The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,162

and Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century show that the country is far from reluctant to go to war. But even they are nothing like the wars of the past. In both conflicts the interstate war phase was quick and (by historical standards) low in battle deaths.181 Most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed, and by 2008 the toll of 4,000 American deaths (compare Vietnam’s 58,000) helped elect a president who within two years brought the country’s combat mission to an end. In Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force followed a set of humanitarian protocols during the height of the anti-Taliban bombing campaign in 2008 that Human Rights Watch praised for its “very good record of minimizing harm to civilians.”182 The political scientist Joshua Goldstein, in a discussion of how policies of smart targeting had massively reduced civilian deaths in Kosovo and in both Iraq wars, comments on the use of armed drones against Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009:Where an army previously would have blasted its way in to the militants’ hideouts, killing and displacing civilians by the tens of thousands as it went, and then ultimately reducing whole towns and villages to rubble with inaccurate artillery and aerial bombing in order to get at a few enemy fighters, now a drone flies in and lets fly a single missile against a single house where militants are gathered. Yes, sometimes such attacks hit the wrong house, but by any historical comparison the rate of civilian deaths has fallen dramatically.

So far has this trend come, and so much do we take it for granted, that a single errant missile that killed ten civilians in Afghanistan was front-page news in February 2010. This event, a terrible tragedy in itself, nonetheless was an exception to a low overall rate of harm to civilians in the middle of a major military offensive, one of the largest in eight years of war. Yet, these ten deaths brought the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan to offer a profuse apology to the president of Afghanistan, and the world news media to play up the event as a major development in the offensive. The point is not that killing ten civilians is OK, but rather that in any previous war, even a few years ago, this kind of civilian death would barely have caused a ripple of attention. Civilian deaths, in sizable numbers, used to be universally considered a necessary and inevitable, if perhaps unfortunate, by-product of war. That we are entering an era when these assumptions no longer apply is good news indeed.183

Goldstein’s assessment was confirmed in 2011 when Science magazine reported data from WikiLeaks documents and from a previously classified civilian casualty database of the American-led military coalition. The documents revealed that around 5,300 civilians had been killed in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2010, the majority (around 80 percent) by Taliban insurgents rather than coalition forces. Even if the estimate is doubled, it would represent an extraordinarily low number of civilian deaths for a major military operation—in the Vietnam War, by comparison, at least 800,000 civilians died in battle.184

As big as the change in American attitudes toward war has been, the change in Europe is beyond recognition. As the foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan puts it, “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.”185 In February 2003 mass demonstrations in European cities protested the impending American-led invasion of Iraq, drawing a million people each in London, Barcelona, and Rome, and more than half a million in Madrid and Berlin.186 In London the signs read “No Blood for Oil”; “Stop Mad Cowboy Disease”; “America, the Real Rogue State”; “Make Tea, Not War”; “Down with This Sort of Thing”; and simply “No.” Germany and France conspicuously refused to join the United States and Britain, and Spain pulled out soon afterward. Even the war in Afghanistan, which aroused less opposition in Europe, is being fought mainly by American soldiers. Not only do they make up more than half of the forty-four-nation NATO military operation, but the continental forces have acquired a certain reputation when it comes to martial virtues. A Canadian armed forces captain wrote to me from Kabul in 2003:During this morning’s Kalashnikov concerto, I was waiting for the tower guards in our camp to open fire. I think they were asleep. That’s par for the course. Our towers are manned by the Bundeswehr, and they haven’t been doing a good