There are no good wars, none. – Chris Hedges
People may like this anti-war speech (below) by correspondent, Chris Hedges, who often wrote for the New York Times … the innocent may feel sympathy for what war has turned him into … however his descriptions do not matter, no matter how brilliant, how truthful; if it turns out he has done nothing to prevent the atrocities he has seen. Perhaps he will change, who knows?
In response I received the following criticism from an old peace activist:
Why do you feel the need to say Hedges has done nothing?
He has written books against war, spoken out heaps.
He gave up a lucrative career. You know nothing about his lifestyle.
What did Karl Marx ever do? Less than nothing.
It is quite rare that people read what I write and even rarer that they reply. Even when they disagree strongly. However, in this case, the peace activist did not read what I wrote and chose to attack Karl Marx, presumably because I mentioned class war. A war usually conducted in this country without arms, but important because it constitutes an evil right here. Poor people cannot afford to live here, and only the rich can come here.
From his tower of American privilege, not a single mention of class war from this American correspondent. Even though his own country is steeped in poverty.
During the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Chris Hedges drove around Srebrenica is a $500,000 armoured car and wore an expensive bullet proof vest and had his own personal body guard. Meanwhile people were slaughtered in the streets and worse.
Many people in the United States criticise the former Yugoslavia … I grew up during a time when Marshall Tito led the non-aligned countries and there was peace in Yugoslavia. No US alliance for them.
Then the wall came down and Gorbachev offered NATO and the Americans social democracy in Russia. NATO and the United States did not accept his offer. Instead they got the oligarchs and Putin. When challenged by encirclement, the Russians invaded Ukraine.
What a civilised place, this Europe. How humane. How civilised. They churn their children’s bones at McDonald-Douglas. Then hand them back to the people in a flour sack, to haunt them all the rest of their days.
We need fewer people like Hedges, no more Paul Keatings. We don’t need Julian Assange anymore, we know what they are. We need more workers and organisers who are activists and fewer people who can not keep their eyes off their phones but instead look at what is around them. Concentrate on what is real. No more bystanders.
Yes Jim, Chris Hedges has done a lot. His biggest mistake is to paint himself as a worthy victim. He needs to re-think what he is doing and look at the failure inside his own country before he points out the failure of the US in other countries. For therein lies the secret of the racism and the naked pursuit of world domination. Maybe he has already, I don’t know.
Just one more suggestion, look at the hegemony wielded by the Fed in the greatest ponzi scheme of all, the Greenback.
Hedges briefly mentions Hollywood but does not get the point of it. Hollywood wields its influence across cultures and languages far richer.
Jim, fancy you giving me the thumbs down on the very day a marxist won the presidency of South America’s largest democracy – Brazil.
Viva Lulla! Long live the people who kicked out the crazy fascist, Bolsanaro!
Ian Curr
2 Nov 2022.
“War is not politics by other means, it is demonic”.
0:00
There are no good wars, none.
7:30
They embrace a pure, blind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own.
16:13
Don’t worry about going to war with Russia. We need to worry about our encirclement.
24:25
What would happen if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for airplanes?
33:48 When atrocities leak out such as the Malai massacre of Vietnamese civilians or the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty.
Transcript
SPEAKERS
Chris Hedges
I didn’t really want to write another book on war. My first one was a force that gives us meaning was not cathartic was extremely difficult to cope with and process, but kind of sickening. Euphoria over the war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile. And so I have this book here
pre emptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies, and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO, beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy 1000s of NATO troops in Eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on Russia’s border, and the refusal to implement the Minks to peace agreement. This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia’s border, was foolish, and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. The invasion of Ukraine would I expect never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed and angry. But to understand is not to condone the invasion of Ukraine under post Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression. I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East Africa, and the Balkans, where I cover the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone. With another friend Miguel Gil Moreno. I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion in a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately and not always successfully struggle to figure out where the fighting the firing is coming from in the hopes you can avoid being hit. I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which years later descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror. My heart racing, my body dripping with sweat. I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language, Spanish Arabic, Hebrew Dinka serbo Croatian Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian death cuts through the linguistic barriers. I know what wounds look like, legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody pulpy mass gaping holes and stomachs, pools of blood cries of the Dine, sometimes for their mothers and the smell, the smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots. I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me. And again in Basra after the first Gulf War, never knowing if I would be executed under constant guard and often without food drinking out of mud puddles. The primary lesson in war is that we as dis Think individuals do not matter. We become numbers, fodder, objects. Life once precious and sacred becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt. We were expendable. Eugene sledge wrote of his experiences. As a Marine in the South Pacific in World War Two. It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.
