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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmerica’s Endless Air Wars ("dangerous, irrational, a crime")
7/6/2015
U.S. Central Commands latest figures on its aerial bombardment of Iraq and Syria reveal that this is the heaviest U.S. bombing campaign since President George W. Bushs Shock and Awe campaign against Iraq in 2003. In the campaigns first ten months from August 2014 to May 2015, the U.S. and its allies conducted 15,245 air strikes, or an average of 51 air strikes per day.
This is only the latest campaign in a 15-year global air war, largely ignored by U.S. media, in which the United States and its allies have conducted at least 118,000 air strikes against other countries since 2000. The 47,000 air strikes conducted in the 6 ½ years since President Barack Obama took office are only a small reduction from the 70,000 in eight years of the Bush administration, and the current campaign will easily make up that deficit if it continues at this intensity until Obama leaves office.
Afghanistan has been the most heavily bombed country, with at least 61,000 air strikes since 2001. That includes 24,000 bombs and missiles in the first year of the war and a relentless bombing campaign that struck Afghanistan with another 29,000 bombs and missiles between 2007 and 2012, a slow motion version of Shock and Awe. That was an average of 13 air strikes per day for six full years, two years under Bush and four under Obama. The heaviest bombardment was in October 2010, with 1,043 air strikes that month, but that total is now eclipsed every month by the new campaign in Iraq and Syria....
....Big SNIP of relevant & disturbing facts....
Apologists claim that U.S. bombing is morally superior to the terrorism of Americas enemies, because the U.S. killing and beheading of civilians is unintentional rather than deliberate. The late Howard Zinn, a former U.S. Air Force bombardier and later a history professor, responded to this claim in a letter to the New York Times in 2007:
These words are misleading because they assume that an action is either deliberate or unintentional. There is something in between, for which the word is inevitable. If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not intentional....
....another huge SNIP....
U.S. leaders of all stripes, military or civilian, Democrat or Republican, still fail to grasp what Richard Barnet concluded in 1973 as he studied the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, at the very moment the number one nation has perfected the science of killing, it has become an impractical instrument of political domination.
The last 15 years of war have served to confirm Barnets conclusion.
After 118,000 air strikes, millions of casualties, trillions of dollars squandered, and country after country plunged into chaos, the U.S. has failed to gain political control over any of them.
But our complacent leaders and their self-satisfied advisers blunder on, debating who to threaten or attack next: Russia? China? Iran? Which threat provides the best pretext for further U.S. military expansion?
As Gabriel Kolko observed, because of inherent, even unavoidable institutional myopia, options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles.
But U.S. war-making is not just dangerous and irrational. It is also a crime. The judges at Nuremberg defined aggression, attacking or invading other countries, as the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. The UN Charter goes one step further and prohibits the threat as well as the use of force....
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/06/americas-endless-air-wars
KG
(28,751 posts)I don't understand how people can be so very upset about Bush's Iraq war and not seem to care that we continue to wage war, spend trillions, & kill thousands of innocents for no apparent reason. Its not like there are transparent, democratic governments in the ME now (or in the US for that matter.)
KG
(28,751 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)therefore no Dem can"
Romulox
(25,960 posts)newfie11
(8,159 posts)I am ashamed and appalled at what my country is doing.
This won't just end whenever the MIC decides to stop bombing ( if ever)!
The radiation on our (non nuke) bombs will continue destroying generations.
RiverLover
(7,830 posts)I never could have imagined our country could be like this, back when I was growing up. We're the Evil Empire now.
SamKnause
(13,108 posts)The U.S. does what it wants, where it wants, to who
it wants, and never suffers any consequences.
RiverLover
(7,830 posts)Its certainly not just in the ME and Russia.
I read another article this morning about peoples protests in Central America against corruption in their govt...and the US wants to send in our armed forces to help counter the protesters...
Popular Protests Are Spreading Across Central America, and Washington Is Getting Nervous
As mass mobilizations sweep Guatemala and Honduras, the US prepares its usual response: Send in the military.
http://www.thenation.com/article/popular-protests-are-spreading-across-central-america-and-washington-is-getting-nervous/