At first glance to the rest of the world, it seems mystifying.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll of 1,003 adults released last Friday says 76 per cent of those questioned said they were following reports about allegations that U.S. troops killed unarmed Iraqi civilians.

But according to the story, whether or not the allegations turn out to be true, 63 per cent of those surveyed said they thought the killings of civilians were isolated incidents. That view was especially true among Americans over 35, whites and those living in the South, where the military has a strong presence.

To top off the cognitive dissonance, 59 per cent now say the United States made a mistake invading Iraq.

I think one thing that needs to be stressed in digesting all of these disparate statistics is that the vast majority of Americans have no idea what this war, or any war, is really like. Television doesn’t count.

One line that I hear constantly from people here in Iowa is that our boys and girls are good boys and girls but that having to exist in Iraq would turn anyone a little nuts.

And for that, they can and should be, forgiven.

But this always raises a sore point with me and one most Americans don’t want to face and it is simply that Americans aren’t the only species on the human globe.

Lost in all the opinions of comfortable white middle class Americans are the props in the game — 26 million Iraqis, countless numbers of whom are dying every day — men, women and children.

You remember them, right? The people we patted ourselves on the back for — for “liberating.”

In the Associated Press story, one woman was quoted: “I think they’re doing everything possible to avoid such things,” said Christine Berchelmann, a retired nurse and Republican-leaning independent from San Antonio. “The people they are seeking out, they are in dwellings right in the middle of all these civilians. There are always going to be casualties.”

One wonders if Ms. Berchelmann would use the term “casualties” if a foreign power managed to invade Texas, patrolled its streets, set up a puppet government, and then slaughtered civilians who dared rise up against it.

But this myopic view is part and parcel of being an American. “They” don’t count. Only our boys and girls have the status of living and breathing human beings with worthwhile lives.

It’s also part of the ignorance of this war, fostered by the U.S. media, that people tend to see these killings as “isolated incidents.”

If Americans looked beyond the bought-and-paid-for U.S. network shills, they could access foreign media, such as the Guardian, in the U.K. which recently ran a story in which ordinary Iraqis reminded the rest of the world that Haditha was not “isolated” by any means.

According to the Guardian story, Omar Saed, 55, a university lecturer in Baghdad, said: “We’d like to send a brief letter to all the world: ‘Please stop the American troops killing any more people.’ We need full cooperation from all to help us avoid any more incidents like what happened in Haditha and Ramadi and all the [other] Iraqi cities.”

Another Iraqi, Omar al-Hadi, a businessman in Baghdad’s affluent Mansour district, said: “Why are the Americans making a big deal of this now? Don’t they know how many thousands of Iraqis have died at the hands of the foreign forces, the terrorists and the militias, and how nothing is ever done about it — apart from occasional expressions of regret?”

If Ms. Berchelmann someday had to collect the remains of her children from a San Antonio street, would she be mollified with expressions of “regret” or perhaps a cheque to reimburse her for the lives of people she loved?

Or would she, like many Iraqis who initially welcomed the Americans as liberators, now take up arms to get some of hers back?

Amazingly, Americans don’t see this disconnect, even though they now see the war as a mistake. Do they now perhaps believe the Iraqis are insufficiently grateful and perhaps should be left to their own devices?

We still have right-wing idiots in this country who counter this kind of criticism by saying that at least people have it better in Iraq now than under Saddam Hussein.

I wonder if Associated Press-Ipsos were to take an honest poll of Iraqis today, how many ordinary Iraqis would agree with that statement?

Keith Gottschalk

Keith Gottschalk

U.S. Keith Gottschalk has written for daily newspapers in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. He also had a recent stint as a radio talk show host in Illinois. As a result of living in the high ground...