The landscape of war is hallucinogenic. It defies comprehension. You have no concept of time in a firefight, a few minutes, a few hours, war in an instant obliterates homes and communities. All that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life. You cannot comprehend what you see, I have tasted enough of war. Enough of my own fear. My body turned to jelly. To know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up and patriotic can’t about liberty, and democracy, and sold to the naive as a ticket to glory, honor and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe, which on some level, will never make sense again. War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life, familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social. Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly. There are no good wars, none. And this includes World War Two, which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American heroism, purity and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin, and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention, along with a crippling sanctions meant to bring down Putin’s government is infantile and dangerous. The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours. There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo, when we were being hit with hundreds of Serbian shells a day and under constant sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city. It made sense to kill or be killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar and Srebrenica had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians, and the wholesale rape of women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from the poison of violence, the soul destroying force, that is war. I knew a Bosnian soldier we heard a sound behind the door, while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK 47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a 12 year old girl whose daughter was 12. He never recovered.
Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony have the godlike power that comes with wielding armies, war planes and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons profit from war expansion NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin Raytheon General Dynamics Boeing, Northrop Grumman, analytic services, Huntington Ingalls who mana BA Systems and L three Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions billions more. The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for 2023. The Biden administration has asked Congress to provide over $50 billion to Ukraine and weapons and aid the permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of a two decade long quagmire in the Middle East, and it is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict, one that now flirts with nuclear holocaust. The same cabal of war mongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials year after year, decade after decade, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate their protein shifting adroitly with the political winds moving from the Republican party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to Neo cons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals. they exude a clean Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the Earth only understand violence. They are pimps of war puppets of the Pentagon a state within a state and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks Project for the New American Century American Enterprise Institute Foreign Policy Initiative Institute for the Study of war, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution like some mutant strain of an antibiotic resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories how many times they lie, or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self defeating catastrophe to the next. I reported on the suffering misery and murderous rampages, these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliott Abrams convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran Contra affair and later pardoned by President HW bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War. And Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office in Latin America, were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the road contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting. They and their coterie of fellow war lovers went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe. They are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel, justifying its war crimes against Palestinians, and myopically conflating Israel’s interests with our own. They advocated for airstrikes and Serbia, calling for the US to, quote take out Slobodan Milosevic. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya,
Robert Kagan and William Kristol with their typical cluelessness wrote in April 2002, that quote, the road that leads to real security and peace is the road that runs through Baghdad. We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of a back the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of 18 of 20, electricity generating plants, and nearly all the water pumping and sanitation systems. During a 43 day period when 90,000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region and the proliferation of failed states. The war in Iraq along with a humiliating defeat and Afghanistan shredded the illusion of US military and global hegemony, it also inflicted on Iraqis who had nothing to do with the attacks of 911 wholesale slaughter of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the Middle East. They continue to call for a war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating, quote, There is nothing we can do short of attacking to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons. They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And they have targeted Danielle Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua. They embrace a pure blind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences, or its inevitable blowback. They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration. They believe in the divine right to impose their quote unquote values on others by force, fiasco after fiasco, and now they are stoking a war with Russia. The Nationalist is by definition, an ignoramus, you can Slav writer Danilo quiche observed nationalism is the line of least resistance the easy way. The Nationalist is untroubled. He knows or thinks he knows what his values are his That’s to say, national that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to ethical and political. He is not interested in others. They are no concern of his hell. It’s other people, other nations another tribe. They don’t even need