A remarkable thing happened in the last few years: the United States swung from a sizable majority opposing marriage equality (gay marriage) to a sizable majority supporting it — a full 20 percentage-point swing.
A new report from the Republican National Committee recently argued that Republicans need to drop opposition to marriage equality if they have much hope of remaining a mainstream party, largely because marriage equality is seen as a “gateway” issue for most younger voters — the future of the party.
This is an astounding — and beneficial — shift in national sentiment and political alignments.
But this essay is not about marriage equality because that battle has been won. To be sure, much remains to be accomplished before we enjoy full marriage equality here in the United States, but the writing is on the wall: before the decade is out we will almost certainly have full marriage equality in most, if not all, states.
This essay is, rather, about a new rights movement that desperately needs attention, what I call “foreign civil rights.” The speed with which marriage equality gained mainstream acceptance — in just a decade, essentially — gives me hope that a similar effort could result in far more respect for foreign civil rights.
But what does this phrase, foreign civil rights, mean?
By foreign civil rights I mean raising the awareness and concern in our country for the rights of people in other countries. The fight to respect fundamental human rights has a long history and there is a global infrastructure in place to do what it can to ensure that fundamental human rights are respected — with very mixed success, unfortunately.
Foreign civil rights focuses, rather, on education of the populace in powerful countries like the United States about the civil rights of those in other countries. The objective of the foreign civil rights movement should be to change the national debate about acceptable projections of national power, whether it’s U.S. power or other nations at issue.
The most basic foreign civil right is the right to stay alive. Access to food, clean water, shelter and medical care are extremely important foreign civil rights, but the right to stay alive precedes these in importance.
I’ve followed foreign policy debates for more than 20 years and I’ve always been disturbed by the degree to which civilian casualties in U.S. and other nations’ conflicts are downplayed or ignored.
Even now, 10 years after the Iraq War, in which the United States used “shock and awe” tactics to take out Saddam Hussein and subdue an entire country, discussions of lessons learned rarely focus on what should clearly be the most important issue: the degree to which our actions in Iraq led to large numbers of civilian deaths and other suffering. The right to stay alive precedes all other human rights.
The number of civilian deaths and casualties that have occurred is certainly debatable. But what is not debatable is that our illegal invasion of Iraq did in fact result in very large numbers of civilian deaths.
Everyone would agree that it is tragic and regrettable that 4,500 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in this “war of choice.” That’s a lot of people to have died for a mistake. Everyone would also agree that 30,000 U.S. soldiers incurring some type of serious bodily injury in Iraq is extremely unfortunate. But all too often the list of tragic outcomes from our war of choice in Iraq ends with these enumerations, or mentions as an afterthought the Iraqi civilian deaths that have also resulted.
Even accepting that, practically speaking and acknowledging that human compassion extends more naturally to those closer to us, I don’t understand how we can, collectively, seem to simply ignore that our war in Iraq has resulted in at least 110,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, according to Iraq Body Count, a count based on media reports only, and probably far more.
How is this not relevant to the national discussion?
A number of reports have looked at civilian casualties in Iraq. The first major report was published in the British peer-reviewed medical journal, The Lancet, in 2006. It found that there had been about 650,000 “excess deaths” in Iraq from the 2003 invasion until 2006. This means the research team did its best to calculate the average death rate in the years preceding the invasion, the death rate in the three years after the invasion (based on numerous interviews in every province of Iraq), using standard epidemiological standards, and then to compare the death rates.
The report did not distinguish between those killed by U.S. troops or other causes of death, or between civilians and armed Iraqi forces, so this is not an apples to apples comparison to the Iraq Body Count numbers, which are based on news reports of civilian casualties only. Rather, the Lancet report looked only at the excess deaths over a three-year period. These 650,000 excess deaths, in just three years, should of course be attributed to the U.S. invasion because they wouldn’t have happened without our invasion.
Another study, by Opinion Research Business, a British polling firm, found an even higher number of excess deaths, more than 1 million. This report was not peer-reviewed.
WikiLeaks documents revealed in 2011 that the U.S. military tallied about 100,000 deaths from incidents involving U.S. troops, in total, with about 66,000 of those labeled as civilian deaths. One academic who has analyzed the Wikileaks data in detail, concluded that this data very likely represents a massive under-reporting of deaths. The reasons should be obvious: how would the U.S. military collect casualty information from air raids, artillery fire, drive-by shootings, etc.?
Even if civilian deaths “only” amount to 100,000, the enormity of the damage our country did in Iraq should still be obvious.
Again, the right to stay alive is the most fundamental of civil rights, so it is my hope that discussions of civilian deaths and casualties in Iraq and other countries will eventually lead to broader discussions about the acceptable use of military force.
This discussion is still highly relevant because we are still fighting wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and many other countries, primarily through ongoing drone warfare. While President Barack Obama rightly called the Iraq war a “mistake” and campaigned heavily against the wisdom of the war on his way to election in 2008, he has pursued more aggressive drone war policies than President George W. Bush ever dared to do.
Civilian casualties, and casualties more generally, are certainly far less in drone warfare than traditional modes of war; yet, civilian casualties are still very high in relation to the alleged benefits. And, increasingly, top-level policymakers and soldiers are decrying the drone wars we’re waging as actually harmful, not helpful, to our broader effort to increase security.
Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, stated recently, after a controversy about the constitutional limits of Obama’s ability to wage drone warfare erupted in the mainstream media: “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes … is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”
Similarly, former Obama counterterrorism adviser Michael Boyle has described drone strikes as counter-productive, saying that the “adverse strategic effects … have not been properly weighed against the tactical gains associated with killing terrorists.”
So our ongoing aggression around the world, in the name of fighting what is more of an ideology than an organization, known as al-Qaeda, is not only producing huge numbers of deaths, dislocations and fear, it is in fact very likely entirely counterproductive to the objective of increasing U.S. security.
How do we increase knowledge of foreign civil rights in our country? Foreign affairs is famously irrelevant to national elections unless we are actually embroiled in a major war. And it seems that U.S. citizens pay less and less attention to foreign affairs. There are many major positive developments, however.
The increasing interconnectedness of our world is one such positive trend, and it may become the trend that trumps all other trends. My feeling is that increased global connectivity — both real and virtual — will ultimately create a feeling of shared identity and shared security that will counter much of the indifference we currently see when it comes to foreign civil rights.
When we travel to other countries, experience those different cultures, meet people with very different lives than us, most of us can’t help but feel more compassion for those people. When we meet new friends in other countries even virtually (social media can, as with many fields of human activity, be transformative here), we learn more about those cultures, again engendering increased compassion.
We should also work hard to improve grade school and college curricula when it comes to global awareness. I attended Eleanor Roosevelt College at UC San Diego, one of five schools, which comprise UCSD, that has an international focus. I enjoyed it greatly and, combined with my frequent travel, learning and my early life (until age 9) in the United Kingdom, I’ve always had a more internationalist outlook than many native-born Americans.
I’m doing my part to improve global awareness through my activities with Worldhealer (I’m on the board), a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit organization focused on teaching life skills to children in developing countries and teaching global awareness here in the United States, at all educational levels.
I am a firm believer that knowledge breeds understanding breeds compassion. This is an ongoing, incremental process. But sometimes incremental change can transform into sudden change — as we’ve seen in recent years with societal acceptance of marriage equality.
Let’s all do our part to transform the drip-drip-drip of global awareness into a flood of concern about foreign civil rights.
— Tam Hunt is a Santa Barbara lawyer and writer, and blogs at Thought, Spirit, Politik. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.