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War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine Hardcover – June 13, 2023
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An unflinching exposé of the hidden costs of American war-making written with “an immense and rare humanity” (Naomi Klein) by one of our premier political analysts
“[War Made Invisible is] an antidote to twenty years of U.S. media malpractice and should be required reading for journalists and all those who long to live in peace.”—Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK
More than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible, by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and what its consequences are, from military and civilian casualties to drained resources at home.
From Iraq through Afghanistan and Syria and on to little-known deployments in a range of countries around the globe, the United States has been at perpetual war for at least the past two decades. Yet many of these forays remain off the radar of average Americans. Compliant journalists add to the smokescreen by providing narrow coverage of military engagements and by repeating the military’s talking points. Meanwhile, the increased use of high technology, air power, and remote drones has put distance between soldiers and the civilians who die. Back at home, Solomon argues, the cloak of invisibility masks massive Pentagon budgets that receive bipartisan approval even as policy makers struggle to fund the domestic agenda.
Necessary, timely, and unflinching, War Made Invisible is an eloquent moral call for counting the true costs of war.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherThe New Press
- Publication dateJune 13, 2023
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101620977915
- ISBN-13978-1620977910
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for War Made Invisible:
"An important new book . . . [War Made Invisible] reveals how we are taught to ignore U.S. war spending, war making, and those others our country wages war against."
—Rethinking Schools
"Norman Solomon has done the nation a great service by collecting this information to try to make our wars a little more visible."
—Radical Philosophy Review
"Norman Solomon has written a new book that deserves to be widely read . . . replete with important insights into how the media establishment and government officials from both major political parties promote the interests of the military-industrial complex. In War Made Invisible, readers will also find an eloquent moral call to end this state of affairs."
—Monthly Review
"A very readable reality check about post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy . . . full of illuminating quotes and facts."
—Peace News
"Solomon offers a powerful framework for understanding geopolitical crises, as well as the unseen yet enduring costs of militarism."
—Truthout
"Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible erects an edifice of evidence showing deliberate, consistent, coordinated, and well-funded efforts to squelch movements opposing the vicious consequences of war. . . . His highly worthwhile book invites readers to embrace his clarity and campaign to end all wars."
—The Progressive
“[War Made Invisible] builds a convincing case that too many secrets are being kept from the public. It’s a troubling and worthwhile call for change.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“An engrossing story of governmental hubris and media compliance. . . . Solomon offers a necessary beam of light on an important subject shrouded in darkness.”
—Booklist
“For decades Norman Solomon has been one of the most insightful critics of the incestuous and war-addicted American press. His new book gives us reason to weep and also to cheer. Weep to see how eagerly our media promotes foreign wars and the politicians and arms makers who design them. Cheer to know that a few clear-eyed Americans see what they are doing and write about it.”
—Stephen Kinzer, award-winning journalist and bestselling author of All the Shah’s Men
“I couldn’t put it down. This book, written in an easy-to-read style, gets to the heart of the matter. The Pentagon (with an annual PR budget of more than $600 million) has a cardinal rule: Above all do not allow American families to actually see the death and destruction that our government is inflicting on mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters in other countries.”
—Ben Cohen, co-founder, Ben & Jerry’s
“The great African writer Chinua Achebe recounts an African proverb that ‘until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’ In Norman Solomon’s gripping and painful study of what the hunter seeks to make invisible, the lions have found their historian, who scrupulously dismantles the deceit of the hunters and records what is all too visible to the lions.”
—Noam Chomsky
“With an immense and rare humanity, Solomon insists that we awaken from the slumber of denial and distraction and confront the carnage of the U.S.’s never-ending military onslaughts. A staggeringly important intervention.”
—Naomi Klein, bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine
“Solomon exposes how media lies, distortions, and misdirections represent the abandonment of journalism’s promise to connect human beings to one another.”
—Janine Jackson, program director, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
“Norman Solomon exposes the cant and lies that underpin the global war on terror, indicting the policymakers, functionaries, and media propagandists who perpetuate this ‘political license to kill.’ Read it to understand how Americans were deceived and at last end what was designed to be a perpetual campaign of global violence and surveillance.”
—Charles Glass, former ABC News chief Middle East correspondent and author of Syria Burning and Deserter
“One of the singular achievements of the U.S. military industrial complex has been its relative invisibility. Enabled by a complicit media, our bloody wars fade into the backdrop of most Americans’ everyday lives, as does the insidious militarization of our culture and economy. Even in Washington, DC, the heart of the complex, one rarely sees a uniform. Norman Solomon performs a vital service with his vivid depiction of the reality behind the artfully crafted veil, and its grim consequences for all of us.”
—Andrew Cockburn, author of Kill Chain and The Spoils of War, and Washington editor, Harper’s Magazine
“When my father hit the black sands of Iwo Jima, the photograph of the flag raising atop Mount Suribachi took 48 hours from the snap of the camera to mothers and fathers viewing their sons on the front pages of their hometown newspapers. Today dozens of conflicts are unseen and unknown by us the taxpayers who pay for them. Norman Solomon now explains how this seemingly impossible situation has become our everyday reality.”
