REPOSTED IN TOTO IN THE INTEREST OF PUBLIC SANITY

Tom Engelhardt
tomdispatch.com
WILLIAM J ASTORE

Americans catching the sights in Afghanistan. Innocents abroad alright—but armed and deadly.

Afghanistan!

Whether the story is the fall of a major city to the Taliban, the destruction of a hospital with staff and patients still in it, or the president’s announcement that U.S. troops will remain in that country until at least 2017, it’s true that you never feel there’s an exclamation point after “Afghanistan.”  Fourteen years later, it remains part of the relatively humdrum background reality of American life.  And yet imagine for a moment that you jumped into a time machine and took a spin back to 1978.  There, you told the first American you ran into that you had just mainlined into the future and discovered that, starting in 1979, the U.S. would be involved in two wars (broken by a decade-long semi-absence) in a single country adding up to a quarter-century of conflict.  If you had then asked for a guess as to which country that might be, I can guarantee you one thing: no American would have said Afghanistan.

I can guarantee you something else, too: if you had insisted that this was America’s war-fighting future, you might have found yourself institutionalized.  Back in 1978, if an American knew anything about that country, it was probably as an exotic stop on the “hippie trail,” not as a war-torn land the U.S. could never leave. The very thought that Afghanistan was crucial to American “national security” or that the U.S. would someday pump hundreds of billions of dollars into that country in a fruitless attempt to “secure” it would have seemed laughable.  Similarly, in the endless years of our second Afghan War, that the country would become the world’s leading producer of a single agricultural product with consistently record-breaking yields — I’m talking, of course, about opium — and be responsible for 75% of the global heroin supply, would have seemed like material for a science fiction novel, not reality.  All of this would have been beyond imagining in the America of 1978.

So welcome back to the twenty-first century!  That none of this shocks us today, that the word “Afghanistan” isn’t joined at the hip to an exclamation point (or at least a question mark) in our thinking, if not the news, tells us just how strange — and yet how normal — the bizarre imperial world of the planet’s “sole superpower” has become. As TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests today, what this country needs is a medical intervention.  After all, as he points out, in Afghanistan and elsewhere we’re suffering from Imperial Tourism Syndrome. Tom

Tourists of Empire
America’s Peculiar Brand of Global Imperialism
By William J. Astore

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he United States is a peculiar sort of empire.  As a start, Americans have been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War of 1898, if not before.  Empire — us?  We denied its existence even while our soldiers were administering “water cures” (aka waterboarding) to recalcitrant Filipinos more than a century ago.  Heck, we even told ourselves we were liberating those same Filipinos, which leads to a second point: the U.S. not only denies its imperial ambitions, but shrouds them in a curiously American brand of Christianized liberation theology.  In it, American troops are never seen as conquerors or oppressors, always as liberators and freedom-bringers, or at least helpers and trainers.  There’s just enough substance to this myth (World War II and the Marshall Plan, for example) to hide uglier imperial realities.

Denying that we’re an empire while cloaking its ugly side in missionary-speak are two enduring aspects of the American brand of imperialism, and there’s a third as well, even if it’s seldom noted.  As the U.S. military garrisons the planet and its special operations forces alone visit more than 140 countries a year, American troops have effectively become the imperial equivalent of globetrotting tourists.  Overloaded with technical gear and gadgets (deadly weapons, intrusive sensors), largely ignorant of foreign cultures, they arrive eager to help and spoiling for action, but never (individually) staying long.  Think of them as the twenty-first-century version of the ugly American of Vietnam-era fame.

The ugliest of Americans these days may no longer be the meddling CIA operative of yesteryear; “he” may not even be human but a “made in America” drone. Think of such drones as especially unwelcome American tourists, cruising the exotic and picturesque backlands of the planet loaded with cameras and weaponry, ready to intervene in deadly ways in matters its operators, possibly thousands of miles away, don’t fully understand.  Like normal flesh-and-blood tourists, the drone “sees” the local terrain, “senses” local activity, “detects” patterns among the inhabitants that appear threatening, and then blasts away.  The drone and its operators, of course, don’t live in the land or grasp the nuances of local life, just as real tourists don’t.  They are literally above it all, detached from it all, and even as they kill, often wrongfully, they’re winging their way back home to safety.

