You Can’t Put a Number on Lives
By: CJ Smith ‘25
American surgeon Samer Attar described the horrors of conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. “There were obliterated faces, disemboweled bellies, dismembered bodies, and chest wounds with collapsed lungs— all hallmarks of injuries from powerful ballistics.”
Right before spring break, I wrote an opinion piece in The Exonian about the global geopolitical impacts of the war in Ukraine, especially as it relates to increasing tensions among emerging and longstanding global superpowers. However, my piece abstracted human suffering from the merciless fighting and terror that overwhelmed civilians, and it contributed to an issue that represents a larger trend in society. We now tend to forget about war for what it truly is, instead viewing it only from the perspective of those it least affects, which leads to the downplaying of civilian deaths in some regions more than others, and increased apathetic outlooks towards the atrocities of war, which gives instigators power to continue this vicious practice.
The lens through which we look at wars is one of the most subtle yet pervasive biases that has spread throughout mainstream media today. As is the case in many of the conflicts both now and of the recent past, most attention goes to the instigators of the battles, not the war-torn places they use like playgrounds. Since the beginning of the Cold War, proxy wars have ravaged countries primarily in the global South, where the U.S. and the Soviet Union turned small skirmishes into major battles by bolstering dictators and revolutionaries alike. Nowadays, regional superpowers push the same wars, with increased economic sanctions and cyber warfare to make conflicts more destructive. Yet, the way we view conflicts has become diluted with increasingly abstract messaging about how war can further goals of certain countries and is necessary in the long run to spread peace. Not only is this message fallacious as I’ll explain later, but it turns public opinion in favor of conflicts and creates a moral hazard of removing atrocities from the narrative of war.
Russian airstrikes have ravaged Syria since the mid 2010s after several global superpowers began taking sides in a once-minor conflict between Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad and Syrian rebels. And we shouldn’t forget the other three failing, puppet government states in the Middle East: Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. It’s likely that you’ve heard more about atrocities in Ukraine in the last two months than about atrocities in any of these places in the last five years. In the media’s eyes, Ukraine is seen as much more relevant, the “hot opening salvo in a global conflict between the free world and a bloc of dictatorships,” as Wall Street Journal commentator Adam O’Neal puts it. None of this is to take away from the amazing investigative reporting on Ukraine, but for the last five years, Russian airstrike after airstrike has struck Syria, Yemen has suffered one of the world’s worst famines, and immense civil war has crushed Iraq, all while very little reporting on the human suffering in these places has become mainstream.
Why? It’s simple: the Middle East is both rich in many resources, most notably oil, and also in the opportunity to make a narrative. That narrative, one of toppling dictatorships, spreading democracy, and eradicating terror, especially in a post Sep. 11 world, helps foreign powers latch onto those resources through public approval of vast military budgets. Simply put, there is no NATO, no EU (European Union), and no explicit enemy threatening the safety and well-being of people in any of these places. Instead, the region is characterized by vague threats to western civilization as a whole. Evaluating the impacts of war on countries based on the amount of resources they hold puts some peoples’ stories above others. And when those stories reflect the chaotic shaking of buildings, the sounds of gunfire and artillery in the air, and the despair and mournfulness which smolder the atmosphere, this imbalance in attention puts some peoples’ lives above others. For nations that claim to spread peace and democracy, they attempt to instill it in very different ways depending on the country. And just like Vietnam and Central America during the Cold War, superpowers today usually leave the country in a much more precarious situation than they found it, setting up failed states, puppet governments, and the terrorist groups they say more military funding will keep at bay.
The 1920s brought the war on alcohol, the 80s brought the War on Drugs and Poverty, and the early 2000s brought the War on Terror. Branded as an attempt to hunt down the masterminds behind Sep. 11 and to prevent the spread of autocracy in the Middle East, the War on Terror turned into an almost two-decade long slog, with the U.S. failing to accomplish its strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq after killing Osama bin Laden. The Cato Institute notes that the U.S. did not succeed in rebuilding these already delicate states, writing that “Afghanistan and Iraq have become even more corrupt since the United States began pouring in resources.” (Cato, 2017) Instead, Islamic terrorist groups have sprung up in the unstable pockets of the region, and the U.S. and China continue to support proxy warfare in the Middle East by supporting the two regional superpowers of Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively. And not only did terrorism and corruption increase after the invasion, but the wars took a devastating toll on not just citizens of the region, but also on U.S. veterans, who suffered tragic physical and mental health problems upon their return home. The Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal in the summer of 2021 proves further that hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives resulted only in Afghan peoples’ loss of freedom, especially for women. Remaking countries in their own image invites global superpowers to disrupt already teetering states. And the radicalism they hoped to soothe, the autocracies they hoped to topple, the perfect democratic states they wished to build all collapse under the rubble that surrounds civilians caught in a war they never asked for.
I am someone who is guilty of looking at wars only through the perspective of how it affects those who instigate it. I could do this because I have the privilege of looking at these conflicts from a far-away distance, as a thought in the back of my mind. The data recorded of casualties in wars will never do justice to the victims of unjust crimes. It instead serves a narrative that war produces long-term beneficial outcomes for those who start it, all while masquerading as a ploy to increase democracy— and with it, power. The imbalances among people who have their stories told versus the people who don’t can be solved only through increased attention and care towards human suffering in places that have never been put in the spotlight. So if you see the number of victims of the next conflict in Syria, or Lebanon, or Libya, or Yemen, think of the stories behind the numbers, the stories that, hopefully one day, will be told.
