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Iraq casualties do not change U.S. public opinion

By Linda Colley

WASHINGTON, APRIL 14. It is the faces that you notice first. Every weekday evening now, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the top news slot in American public broadcasting, closes in the same way. In total silence, and one after another, it shows the name, age, and photograph of every newly declared U.S. military casualty in Iraq.

Almost all are male and under 23. Some pose awkwardly in brand-new uniforms; others look dashing and proud. Many of the dead faces are half-hidden by the black-and-white peaked U.S. marine cap. It is a sombre, moving ritual and it takes time to recover and start analysing just what is being shown on your television screen — and what is not.

The most glaring omission is that here, as in Britain, the media hardly ever broadcasts the details of Iraqi casualties. If the Iraqbodycount.net website is correct, there are now some 11,000 of these, with women, children and the elderly all well represented among the fatalities. Yet we are rarely allowed to see these particular dead faces. There are other concealments too, much less important perhaps, but no less eloquent about the kind of war this is.

The dead U.S. servicemen commemorated on the Lehrer show seem, at a superficial glance, to be a multifarious constituency. They come from virtually every State, and from all of America's ethnic groupings. But, as one begins to digest the details flashing up on the screen, a pattern emerges. America's soldiery, like its war dead, comes disproportionately from its southern States, and from its aspiring poor — both white and black.

This speaks to the sort of society early-21st-century America has become. In recent decades, it has been more successful and proactive than western European states in providing opportunities for ambitious and educated blacks and women. (If you doubt this, just ask yourself how long it is going to be before a black woman is as prominent in foreign policy-making in a British Cabinet as Condoleezza Rice is in George Bush's administration.)

On the other hand, since the 80s, the U.S. has devoted far less effort than most European Governments to eradicating poverty. Incomparably rich, it contains within its boundaries millions of poor people with few prospects or state perks. For these Americans, especially in the agrarian, conservative south, military service is a lifeline, even if it sometimes leads to violent death.

The huge U.S. military installations (all called forts) that exist in most States, but that cluster in the south, are well-provided, insulated worlds to themselves. The eight forts in Texas and Georgia, for instance, hold together some 100,000 troops, as well as tens of thousands of civilian aides and family members.

Each fort has its own schools, hospitals, dentists, shopping malls, bowling alleys, pools and houses of a style and size most of the men and women within its guarded walls could only dream about outside. Here, the American dream is on offer to a sector of the population that could otherwise never hope to share it.

What this means is that the U.S. has engineered for itself in the present what most successful empires in the past have striven to create: a highly professional, self-conscious and privileged military caste that is substantially cut off from the doubts and distractions of civilian society. This is why predictions that the sharp rise in U.S. casualties in recent weeks must of necessity result in large-scale American disillusionment with the war are way off the mark.

Naturally, Americans grieve for their warrior dead. But since — in sharp contrast with Vietnam — there has been no draft, the U.S. military is just too cut off from civilian experience, and also too privileged, for these kind of losses by themselves to cause widespread and lasting revulsion at the war. Moreover, I come back to the point that most U.S. soldiers are from the poor. By contrast, most of the decision-makers in Congress and the Senate are rich. Few have military histories or relatives in the armed services.

It is not individual soldiers dying in Iraq so much as growing doubts about the judgment, effectiveness and truthfulness of the President, George W. Bush, and about the war's purpose, that are currently leaching support from his administration. For the first time, a poll has put the number of Americans who are unhappy about the conduct of the war as higher than the number who still felt it was going well.

Another display of faces on the Lehrer show last week — live, talking heads this time — was eloquent about this increasing sense of unease. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was interviewed along with his Democratic shadow, Senator Joseph Biden.

Instead of sparring over the war, the two men were in striking and uncanny agreement that — as Biden put it — ``I don't know what the plan is.''

Evident, indeed, in some American political and media comment in recent days has been a grim and growing recognition that acts of imperial assertiveness can be costly and chancy, not just for those on the receiving end, but also for those who engage in them.

It is all too easy to assume that empires at their peak simply impose dominance, but history shows that they often get caught out. In 1920, the British, too, sought to use their military superiority to quell ``insurgents'' in Iraq, and as a result implanted lasting hatreds there.

They, too, sought to train up a professional Iraqi army — which promptly became a hotbed of anti-British Iraqi nationalism. —

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