For too many soldiers the immersion in these cultures is like being sent to exterminate roaches. Their insularity, reinforced by the strong peculiarities of the American military subculture, makes them permanent ignoramuses about the country they are supposed to be “helping.”

…

Imperial Tourism Syndrome

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]all it Imperial Tourist Syndrome, a bizarre American affliction that creates its own self-sustaining dynamic.  To a local, it might look something like this: U.S. forces come to your country, shoot some stuff up (liberation!), take some selfies, and then, if you’re lucky, leave (at least for a while).  If you’re unlucky, they overstay their “welcome,” surge around a bit and generate chaos until, sooner or later (in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, much, much later), they exit, not always gracefully (witness Saigon 1975 or Iraq 2011).

And here’s the weirdest thing about this distinctly American version of the imperial: a persistent short-time mentality seems only to feed its opposite, wars that persist without end.  In those wars, many of the country’s heavily armed imperial tourists find themselves sent back again and again for one abbreviated tour of duty after another, until it seems less like an adventure and more like a jail sentence.

The paradox of short-timers prosecuting such long-term wars is irresolvable because, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the twenty-first century, those wars can’t be won.  Military experts criticize the Obama administration for lacking an overall strategy, whether in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.  They miss the point.  Imperial tourists don’t have a strategy: they have an itinerary.  If it’s Tuesday, this must be Yemen; if it’s Wednesday, Libya; if it’s Thursday, Iraq.

In this way, America’s combat tourists keep cycling in and out of foreign hotspots, sometimes on yearly tours, often on much shorter ones.  They are well-armed, as you’d expect in active war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan.  Like regular tourists, however, they carry cameras as well as other sensors and remain alert for exotic photo-shoots to share with their friends or the folks back home.  (Look here, a naked human pyramid in Abu Ghraib Prison!)

WTF! ?!

As tourists, they’re also alert to the possibility that on this particular imperial safari some exotic people may need shooting.  There’s a quip that’s guaranteed to win knowing chuckles within military circles: “Join the Army, travel to exotic lands, meet interesting people — and kill them.”  Originally an anti-war slogan from the Vietnam era, it’s become somewhat of a joke in a post-9/11 militarized America, one that quickly pales when you consider the magnitude of foreign body counts in these years, made more real (for us, at least) when accompanied by discomforting trophy photos of U.S. troops urinating on enemy corpses or posing with enemy body parts.

Here’s the bedrock reality of Washington’s twenty-first-century conflicts, though: no matter what “strategy” is concocted to fight them, we’ll always remain short-time tourists in long-term wars.

Imperial Tourism: A Surefire Recipe for Defeat

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s all so tragically predictable.  When it’s imperial tourists against foreign “terrorists,” guess who wins?  No knock on American troops.  They have no shortage of can-do spirit.  They fight to win.  But when their imperial vacations (military interventions/invasions) morph into neocolonial staycations (endless exercises in nation-building, troop training, security assistance, and the like), they have already lost, no matter how many “having a great time” letters — or rather glowing progress reports to Congress — are sent to the folks back home.

By definition, tourists, imperial or otherwise, always want to go home in the end.  The enemy, from the beginning, is generally already home.  And no clever tactics, no COIN (or counterinsurgency) handbook, no fancy, high-tech weapons or robotic man-hunters are ever going to change that fundamental reality.

