Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Shame
This is the cost of war.
No, it’s not a dead Iraqi child, though I think that the corporate media has made a decision, collectively, to not show the brutality of war, and that we do need to see the human costs of our decision. Check out some of the foreign newspapers to the left. You will actually see pictures of the aftermaths of battles in Iraq. The last time the U.S. media showed something like that was when it showed the rubble left in the wake of the U.S. airstrike on that Pakistani border village. Before that, I can’t remember the last time I saw pictures of carnage in Iraq.
I really don’t like to sound like a pacifist, because I’m not, but tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in this war. If you believe the military, the number is 33,000. If you believe the Lancet study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the number is 100,000.
We did indeed liberate Iraqis from a despot, but we also started a war that has led to the death of at least eleven times as many civilians as died on September 11th, and maybe closer to thirty times as many, in a nation far smaller than our own.
This is why war is a last resort, not just another tool in a nation’s toolbox. This is why war should be an act of desperation, not an extension of diplomacy to get another nation to bend to our will on any number of issues. This is why war is only justified, in international law, to repel an invasion or to stop an ongoing genocide.
Because despite all the smart bombs and surgical strikes, you can’t wage war on a government. You can only wage war on a people. Every war in the history of mankind, from the Peloponnesian War to this current one, results in the death of far more civilians than military personnel. And call me crazy, but military personnel are people, too.
The President, and Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, and all the other neocons in the administration thought they could swoop into Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and leave in a matter of months, or a year, after quickly setting up an Iraqi government. They thought they could do all this with a quarter of the troops that had been used in the Gulf War.
They were wrong. We have earned the enmity of the international community, created a war zone in a country we liberated, lost 2,500 troops, and sunk $400 billion in the war so far, and now the President thinks that we will need to maintain a presence in Iraq past the end of his presidency in 2008.
And all this not because we were genuinely threatened by Saddam Hussein, but simply because, in the words of Paul Pillar, “the desire to shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region.”
We have learned nothing since Vietnam. We never learned that it is folly of the highest order to start a war based on a political theory.
We have also, apparently, never learned that imperial presidential powers are a road to perdition.
I would have though the disasters of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies would have taught us something. I was wrong.
Or maybe it is more accurate to say that the lesser half of this country never learned these lessons. The generals that questioned the administration’s judgment were muzzled. The massive war protests were ignored. The protestors of Drinky’s warrantless wiretapping program are called “extreme” and even smeared as traitors by their opponents, as are the people who protest extraordinary rendition, and torture, and indefinite detainment for anyone the president labels an “enemy combatant.”
Why don’t you ask the 2,500 families of the dead Americans lost in this war who they think is a more loyal American, the war protestors or the imperialists who sent their loved ones to Iraq to die in a Godforsaken desert out of a desire to shake up the power structures of the Middle East.
It goes the same way every time, and I tire of the same trick being played on Americans, over and over again, generation after generation. From the fictitious border invasion that started the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the sinking of the “civilian” ship the Lusitania in 1917 to the Gulf of Tonkin charade in 1964 to the “weapons of mass destruction” hobgoblin in 2003, the trick never changes, just the actors.
The trick is the same even when it is only used to justify economic aid or a small military intervention in a third-world country, as Latin America learned the hard way in the 20th century. America roars in, with a divine mandate to spread democracy, and invades a third world nation to civilize the savages, even if that means killing them. Don’t pay much attention to the “democracy” we installed in Chile in 1973, or Vietnam in the sixties, or South Korea in the fifties, or Guatemala and Nicaragua and countless other Latin American nations all throughout the twentieth century. If those democracies were worse than the governments they replaced, it was just an honest mistake we happen to make over and over and over again. And if we happen to support dictatorships in the meantime, it is only a matter of necessity.