investigating. The Nationalist sees other people in his own image nationalists. The Biden administration is filled with these ignoramuses including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden’s Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. Anthony Blinken is the Secretary of State Jack Sullivan is national security adviser. They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls. That includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded the Institute for the Study of war, William Kristol, Max boot, Gary Schmitt, Richard Pearl, Douglas Fife, David Frum, and others. Many were one staunch Republicans or like Newland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets, and an ever expanding military. Julian Benda, call these courtiers to power, the self made barbarians of the intelligencia. They once railed against liberal weaknesses and appeasement, but they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party, rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia, and who call the invasion of Iraq a big fat mistake. Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon and liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate who reviled these arrogant unelected power brokers as they should voted for Trump, these ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did, including children, every dead body. I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty and their sick bloodlust. They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military, but they eagerly ship young American men and women to fight and die for their self delusional dreams of Empire and American hegemony or as in Ukraine, they provide the weaponry and logistical support, so Ukrainians and Russians can bleed in perpetuity. historical time stopped for them with the end of World War Two, the overthrow of democratically elected governments by the US during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile, where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the Commander in Chief of the Army, General Renee Schneider, and President Salvador Allende, the Bay of Pigs the atrocities and war crimes that define the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination they claim as benign, a force for good, benevolent Gemini, the world the late Charles Krauthammer insisted welcomes our power, all enemies from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, or the new Hitler. All us interventions are a fight for freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad, but our most dangerous enemy is within the war mongers built a campaign against a country build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then wait for a crisis. They call it the next Pearl Harbor to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton, denouncing his policy of containment in Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the quote, course of weakness and drift, they warned was to put our interests and our future at risk. Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq liberation act. Few Democrats or Republicans dare to be seen as soft on national security. The Act stated that the US government would work to quote, remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein and authorize $99 million towards that goal. Some of it used to fund Achmed Shahla B’s, Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq war during the administration of George W. Bush. The attacks of 911 gave the war party it’s opening first with Afghanistan and Iraq. Crowd hammer, who knew nothing about the Muslim world wrote, quote, the way to tame the Arab Street is not with appeasement, and sweet sensitivity, but with raw power and victory. The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again, is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything. Psychologically, above all, the psychology in the Middle East is now one of fear and deep respect for American power, now is the time to use it.
Removing Saddam Hussein from power crystal crowed would, quote, transform the political landscape of the Middle East. It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the United States. The lust for apocalyptic global war, they lost for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian wrote in 1999 that, quote, America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight to major regional conflicts, and it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia, some considerable but not infinite time from now. They believe violence magically solves all disputes even the ISRAEL PALESTINE morass. In a bizarre interview immediately after 911 Donald Kagan the yield Classicist and right wing ideologue, the father Robert and Fred Kagan called along with his son Fred for the deployment of US troops in Gaza. So we could, quote, take the war to these people. They long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine with Robert Kagan saying that we quote, need to not worry that the poor problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions. We we need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions. His wife, Victoria Nuland was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014. With the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected president victory and a chunk off and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for US troops to be sent to Syria to assist quote unquote moderate rebels seeking to overthrow Bashar Al Assad. Instead, the intervention spawned the caliphate, the US ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad’s de facto Air Force. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 911 is a self fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target only understands force. We can they assure us militarily bend Russia to our will. It is true that acting firmly in 2008, or 2014 would have meant risking conflict, Robert Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. But Washington is risking conflict now. Russia is ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014. If the West had intervene then, and it has always been extraordinarily small. Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world. In short, don’t worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won’t use the bomb. I do not know if these people are stupid, or cynical, or both. They are the useful idiots of the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks. They rotate in and out of power parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute before being called back into government. They are as welcomed in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House. The Cold War for them never ended. The world remains binary, us and them good and evil, and they are never held accountable.
