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June 1, 2022 13 Comments on War as Terrorism: Conflicts We Can’t Win, Suffering We Don’t See This is suffering that numbers can’t capture, but it should remind us that war is a form of terrorism.
By Andrea Mazzarino / TomDispatch
Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as “collateral damage.”
We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? In that era when the only foreign conflict most of us knew about was the 1991 U.S. tromping of Iraq, mainly an air-power war from the American point of view, we certainly didn’t think about what we would now call war crimes. It might have been cause for a therapy referral if one of us had taken a G.I. Joe and pretended to shoot a child, whether armed with a suicide bomb or not.
Having lived through more than a century and a half of relative peace in our homeland while fighting endless conflicts abroad, only in the past 20 years of America’s post-9/11 war on terror, waged by U.S. troops in dozens of countries around the world, have some of our children begun to grapple with what it means to kill civilians.
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