In all of the foreign conflicts that the USA has gotten
into, civilian deaths are usually high. Nick McDonell begins his story by
staying in a hotel in Erbil where the other foreign press are staying. Enjoying
a third-rate luxury hotel with the name – I kid you not – The Classy Hotel, is
not a way to understand hat’s really going on. The US press are all lounging
together, and the local reporters, who know the inside stories, aren’t getting
published in US papers.
The author, while posted to Iraq, goes to meet an army
colonel, who turns out to be not in the army but in civil defense. The
colonel’s job is to locate the dead, but he’s faced with two problems; first,
the regular army get in the way, and second, the army are not much good at
keeping the people alive anyway. Few people care about civilian dead, until a
wealthy influential man is killed and a lot of people want him recovered.
Throughout the book, Iraqi troops cower in wrecked vehicles,
in ragged uniforms, low on everything, while officers are treated like princes
(typical of third-world armies.) If nobody cares about the troops, then why
would the troops care about civilian deaths? In a country where record-keeping
is not that great, there isn’t much accurate data on civilian deaths and the
families are lucky to get compensation. The author uses as an example an Iraqi
civilian guard at a US base, who was paralyzed in a shooting, and got $7,000.
As for the services for disabled people in Iraq, there basically aren’t any.
The problem with this book is that the title says “American
Wars,” but the book focuses mainly on Iraq. What about the other wars where
civilians got killed? There were a sizeable number of civilians killed in
Panama, Somalia, Desert Storm, and the bombing of Belgrade where the Chinese
embassy was hit. Did the families of the dead receive any compensation? The
answer is most likely no.
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