It is only when we ask the question of “necessary for whom” do we get an understanding of the world that is not filled with so many holes and intellectual contradictions that it serves only as a mockery of itself. Who in America benefited when Eisenhower instructed the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala in 1954? Which Americans benefited when he used the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953? Which Americans benefited When Nixon used the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Chile in 1973? Which Americans benefited when Reagan subverted the government of every nation in Latin America in the 1980s?
And was it really that important to topple the government of Vietnam in 1964? Was it really that important to help Indonesia butcher its dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s? Did we really need Turkey as an ally so badly that we needed to look the other way as they exterminated thousands of Kurdish villages in the 1990s with the aid of record amounts of U.S. military hardware sales? Do we really need Israel as an ally so badly that we can ignore the depredations of the one nation on Earth in violation of more U.N. Security Council resolutions than any other?
Why the Hell did we fund the dictatorship of Morocco for decades? They don’t even have resources we need! They’re not even located in a strategic area of the world!
We are not a fumbling, good-natured nation; we have been ruled for generations by politicians who play chess with world governments and sacrifice real people’s lives for corporate investments and political theories. For the loss of $13 million that wasn’t even really ours we tossed Guatemala’s government in 1954 and plunged them into civil chaos that took them decades to recover from, if they even have. We don’t support democracy, and we never have. We support friendly governments, period. We are still staunch allies of Saudi Arabia, but Hugo Chavez is just a vile dictator. We have no problem with Uzbekistan, but France is a failed socialist state that is a poor ally in the War on Terror. The United Arab Emirates are a great ally of ours, according to the president, despite the fact that they are an alliance of monarchs, and Pakistan, though a military dictatorship, is another ally.
Germany is “Old Europe” and Russia is corrupt, as the pundits on the right are quick to point out when they oppose an initiative of ours in the War on Terror or in dealing with Iran, but I hear nothing but deafening silence from these astute judges of character on the genocide in the Sudan or on the draconian measures of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who recently bulldozed the homes of 750,000 poor people in his country who are now sleeping in the streets.
Africa has no oil. It is riddled with AIDS, poverty, and ruin. It is of no strategic interest to the United States. That’s why Bill Clinton never did anything to avert the genocide in Rwanda, and that’s why Drinky won’t do anything to avert the genocide in the Sudan, or to use the awesome power of the U.S. military to topple a dicatator like Mugabe. There is simply no money in it.
So instead Drinky plays the same shell game his predecessors played, though Bush is far more clumsy at it than they were, and his duplicity is far less excusable in an era when we have left Jim Crow and Nikita Khrushchev behind. He dangles the hobgoblin of Terror in our faces for years, instilling fear, rallying support. Nevermind that 9/11 occurred on his watch and might have been preventable, according to numerous stories that have surfaced regularly over the past five years like this one. He proceeds to orchestrate a campaign of misinformation that would have looked clumsy in the 1920s, much less in the Information Age: endless war, terror alerts, slandering critics as traitors, disseminating disinformation through the media his junta controls like FOX News (the #1 news outlet in America), talk radio, Regnery Press, the Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines and blogs.
Mussolini would have approved of this level of media control. To have the #1 TV news station and almost the entire radio news market under your control is a feat that has rarely been equaled by fascists in world history, and Mussolini and Hitler were rulers of far smaller countries than the United States. Only the oligarchy of the Soviet Union at its peak and that of Communist China could exceed that of the United States for sheer number of people under their control through propaganda and fear.
Nationalism isn’t a divine right. You are only justified in being proud of your homeland when you homeland is something to be proud of. Yet half of this country labors in a small world where criticizing your homeland is treason, where America is always right, and where we are constantly threatened by foreign powers. How long have we been at war? We fought the Cold War from 1945 to 1990, the Gulf War in 1991, some brief military interventions in the nineties, and now we are lost in yet another interminable War on Terror that shows no signs of ever ending.
It should be called the War of Terror, and it has been being waged on the American people for years. I understand the fact that terrorists attacked us on 9/11, and that there really are people out there who want to kill Americans.
