The Saturday headline in the Wall Street Journal was: "Anti-U.S. Mobs on Rampage."
The next day, a NATO airstrike killed eight women collecting firewood in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an event that garnered virtually zero mainstream U.S. headlines.
Somewhere in the gap between these two phenomena -- the overheated news about our violent, irrational enemies in the Middle East and the silence surrounding our war and occupation of the region -- lies American politics, values, the presidential race, the national identity. Beyond that gap lies the truth about who we are, and only when we have access to it does the future turn into creative possibility and peace become possible.
The conventional wisdom we're fed in the mainstream media takes into account only the fear -- the hysteria -- implicit in the Wall Street Journal headline. The story, by Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee, goes on to tell us:
The regional furor, coming just three days after an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other workers, underscored Washington's diminished ability to influence a region where a number of governments newly elected during the so-called Arab Spring have minimal control over their restive populations.
"In many cases," the story continues, "the political leaders and security forces within these new governments have proved unwilling, or incapable, of challenging the protesters and radical Islamist groups that have gained greater license to take to the streets."
In other words, the Middle East is archaic, volatile, "restive," a region full of religious fanatics easily manipulated by cynical leaders. Almost anything -- an idiotic 13-minute film clip on YouTube for "Innocence of Muslims," for instance -- can set off their murderous fury. The new governments that replaced the old autocracies can't control such people. And now, tragically, several Americans are dead.
As the story progresses, the thesis slowly hardens into fact. Finally, ka-boom:
Whereas Arab violence generates adrenalin-pumping headlines and is mostly reported outside any serious context -- e.g., the U.S. devastation of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Koran burnings, the ongoing drone assassinations -- the violence that emerges from U.S. policy is softened with so much context it's often a struggle to figure out if anything happened at all.
For instance, the NATO airstrike last weekend that killed eight Afghan women and injured eight more, including young girls, was headlined thus in the New York Times: "Karzai Denounces Coalition Over Airstrikes." The focus of the story, as Peter Hart points out, is the tension the deaths caused "between Mr. Karzai and his American benefactors." Meanwhile, "the killings of Afghan women are a secondary news event."
The story of the deaths concludes: "Coalition forces were apparently unaware that village women sometimes go into the woods in the early hours of the morning to fetch wood for cooking fires they need to have going by breakfast time."
This is the innocence of U.S. foreign policy. I feel far more horror -- more fear about the future -- in its pseudo-apology for the high-tech deaths of eight women than I do in the angry protests of aggrieved Arabs.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com, visit his website at commonwonders.com or listen to him at Voices of Peace radio.
© 2012 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.