New Post July 2, 2014
More Excerpts from Chapter One
The
Costly War Habit
America’s
chronic war habit is clearly no ordinary habit. Ordinary ones range from
harmless indulgence to expensive and harmful addictions. America’s war habit
has much fewer variations but all go far beyond self-indulgence, typically are
dreadfully consequential in monetary and human costs, and usually affect not
just individuals but also the socioeconomic and political conditions of entire
nations, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq being a recent example, not to mention
the adverse effects on all elements of America’s society.
The
Human Costs, Statistically Speaking
Over
two and one-half million Americans have been sent to their graves from military
interventions authorized by America’s warriors-in-chief. [23] The most deadly
internal war, the Civil War, sent over 600 thousand Americans to their graves.
Add to all of the foregoing blood spilling the six to seven million civilians
who died from U.S military intervention in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. Add to
that a former CIA agent’s estimate that six million people have died from covert
CIA operations alone. Then add the mounting death toll from President Barack
Obama’s drone killings by the thousands in far away places like Afghanistan,
Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and probably more that are
still secret. [24] Based on his exhaustive study, James Lucas, a retired social
worker and currently an anti-war activist and writer, estimates that U.S.
military interventions have been directly responsible for between 20 and 30
million civilian deaths throughout 37 countries just since after WWII and only
up to 2007. [25]
To
the casualties and human suffering from America’s use of force must also be
added the human suffering from America’s use of sanctions to bring countries to
their knees. In an admission that would be indictable as an international war
crime if not made by American officials, in this case Vice President Joe Biden
and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “both openly admitted that the
US-led sanctions against Iran (and Syria) are politically motivated and
constitute a “soft-war” against the nearly 80 million people of Iran (23
million people in Syria) in order to achieve regime change.” [26] The
administration’s claim that there are no sanctions on medicine, food, and other
necessities belies the known fact that multinational corporations are reluctant
to ship supplies to a sanctioned country for fear of violating a bureaucratic
technicality.
In
what must be one of the most morally outrageous and barbaric remarks by a U.S.
official was the televised answer by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to
reporter Lesley Stahl’s question about whether the price of sanctions against
Iran were worth it considering half a million children died as a result. “I
think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth
it,” the Secretary of State answered. [27]
The
Human Costs, Human Beings’ Speaking
Dead men by mass production—in
one country after another
—month after month and year after
year. To you at home
they are columns of figures, or
he is a near one who went
away and just didn’t come back.
You didn’t see him lying
so grotesque and pasty beside the
gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the
multiple thousands.
That’s the difference.
--Ernie Pyle [28]
Those
were the posthumous sentiments of the WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle. He was
acknowledging a simple truth about human nature. Numbers about humanity cannot
speak to humanity like human beings can. As Mr. Pyle knew, even tabulations of
horrific consequences of war tend to numb and depersonalize reactions to them
(with the exception of the casualties on America’s home land, September 11,
2001). Adding personal stories like the few selected below helps to elicit some
form of emotional response at least to all but the most hardened and
insensitive of people, including sociopaths (who may be overrepresented among
America’s warriors and spies).
Michael
Moore, Oscar, Emmy and book award winner collected and published letters from
soldiers in Iraq and their families back home. This vignette is from one of
those letters:
“---my son was killed in
Iraq---. He was going to be
a proud father of a baby
boy. ---the Army would not
pay for us to go
to his funeral. Several months later they
offered to fly
us free to meet with President Bush.
No thanks.” [29]
Not
all deaths happen on the battlefield. Many soldiers who escape death there meet
it back home by their own means. According to a Veterans Affairs report a
veteran commits suicide every 80 minutes. It is the final stage of what
clinicians call “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” A case in point among
thousands is William Busbee, who was in the Army Special Forces, airborne and
the Army Rangers:
---Mr. Busbee “sat with
a .45-caliber gun pointed to
the side of his
head. ‘Look at me,’ his mother cried
out as she tried
to get her son’s attention. ‘Look at
me. Don’t you do
this. Don’t do it. He wouldn’t turn
his head to look
at me.’ [Then he] took his life---with
his mother and
sister looking on.”
“He told me how
he picked up the body parts and
loaded them onto
a helicopter so their families would
have something
to bury,” his mother said. “She said
her son had
tried to commit suicide in Pesh Valley of
Afghanistan. He
told me, ‘Momma, the William you
knew died over
there.’ ” [30]
Like
the legendary Mafia don with his hit list or like a “one-man death panel,”
Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama sits in his office and picks people from the
drone hit list handed to him by his chief terrorism advisor. [31] Later, people
thousands of miles away get hit. Thousands have been hit and killed so far.
Among them are innocents not connected to any terrorist group who the killers
euphemistically refer to as “collateral damage.”
Sometimes
the dead were elders riding in a bus to a village meeting to resolve a
community issue having nothing to with America:
"the loss of 40
leaders on a single day is devastating for that
community."
---the strike actually removed, in one fell swoop,
the most
stabilizing forces in an entire community. A nearby
villager
remembers the attack, which also claimed four of his
cousins. The
villager’s six-year-old son was later afraid -- to
sleep in their
house, saying ‘We cannot go home. We have
to spend the
night in the tree.’" [32]
Sometimes
the dead were more than a dozen members of a wedding party:
“Scorched
vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the
road.”