It was a dynamic already obvious five decades ago in Vietnam: a ticket-punching mentality that involved the constant rotation of units and commanders; a process of needless reinvention of the most basic knowledge as units deployed, bugged out, and were then replaced by new units; and the use of all kinds of grim, newfangled weapons and sensors, everything from Agent Orange and napalm to the electronic battlefield and the latest fighter planes and bombers — all for naught.  Under such conditions, even the U.S. superpower lacked staying power, precisely because it never intended to stay.  The “staying” aspect of the Vietnam War was often referred to in the U.S. as a “quagmire.”  For the Vietnamese, of course, their country was no “big muddy” that sucked you down.  It was home.  They had little choice in the matter; they stayed — and fought.

Combine a military with a tourist-like itinerary and a mentality to match, a high command that in its own rotating responsibilities lacks all accountability for mistakes, and a byzantine, top-heavy bureaucracy, and you turn out to have a surefire recipe for defeat.  And once again, in the twenty-first century, whether among the rank and file or at the very top, there’s little continuity or accountability involved in America’s military presence in foreign lands.  Commanders are constantly rotated in and out of war zones.  There’s often a new one every year.  (I count 17 commanders for the International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan, the U.S.-led military coalition, since December 2001.) U.S. troops may serve multiple overseas tours, yet they are rarely sent back to the same area.  Tours are sequential, not cumulative, and so the learning curve exhibited is flat.

There’s a scene at the beginning of season four of “Homeland” in which ex-CIA chief Saul Berenson is talking with some four-star generals.  He says: “If we’d known in 2001 we were staying in Afghanistan this long, we’d have made some very different choices.  Right?  Instead, our planning cycles rarely looked more than 12 months ahead.  So it hasn’t been a 14-year war we’ve been waging, but a one-year war waged 14 times.”

True enough.  In Afghanistan and Iraq as well, the U.S. has fought sequentially rather than cumulatively.  Not surprisingly, such sequential efforts, no matter how massive and costly, simply haven’t added up.  It’s just one damn tour after another.

But the fictional Saul’s tagline on Afghanistan is more suspect: “I think we’re walking away with the job half done.” For him, as well as for the Washington establishment of this moment, the U.S. needs to stay the course (at least until 2017, according to President Obama’s recent announcement), during which time assumedly we’ll at long last stumble upon the El-Dorado-like long-term strategy in which America actually prevails.

Of course, the option that’s never on Washington’s table is the obvious and logical one: simply to end imperial tourism.  With apologies to Elton John, “sorry” is only the second hardest word for U.S. officials.  The first is “farewell.”

A big defeat (Vietnam, 1975) might keep imperial tourism fever in check for a while.  But give us a decade or three and Americans are back at it, humping foreign hills again, hoping against hope that this year’s trip will be better than the previous year’s disaster.

In other words, a sustainable long-term strategy for Afghanistan is precisely what the U.S. government has failed to produce for 14 years!  Why should 2015 or 2017 or 2024 be any different than 2002 or 2009 or indeed any other year of American involvement?

At some level, the U.S. military knows it’s screwed.  That’s why its commanders tinker so much with weapons and training and technology and tactics.  It’s the stuff they can control, the stuff that seems real in a way that foreign peoples aren’t (at least to us).  Let’s face it: past as well as current events suggest that guns and how to use them are what Americans know best.

But foreign lands and peoples?  We can’t control them.  We don’t understand them.  We can’t count on them.  They’re just part of the landscape we’re eternally passing through — sometimes as people to help and places to rebuild, other times as people to kill and places to destroy.  What they aren’t is truly real.  They are the tourist attractions of American war making, sometimes exotic, sometimes deadly, but (for us) strangely lacking in substance.

And that is precisely why we fail.

[box] Copyright 2015 William J. Astore
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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

By Joaquin Flores
A FORT RUSS DISPATCH
A six part report investigating the real causes of the war on Syria

The debate surrounding the origins of the war in Syria is of critical importance.  The outcome of this conflict will be a major factor in determining the balance of power in the world during the coming period.  With the recent and interestingly sudden refugee surge from the region into Europe, followed later by an increase in participation of Russian military forces in the conflict, being able to make sound and unbiased assessments of the causative factors in this conflict is a pressing need.