—James Bradley, author of Flag of Our Fathers
“No one is better at exposing the dynamics of media and politics that keep starting and continuing wars. War Made Invisible will provide the fresh and profound clarity that our country desperately needs.”
—Daniel Ellsberg, bestselling author of The Doomsday Machine
“It has been impossible to build an ongoing, effective anti-war movement when the mainstream media in this country has refused to explain to the American people the mendacious pretexts and horrific consequences of U.S. military adventures. War Made Invisible pulls back the curtain on the warmakers and the fawning journalists who enable them to lie and kill with impunity. It exposes the tangled web between the lives we destroy abroad and violence that tears at the heart of our community back home. The book is an antidote to twenty years of U.S. media malpractice and should be required reading for journalists and all those who long to live in peace. ”
—Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK
“Norman Solomon has been speaking necessary truths about America’s addiction to military power for decades, with clarity, directness, and unswerving principle. The message he delivers here is especially urgent in our era of extreme political division: Almost no Americans understand the true costs of our war machine, and both parties are actively deceiving us.”
—Andrew O’Hehir, executive editor, Salon
“‘The first casualty when war comes is truth,’ Senator Hiram Johnson of California said in 1929. Almost a century later, corporate media ever more closely conforms to the dictates of Pentagon planners, shutting out whistleblowers, dissenters, and those at the target end of U.S. military might. Cutting through this manufactured ‘fog of war,’ Norman Solomon eloquently casts sunlight, the best disinfectant, on the propaganda that fuels perpetual war. War Made Invisible is essential reading in these increasingly perilous times.”
—Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
"In this brilliant and timely book, Mr. Solomon courageously exposes America for having veered tragically off course, leaving behind its sacred ideals and betraying the very roots of its revolutionary past. In these difficult times when truth and justice seem to have lost their way, a very special and daring book appears out of the darkness of this seemingly endless night, giving us all as a nation and people a reason to hope."
—Ron Kovic, Vietnam veteran and author of Born on the Fourth of July
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : The New Press (June 13, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1620977915
- ISBN-13 : 978-1620977910
- Item Weight : 15.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #169,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, author and activist. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in June 2023. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called the book “a powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy.”
Solomon's dozen other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. The Los Angeles Times called it “brutally persuasive” and “a must-read for those who would like greater context with their bitter morning coffee, or to arm themselves for the debates about Iraq that are still to come.” The newspaper's reviewer added: “Solomon is a formidable thinker and activist.”
Solomon wrote the nationally syndicated "Media Beat" weekly column from 1992 to 2009. His book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) was published in January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq.
A collection of Solomon’s columns won the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.
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In the next chapter, the author makes an interesting analysis. Thousands of American outlets devoted news coverage to Russia’s war in Ukraine that would have been unthinkable while reporting U.S. warfare. To probe too deeply and illuminate human suffering would be too much of a threat to the careers of reporters and for the media institutions. It is noted that the business of war and the business of news are thoroughly intertwined. There is a name for this: the military-industrial-media complex. The author has observed that the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting. Let’s take Afghanistan. The total coverage “amounted to an average of twenty-four minutes per network, per year, for a conflict on which the U.S. has spent $2.3 trillion of the public’s funds.” This statement sums it quite nicely: “The warfare state of the United States maintains its grip at home while militarism is euphemized, accepted, and internalized, and honored with silence if not praise.” And take the Iraq war. There were 4484 U.S. dead and a whopping 32,200 wounded. The cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom is pegged at $806 billion. The author made another interesting observation that “just about every targeted or untargeted victim of U.S. warfare in the twenty-first century was a person of color.”
After two decades of the “war on terror,” at least 929,000 lives have been sacrificed on all sides, mostly on the other side. This includes 387,000 civilian deaths and 7,050 American soldier deaths. As the author notes, what we have here is a strong “willingness of Americans to want to feel good about the American Dream and their reluctance to confront the American Nightmare.”
“U.S. media support for the “war on terror” has been as perpetual as the “war on terror” itself,’ writes Solomon, who in one of the most chilling passages, describes how he traveled to Iraq three times shortly before the US invasion left an estimated one million Iraqis dead and wounded, their country’s landscape littered with depleted uranium dust from coated US tanks. “Eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant along the Tigris River, under the same stars that might be seen anywhere on Earth, couples and small groups of diners sat at a dozen candlelit tables; the dusk filled with laughter; I stared and thought about how terribly fragile it all was.”
The fragility of a starlit night turned to bomb-lit horror–be it in Kosovo, Baghdad or Beirut--can be blamed not only on the media–which fires journalists who ask too many probing questions–or on successive presidential administrations, from Clinton to Obama to Trump to Biden–but on an underlying belief in US exceptionalism.
Toward the end of Solomon’s meticulously detailed look at the invisibility of US wars, he turns to Daniel Ellsberg, the great Pentagon Papers whistleblower, for insight. “... it’s not difficult to deceive them (US public) … you’re often telling them what they want to believe–that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality.”
As Solomon’s critique of propaganda suggests, the first step in making war visible, in resisting an empire with 800 military bases and an endless “war on terror,” is to tell the truth, to show the face of war, to face the truth of a war-mad empire, and then act in defiance.
Also, please take the online course Ending War 101 offered by the Rotary Action Group for Peace and World Beyond War.