But we are only seeing half of the equation if we focus so solipsistically on what they have done to us without acknowledging what we have done to them. There have always been people out there who wanted to kill Americans, and if your brother or sister was blown apart by an Israeli missile strike on a suspected terrorist’s car using a Boeing Apache chopper you might want to kill Americans, too. If you lived in a village in Guatemala or El Salvador where your sister was raped and killed by CIA-trained governmental death squads you might want to kill Americans, too. If your family was exterminated by governmental death squads in Indonesia in 1965 with the aid of CIA equipment and signals intelligence you might have been one of those cheering in the streets of Jakarta when 9/11 happened. If your family was among the 2 million Vietnamese civilians who were wiped off the face of the planet in the Vietnam War, you might also have cheered when 9/11 happened.
Apartheid says that Islam is as Islam does. I would counter that America is as America does. We are no better than the Arab Street if we dismiss the death of innocents with a wave of the hand and then react with outrage when they reply in kind. Blanketing an area with bombs and killing thousands of civilians in an effort to wipe out a hundred insurgents is no more moral than going into a village suspected of harboring insurgents and spraying bullets indiscriminately with an M16. Just because it’s done from a greater distance doesn’t mean it’s more defensible.
If you acknowledge that civilian deaths are acceptable collateral damage in a war against an enemy you open a Pandora’s box of problems that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will forever strive to walk a tightrope over an abyss by saying that killing as limited an amount of civilians as possible to defeat an enemy is morally superior to deliberately targeting civilians of an enemy nation to defeat an enemy.
And who knows what words are spoken and left unspoken in the planning rooms of our generals. Have they ever used indiscriminant destruction of civilian areas to intimidate, destroy the morale of, or flush out insurgents? I simply don’t know. We have before. We incinerated 100,000 civilians in Dresden in WWII in a firebomb raid against a city that we knew had no military targets in it. Churchill explained that Dresden was an “important communications nexus” for the German army, an intellectual way of saying that it had a lot of roads and telegraph lines running through it. The people who lived next to those roads and lines were inconsequential.
I can’t help but think we thought the same thing of the civilians in Veitnam, looking at the vast number of them we killed.
We must judge ourselves with the same clear and unsparing vision we level on others. To do so is not treason: it is justice. It is fairness. It is goodness. It is reason and compassion at the same time, to be willing to make the same sacrifices that you demand of others.
To do so is to do the only thing you can do if you wish to be a nation that is a beacon to others. To do so is to accept responsibility for leadership by showing that you are worthy of it. To do so is to realize Christ’s Golden Rule. To do so is to be a good Christian, a good American, a good person.
If my country demands that I do any less I will simply refuse. I would rather be a good person than a good American. America is not nor has ever been a tautological equivalent of goodness. It must be made that way, and it must be maintained in that status by labor that never ceases as long as you and I draw breath.
It is not laborious to be a patriot, or to have blind faith in your president, or to dismiss the suffering of others, or to desire a hegemony over most of the planet. Labor means sacrifice. Sacrifice means giving something of yourself.
Cheering on the troops is not sacrifice. Enjoying a tax cut in a time of war is not a sacrifice. A sacrifice would be forgoing our corporate interests by simply allowing a democratic regime to exist without our meddling, without our funding a corporate-friendly political party to allow it to seize power in the government, without our political intimidation. A sacrifice would be occasionally helping a desperate nation not because we wanted access to their resources, but instead simply because they were in desperate need of help.
I think of the blood we have spilled in Iraq and the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent and continue to spend and I hang my head in shame at the loss. We have spent $400 billion in Iraq, with the bill mounting daily. We pledged only $950 million to help the families of the 186,000 dead and over a million displaced in the Asian Tsunami of 2004. I think of the real good that might have been done by $400 billion spent on something other than a war and I am ashamed of my people and my government.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 6:01 PM 