In looking at the question, we first would like to discuss the reasons for the writing of this report. The political sciences contain the taxonomic and conceptual framework, and explanatory power, to describe the causes of the Syrian conflict.  But in the West, lay journalistic and semi-analytic write-ups, and otherwise accessible writing on the subject, does not make adequate use of much of these well developed ideas.  These relate perhaps to practical problems relating to publishing space, as well as to how writers and publishers have assessed the capacity of mass audiences to make use of, or absorb, said writing.  

In cases where western analytic works are in question, documents coming from mainstream think-tanks which deliver analysis both to governmental institutions and to the public, may indeed be engaged in willful misrepresentation of the operating schema. The approach of the author in related works has been to target the ‘real audience’: already well informed citizen-activists and ‘geopolitical trainspotters’ who have read possibly hundreds of articles on the subject, only to be confronted with recurring characterizations, recirculated memes and tropes, which problematically combine the recitation of facts alongside politically convenient narratives.

Our main task therefore is to bridge the gap between objective and systematic analysis and accessible presentation: making use of standardized tools without prejudice, delivered without reliance on references not already generally accessible to the audience.  This necessarily involves some discussion of the histories of all of the players.  While the total work will require 6 parts, each being slightly longer than a standard article’s length, it will condense and present information with a discussion in such a way that in fact contextualizes much of the public writing on the subject, and indeed perhaps will liberate the reader from the onerous task of data-mining in – what would otherwise be – hundreds of other articles.

Indeed, as mentioned above, the present public and accessible literature on the subject of the Syrian conflict is problematic.

Incoherencies in other attempts to describe the Syrian conflict arise from factors external to the present body of literature on the subject: there are few if any really concealed facts or truths which could make understanding the conflict difficult.  Real issues arise in narratives, over-focus on some facts to the exclusion of others, and real-politik concerns relating to political polarization. This report will not review this existing literature and public writing, but instead will take a ‘clean slate’ approach, and rely on either uncontested facts, generally accepted facts, or otherwise easy to reference findings and assertions.   

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]ndeed the Syrian crisis since its inception has generated a significant volume of western public literature, as attempts have been made to address the fundamental question of the war’s causes, and what the primary issues were that catalyzed and fueled its genesis. While some of these efforts were well-intentioned and partially thorough, and yet other efforts intentionally disingenuous, they were similar in their attempts to provide an answer to one of the greatest apparent geopolitical debates of the present time.  

These problems have hitherto been represented in the public presentations of think-tanks, both governmental (and related, such as the Council of Foreign Relation’s ‘Foreign Policy’) and independent, alike. The debate over the war and its origins has once again polarized non-interventionist and anti-imperialist socio-political movements in the West as well, and has made strange political bedfellows of advocates, activists, analysts, and even the players themselves, on ‘either side’ of this conflict. 

The Syrian conflict has drawn particular attention to questions revolving around national sovereignty and the right of peoples to self-determination; to the role of NGOs and non-profits sanctioned by the UN; to the relationship and shared rights between minority and majority demographic groups, whether religious or ethnic, within a modern nation-state; and as well as issues revolving around the inherent and internationally recognized rights of nations to preserve their security and represent their people(s) within the framework of international law and the UN charter. 

Furthermore the conflict has shed light on issues relating to foreign states’ use of proxy or mercenary armies; the role of weaponized and proxy volunteer or ideologically/religiously based social-movements deployed for use in another country.

Finally the conflict has drawn attention to the roles and relationships of governments in their efforts to balance between ‘legitimacy’ on the one hand, and the external pressures placed on them to increasingly ‘liberalize’ (i.e. privatize and open to foreign control and ownership) their economies as well as the liberalization of  pluralist civil institutions. 

Complexity and Polarization: why public writing on the Syrian conflict is deficient

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he theories provided to date which attempt to summarize the issue in any case have different problems, but in the case of honestly and well presented literature, the authors are not at fault per se.  Rather, the deficiencies of these writings are a product of two problematic factors at work: the multitude of factors at play combined with the polarizing nature of the conflict.  

