http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0409-03.htm
Orwell Would Revel in 'Collateral Damage'
By Hussein Ibish
Published on Monday, April 9, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times
Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to be executed May 16, has
solidified his position as the poster boy of cold-blooded villainy.
The Oklahoma City bomber has once again outraged the American public
when he described the 19 dead children among his 168 victims as
"collateral damage" in an interview.
Although it scarcely seemed possible, this appalling comment has made
McVeigh an even more despised figure in American society. It produced
widespread and justified expressions of revulsion and anger at his
lack of regard for even the most innocent of his victims.
There is no doubt that McVeigh is an exceptionally malevolent and
brutal criminal. Yet the rest of us may not be as distant from his
propensity to rationalize the killing of innocents as we prefer to
believe. All too often, good people allow themselves to believe that
the end justifies the means, that "war is hell." Or they find some
other means to dismiss the deaths of those who did nothing to deserve
being killed.
It is worth recalling where McVeigh got this chillingly antiseptic
phrase "collateral damage." It was coined by the Pentagon during the
Gulf War to describe the deaths of innocent Iraqis during the massive
bombing campaign in 1991 and was an attempt to obscure and rationalize
these deaths through Orwellian jargon.
"Collateral damage" during the Gulf War included, in only one
instance, 313 people incinerated at the Amiriya bomb shelter in
western Baghdad, which was deliberately attacked.
When asked about the extent of Iraqi casualties toward the end of the
Gulf War, then-military Chief of Staff Colin Powell blandly remarked:
"That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in."
Indeed, it is not a matter that has ever seemed to concern too many
Americans. The same applies to the effects of sanctions on innocent
Iraqi civilians over the past decade. Asked by an interviewer if the
deaths of 500,000, not 19, Iraqi children because of sanctions could
possibly be justified, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did
not dispute the figure or the causality, but instead simply remarked:
"We think the price is worth it."
McVeigh was a gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle during the Gulf War
and told his relatives that "after the first time, it got easy" to
kill Iraqis. It is possible that by invoking the awful phrase
"collateral damage," McVeigh is not only repeating a rhetorical device
for denial he learned in the military service, but he is actually
taunting the government, and even society at large, for its own
propensity for callous indifference.
"Collateral damage" also was invoked to describe the effects of
attacks on civilian passenger trains, refugee convoys and the
headquarters of Radio Television Serbia during the war in Kosovo.
And who remembers, or ever even cared about, the night watchman killed
during the missile attack on the Shifa factory in Sudan, a facility no
one now denies was simply making badly needed medicines, not chemical
weapons?
Of course, these psychological defenses are not confined to U.S.
society. They approach a depressing universality. To take another
example, the process of rationalizing the deaths of innocents is
clearly evident on both sides of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli
conflict.
Objections from Americans that the Gulf and Kosovo wars were "just,"
from Palestinians that liberation must be achieved "by any means
necessary" or from Israelis that they must ensure their security "at
all costs" merely illustrate how the process of rationalization
actually works. Once we begin to accept the pernicious notion that the
ends justify the means, a callous moral blindness is the inevitable
result.
In our tendency to rationalize and accept the killing of innocents,
there may be more of McVeigh in most of us than we would care to
admit.
Hussein Ibish is communications director of the American-Arab
Anti-discrimination Committee.
Copyright (c) 2001 Los Angeles Times
