of fear, whether brought on by poverty and unemployment, or by "the foreigners" and "the communists" (or today's "the terrorists"), that the most destructive forms of nationalism feed on.

The privileging of American lives over those of other countries--soldiers and civilians--is one important way the U.S. government (and a corporate media biased in its favor) displays its nationalistic tendencies through the guise of the rhetoric of patriotism. Moreover, this act of valuing Americans over non-Americans has arguably been a key factor not only in garnering public support for subsequent military ventures but also in fogging the horrible reality of war: that individuals suffer greatly on both sides. It so happens that America's past is chock-full of wars, headliners and covert ones, "good" and "bad." From the 1902 "liberation" of the Philippines to the 2003 "liberation" of Iraq, tens (and sometimes even hundreds) of thousands of civilians died (and continue to die) by U.S. bombs and guns. Hardly do these deaths enter the American popular imagination, our cultural narrative, or our commemorations of war.

Take Vietnam, for instance. Important as it is to recognize the nearly 60,000 Americans who gave their lives in that war, where is any acknowledgement in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial of the two to three million Vietnamese, each also with a name, who got caught in a carpet bombing and were incinerated by napalm? My argument is not that the horrors of war didn't happen to U.S. troops, but more so to point to how our selective recounting of the human casualties of war--so-called collateral damage--plays a critical role in how we both construct the past in our cultural memory and understand current issues based on that memory.

If in comparing the Iraq war to Vietnam, as more and more people are doing both successfully and unsuccessfully, we only refer to the two wars' American deaths in drawing our parallels, we privilege American lives and in effect display a dangerous form of nationalism, and perhaps our racism, too. An April 18 New York Timeseditorial by historian Niall Ferguson, on why American should embrace its imperialism for the good of Iraq, did just this. Disregarding the devastation done to both the Vietnamese and the Iraqis, he showed how fewer troops had gone over to Iraq over a certain time frame and that fewer had died there thus far. Furthermore, he continued, the popularity of the Iraq venture is already weakening, whereas the Vietnam War had public support until the late sixties. Ultimately, he argues, the two wars are in fact quite different. While one can accept Ferguson's central claims as to the wars' distinct differences, if one could also imagine a conversation between Vietnamese and Iraqi civilians now dead from the sort of bombing he describes with sardonic pith ("It wasn't pretty"), they would surely disagree.

Before the U.S. can enter the international community as an equal partner we must cease to misguidedly equate a passion for our country's founding ideals--forgotten, or perhaps never understood, by our current leadership--with valuing our nation, culture and people over another nation, its culture, and its people. There's no place in this world for American exceptionalism, yet we continue to embrace, espouse, and teach this belief. Most high school history textbooks, for instance, continue to talk of the twentieth century as "the American Century," rather than viewing history as a composition of multiple stories, experiences, and perspectives. Labeling any span of humankind's life on this planet as distinctly "American" should give the world some insight into how we see ourselves, and how we want everyone else to see us.

And yet if what you learned in school didn't stick, we have the president of the United States to model this arrogance. After the gruesome beheading of American contractor Paul Johnson by Al Qaeda members in Iraq on June 18, President George W. Bush stated, "There's no justification whatsoever for his murder, and yet they killed him in cold blood." Was the killing of a dozen innocent Iraqis hours later by a U.S. missile gone awry justified? Were they not killed "in cold blood"? Since when were America's methods of war crimes (incidents of the "missile miss" sort have become a regular occurrence these days) deemed by experts the "right" way to murder? If we are to create any peace in this world, all killing must be viewed as "barbaric," the president's description for the beheading. For whatever the means, the ends are the same: the deaths of wives, husbands, and children.

After Johnson's murder, the U.S. government and corporate media loudly expressed their outrage, just as they did after the beheading of Nick Berg. Surely enough, like after the Berg case, alongside the understandable anger came a sort of bewilderment, a response of, How could they do this? While the question is not surprising, it is a sad commentary that so many Americans, even those who have been speaking out against the occupation, can be so sickened by a single murder of one of us though we seldom express a true concern for the innocent Iraqis killed daily, not just anti-administration criticism. But who can blame us? There's no special news segment for each of those people, nothing about their good nature, sense of humor, devotion to family. Yet this is even more reason to make an extra effort to think about what we have failed to remember throughout our history: American families are not alone in asking the question above. In fact, American war deaths over the past hundred years have comprised but a small fraction of the millions. To privilege our own is to dehumanize the others.

I am not defending Berg's and Johnson's murders or belittling their lives. But at this point, we cannot even count the number of Iraqi families whose innocent mothers and daughters have met the same fate, but instead by our so-called advanced weapons. Recent estimates by human rights groups say the number of Iraqi civilians killed since March 2003 is pushing 10,000. The U.S. government refuses to compile a list, and name even one of those Iraqis. In other words, their lives don't count.

The president continued his statement of June 18: "And it should remind us that we must pursue these people, and bring them to justice before they hurt other Americans." Perhaps for many Americans watching on television, or reading these words in the paper, little seems strange. Of course our president wants to protect us. But imagine you're a Thai soldier. Or you work for the British embassy. Or you're an Iraqi who deeply believes in the possibility of democracy, who remains hopeful. Or perhaps you're Kim Sun-il, the South Korean hostage in the days before his life was taken on June 22. Would you not likely wonder, Who does the U.S. government, the coalition leader and self-proclaimed prophet of freedom for Iraq and the world, really value? Am I as a soldier, a worker, a person, worth less because I'm not American?

In President Bush's eyes, the answer seems to be yes. And judging from the American-centric reportage of the increasingly consolidated mainstream corporate media--which millions of Americans solely rely on for their information--the answer also seems to be a firm yes. And if we look back at how we remember (and misunderstand, and misuse) the past, in our national memorials in Washington (our dead), in our school textbooks (our century), and in our popular imagination--in other words, in our cultural memory--that same answer is affirmed time and time again. Manifest destiny, the notion that America has a unique duty to spread its superior beliefs, values, and systems (our culture) and that this is divinely determined, is not a relic of the past, but undoubtedly infuses our foreign policy thinking (and military enterprises) today. Like the administration's rhetoric of patriotism, the "do-gooder" language of liberation, democratization and humanitarianism encrypted in this foreign policy has never been so replete with such flagrant and, in the case of Iraq, transparent, political and philosophical contradictions. It's about time we humbly climb down from our egregiously high horse, take a look around, and recognize we've forgotten our history. Or maybe we're simply remembering it all too well.