When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangelove if we don’t stop them will terminate life as we know it on the planet. The ruling class divides the world into worthy and unworthy victims. Those we are allowed to pity such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare and those whose suffering is minimized dismissed or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi Palestinian Syrian Libyan Somali and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We echo in the empty promises for Moscow claim we do not target civilians rulers always paint their militaries as humane there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordnance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar artillery, tank shells and belt fed machine guns. This bifurcation into worthy and unworthy victims. As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky pointed out in Manufacturing Consent is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. The Russian speaking population in Ukraine to Moscow are worthy victims. Russia is their Savior. The 7.6 million refugees and the millions more Ukrainian families cowering in basements, car parks, and subway stations are unworthy Nazis were the victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate and just worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity mentioned the provocations carried out by the Western alliance with the expansion of NATO and the missile batteries in Eastern Europe. The US involvement in the In 2014 ouster of Jana COVID, which led to the civil war in the east of Ukraine between Russian backed separatists and Ukraine’s army, a conflict that has claimed 10s of 1000s of lives and you’re dismissed as a Putin apologist. It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims and by extension ourselves. We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self adulation, and a poisonous nationalism. The case the cause become sacred, a religious crusade. fact based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors and opportunists become experts used to fuel the conflict. So celebrities who liked the powerful carefully orchestrate their public image pour out their hearts to worthy victims. Hollywood stars such as George Clooney made trips to Dar for to denounce the war crimes being committed by Khartoum. At the same time, the US was daily killing scores of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Dar four, but to express outrage what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy. Saddam Hussein’s attacks on the Kurds, considered worthy victims saw an international outcry. Why Israeli while Israeli attacks on the Palestinians subjected to relentless bombing campaigns by the Israeli Air Force, and its artillery and tank units, with hundreds of dead and wounded was at best an afterthought. At the height of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s were the victims were the Republicans battling the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Soviet citizens were mobilized to send aid and assistance. Unworthy victims are the millions of people Stalin executed, sometimes after tawdry show trials and sent to the gulags.
While I was reporting from El Salvador in 1984, a Catholic priest was murdered by the communist regime in Poland. His death was used to excoriate the Polish communist government, a stark contrast to the response of the Reagan administration to the rape and murder of four Catholic missionaries in 1980, and El Salvador by the Salvadoran National Guard. Reagan, the Reagan administration sought to blame the three nuns and lay worker for their own deaths. Jean Kirkpatrick Reagan’s ambassador to the UN said, the nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists. Secretary of State Alexander Haig speculated that perhaps they ran a roadblock for the Reagan administration, the murdered church women were unworthy victims. The right wing government in El Salvador armed and backed by the United States, joked at the time, hotspot RIA motto on Quora be a patriot kill a priest. Archbishop Oscar Romero, was assassinated in March of 1989 years later, the Salvadoran death squads would gunned down six Jesuits and two others at the residence on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador. Between 1977 and 1989 death squads and Salvadoran soldiers killed 13 priests. It is not that we’re the victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion. It is that worthy victims alone are rendered human people like us. Unworthy victims are not. It helps of course when as in Ukraine, they are white. But the missionaries murdered in El Salvador were also white, and American. And yet it was not enough to shake us support for the country’s military regime. The mass media never explained why Andrei Sakharov is worthy, and Jose Luis Isetta is a brilliant Paraguayan mathematician who was imprisoned is unworthy. The attention and general dichotomies ation occur naturally, as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media. Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends. Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only passed through the filters, they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns if the government When, or corporate community in the media feel that a story is useful, as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public. This was true for example of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean airliner kl 007. In early September 1983 269 passengers and crew were killed an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced the Reagan administration’s arms plans. As Bernard worksman noted complacently in the New York Times August 31 1984. US officials assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow. In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 108 civilians were killed, left no outcry in the West. No denunciations of cold blooded murder, no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility. In a 1973 editorial. no useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week. There was a very useful purpose served by focusing on the Soviet act and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable
if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims or not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched on lies and fabrications. Imagine if America’s largest banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, were like Russian banks cut off from the international banking system. Imagine if our oligarchs Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, who were certainly as venal as Russian oligarchs had their assets frozen, and estates and luxury yachts seized Bezos his yacht, by the way, is the largest in the world. It cost $500 million and it is 57 feet longer than a football field. Imagine if leading political figures such as George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, along with oligarchs were suspended were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world’s biggest shipping line suspended shipments to and from the United States. Imagine if the US international media news outlets were forced off the air. Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airliners. And our airliners were banned from European airspace. Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events. Imagine if our Symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing unless they denounced the Iraq War and in a kind of perverted loyalty oath condemned George W. Bush. The rank hypocrisy is stunning. Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under under international law war criminals for carrying out a pre emptive war are chastising Russia for its violation of international law. The US bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers called shock and awe. So the dropping of 3000 bombs on civilian areas that killed over 7000 non combatants in the first two months of the war. Even Russia has yet to go this far. I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation that is a war crime, a Fox News host said with a straight face to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush’s national security adviser during the Iraq War. It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order. And that is why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments, is also part of it, Rice said and I think the world is there. Certainly NATO is there, he’s managed to unite NATO in ways I didn’t think I would ever see after the end of the Cold War. Rice inadvertently made a case for why she should be put on trial with the rest of Bush’s enablers. She famously justified the invasion of Iraq by stating quote, The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Her rationale is no different than that peddled by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who says the Russian invasion is being carried out to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons. what Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up till now was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact the press, a wash and moral posturing will not address no one has mastered the art of techno war and wholesale slaughter like the US military. When atrocities leak out, such as the malai massacre of Viet Nummies civilians or the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty by branding them aberrations. The truth is that these killings and abuse or deliberate they are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military infantry units assisted by long range artillery fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones, and helicopters level vast swathes of enemy territory, killing most of the inhabitants. The US military during the invasion of Iraq, from Kuwait, created a six mile wide free fire zone that killed hundreds if not 1000s of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency.
