Will President Elect Obama Offer Real Change in Wartime?

In his victory speech on November 4, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama appealed to our best selves, reminding us of an America acting from a sense of moral principle, an America that seeks to redress injustice at home and tyranny abroad. He called us to face our current crises from a shared sense of moral purpose. But I wonder whether he intends to address a crisis of massive proportion that continues in the current military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The crisis centers on civilian suffering in war. From a global perspective the evidence of systematic devastation of civilian noncombatants is compelling. Studies show that war's weakest participants are its greatest victims. In fact, civilian noncombatants die in far greater proportion than do combatants in wars of all kinds. The United Nations reports that civilians accounted for approximately 75 percent of war deaths in protracted conflicts occurring in the years from 1985 to 1995. And combat fatalities represent a small proportion of the total mortality that results from life-threatening conflicts that warfare generated.

A 2005 study confirmed that the majority of conflict-related deaths occur off the battlefield, typically from disease and malnutrition. For example, only six percent of the total 2.5 million war-related deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo were combatants.

U.S. military leaders often describe civilians as "objects" and their casualties as "collateral" to war's primary forces. From a militaristic perspective warfare is not "theirs" to win or lose. The plight of civilians constitutes an aspect of war that is, presumably, universal, timeless, and uncontrollable. And the polarizing rhetoric of "us against them" and "their gain is our loss" reinforces an indifference to the plight of civilians in war.

This militaristic perspective masks an anti-civilian ideology in which civilians are cast through the lens of the instruments of war. In this framing civilians are characterized as frictions to war's machines, collateral to their efficiency, and systematically eliminable to the military progress of "civilized" nations (see von Clausewitz). Just below the surface of war's rhetoric is a radical objectification in which civilians are treated as mere material bodies, atomized into isolated units, and alienated from their own (social) humanity.

Two days before Obama's victory speech, the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, spoke about the devastation that coalition forces brought to his country: the bombing of an Afghan wedding party in October and a similar episode in August in which 90 civilians were killed. He could also have mentioned the fact that more than 4,000 Afghan civilians have been killed by coalition forces since the beginning of the so-called war on terror.

Is the U.S. military leadership prepared to take responsibility for such crimes and apologize to Afghanistan, the combat soldiers, and the American public? Clearly, the true test of America's commitment to moral principle will be shown in public acts of forgiveness and in meaningful commitments to stop killing war's weakest participants.