The US
State of War
"Every country destroyed or destabilized by U.S.
military action is now a breeding ground for
terrorism."
By Nicolas J. S. Davies
July 09, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-This is the state of war in the United States
in July 2017.
The U.S. bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria is
now the heaviest since the bombing of Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s-70s, with 84,000
bombs and missiles dropped between 2014 and the
end of May 2017. That is nearly triple the
29,200 bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq in the
“Shock and Awe” campaign of 2003.
The Obama
administration escalated the bombing campaign
last October, as the U.S.-Iraqi assault on Mosul
began, dropping 12,290 bombs and missiles
between October and the end of January when
President Obama left office. The Trump
administration has further escalated the
campaign, dropping another 14,965 bombs and
missiles since February 1st. May saw the
heaviest bombing yet, with 4,374 bombs and
missiles dropped.
The U.K.-based Airwars.org monitoring group has
compiled reports of between 12,000 and 18,000
civilians killed by nearly three years of
U.S.-led bombing in Iraq and Syria. These
reports can only be the tip of the iceberg, and
the true number of civilians killed could well
be more than 100,000, based on typical ratios
between reported deaths and actual deaths in
previous war-zones.
As the
U.S. and its allies closed in on Mosul in Iraq
and Raqqa in Syria, and as U.S. forces now
occupy eight military bases in Syria, Islamic
State and its allies have struck back in
Manchester and London; occupied Marawi, a city
of 200,000 in the Philippines; and exploded a
huge truck bomb inside the fortifications of the
“Green Zone” in Kabul, Afghanistan.
What
began in 2001 as a misdirected use of military
force to punish a group of formerly U.S.-backed
jihadis in Afghanistan for the crimes of
September 11th has escalated into a global
asymmetric war. Every country destroyed or
destabilized by U.S. military action is now a
breeding ground for terrorism. It would be
foolish to believe that this cannot get much,
much worse, as long as both sides continue to
justify their own escalations of violence as
responses to the violence of their enemies,
instead of trying to deescalate the now global
violence and chaos.
There
are once again 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan,
up from 8,500 in April, with reports that four
thousand more may be deployed soon. Hundreds of
thousands of Afghans have been killed in 15
years of war, but the Taliban now control more
of the country than at any time since the U.S.
invasion in 2001.
The US
is giving vital support to the Saudi-led war in
Yemen, supporting a blockade of Yemeni ports and
providing intelligence and in-air refueling to
the Saudi and allied warplanes that have been
bombing Yemen since 2015. UN reports of 10,000
civilians killed are surely only a fraction of
the true numbers killed, and thousands more have
died from disease and hunger.
Now
Yemen is facing a humanitarian crisis and a
raging cholera epidemic due to lack of clean
water or medicine caused by the bombing and the
blockade. The UN is warning that millions of
Yemenis could die of famine and disease. A
Senate bill to restrict some U.S. arms sales to
Saudi Arabia was defeated by 53 votes (48
Republicans and 5 Democrats) to 47 in June.
Closer
to home, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)
recently hosted a conference with the presidents
of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in
Miami. This signaled a further militarization
of the U.S. war on drugs in Central America and
efforts to limit immigration from those
countries, even as a report by State and Justice
Department inspector generals held State
Department and Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) agents responsible for the killing of four
innocent civilians (one man, two women and a
14-year-old boy) by machine-gun fire from a
State Department helicopter near Ahuas in
Honduras in 2012.
The
inspector generals’ report found that DEA
officials repeatedly lied to Congress about this
incident, pretending the Hondurans were killed
in a shoot-out with drug traffickers, raising
serious doubts about accountability for
escalating U.S. paramilitary operations in
Central America.
Right-wing opposition protests in Venezuela have
turned more violent, with 99 people killed since
April, as the protests have failed to mobilize
enough popular support to topple the leftist
government of Nicolas Maduro. The U.S. supports
the opposition and has led diplomatic efforts to
force the government to resign, so there is a
danger that this could escalate into a US-backed
civil war.
Meanwhile in Colombia, right-wing death squads
are once again operating in areas where the FARC
has disarmed, killing and threatening people to
drive them off land coveted by wealthy
landowners.
Looming
over our increasingly war-torn world are renewed
U.S. threats of military action against North
Korea and Iran, both of which have more robust
defenses than any that U.S. forces have
encountered since the American War in Vietnam.
Rising tensions with Russia and China risk even
greater, even existential dangers, as symbolized
by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists'
Doomsday Clock, whose hands now stand at 2-1/2
minutes to midnight.
Although our post-9/11 wars have probably killed
at least 2 million people in the countries we
have attacked, occupied or destabilized, U.S.
forces have suffered historically low numbers of
casualties in these operations. There is a real
danger that this has given U.S. political and
military leaders, and to some extent the
American public, a false sense of the scale of
U.S. casualties and other serious consequences
we should look forward to as our leaders
escalate our current wars, issue new threats
against Iran and North Korea, and stoke rising
tensions with Russia and China.
Nicolas
J. S. Davies is the author of
Blood On Our
Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of
Iraq.
He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in
Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on
Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive
Leader.
This
article was first published by
Common Dreams
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The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.