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Obama’s Letters of No Apology
By Paul Street
11/08/08 "Dissident
Voice" - -- Should
Barack Obama’s volunteers mail “Letters of No Apology” to
survivors of the large number of people killed by U.S. imperial
assault in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Recently Obama was asked by
CNN’s Candy Crowley if “there’s anything that’s happened in the
past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms
of foreign policy?” Obama responded by saying, “No, I don’t
believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in
Iraq was a mistake. We didn’t keep our eye on the ball in
Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m much
more interested in looking forward rather than looking
backwards.” The United States, Obama told Crowley, “remains
overwhelmingly a force of good in the world.”
“SHOT AS THEY RAN”
I would like the Afghan “war”
enthusiast
Barack Obama to write a Letter of No Apology to Orifa Ahmed. On
October 7, 2001, Orifa’s house in the Afghan village of Bibi
Mahru was destroyed by a 500-pound bomb dropped by an American
F-16 plane. The explosion killed her husband (a carpet weaver),
six of her children and two children, who lived (and died) next
door. Away visiting relatives when the bombing occurred, Orifa
returned to find pieces of her children’s flesh scattered around
the killing site. She received $400 from U.S. authorities to
compensate her for her losses.
I would also like Obama to write
a “Letter of No Apology” to Gulam Rasul, a school headmaster in
the Afghan town of Khair Khana. On the morning of October 21,
2001, the United States dropped a 500-pound bomb on his house,
killing his wife, three of his sons, his sister and her husband,
his brother, and his sister-in-law.
Another “Letter of Apology”
should go to Sher Kahn, an old man who lost seven relatives when
the United States assaulted the Afghan village of Niazi Qala on
December 29, 2001. Here is how the British author and filmmaker
John Pilger describes the attack:
The roar of the planes had
started at three in the morning, long after everybody had
retired for the night. Then the bombs began to fall —
500-pounders leading the way, scooping out the earth and
felling a row of houses. According to neighbors watching
from a distance, the planes flew three sorties over the
village and a helicopter hovered close to the ground, firing
flares, then rockets. Women and children were seen running
from the houses towards a dried pond, perhaps in search of
protection from the gunfire, but were shot as they ran.
“Letters of No Apology” should
also go from the “antiwar” Obama campaign to survivors of:
- 35 Afghan refugees who were
bombed by the U.S. for riding in a bus in flight from U.S.
assault.
- 160 Afghanis killed in
repeated U.S. bombings of the village of Karam.
- 93 people killed when U.S.
Ac 130 gun-ships strafed the small farming village
Chowkar-Karaz. (The Pentagon said the community was
“supporting terrorists” and therefore deserved its fate:
“those people are dead,” a Pentagon spokesman told
reporters, “because we wanted them dead.”)
- Rampant U.S. torture of
civilians and non-combatants employed as part of the “war on
terror” at the Bagram military base, near Kabul, since the
fall of 2001.
- 64 civilians killed when
the U.S. bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan in
early July of this year (This was the fourth wedding party
blown up by the U.S.-led “coalition” since the fall of
2001).
- 19 women who died in the
gynecology wing of a Kabul hospital bombed by the U.S. in
October of 2001.
- The countless other U.S.
attacks on Afghan villages that have added to a civilian
death toll that certainly goes well into the thousands since
the U.S. initiated its “liberation” of Afghanistan from a
Taliban government the U.S. largely put into place during
the 1990s.
The people of Afghanistan can be
forgiven for thinking it might not be all bad if Uncle Sam has
occasionally taken his eye off “the ball in Afghanistan.”
U.S.-”liberated” Afghanistan
remains desperately poor and violence-plagued under the control
of religious extremists, warlords and the deadly U.S. Empire.
Women are less safe there now than under the Taliban.
“AS ILLEGAL AS THE
INVASON OF IRAQ”
For what it’s worth, prominent
legal scholar Marjorie Cohn notes that “the invasion of
Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq.” As Cohn
explains:
“The U.N. Charter provides that
all member states must settle their international disputes by
peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in
self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After
the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of
which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.”
“The invasion of Afghanistan was
not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter
because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not
‘armed attacks’ by another country. Afghanistan did not attack
the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from
Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of
an armed attack on the United States after September 11, or Bush
would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October
2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be
‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no
moment for deliberation.’ This classic principle of self-defense
in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal
and the U.N. General Assembly.”
