Americans are shopping while
Iraq burns.
The competing television news im-
ages on the morning after Thanks-
giving were of the unspeakable car-
nage in Sadr City - where more than
200 Iraqi civilians were killed by a
series of coordinated car bombs -
and the long lines of cars filled with
holiday shopping zealots that
jammed the highway approaches to
American malls that had opened for
business at midnight.
A Wal-Mart in Union, N.J., was be-
sieged by customers even before it
opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Friday.
"All I can tell you, said a Wal-Mart
_____________
Nothing keeps us
from shopping.
_____________
employee, "is that they were fired up
and ready to spend money.
There is something terribly wrong
with this juxtaposition of gleeful
Americans with fistfuls of dollars
storming the department store bar-
ricades and the slaughter by the
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians,
including old people, children and ba-
bies. The war was started by the U.S.,
but most Americans feel absolutely
no sense of personal responsibility
for it.
Representative Charles Rangel re-
cently proposed that the draft be re-
instated, suggesting that politicians
would be more reluctant to take the
country to war if they understood
that their constituents might be
called up to fight. What struck me
was not the uniform opposition to the
congressman's proposal - it has
long been clear that there is zero sen-
timent in favor of a draft in the U.S.
- but the fact that it never provoked
even the briefest discussion of the re-
sponsibilities and obligations of ordi-
nary Americans in a time of war.
With no obvious personal stake in
the war in Iraq, most Americans are
indifferent to its consequences. In an
interview last week, Alex Racheotes,
a 19-year-old history major at Wes-
leyan University in Connecticut,
said: "I definitely don't know anyone
who would want to fight in Iraq. But
beyond that, I get the feeling that
most people at school don't even
think about the war. They're more
concerned with what grade they got
on yesterday's test."
His thoughts were echoed by other
Paul Krugman is on vacation.
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students, including John Cafarelli, a
19-year-old sophomore at the Uni-
versity of New Hampshire, who was
asked if he had any friends who
would be willing to join the Army.
"No, definitely not, he said. "None of
my friends even really care about
what's going on in Iraq.
This indifference is widespread. It
enables most Americans to go about
their daily lives completely uncon-
cerned about the atrocities resulting
from a war being waged in their
name. While shoppers here are
scrambling to put the perfect touch
to their holidays with the purchase of
a giant flat-screen TV, or a PlaySta-
tion 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a
society in the midst of a meltdown.
According to the United Nations,
more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were
killed in September and October.
Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in
Baghdad, a staggering figure.
In a demoralizing reprise of life in
Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the
U.N. reported that in Iraq: "The situ-
ation of women has continued to de-
teriorate. Increasing numbers of
women were recorded to be either
victims of religious extremists or
honor killings.' Some non-Muslim
women are forced to wear a head-
scarf and to be accompanied by
spouses or male relatives.
Journalists in Iraq are being "as-
sassinated with utmost impunity,"
the U.N. report said, with 18 mur-
dered in the last two months.
Iraq burns. We shop. The Ameri-
cans dying in Iraq are barely men-
tioned in the press anymore. They
warrant maybe one sentence in a long
roundup article out of Baghdad, or a
passing reference - no longer than a
few seconds - in a television news ac-
count of the latest political ditherings.
Since the vast majority of Ameri-
cans do not want anything to do with the
military or the war, the burden of
fighting has fallen on a small cadre
of volunteers who are being sent into
the war zone again and again. Nearly
3,000 have been killed, and many
thousands more have been maimed.
The war has now lasted as long as
the American involvement in World
War II. But there is no sense of col-
lective sacrifice in this war, no
shared burden of responsibility. The
soldiers in Iraq are fighting, suf-
fering and dying in a war in which
there are no clear objectives and no
end in sight, and which a majority of
Americans do not support.
They are dying anonymously and
pointlessly, while the rest of us are
free to buckle ourselves into the fam-
ily vehicle and head off to the malls
and shop.
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