Measures undertaken to simply “point a finger” and suggest that, that there is one specific reason this crisis came to be is an erroneous conclusion, and counterproductive to a more complete and accurate understanding of the question: what caused the Syrian crisis?

What caused the Syrian crisis?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he answer to this question is far from simple and requires in-depth analysis of all associated materials and variables rather than attempting to identify one specific causative agent (i.e. person, state, process, phenomenon, or ideology). Politics and sociology are anything but simple, and foreign policy and geostrategy is of even equal complexity.

Complex answers are unpopular, and are not ready-made for mass circulation.  Understanding of the problems involves something of a learning curve, and certain processes and the underlying theories which describe them are currency among experts, but are somewhat unknown to lay readers, even those with considerable fact-based information on the subject.

Polarization

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]olarization of the subject, as stated, is another reason for problematic analysis.  Out of concern that certain conclusions related to the cause of the war will be taken out of context by later critics or readers, ultimately opposed  to the conclusions of the author, or used by other analysts and writers in a decontextualized manner, work to greatly discourage an analytic piece which looks at all of the causes of the conflict.

It is impossible to reach conclusions about the reasons for a war which has caused such a catastrophic loss of life, especially when issues of war-crimes and crimes against humanity are at issue, which do not conclusively provide ammunition to one of the various sides in a real-existing and still on-ongoing conflict. Thus, researchers are prone to omit or soften focus on causes for the conflict which may be deemed to work against the general conclusions or narrative being presented.  

One of the necessary sources to look at in attempting to analyze the causes of this conflict are military leaders themselves.  Many of the military leaders that are interviewed to provide their feedback about the Syrian crisis often respond—“Syria is complicated.” While this answer is in many respects seemingly evasive or inconclusive, it is actually the best answer that can be provided.

Complexity

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]es, Syria is complicated, but why?

What is so complicated about a state one-third the size of Texas? What factors make it so? What is the origin of this apparent complexity? Why is a solution so difficult to arrive at? Why has the conflict in Syria become one of the greatest human tragedies in recent decades?

A deeper and more critical analysis of the associated factors must be applied. In order to adequately describe the conflict in Syria, one must understand the history and this act is best accomplished if each involved party is examined independently and also concomitantly;  It is the attempt of this analysis to do exactly that.

Many in the Middle Eastern region and outside unequivocally assign primary responsibility to one state, person, process, or ’cause’. In order to better identify the Syrian crisis all involved states, or more specifically persons with interests, must be contemplated. Arriving at the answer is not a simple task because many persons and states are involved, both directly and indirectly.

Rather than focusing on every party and state involved and how they have contributed to the Syrian crisis this analysis will focus on the primary state candidates—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. It is best to examine each state independently to better identify the cause for their involvement, but before this is done we must take a moment and understand what Syria is and why “it’s complicated.”

Syrian Army soldiers (SAA).

To summarize the findings, historical background and information about the various players is presented elsewhere inconsistently. Regarding the conflict itself,  there are multiple causative factors, some the products of direct human agency, and others – when going back in time – are  indirect or unintentional ‘perfect storm’ types of causes or catalysts.  These involve what a number of external actors such as neighboring states and hegemonic powers did, whether as a result of their own agency as such, or as a result of being compelled, yet, by still other causative factors.  These are complex.  

Polarization of the subject made reporting difficult.  Recognition of 1.)  the rational and/or legitimate basis of the demands of the opposition;  alongside of 2.) a recognition that government policy of the Syrian government was significantly problematic; together with 3.) a view that the Syrian state made notable errors, including violations of human rights – broadly defined, in the initial stages of the conflict, and that 4.) Syrian domestic and foreign policy for years leading up to the initial protests were a significant causative factor,  is difficult to do when a given analysts’ ultimate conclusion is that the best solution to the crisis involves the integrity of the Syrian state administered by and large by its present leadership. 