Sold as a legitimate defensive
response to the jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken without definitive proof
or knowledge that that country’s largely U.S.-created Taliban
government was responsible in any way for 9/11. It occurred
after the Bush administration rebuffed efforts by that
government to possibly extradite accused 9/11 planners to stand
trial in the U.S. The U.S. sought to destroy the Taliban
government with no legal claim to introduce regime change in
another sovereign state. The invasion took place over the
protest of numerous Afghan opposition leaders and in defiance of
aid organizations who expected a U.S. attack to produce a
humanitarian catastrophe. And, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2003,
U.S. claims to possess the right to bomb Afghanistan — an action
certain to produce significant casualties — raised the
interesting question of whether Cuba and Nicaragua were entitled
to set off bombs in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S.
provided shelter to well-known terrorists shown to have
conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban and Nicaraguan people
and governments.
Under Bush’s rationale for launching his assault on Afghanistan
(an attack that Obama wishes to significantly expand), citizens
of Latin American states whose dictatorships were schooled in
torture at the School of the Americas (Ft. Benning, Georgia)
would be free to attack American cities and villages.
“IRAQ HAS BEEN KILLED”
As for the U.S. “mistake” in
Iraq, where to begin with the Letters of No Apology that Obama
and his staff need to write? The U.S. has undertaken a highly
criminal occupation of that country against the wishes of the
“liberated” nation’s own populace. In a marvelous example of
what Obama called (in Berlin last week) U.S. “sacrifice” for
“freedom,”
the U.S. has inflicted a bloody Holocaust on Mesopotamia,
killing (directly and indirectly) as many as 1.2 million Iraqis
and maiming and displacing many millions more. According to the
respected journalist Nir Rosen last December, “Iraq has been
killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been
more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in
the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There
is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be
contained.”
I wonder what Rosen would have
had to say about the following comment offered by Barack Obama
to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in
Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that
state’s Democratic primary: “It’s time to stop spending billions
of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start
spending the money putting America back together.”
“We should support the millions
of Iraqis,” Obama told 200,000 rapt listeners in Berlin, “who
seek to rebuild their lives even as we pass on responsibility to
the Iraqi government.”
“Rebuild their lives” from
exactly what, pray tell? Senator Obama did not elaborate on the
two U.S. military attacks, the decade plus of murderous
“economic sanctions” (which killed more than half a million
children — a cost that the current Obama advisor and supporter
Madeline Albright called a “price worth paying”), and the
ongoing invasion’s ever-climbing death toll. Obama will continue
the occupation as president, something known by those who care
to read between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign
rhetoric.
Reading Obama’s line about
“freedom”-loving America’s overseas “sacrifice” in his Berlin
Address, I was reminded of something he said in a speech to The
Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: “The
American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in alleged
support of the Iraq "war" - P.S.]. They have seen their sons and
daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.
This was a spine-chilling
selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for colossal U.S.
war atrocity — the crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter
of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals,
and the practical leveling of an entire city — by the U.S.
military in April and November of 2004. The town was designated
for destruction as an example of the awesome state terror
promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not
surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of
American imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It was a
deeply provocative and insulting place to choose to highlight
American “sacrifice” and “resolve” in the brazenly imperialist
occupation — described as “a colonial war” by the grand U.S.
imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski (an Obama foreign policy
advisor) — of Iraq.
Recycling the imperial discourse
of elite Democratic “doves” during and on the Vietnam War,
Obama insists that the monumentally illegal and transparently
petro-colonial occupation of Iraq was a “strategic blunder”
resulting from “our” over-zealous “good intentions” (sometimes
we just get a little crazy with our noble passion to spread
liberty).
Not true: Operation Iraqi
Liberation (O.I.L.) is an imperial CRIME (aggressive warfare was
the top crime for which Nazi leaders were executed at Nuremburg)
obviously dedicated to deepening U.S. control over
hyper-strategic oil resources in the world’s energy heartland
while serving the ongoing interests of the American
military-industrial complex.
Barack No Apology (Because We
Are Good) Obama wants badly to expand what he calls George W.
Bush’s “good” and “proper” war on Afghanistan while claiming to
want to reduce America’s “mistake[n]” presence in Iraq.
The world should beware.
Superpower may be getting ready to take on some outwardly new
faces, but its dangerous national narcissism will live on along
with its empire of bases, bullets, and bombs.
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