Death From Above, Silence Below (w/Norman Solomon)
How politicians can kill without consequence.
In this conversation I spoke with journalist, activist, and author Norman Solomon about the U.S.-backed military assault on Iran, the human cost of modern aerial warfare, and why the American public, which is now clearly opposed to this war, is being failed by both its media and its political leadership. We discussed the long-term shift in America’s approach to war as it has moved from ground troops to air power—a move that hides the human cost of military violence from the American public.
Norman traces this pattern back to Vietnam, where I.F. Stone described the same dynamic in what he called “Vietnamization”: a strategy that let others die on the ground while Americans bombed from above.
This ‘endless air war’ policy helps politicians and the press minimize civilian deaths, while a compliant Democratic Party focuses on procedural debates rather than moral reckoning.
We also talked about the need for activism that places real political pressure on elected officials, with in-person demonstrations, primary challenges, and other kinds of sustained organizing.
Selected quotes and transcript below.
Selected Quotes
“What has been invoked as a ‘rules-based order’ really means: we make the rules, and we break them whenever we want.”
—Norman Solomon
“When war is conducted through aerial technology, it seems to disconnect our moral code.”
—Richard Eskow
“We are witnessing a ‘provisional humanity,’ where victims are only human when their deaths serve our political purpose.”
—Richard Eskow
“Why are we so circumspect and polite that we can’t even set up a picket line outside the district office of a House member who votes to funnel blood money to the arms industry?”
—Norman Solomon
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)
Richard Eskow: Norman Solomon is a writer, a journalist, and an activist. He is the national director of Roots Action, which can be found at rootsaction.org. He is also the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of a number of books, including — germane to our conversation today — War Made Invisible, and before that, War Made Easy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy.
He joins us now. First of all, Norman, welcome back to the program.
Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Richard.
Richard Eskow: Let me start with this: the horror of war is upon us once again, and the last war in Gaza isn’t over. Fifty years ago I could not have imagined that we would still be fighting wars — and that those wars would still be either absurd, evil, or both. Do you share that disorienting feeling?
Norman Solomon: It’s a feeling I do share — that there’s a level of insanity that has not dissipated. If we think back to the Vietnam War ending roughly 50 years ago, there was, in the 1980s, this complaint from a lot of the militarists in the U.S., and some in the media as well, about the so-called Vietnam syndrome. There’s the infamous moment after the end of the Gulf War when the first President Bush declared that we had “licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” The message was that the inhibition against U.S. military intervention — which had taken hold among the American public — had been overcome.
If we look at the last few decades, there’s been a gradual recrafting of what it means for the U.S. to intervene militarily. There were substantial U.S. troops on the ground during the 1991 Gulf War. During the Iraq War beginning in early 2003, there was heavy bombing from the air and a large ground force. Likewise with the 20-year Afghanistan war, which in terms of U.S. involvement ended just a few years ago — again, air power and troops on the ground.
But what we’re seeing more and more now — in terms of U.S. assistance for the genocidal bombing in Gaza, and in recent weeks the attacks on Iran, first last summer and now terribly ongoing as we speak — is that putting troops on the ground has really gone out of political fashion in the U.S. So in a way, ironically, the Vietnam syndrome has been transmuted and twisted around. The question has become: why not kill from the air? We have superior air technology, and that is what we’re seeing play out right now in Iran.
Richard Eskow: What we’re also seeing is a kind of dissociation in the public mind that comes with this. People can understand when their neighbors, or their neighbors’ sons and daughters, are fighting a war somewhere. What they struggle to grasp is that real lives are being taken every day — for a war the American people don’t want, for a war whose logic has never been coherently explained to them. And even when something as stark as 170 young schoolgirls being killed comes out, the response is all denial and evasion. We don’t know whose bomb it really was. If troops on the ground had fired on a school, the reaction might be different — but when war is conducted through technology from the air, it seems to sever our moral code somehow. Does that resonate with you?
Norman Solomon: Yes, absolutely. There’s a terrible overlap — a kind of Venn diagram — of imperial arrogance and military dominance. The implicit attitude seems to be: we’re above it all. The U.S. Military has been equipped with unrivaled technology, with the capacity to kill from high in the sky. Whatever is happening on the ground — especially when no Americans are dying — becomes politically and media-abstracted. The U.S. has an enormous gap over every other power in terms of overall military capacity, and the Israeli Air Force is phenomenal in its destructive capabilities. As we’re speaking, the combination of Pentagon capacity and Israel’s ability to destroy life on the ground has merged into a single enterprise.
We’ve also heard, just in the past day or so, President Trump saying he’d be happy for the U.S. to provide “air cover” for Kurds to fight on the ground. This is not new — it has additional horrific wrinkles because it’s so shameless. But if you go back to the Vietnam War, the great journalist I.F. Stone pointed out that the U.S. Military was increasingly relying on air power during so-called Vietnamization in the war’s final years. It was the ARVN — the South Vietnamese Army — on the ground doing the fighting, the killing, and the dying, while U.S. troops were withdrawing and the bombing continued ferociously. As Stone put it, the coolies on the ground would do the killing and dying; U.S. forces from the skies would handle that facet of the warfare. In fact, during the last three years of U.S. troop deployments in Vietnam, aerial bombing actually increased. The director of ABC News sent a directive — a telex — to reporters on the ground in Vietnam saying the main story now was that American troops were leaving. Meanwhile, the bombing was more ferocious than ever.