Likewise, recognition that the Syrian government has 1.) met either all or the most critical of the legitimate opposition’s demands;  2.) that the alternative to the present government posed by the predominant Islamist ‘rebel’ factions will be tremendously worse all around; and  3.) that public polling and elections during the course of the conflict have demonstrated increased rather than decreased support for the Syrian government; and that 4.) uninvited foreign states and foreign backed actors have not only exacerbated the conflict but indeed were involved in planning it, are practically impossible facts to include when the conclusion of a given analyst is that the ‘resolution’ talks must result in a devolution of power away from the present Syrian government, and a transition to a different government which satisfies the Western powers. 

About the Author

Joaquin Flores is a Mexican-American expat based in Belgrade. He is a full-time analyst and director at the Center for Syncretic Studies, a public geostrategic think-tank and consultancy firm, as well as the co-editor of Fort Russ news service. His expertise encompasses Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and he has a strong proficiency in Middle East affairs. Flores is particularly adept at analyzing ideology and the role of mass psychology, as well as the methods of the information war in the context of 4GW and New Media. He is a political scientist educated at California State University. In the US, he worked for a number of years as a labor union organizer, chief negotiator, and strategist for a major trade union federation.

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We apologize for this inconvenience. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

By David Swanson

The fateful landing of Columbus in 1492. The European plague had arrived. As was the custom of the time, Columbus proceeded to take possession of these lands for the Spanish crown. (Click on the images)

In Aguirre, Wrath of God, German director W. Herzog faithfully recreated the brutal conquest of the new world by the Spaniards. (Still: Klaus Kinski as the mutineer Aguirre. The script is based on a true story.)

LUCIANA BOHNE

They suffer without voices. Giles Duley

While Russia was bombing ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria, the US was bombing a hospital in northern Afghanistan.

KUNDUZ, AFGHANISTAN -OCTOBER 03: Doctors Without Borders (MSF) staff are seen during a surgery after a US airstrike on MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 03, 2015. (Photo by MSF/Pool/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)/ Click on image.

In the early hours of Saturday last, a day after the US warned Russia not to target civilians in Syria, a US airstrike killed twenty-two aid workers and patients—three of them children— at the health facility in Kunduz, run by the humanitarian assistance organization, Medicins sans Frontieres–Doctors without Borders (DWB).

The bombardment lasted thirty minutes, despite frantic appeals by the staff to Washington and Kabul. GPS co-ordinates had recently been supplied to all parties in the fighting.

On Sunday, Christopher Stokes, general director of DWB, called the strike a “war crime.” On 4 October, The Washington Post wrote, “U.S. forces may have mistakenly bombed a hospital.” Hamdullah Danishi, acting governor in Kunduz, said, “The hospital campus was 100 percent used by the Taliban.” DWB officials contested in a statement the charge that Taliban forces were posted in the garden, at the center of the charity hospital: “The gates of the hospital were all closed so no one that is not a staff, a patient or a caretaker was inside the hospital when the bombing happened.”

By a curious coincidence, only a week before the bombing of the hospital compound in Kunduz, DWB in Yemen had discredited the claim by the Saudi government that the massacre of a wedding party on 28 September had been a mistake and that the target of the Saudi coalition forces had been the rebels, not the 131 civilians (80 of them women) who were killed. DWB officially stated that there had been no military presence in the vicinity of the wedding party.

The United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) underscores the critical role that DWB performs in Yemen in saving lives:

Médicines Sans Frontières continues to operate its surgical centre in Aden, and has played a crucial role in saving the lives of many severely injured people. The continuity and scaling up of this centre is critical in ensuring an effective health response in Aden.

Yemen drone strike bodies. Courtesy of the sanctimonious US-led NATO alliance. These victims are even denied their full humanity. The US—a leader in public relations lingo— long ago coined the obscene term “collateral damage” to sanitize Pentagon crimes. To render abstract and obscure is to deny.

