This is my most recent post for the Xenia Institute, now featured at Dialogic Magazine.  I encourage you to take your comments to the original article at the Dialogic website.

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War is brutal and impersonal … If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war.

- Chris Hedges, columnist at TruthDig

Frame grabs from a video posted on WikiLeaks.org, showing a U.S. Army Apache helicopter firing on a group of people in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. UPI/WikiLeaks.org Photo via Newscom Content © 2010 Newscom

The fog of war has cleared to reveal a storm of controversy raging around the publication of a classified video footage of an attack by U.S. Army Apache helicopters against Iraqis in 2007. The air strike resulted in the wounding of two children and the death of at least a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. In Dialogic’s News and Analysis section, we took a look at the discussion from around the blogosphere. However, the narrative begs further discussion as to what it says about our society and culture.

While the responses to the attack range from moral outrage to unqualified support, I want to highlight a middle voice. Anthony Martinez, writing at his personal blog, A Look Inside, gives us his response to events of the video. Claiming his experience as both an infantryman on the ground as well as hours spent at consoles directing aerial traffic in Iraq, he offers what I feel is a thoughtful and mediated response to the events of this helicopter strike:

All in all, the engagement clearly went bad. I would have objected when I was a private first-class pulling triple duty as an RTO, driver, and vehicle gunner. I would have objected when I was a sergeant working well above my pay-grade as the Brigade Battle NCO. My assessment is based on my experiences in that very theater of operations. I did not see a threat that warranted an engagement at any point. I did, however, see the elements indicating such a threat could develop at any moment. (note: As I did, in fact, already know several things about the situation when I viewed this footage I cannot say with any certainty that had I viewed the exact same footage at the time of the incident that I would not have concluded the camera was an RPG as well.) People can make their judgements however they wish, but what is clearly visible is not the entire picture.

In my non-professional tactical opinion, I tend to agree with Martinez. The threat wasn’t imminent, but there was definitely the potential for one to develop. This is the fog of war — the complexities of modern warfare* that this video reveals to us. The new battlefield fails to provide a clear enemy or even limit itself to a bounded “field of battle,” choosing instead to spill into the ambiguity of urban areas where combat zones and homes occupy the same place; where insurgents and innocents routinely wear the same clothing. War no longer takes place on the grand battlefields of some bygone “Stratego” age of Napoleonic armies facing off in remote locations with colorful uniforms and flags to clearly delineate friend or foe, civilian or military. Writing for The American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias puts the problem on the ground into perspective:

It’s not that our troops are bad people. It’s that war is dangerous. The consequences of not pulling the trigger when you think you see someone swinging a rocket launcher in the direction of your helicopter are extremely severe — you die. Your friends die. On the flip side, the consequences of being a bit too trigger-happy are, of course, terrible for the people who wind up dead and bad for the mission but not so severe for you personally.

In a way, this video reminds us of the brutality of the wars in which we as a nation are engaged. A caller’s comments on Talk of the Nation highlight the unfortunate surprise we seem to receive every time the gruesome experience of war comes home to confront us and our relative safety. When asked by host Neal Conan what he had learned from the video, the caller responded:

Well, I guess I – what I think mostly, it’s how far removed we are from that world and how it isn’t on our radar and basically, how I feel we bury our heads in the sand and we don’t hear about it. And when something like this comes out, it’s very clear that things are going on that we’re not really tied into.

What the caller describes as a type of head-in-the-sand ignorance, Tom Engelhardt at Tomdispatch.com equates to a form of Olympian arrogance. Noting that we as a nation have not lived the experience of war in our own neighborhoods, he discards the argument that we suffer from a failure of imagination, describing it instead as a failure of empathy, driven by romantic notions of our role in the world:

We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes — “collateral damage” — when they are the norm, not the exception, not what’s collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best (of values and intentions) to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves … while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.

Military personnel are trained to create psychological distance between themselves and their enemies, providing them with the ability to override their natural refusal to kill a fellow human being. Perhaps we at home suffer from our own form of distance, removed from the harsh realities of warfare. Aided by Yglesias’ charge that this new type of warfare shields the public from its harsh reality, we may be seduced by a more sanitized understanding of combat, where terms like “collateral damage” damage hide the stark reality that people are dying. Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent elegantly describes the inelegance of war and how it is represented to us back at home:

Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief element of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn … This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining. And the press is as guilty as Hollywood.

It is this artful narrative of war that is undermined by the ambiguous reality presented in leaked videos such as this one. We are allowed to see the messiness of the battlefield, a place where cameramen mingle with combatants, that frustrates the myth of war as a glorious and good. Instead of a necessary evil that occasionally leads to “collateral damage,” we learn that war is always marred by indiscriminate violence. This video reminds us that we cannot neatly package our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into a simple, sanitary box and push it into the recesses of our minds. Instead, videos like this remind us that the price of war is always more than we bargain for.

The question that confronts us now is: how do we respond?

Will we continue to bury the real price of war between our incessant debates between left and right, hawk and dove, conservative and liberal, as people continue to die in our name? Will we chastise these helicopter pilots for making crude jokes and callous remarks in order to ignore the thought that day in and day out, our soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen continue to suffer the dehumanization of combat because we sanction it – or worse, because we demand it? Will we continue to deny the connection between our national self-interest and our rapacious appetite for resources and wealth that implicates us in the deaths portrayed in this video, along with countless others?

Or will we overcome our ignorance, set aside our arrogance, and grasp our inherent agency to become peacemakers and work toward a just and equitable world where we might put an end to our need for violence and war?

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* In reality, we should probably be using the term postmodern warfare given that combat now blurs the clear boundaries of the modern nation-state. Combat takes place between large, militarized nations and small, covert insurgent groups that claim no certain political nationalities and do not play by what they see as the arbitrary geopolitical “rules” of the modern era.