War Made Invisible
By Norman Solomon
The New Press
240 pages, $24
A popular anti-war slogan during the Vietnam war, “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,” hoped to encourage young men to resist the draft. The draft ended 50 years ago and today’s war makers rely on volunteers. Now, to avoid any criticism from the home front, our political leaders have to make the country’s conflicts “invisible,” or to be more precise, have to hide the human toll that it produces. That’s not hard to do as both Republican and Democratic administrations—war is a bipartisan endeavor—have the mainstream media not only on their side, but they share the same bed. In “War Made Invisible,” Norman Solomon, author of 12 books and a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic conventions, pulls no punches in bringing the military-industrial-media complex to light.
In clear, accessible language, and in less than 250 pages, Solomon details the ways in which the media accepts the premises of America’s wars—fighting for democracy, intervening humanely—and hides the horrific fate of its overseas victims, most often people of color in Asia or the Middle East. Beyond that, the media often fails to report on many of the places where the U.S. military is bombing. According to Brown University’s “Cost of War” project, since September 11, 2001, that list includes 22 countries in four continents.
After the chaotic and deadly U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021, President Biden stated at the U.N. that the U.S. was no longer at war, rendering invisible the role of U.S. troops stationed in Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere.
The arms industry—Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, et al.—has spent $285 million in campaign contributions and $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades. A lot of money, but a worthwhile investment, given that Pentagon contractors have received $7.2 trillion (2021 dollars) over that time period. With hardly a dissent, Congress has easily passed these bloated military budgets year after year. With the same near unanimity, the mainstream media accepts the numbers and all administration rationales for those amounts.
As a case study of the media’s almost unquestioned support for war, Solomon examines the coverage of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Less than two months before the massive bombardment began, New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote that the U.N. weapons inspection team probably wouldn’t find “irrefutable evidence that an enemy is amassing weapons of mass destruction,” but “the Iraqis are highly experienced in the craft of ‘cheat and retreat.’” Leaving any doubts aside, he concludes that not invading “will be the most dangerous option of all.”
Solomon is more direct. He writes that Remnick’s “clarion call for the United States to invade Iraq was a strong note in an orchestrated push for war,” as was his power over the magazine’s articles that “vehemently favor[ed] an invasion—including pieces promoting false claims of ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda …”
Cheerleading for illegal wars seems to bring no shame or accountability as Remnick still edits his influential magazine. The same goes for New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who called the Iraq war “one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad …” Even before “shock and awe,” in the late 1990s, Friedman used his prestigious position at the Times to advocate “bombing Iraq, over and over and over again … Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who’s in charge.”
Contrast the treatment of war hawks like Remnick and Friedman with Phil Donahue, who hosted anti-war guests on his popular MSNBC show. The network fired Donahue three weeks before the Iraq invasion because, as a leaked document stated, “the show could become ‘a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.’” Only one narrative, it seems, is allowed.
It turns out that the general policy of the mainstream media’s reluctance to photograph the human victims, the carnage of war, comes with exceptions. With the Russian invasion and assaults on Ukraine, the American press led with headlines and graphic photos of civilian casualties. One study pointed out that, in a single month, April 2022, The New York Times published 14 front-page stories about Russian-inflicted civilian deaths, while in a “comparable period,” after the U.S. “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, the newspaper of record managed just one story on U.S.-inflicted civilian deaths.
In perhaps Solomon’s most powerful chapter, “The Color of War,” we see that the Ukraine coverage reflects not only a desire to paint our enemy (i.e., Russia) in the worst negative light, but displays a willingness to value white lives over others. After just a week of wall-to-wall news coverage of the invasion, El-Tayyab, from the Friends Committee on National Legislation, called out the U.S. media for “blatantly displaying racism by only adequately covering a war between white people” while making “coverage of wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia, etc.” virtually invisible.
Solomon interviewed Daniel Ellsberg in 2021. They discussed the power of seeing photographs of the victims of war, and Ellsberg remembered that, in response to September 11, The New York Times ran a photo of everyone who had been killed in that attack along with human interest stories about each of them. Ellsberg went on to “[i]magine if the Times were to run a page or two of photographs of the (Iraqi) people who burned on the night of ‘shock and awe’” along with stories about their lives. “Of course it’s never happened—nothing like it.”
Towards the end of his book, Solomon refers to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” Riverside Church speech in 1967, as relevant as ever now, more than a half century later: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” With the military budget eating up 51 percent of federal discretionary spending, less and less is available for needed social programs.
Here’s another “imagine”: What if the media publicized, in concrete, understandable terms, what ordinary Americans could gain with significant cuts in the Pentagon budget? One of the valuable sources that Solomon uses, the National Priorities Project, allows us to see the kinds of “trade-offs” we could have for cuts in the military. Let’s take Berkshire County, for example. During the last fiscal year, over $296 million of the federal taxes county residents paid went directly to the military. If that were cut in half, the savings would fund about 1,300 registered nurses for a year, or pay for the yearly costs of more than 15,000 public housing units. Imagine if all the media outlets in the county headlined these trade-offs and made visible what the costs of war are in diminished health care and homelessness?
Norman Solomon has written a book for our times, but one that will likely be made invisible by The New York Times and other mainstream sources. Hopefully, word of mouth and alternative media will spread his vital message.