WHO reports that all governorates in Yemen are in dire need of trauma and surgical medicines; of fuel for ambulances and generators in health facilities; of medicines for chronic diseases; of safe water in health facilities; of food, particularly as 170,000 children in Yemen are already suffering from malnutrition after six months of the US-backed war; of more ambulances and more medical teams in Southern Yemen.  Yet, WHO laments that attacks on existing medical personnel and facilities have been ongoing:

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n 4 April, two volunteer paramedics with the Yemen Red Crescent Society in Aden were shot when their ambulance was hit by gunfire. The paramedics, who were brothers, died from their injuries on their way to hospital. On 30 March, a volunteer ambulance driver with the Yemen Red Crescent Society was killed after his vehicle was hit by gunfire in Al Dhale’a.

Drones have entered the public imagination. Children and adults fear the skies.

Although WHO is careful not to reveal the agency of the attackers on medical teams and facilities, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, reports that thirty-eight Yemeni civilians were killed on average every day between 25 March and 12 April by the Saudi-led bombing campaign:

Two-thirds of the reported civilian deaths during the conflict since March were caused by airstrikes. When you’re getting this very high toll of civilians, it suggests something may be going badly wrong or perhaps not enough care is being taken.

Indeed, in recent days, the US-backed Saudi coalition has become a source of embarrassment to the American political establishment. In the New York Times, US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter is credited with saying that the US-backed Saudi bombing campaign has strengthened Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This is a tergiversation for the cold truth: the campaign has not succeeded in quelling the Houthi rebellion, but it has succeeded in wreaking civilian chaos on Yemen.

Yemen hunger—war made. Corporate presstitutes pretend such terrible reality does not exist.

Though seldom front-page news, the Saudi airstrikes have destroyed hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, and refugee camps.  On 30 March, in Northern Yemen, an airstrike at a camp for displaced people killed dozens of internal refugees.  Shortly afterwards, an airstrike destroyed an Oxfam warehouse, storing humanitarian aid. An airstrike on the Mazraq camp for displaced persons in Hajiah province killed forty people and wounded two hundred, as reported by the International Organization for Migration, which provides assistance in the camps.

Not that all grief in Yemen can be laid at Saudi doors. Yemen has been subjected to US drone strikes since December 2009, when President Obama authorized the first known strike, killing fourteen women and twenty-one children. On December 12 last, a drone hit a wedding convoy, killing twelve men. From 2011 to the present, Obama has sold the Saudis $80 billion in arms.

In the context of these atrocities against civilian persons and social structures in Yemen, it becomes absurd to hold up the lamp of humanitarian righteousness against the supposed motivational dark perfidy of the Russian intervention in Syria, which anyway appears to be making short shrift of the ISIS hordes in less than a week. When ISIS beheads people the media whips up the public into berserker frenzy; when Russia beheads ISIS, the media responds morosely.

Yemen wedding site. No longer a place of celebration.

Quite frankly, the whole treatment of civilians in Yemen since 2009 turns American protests against week-long Russian strikes killing civilians in Syria a farce—not to mention that such accounts are reported by the dubiously “neutral” Syrian Observatory on Human Rights, which, excluding unnamed “activists” and “activist groups,” appears to be the single source available to and quoted for evidence by the Western press and media.

Trevor Timm in the Guardian implicitly sums up for readers the difficulty the US has in selling the Orwellian ritual of the daily two-minute-of-hate-Russia, based on a count of Russian atrocities to civilians in Syria vis-à-vis longstanding, largely American atrocities in Yemen:

While the crisis in Syria continues to garner front-page headlines and ample television coverage, the media has largely turned a blind eye to the other travesty unfolding in the Middle East: Yemen has turned into a humanitarian disaster, where thousands of bombs are being dropped, 1.5 million people are displaced and more than 90% of the population is in need of assistance. The major difference? In Yemen, the US is one of the primary causes of the problem.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merican humanitarianism is just plain double-speak.  British news photographer, Giles Duley, who lost three limbs in Afghanistan in February of 2013 while documenting the work of the Italian war-surgery hospital of Emergency in Kabul, puts it trenchantly:

After more than 10 years of being in Afghanistan, during a so-called “nation building process,” we are yet to build one functioning hospital.