Richard Eskow: And in this case, so much of the bombing is by proxy — we’re providing Israel with the majority of the weaponry it’s using, including not only aerial munitions but arms for its ground forces as well. The moral responsibility seems to me something the American people, and certainly the news media, haven’t fully grappled with: when we arm a military like Israel’s, we are responsible for what it does — not only in Iran, but in Lebanon, where there’s been what would in normal times be considered a major invasion. Lives are being lost — at least a hundred in Lebanon, and probably thousands in Iran by now.
Yet the coverage is almost entirely about what Trump will do next, or what outrageous thing he just said — not about our culpability. During the Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite famously delivered a critical assessment of the war, and in the early years there was enough negative coverage that it shaped American public opinion and created a moral foundation for the country’s turn against the war. We had the iconic photograph of the little girl fleeing napalm. Now we have the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, and rather than that kind of visceral, lasting image, we get U.S. Central Command issuing denials. There’s no equivalent moral reckoning in the media. Am I wrong? Am I not following the right news?
Norman Solomon: Overall, if you look at the so-called legacy media — the homepage of the New York Times, for instance — when a few Americans were reported killed, it was a much bigger headline than 150-plus girls killed in Iran. That is essentially the valuation of human life that U.S. media has adopted.
As for the Vietnam War, there’s a kind of nostalgia for a critical media culture that barely existed. Daniel Hallin, a scholar at the University of California San Diego, wrote a classic book called The Uncensored War — “uncensored” in quotes — in which he actually examined the broadcasts of all three TV networks’ primetime news and found that there was very little footage of the war’s suffering shown to American viewers. The memorable image of Marines burning a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters is remembered precisely because it was so rare. The My Lai massacre received almost no coverage until very late in the war. That dynamic has continued. Yes, we can point to individual stories about the carnage in Iran that have appeared in the last few days — but they’re the exception. The essence of propaganda is repetition, and what is repeated is the framework: How does this affect America? How does it affect Israel? What is the U.S. doing? There are maps in the New York Times and Washington Post showing missile strike locations. It is a deeply abstracted process. The Iranian people are dehumanized to the point where they are, at best, statistics — occasional photos and oblique references.
Richard Eskow: What strikes me most, Norman, is the provisionality of it all. We had horrific shootings of Iranian protesters by their own government before the U.S. and Israel launched these attacks, and in some way Trump has used that as justification — “the Iranian people want freedom.” Well, they do want freedom, and they’re entitled to it. But all the empathy directed at those protesters has now been redirected into bombing the same people. They live in the same place.
It reminds me of the young Iranian woman who died after being taken into police custody following a demonstration — her name was repeated endlessly by politicians, all over the U.S. media. And barely a week later, John McCain was singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” — the very country where that woman lived. It’s a kind of provisional humanity that gets extended to people like Iranians: when their suffering serves our political purposes, they are fully human; when it doesn’t, we are indifferent to their deaths. Am I being unfair?
Norman Solomon: The phrase “provisional humanity” is exactly right. I have a chapter in my book War Made Invisible called “Lives That Really Matter and Lives That Really Don’t.” The underlying dynamic is that the significance of an Iranian life, or an Afghan life, or an Iraqi life, is largely determined by how useful that life is as a political propaganda tool — specifically to demonstrate that the United States military is ultimately a moral force, acting in the name of human freedom. It’s a mythology that runs across both parties.
Right now, Republicans in Congress are the more vocal enthusiasts for bombing Iran, while many Democrats are raising questions about congressional authorization. But in all of that procedural debate, actual Iranian people are almost phantoms — rarely discussed as real human beings, and almost never heard from directly. There is that old echo from Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” And there’s an echo of it now in the framing around Iran — how many people must be terrorized and killed in order to impose our version of freedom upon them?
Richard Eskow: You mention the Democratic leadership, and it won’t surprise you that I haven’t been happy with their performance here. It seems as though their primary concern is their own institutional prerogatives — not the killing of Iranian civilians, not the absence of any clear goal or strategic logic, and certainly no mention of international law, which these actions violate. The killing of Khamenei violates it. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro violates it. The objection seems to be simply: you didn’t consult us. Am I being unfair to the Democratic leadership?
Norman Solomon: In terms of the so-called leadership — Hakeem Jeffries in the House, Chuck Schumer in the Senate — no, I don’t think you’re being unfair at all. There are ranges of opinion and statement coming from Democrats in both chambers, but broadly speaking, procedural objections about congressional war powers are being used as a shield — a way to signal concern while avoiding any challenge to the underlying premise that the United States has the right to work its will militarily in the world. That premise is essentially assumed across the political spectrum. The real debate is tactical: Is it wise? Is it achievable? What comes after?
