Keeping Count (When Ours Goes Down, Theirs Goes Up)
By Dave Lindorff
Created Jul 6 2008 - 1:20pm
Celeste Zapalla, the Gold Star mother of an early casualty in America's
invasion of Iraq who lost her son when he was doing guard duty during a
fraudulent "search" for alleged WMDs in Iraq, was speaking from the heart
when she told a group of antiwar demonstrators at Philadelphia's
Independence Mall Saturday that she was grateful no American troops had
been
killed during the past week in Iraq.
Her concern for the troops' well-being is understandable.
But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are coming
at
the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even more true in
Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.
The reason for this ugly calculus is that in order to keep politically
damaging US casualties as low as possible, the US military and the
Bush/Cheney administration that gives the generals their marching orders,
are resorting increasingly to the use of air power--bombs and rockets and
remote controlled, missile-equipped Predator drone aircraft--to attack
suspected militant targets.
Case in point--the 22 people the BBC re****ts [1] were killed in eastern
Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province yesterday in a US missile strike on what
turns out to have been a wedding procession. According to re****ts from
local
Afghan police and other officials quoted in the BBC story, 19 of the
victims
of this horrific attack were women and children.
This slaughter--which US military authorities, following their standard
MO,
are denying, claiming that those killed were "militants"-- follows an
earlier one Friday in Afghanistan, in which a missile fired from a US
helicopter killed 15 people, all civilians.
It has reached a point that in Afghanistan, the US and its NATO allies
(thought primarily the US, since most NATO forces are not in front-line
combat roles, and are not conducting most of the air strikes) are killing
far more Afghan civilians than are the Taliban and their allies in the
country.
The same thing is true in Iraq, where the on-the-ground combat role of US
forces is being scaled back, while the use of air power is being ramped
up.
The very idea of conducting an "occupation" via airpower is fundamentally
criminal in nature, since there is simply no way that people operating at
command centers and computer terminals--sometimes in the case of Predator
drones, terminals that are actually situated in the US!--can make accurate
determinations about who the target is, and, equally im****tantly, how many
innocent civilians may be in the immediate vicinity of a strike.
We cannot celebrate the reduction in US casualties if they are coming at
the
expense of innocent civilians (and I know that this was not Ms. Zapalla's
intent, either).
The same strategy of killing from the air was adopted in the later years
of
the Vietnam War. It wasn't as successful at reducing US casualties,
because
in Vietnam, US forces were confronting a large, well organized military
force, and had to confront them on the ground, but it was successful at
killing innocent Vietnamese, as well as people in Cambodia and Laos, who
were dying at a more prodigious rate towards the end of that conflict than
in its earlier years, thanks to indiscriminate US bombardment.
The same thing is happening now in America's current imperialist wars.
At the Independence Mall demonstration, organized by the venerable
Brandywine Peace Community, there was a somber memorial made to America's
dead in Iraq: a black cloth on which was painted the number 4000 in large
white numerals. Several blood-red long-stemmed roses were laid upon the
cloth. But there should have been a second black cloth also strewn with
roses, on which should have been painted the number 1.2 million-the
estimated number of innocent Iraqis killed in America's invasion and
occupation of their country. (I don't mean to criticize either Celeste or
Brandywine here, and certainly the Iraqi and Afghani deaths were mentioned
by speakers at the event.)
We in the anti-war movement need to make certain that we do not allow the
issue to be narrowly focused on protecting American troops. We need to
continually make the point that it is criminal for America's military
forces
to be slaughtering innocent Iraqis and Afghanis.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues.
I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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