Yemen wedding after US strikes.

The director of Emergency, heart and lung transplant surgeon, Gino Strada, has just been awarded the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative to the Nobel Prize. Emergency runs a worldwide network of charity war-injuries hospitals based on “the right to be cured,” in accordance with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Paris, 10 December 1948). On the medical situation in Afghanistan, the website of Emergency writes:

The number of hospitalized injured has increased in a frightening way: from 2010 to now, the admissions to our war-surgery hospitals have more than doubled. The deterioration in the security situation was also registered by the United Nations. According to the latest report from Unama (United Nation Assistance Mission in Afghanistan), in the first 6 months of 2015, there have been at least 4.921 victims between dead and injured, the highest number ever, considering the same period in previous years.

Yemen wedding strike. Any assemblage of people may draw the attention of the American “bug-splatters.”

To expose the ludicrous argument that refugees flee “dictators,” we need only turn to Iraq, where the US removed a “dictator” twelve years ago. As the website of Emergency notes,

From 1 January 2014 to 30 April 2015, 14.947 civilians in Iraq have lost their lives; 29.189 were injured. In the same period, more than 2.8 million people have been forced to abandon their home. Among these, there were 1.3 million children (Report, United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq).

It is a moral trial for me to accept the objections of my brothers and sisters on the left to any intervention that would begin to challenge the serial provider of all this suffering. Admittedly, I am prejudiced by experience. When the Allies bombed Italian cities, we cursed the bombs but not the bombers. Frankly, it made no difference who the bombers were. They could have been 13^th-century flying Mongols. They were bringing the war to an end. That’s all that mattered, for war makes unscrupulous survivors of us all.

Smoke rises after a Saudi-led airstrike in Sanaa, Yemen, Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015.  (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Meanwhile on Monday, Gino Strada’s Emergency received twenty-one patients from Kunduz:

At the Emergency hospital in Kabul yesterday 25 patients arrived from the city of Kunduz and the hospital of Médecins sans Frontières, bombed by Nato on Saturday night. Nineteen were hospitalized, the other 6 were treated and discharged. The Emergency hospital in Kabul was already full: in the last 3 days 60 wounded arrived, 320 in the last month, 1.719 in the last 5 months. Our staff is preparing more space, in anticipation for the arrival of other wounded [my translation].

And so it goes. Every horror story has its heroes.

Sources:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/03/kunduz-charity-hospital-bombing-violates-international-law

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/04/afghanistan-hospital-airstrike-us-military-investigation-msf-doctors-without-borders

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/afghan-official-hospital-in-airstrike-was-a-taliban-base/2015/10/04/8638af58-6a47-11e5-bdb6-6861f4521205_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/afghan-official-hospital-in-airstrike-was-a-taliban-base/2015/1

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/09/coalition-killing-civilians?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=194ce0ca76-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-194ce0ca76-398530681

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/09/29/world/middleeast/ap-ml-yemen.html?_r=0

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2014/1/17/what-really-happenedwhenausdronehitayemeniweddingconvoy.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-widens-role-in-saudi-led-campaign-against-yemen-rebels-1428882967

https://soundcloud.com/bbc-world-service/unsafe-streets-of-yemen?ocid=socialflow_twitter

http://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/yemen/WHO_Yemen_sitrep2_7_April_2015.pdf?ua=1

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/us-backed-airstrikes-yemen-kill-civilians-hopes-peace#_=_

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-seeks-new-authority-to-expand-yemen-drone-campaign/2012/04/18/gIQAsaumRT_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/opinion/how-drones-help-al-qaeda.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/world/middleeast/ashton-carter-us-defense-secretary-warns-of-al-qaeda-gains-in-yemen.html?_r=0

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/01/444912621/u-s-backed-saudi-bombing-campaign-blamed-for-civilian-deaths-in-yemen

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