The war in American hearts and minds

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11 - 9 - 2006


Andrew Stroehlein, an American-born journalist who has worked in war zones around the world, returns to his homeland to find that the "conflict mentality" he has encountered in other global regions has taken root in the United States too.

The conflict mentality that has taken hold of disturbingly a high proportion of the American public has had a cascading effect on US politics, US foreign policy and thus the rest of the world. The war they believe they are engaged in is far larger in their collective imagination than the very real war in Iraq, where Americans are actually dying, and which the overwhelming majority of people back home can treat as a distant affair requiring no sacrifice on their part.

This war is the big one - the "war on terror" as it was quickly labelled in 9/11's aftermath. It is for many Americans an existential war which people feel threatens every individual American personally. It is a global conflict, of which Iraq is either (depending on one's political preferences) just one part or a distracting sideshow.

From a purely rational and detached perspective, such a sentiment sounds completely misplaced, if not downright loopy: the day-to-day life of most Americans does not seem to have changed much at all since 9/11, not a single American has been killed by terrorist action in the US since 9/11, and there are none of the visible privations associated with a population face-to-face with war. Yet, that is the prevailing mindset, and I hear Americans talking like the Serb father and the Kosovo Albanian journalist with startling frequency.

Perhaps this belief in an existential war stems in part from the fact that relatively few Americans alive today - Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq notwithstanding - have lived through a "real" war. But the major reason is the unprecedented national trauma of 9/11 itself, and this is something not very well understood outside the US - at least not in Europe, including Britain, my adopted home. Immediately following 9/11, the entire world had enormous sympathy for America's loss ("we are all Americans", said the newspaper headlines); but after five years, the world has moved on. America hasn't.

more . . . http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=3&debateId=77&articleId=3890


Stirring Up The Dust At Ground Zero (9-11-2006)