Depraved indifference

The clear, crisp morning of Sept. 11, 2001 saw a cruel kind of devastation visited on New York City. Fireballs, plumes of black smoke and tons of debris circulated in the air as innocent civilians perished by the thousands.

It was no doubt a terrible day, and one that made Americans of all political stripes genuinely mourn the loss of innocent life and feel the pain of the victims' families.

About one month ago in the Iraqi town of Aitha, a cruel kind of devastation also clouded the sky with black smoke and flying debris. The victims were members of an extended Iraqi family - four women, three men and seven children were obliterated when an F-16 fighter from the United States Air Force dropped a 500-pound bomb on their home, apparently by mistake.

This, too, was a terrible day - there are many in Iraq - but the events of Jan. 8 went largely unnoticed, as do a vast majority of the civilian deaths in Iraq. At minimum 15,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq, but that's just the bodies that have been counted by journalists. The magazine The Economist estimates 40,000 civilians have died since the U.S. invasion began; the medical journal Lancet guesses the number is close to 100,000.

But most of the Americans who felt pain on Sept. 11 don't feel much of anything when they hear of civilian deaths in Iraq, which they only hear about on rare occasions the mainstream U.S. media bothers to report them.

The U.S. military may not be specifically targeting civilians, while terrorists do so exclusively. But innocent civilians die in both cases, and we accept the deaths as necessary - we don't do body counts, and we don't mourn the deaths of innocent Iraqis. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are engaging in a global war, and they both find civilian deaths acceptable.

Far more civilians have died in Iraq than were lost here three years ago. The amount of innocent civilians we have killed is at minimum six times more than Osama bin Laden has achieved, according to independent reports by journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why are people so comfortable with this large number of innocent deaths, especially when it's being done with their tax dollars and in their name?

Are Iraqis like the family killed on Jan. 8 less innocent than Americans working in the twin towers on Sept. 11?

Do their deaths matter less because their skin is a different color, or because they speak a different language or worship a different god?

Or are their deaths simply acceptable because they are unfortunate collateral damage that comes with the territory of our foreign policy goals?

I would hope the answer to all these questions is no, but for many Americans, the answer seems to be yes - otherwise, popular support for the war and by extension these civilian casualties would not be so high.

One cause the public's indifference is that the media simply does not report these casualties. For certain, many Americans would horrified over Iraqi deaths if they actually saw them up close, as they did on Sept. 11. Perhaps that's exactly why the deaths are not reported.

Simple vocabulary can also account for some of this shocking indifference. In the minds of most Americans, there is a clear difference between deaths as a result of "war" and deaths that result from "terrorism." But what is the real difference? Author Arundhati Roy says that terrorism is just the privatization of war - whether attacks are carried out by governments or individuals, bombs are bombs and dead is dead.

Accepting innocent deaths in war because it's war is a dangerous mentality for a nation to have, just as it's a dangerous mentality for individuals to have. Timothy McVeigh told interviewers he knew innocent people would die in Oklahoma City, but that he treated it as acceptable "collateral damage" to his plan of sending a message to the federal government. This was an attitude McVeigh said he learned as a soldier in the Gulf War, when his unit would shoot and kill Iraqis regardless of whether they were being attacked.

Just as this mentality warped McVeigh, it can warp our nation. The destruction of innocent life is terrible, but indifference to the deaths is equally as depraved.