When it comes to America’s endless war on terror, Norman Solomon takes no prisoners. Mainstream journalists come under relentless fire. No recent American president escapes his sights.
In a new book, Mr. Solomon argues that the U.S. government, enabled by its cheerleading media handmaidens, has devalued and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the years since 9/11. It has done so while scarcely acknowledging the existence of the victims, much less their pain and suffering, he writes.
“War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine” is the Inverness author and activist’s 13th book. It makes a case for conciliation over conflict and for acknowledging that America’s own militaristic adventures deprive it of the right to make sweeping moral judgments about those of others.
“What happens at the other end of American weaponry has remained almost entirely a mystery, with only occasional brief glimpses before the curtain falls back to its usual place,” Mr. Solomon writes. “America has been conditioned to accept ongoing wars without ever really knowing what they’re doing to people we’ll never see.”
Mr. Solomon is a progressive journalist, a former candidate for United States Congress, the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy and a co-founder of RootsAction.org, a political organizing website with 1.2 million subscribers. He will discuss his new work in a Zoom conversation sponsored by Point Reyes Books on July 11.
Mr. Solomon assails President George W. Bush and virtually the entire political establishment for whipping Americans into an us-versus-them frenzy after the 9/11 attacks and quickly launching a war in Afghanistan. The media aided the incitement, he writes, scarcely questioning the wisdom of the war. Then, they acted as cheerleaders when President Bush embarked on an illegal war in Iraq that was based on the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
He discusses a U.S. missile attack that struck a Baghdad shelter and killed 408 civilians. “Most of the people who died in the attack were burned alive,” Mr. Solomon writes. “Days later, NBC Today host Katie Couric informed viewers that Operation Desert Storm ‘was virtually flawless.’ Meanwhile, critics of the war were persona non grata in televisionland.”
Mr. Bush’s dishonest wars have been succeeded by ongoing campaigns of drone warfare and secret counter-terrorism operations conducted by Presidents Obama, Trump and Biden, Mr. Solomon writes, each of whom has signed off on ever-expanding defense budgets.
Speaking with the Light this week, Mr. Solomon, who made numerous trips to Moscow as part of his anti-nuclear activism in the ‘80s, praised American journalists for their detailed coverage of the human costs of the Ukraine War. But he asks why the victims of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere haven’t received the same compassionate coverage.
“We tacitly have been successfully encouraged to view some human beings as precious, and others as disposable,” Mr. Solomon said. “The victims of the War on Terror are virtually invisible, and their humanity is essentially discounted.”
The failure of the U.S. and its allies to pursue a diplomatic solution in Ukraine has brought the world perilously close to the precipice of nuclear war, Mr. Solomon said.
“The United States is simply pouring in vast quantities of weapons while foreclosing any support for negotiations,” he said. “The two nuclear superpowers are on a collision course. Where does this all lead? Plausibly, it leads into exterminating the lives of approximately 99 percent of the people on the planet from nuclear winter.”
The Zoom conversation hosted by Point Reyes Books will be held on July 11 at 5 p.m. For more information, go to https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/norman-solomon-virtual.