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As the country processed the untimely death of actor-comedian Robin Williams this week, a number of people, at least in my Facebook and Twitter feeds, wanted to know why people seemed more worried about Williams than the crisis in Iraq.
https://twitter.com/repub9989/status/499636731269107714
The answer is simple.
It’s because Williams was a part of Americans’ lives more than what’s occurring in Iraq, despite the immense gravity of what’s happening there.
Most Americans are intellectually and emotionally distant from their country’s foreign policy decisions in ways the people who live in those countries and our military cannot be. For most, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya are places a world away, where no good news ever seems to come from and nothing seems to change.
Even the politicians directly responsible for getting us involved in these conflicts sometimes try to mention them as little as possible. As Commander-in-Chief, President Obama has been guilty of this. Mitt Romney barely mentioned Iraq during the 2012 campaign. He wasn’t really eager to talk about Afghanistan either.
If men jockeying to conduct the U.S.’s foreign policy can sometimes ignore it, what are we to expect from the average American?
However morally troubling, there is a distance.
There is no distance between most Americans and Robin Williams. He was a part of all our lives. Mork and Mindy. Good Morning Vietnam. Mrs. Doubtfire. The Birdcage. Peter Pan. For more than three decades, Williams put smiles on millions of faces as part of some the most beloved movies of our childhood and adulthood. Williams was an entertainer who penetrated the popular culture to such a degree that it would’ve been surprising not to see some sort of national observance or reaction to his death.
We all felt like, on some level, we knew him.
On the Washington DC metro recently, I overheard a tourist family discussing the upcoming anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on their way to visit Arlington Cemetery. The mother, I presume, said something along the lines of, ‘just imagine that over in the Middle East, things like 9/11 happen every day.’
That might not be exactly precise, but it is true that the awful, jarring violence visited upon the United States on September 11, 2001, is experienced on a more regular, however dispersed, basis by those living in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The horrors of war are certainly experienced by members of our military overseas, who often return home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other problems, if they are lucky enough to return home.
War is incredibly ugly and heartbreaking. But when you are separate from it, it becomes easier to forget or ignore. Even the recent attacks by Islamic extremists against Iraq’s minority populations only heightened Americans’ awareness due to online photos and horror stories. Briefly, there was less separation.
Wars go on long after the public has moved on. It’s a terrible thing. But it’s a thing.
Those who can’t understand why Americans would react more to the death of a beloved actor-comedian than what’s happening in Iraq simply don’t understand human nature. They also don’t understand our foreign policy.
Eventually forgetting about the wars we fight has become an unfortunate but enduring aspect of modern American foreign policy.
Instead of fretting over why so many seem to care more about Robin Williams than Iraq, perhaps we should use this opportunity to remind ourselves why we shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place.