When I entered southern Iraq, in the first Gulf War, it was flattened. villages and towns were smoldering ruins, bodies, including women and children lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed, power stations had been destroyed. schools and hospitals had been flattened. Bridges had been obliterated. The United States military always, always wages war by overkill, which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south, where our purported Vietnamese allies allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents 3 million white phosphorus rockets. white phosphorus will burn its way entirely through a body and an estimated 400,000 tonnes of jellied incendiary napalm 35% of the victims Nick Turse rites of the war, died within 15 to 20 minutes. Death from the skies like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper. Vietnamese villagers including women, children and the elderly were often herded into tiny barbed wire enclosures known as cow cages. They were subjected to electric shocks gang raped and tortured by being hung upside down and beaten euphemistically called the plane ride until unconscious. fingernails were ripped out. fingers were dismembered detainees were slashed with knives. They were beaten senseless with baseball bats and waterboarded targeted assassinations orchestrated by CIA death squads were ubiquitous. wholesale destruction, including of human beings to the US military, perhaps any military is orgastic. The ability to unleash sheets of automatic fire hundreds of rounds of belt fed machine gunfire 90 millimeter tank rounds, endless grenades, mortars and artillery shells on a village, sometimes supplemented by gigantic 2700 pound explosive projectiles fired from battleships along the coast was a perverted form of entertainment in Vietnam, as it became later in the Middle East. US troops litter the countryside with Claymore mines, canisters of napalm, Daisy Cutter bombs, anti personnel rockets, high explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high explosive shells in iron fragmentation bombs, including the 40,000 pound bomb loads dropped by the giant B 52. Stratofortress bombers, along with chemical defoliants, and chemical gases dropped from the sky. These are our calling cards. vast areas are designated free fire zones A term later changed to the more neutral sounding specified strike zone where everyone in these zones is considered an enemy, even the elderly women and children soldiers and Marines who attempt to report war crimes risked their lives. On September 12 1969, Nick Turse writes in his book kill anything that moves the real American war in Vietnam, George chunko sent a letter to his parents, explaining how his unit had entered a home that at a young Vietnamese woman, for young children and elderly man and a military age male. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese Army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner chunko wrote was ridiculed slapped around and had mud rubbed into his face. He was then executed. a day late a day after he wrote the letter chunko was killed juncos parents Turse rights suspected that their son had been murdered, to cover up the crime. I carry within me death, a smell of decayed and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, the shrieks of children, the sound of gunfire, the Deafening Blast the fear, the stench of cordite, the humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life, the loss of comrades and friends, and then the aftermath, the long alienation, the numbness, the nightmares, the lack of sleep, the inability to connect all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret, the repugnant lies mouth around us about honor and heroism and glory, the absurdity, the waste, the futility. It is only the broken and the maimed, that no war and we ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our back this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death. And the weight of it digs into our shoulders, and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life uphills and downhills along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us those who know us best. Know that there is something unspeakable and evil, many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate, it is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war. Wars captured in the long vacant stares in the silences in the trembling fingers in the memories most of us keep buried deep within us in the tears. It is impossible to portray war, narratives, even anti war narratives make the irrational, rational. They make the incomprehensible comprehensible. They make the illogical law logical, they make the despicable, beautiful, all words and images, all discussions, all films, all applications of war good or bad or an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the scars and wounds that we carry within us. Those we cannot articulate the horror, the horror. I wander through life with this dead