Well, “what comes after” is indeed a legitimate question. But shouldn’t we also be asking whether the aggression itself needs to be stopped and rolled back? Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is clear: the power to declare war belongs to the legislative branch. Congress has a responsibility not just to complain but to act.
There’s also a parallel to the domestic situation. It is frankly Orwellian when President Trump expresses compassion for protesters killed in Iran while remaining entirely indifferent to protesters killed under his watch in Minneapolis. And at a deeper level, the whole premise — that the United States is the arbiter of human rights, the nation occupying the moral high ground — collapses under scrutiny. Three or four years ago, President Biden exchanged a fist bump with the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, a man the CIA concluded had ordered the murder and dismemberment of the journalist Khashoggi inside a Turkish consulate. Something is fundamentally backwards here. The “rules-based order” that was invoked by the previous administration really means: we make the rules, and we break them whenever we choose.
Richard Eskow: I’d also point to a failure — even a betrayal — by the media of its own colleagues. Khashoggi was a journalist. He was murdered and dismembered, his remains shipped out. Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces, according to forensic analysis. These stories were mentioned but never given the sustained moral weight they deserved.
But this moment feels different in a certain way, Norman, and I want to talk to you about both the politics and what the anti-war community can do. The Vietnam War was initially popular. The first Gulf War was popular. The second Iraq invasion had enormous public support once it began. The movement for sanity — I’d call it that — has always had an uphill climb.
In this case, though, the public doesn’t like this war. Among other things, we’re not even getting a coherent lie — we’re getting contradictory statements from Trump himself, contradicted then by Rubio, contradicted back again. The public is roughly 59% opposed, according to the last numbers I saw. And yet we’re still not seeing the moral courage we need, from politicians or from the media. It feels almost like a gauntlet thrown down to those of us who want change: the wind is at your back now. Let’s do something about it. Does that make sense to you?
Norman Solomon: Yes, it does. Part of the gap between that polling and the overall tone of media coverage is that the public is ahead of mainstream journalists — and yet public opinion remains very susceptible to manipulation. Consider the Gulf War: President George Herbert Walker Bush emerged from it with a 91% approval rating in Gallup. Then, because the economy deteriorated, he lost his re-election bid.
The media remains tremendously powerful. When the United States launched its attack on Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11, polling showed 90% of the public in support, with only 5% opposed and 5% uncertain. Those are virtually Soviet-style proportions. The question is: why would nine out of ten Americans support going to war against a country that essentially had none of the 19 hijackers living in it or originating from it? That’s how powerful the propaganda system can be.
Richard Eskow: Absolutely. And there’s a knock-on effect: even as more people consume alternative media, the corporate media still sets the dominant tone, and social media is increasingly being corporatized — the Ellison family buying TikTok, CBS, and so on.
The other dimension I want to raise is cost — not just the moral cost but the economic one. This is going to have a devastating impact on working people in this country and in Europe who are already struggling. With all of that in mind — the public opposition, the media failures, the economic stakes — how do we mobilize fast and effectively enough to slow down, and hopefully halt, this bloodshed?
Norman Solomon: As always, it comes down to information flow and organizing. Media outlets like this one are crucial for getting counter-narratives out, sharing analysis that helps people mobilize. And organizing has to happen not just online but in neighborhoods and communities. At Roots Action — rootsaction.org — our team works very hard on action alerts and practical steps people can take. Many other organizations are doing the same.
The gap between public opinion and elected officials is enormously significant and could be a powerful lever heading into the midterm elections. Most Americans — and by a large margin, most Democrats — believe Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. And yet it’s very hard to find many Democrats in Congress willing to say that. That gap needs to be widened and illuminated. We have to make clear that we can vote these people out — that we will primary them and support better candidates.
One of the persistent problems is that progressives spend too much time supplicating elected officials — especially in blue districts, where there’s so much gratitude for the good things those officials do that their votes for war and a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget get soft-pedaled. We need to stop being so accommodating and make it publicly clear that we will fight to primary them and elect genuinely better candidates. Without electoral leverage behind our lobbying, we’re being ignored.
Richard Eskow: All we have on our side is morality, rationality, and public opinion — so I suppose that’s why they don’t listen. Where can people go to get involved? Is Roots Action the place to start?
Norman Solomon: When people lead, leaders follow — and that’s also true of opportunism in office. Politicians do have their fingers to the wind, and we have to generate enough human force to shift it. I’d really encourage people to think about this: there are at least a thousand congressional district offices around the country. Why are there so few picket lines outside them? Most of these members are, in practice, voting for more and more war. Why do they get let off the hook? Most people live close to a congressional district office — it doesn’t take much to get some poster board, make a sign, and organize.
But behind that is the real work: the midterm elections. Justice Democrats is one organization doing critically important work on primaries — replacing corporate Democrats with genuine progressives. At rootsaction.org, people can sign up for action alerts. At accuracy.org, the Institute for Public Accuracy, you can get information and analysis that counters not only the disinformation coming from corporate media but, perhaps more importantly, the silences — what is consistently left out of the coverage. Whether it’s this program or other independent outlets, the work of breaking those silences, providing information and analysis, and bearing moral witness to what is almost entirely absent from corporate media is essential.