Derrick Jackson of the
Boston Globe has thought-provoking op ed this morning entitled
A look in the mirror for America. I caution that it will offer a challenge that some, the day after the attacks, might not yet be prepared to hear. And after yesterday's brouhaha over the diary Armando deleted, I recognize that there is some danger in my posting about this diary.
I think if you read the whole piece, you will grasp why I have posted it. Jackson begins with several paragraphs where he repeats words by Bush yseterayd and at Fort Bragg, Balir and Prime Minister Martin of Canada yesterday, all decrying the death of innocents. Jackson then notes
It was all appropriate in the moment. In a greater context, there is a tragic hollowness. The world, of course, shares the sympathies of Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who said the London bombings were a ''despicable, cowardly act." Yet every invoking of the innocents also reminds us of our despicable, cowardly killing of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Some will say that now we should not talk about anything else except the terror that has just occurred, which did not target the military or the political leadership of Britain, but sought to strike at the British people. And some will question why one who posts primarily on education will consider this an appropriate posting by me. You may already be turned off by the final sentence in the paragraph quoted above.
And yet part of the function of a teacher is to provoke others to think, to try to understannd why. The title of Jackson's piece has the image of a mirror. Can we by looking in that mirror in some small way see ourselves and our actions Iraq and Afghanistan as others see them?
Jackson's next paragraph confronts us directly with the issue:
Or perhaps you forgot about them. That was by design. We have rightfully mourned the loss of nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. We have begun mourning the loss of about 40 people in London. We have mourned the loss of 1,751 US soldiers, who, bless them, were following orders of their commander in chief. But to this day, there has been no major acknowledgement, let alone apology, by Bush or Blair for the massive amounts of carnage we created in a war waged over what turned out to be a lie, the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
He reminds us that our military has deliberately not offered us an accounting, giving us statement by two military military leaders:
''We don't do body counts," said both General Tommy Franks, former Iraqi commander, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. When Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt was asked about the images of American soldiers killing innocent civilians on Arab television, Kimmitt said: ''My solution is quite simple: Change the channel. Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda. And that is lies."
And perhaps Gen. Kimmett was right, in that we don't deliberately target civilians, although there is some independent evidence to the contrary. And certainly it is has not been just Arab television that has presented the world with pictures of widespread destruction of civilian areas. For example, was everyone in Fallujah a terrorist or supporting a terrorist? What about our refusing to let ambulances in, to let men of fighting age out, our destroying of the hospital? What accounting did the admininstration offer us?
Jackson writes
The United States waged its own war of propaganda by refusing to conduct a legitimate, authoritative, honest accounting of the deaths of innocent civilians. As it urged people to change the channel, the Bush administration cut off all channels to finding out what we did to women, men, and children who were shopping, working, or leaving their mosques. In an invasion based on falsehoods, the truth of the civilian carnage might have been too hard for Americans to take, and support for the war might have ended in the first few weeks.
Jackson says that the absence of this coverage in the United States allowed Bush to change his justification for the war from WMD to liberation of the oppressed. He notes
It is a lot easier to tell the world you are their great liberator if you do not have to own up to the thousands of dead people who will never get the chance to vote in that free election. It sounds a little bit like people who say African-Americans should be thankful for slavery because they are no longer in Africa.
By now many readers might have turned from Jackson's piece in anger. That would be a mistake, for in his final paragraph he clearly makes the point of his writing this column:
Worse, this denial of death, in a war that did not have to happen, is sure to fuel the very terrorism we say we will defeat. The innocents in the so-called war on terror are always ''our" citizens or the citizens of our allies. The only innocent Iraqis are those killed by ''insurgents." Our soldiers clearly did not intend to kill innocents. But this posturing of America as the great innocent, when everyone knows we kill innocents ourselves, is likely only to make us look more like the devil in the eyes of a suicide bomber.
Let me repeat a key point in that final paragraph that is likely to get lost in the furor and emotional reaction many will have Our soldiers clearly did not intend to kill innocents. That is very different than the intent of those who flew planes on 9-11 or planted bombs in Bali, Manila and yesterday in London. But our unwillingness to acknowledge the innocents we have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, either as 'mistakes" or "collateral damage", will continue to fuel anger against us and steel resolve to continue resisting us as much as yesterday's terrible attack will certainly not cause the British -- who survived the Blitz and many terror attacks by the IRA - to weaken their resolve.
We can and should mourn for those who died yesterday. But we cannot ignore the death and suffering that our actions have causes, and we should also mourn the deaths that have resulted from our actions. Do not those lives also matter?