Tomgram: William Astore, The Face of War (Don't Look!)

[Note for TomDispatch readers: For the last year or so, Timothy MacBain -- with one of the great soothing voices around -- has been producing top-notch audio interviews with TomDispatch authors at a rate of one or two per week. Today, TD is posting his latest interview, with retired Lt. Col. William Astore on what it felt like to come out of the military and learn how to write honestly about wars. You can hear it by clicking here or download it to your iPod, here. I just wanted to remind TomDispatch readers that, given MacBain’s growing archive of your favorite TD writers, you can be listeners here, too. Don’t miss a chance to check out the Astore interview and others. They’re special.

By the way, one small note: In response to a reader in Japan, we’ve added the icon for the Japanese Amazon store to those for the U.S., British, and Canadian ones -- and in the process I’m just reminding TD readers that, if you’re going to Amazon anyway, why not do it through any book link at this site or any of those icons? (To find them, look to the right of the main screen and scroll down.) We get a small cut of your purchase at no extra cost to you and it does add up! It’s a nice way to contribute regularly! Tom]

You’d think that people always seeking “lessons” from war would draw one from our latest wonder weapon, which fights our wars for us without an American in sight. I’m talking, of course, about the drone aircraft that have, in recent years, become a signature form of American war-making. They represent truly advanced technology, with ever newer generations of them in production and on the drawing boards, ones that might some distant day be able to fight actual Terminator wars more or less on their own.

The drones already in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and perhaps other zones of conflict are now celebrated in Washington for their special “precision” in taking out enemies. Like all such weapons, however, they look so much more precise to those using them than to those on whom they are being used. They are also only as good as the intelligence that sends the missiles and bombs towards targets on the ground, which means that such weaponry will always, repetitively, kill innocent civilians (and sometimes only them). Don’t be fooled by the stories that invariably describe the latest drone attack as taking out so many “suspected militants.” It ain’t necessarily so.

Our precision weapons look different indeed if you happen to be under them, as the headline of a recent Reuters article makes clear: “Drones spur Yemenis' distrust of government and U.S.” Yes, Virginia, ever since the underwear bomber headed from Yemen Detroit-wards and threw this country into a paroxysm of fear, your advanced weapons systems have been buzzing the skies of that country and evidently firing missiles as well. “Suspected militants” have died, but so have civilians. ("Now children and women are terrified and can't sleep... people are haunted. They expect the next strike to hit the innocent and not the fugitives...") While enemies are certainly being assassinated, enemies -- undoubtedly more of them -- are being created. And as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore points out, Americans know next to nothing about all of this. We are generally as cosseted from our wars -- and the world they are helping to create -- as the pilots who fly such aircraft from Langley, Virginia, or Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, “warriors” whose most dangerous moments are caught in an on-base sign that warns pilots at Creech to “drive carefully” on leaving after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq. This, it says, is “the most dangerous part of your day.”

There are lessons to be learned from all of this, but not by Americans, not right now anyway. When Astore focuses on how isolated we are from the wars Washington fights in our name, he’s on to something deep and degrading. It should be a lesson to us all. Tom

The New American Isolationism

The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities

By William J. Astore A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war’s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.