[33]
“Bride
and Boom” headlined the insensitive New York Post, referring to that scene in
Yemen. From an entirely different perspective, one of humanness and disgust was
the comment by Tom Engelhardt, journalist, editor, book author, and university
instructor that “‘Till death do us part’ has gained a far grimmer meaning” [34]
Sometimes
the dead were beloved grandmothers:
“---a father
with his two children—came all the way from the
Pakistani tribal
territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol
to tell the
heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s
beloved
67-year-old grandmother. Watching the beautiful
9-year-old
Nabila relate how her grandmother was blown to
bits while
outside picking okra softened the hearts of even the
most hardened DC
politicos.” [35]
That
last scene was depicted in an article by Medea Benjamin, book author and
staunch critic of war and drone strikes. While I respect her eyewitness
account, I doubt that “the hearts of most hardened DC politicos” were softened
because she reports that only five members of Congress attended the hearings.
[36] That leaves out over 500 more hardened politicos who didn’t bother to
attend it.
Sometimes
the dead from drone strikes were children, several hundred so far; among them
infants of 1, 2, 3 and 4 years old; sometimes the dead were brothers and
sisters of an entire family:
Four sisters,
ages 4 to 9 years were struck and killed by an
American drone
strike. Four children, ages 3 to 13 years old
in a different
family in the same country were struck and killed
by an American
drone strike. [37]
Pause
for a moment and ask yourself this question: What kind of a human being is it
in the Oval Office that authorizes these deadly strikes?
Drone
strikes, of course, are just the newest technological age of U.S. barbarism
that kills people, among them children. It’s an old story, with just the
technology having changed.
Margaret
Kimberley, a New York based writer and activist for peace and justice issues
notes that “America has a long history of killing little children. Hundreds of
thousands of children were taken from Africa to be enslaved in America, little
children were lynching victims and children are now killed by drones,
sanctions, and the other aggressions that this country meets out to the rest of
the world.”
She
estimates that “the number of children killed by American militarism and covert
wars since WWII is easily in the order of 20 million.” [38] I have no idea how
much of these 20 million children are included in the estimate of 20 to 30
million civilian deaths cited earlier.
But
does a more precise estimate really matter? Children of the world, at the mercy
of stronger and older people, are meant to be loved and nourished, not
murdered.
Sickening---Sickening---
Sickening. I can’t say it enough times.
Another
sickening form of America’s war habit is the practice of torturing captives.
Torture sometimes amounts to death cruelly delayed. The U.S. reportedly has
authorized torture chambers in more than 54 countries, a revelation that
“should make all of us in this country cringe with shame. [39]. How are people,
judged guilty by the torturers, actually tortured? Think about a U.S. regime
that relies on torture to try and extract confessions and information from
human beings held captive in “black sites, borrowed prisons and by borrowed
torturers in many cases” [40]. Think about an American regime that approves of
treating human beings like this:
• Can’t sit, stand or lie down.
• Beaten, excruciating pain, testicles
whipped.
• Deprived of sleep.
• Given inadequate food and water.
• Hooded.
• Humiliated,
• Jammed into small boxes.
• Naked.
• Shackled.
• Slammed into walls.
• Sodomized.
• Water poured into mouth and lungs.
Peter
Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer (since retired) at the
State Department, has pointed out that “Horrific as it may be, pain fades,
bones mend, bruises heal. No, don’t for a second think that the essence of
torture is physical pain. If, in many cases, the body heals, mental wounds are
a far more difficult matter. Memory persists.”
That is especially so, h points out, with the victim’s sense of
humiliation from being so helpless. [41]
23.
Wilson, S.B. Op. cit.
24.
Wilson, S.B. Op. cit.
25. Lucas, JA. Deaths In Other Nations Since WW
II Due To Us Interventions.
Countercurrents.org, April 24, 2007.
26.
Lamb, F. US Officials Confess to Targeting Iran’s Civilian Population. Cyrano’s
Journal, February 16 2013.
27. 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996.
28.
Hedges, C. Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War. Truth Dig, March 19, 2012.
29.
Moore, M. Will They Ever Trust Us Again? Letters from the War Zone. Simon &
Schuster, 2004.
30.
Madrak, S. Soldier's Mom: Military
Suicides Are 'Out of Control.' Crooks & Liars, November 27, 2012.
31.
Pollitt, K. America Doesn't Torture'—It Kills. The Nation, February 13,
2013.
32.
Huffington, A. 'Signature Strikes' and
the President's Empty Rhetoric on Drones
Huff
Post Politics, July 10, 2013.
33.
Engelhardt, T. The US Has Bombed at Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001. The
Nation, December 20, 2013
34.
Englehardt, Op Cit.
35.
Benjamin, M. Drones Have Come Out Of the Shadows. Dissident Voice, November 4,
2013.
36.
Benjamin, Op. Cit.
37.
Chossudovsky, M. The Children Killed by America’s Drones. “Crimes Against
Humanity” committed by Barack H. Obama. Global Research, Center for Research on
Globalization, January 26, 2013.
38.
Kimbereley, M. Freedom Rider: Killing Children. Cyrano’s Journal, January 5
2013.
39.
Scheer, R. America's Global Torture Network. OpEdNews, February 8, 2013.
40.
Van Buren, P. Torture Superpower. TomDispatch.com, December 18, 2012.
41.
Van Buren, Op. cit.