[A-List] History and Haiti, et al, from Black Commentator

["Stan Goff" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The U.S. Marines stood by and did nothing while the library at the
Aristide Foundation was burned. With my own eyes I saw the American
Marines stand and watch while rebels cut a woman and shot her. I yelled
at them, "Do something!" and they swung their guns around toward me and
yelled, "Get back!"

While I hid in a field the American Marines put their hats on the bodies
of dead people and posed for pictures with them. It made me sick because
in Haiti we respect the dead. The Americans scare me; I don't believe
that they want anything good for the Haitian people because they support
the criminals who oppose democracy.

- "Johnny," a former radio journalist in Port Au Price, Haiti (Z-Net,
March 10, 2004)

Americans are clearly faced with a choice.  On the one hand, they can
continue in their collective pretense that "the opposite of everything
is true," prattling on about "innocent Americans" being "the most
peaceful people on earth" while endorsing the continuous U.S.
disposition of death, destruction, and domination in every quarter of
the globe.  On the other, they must at last commence the process of
facing up both to the realities of their national history and to the
responsibilities that history has bequeathed.  In effect, Americans will
either become active parts of the solution to what they and their
country have wrought, or they will remain equally active parts of the
problem.  There is no third option.

- Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on
the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (AK Press,
2003, p. 79)

John Kerry Haunted by the Youthful Admission of "Absolute Horror"

There are many indications that the United States is nowhere near ready
to repudiate imperial arrogance, racism, and criminality so that it
might join or help create a real world community.  One such indication
is the brazen chutzpah with which it has restored fascist thugs to power
in Haiti, standing by while U.S.-friendly henchmen butcher supporters of
a president that American military personnel kidnapped "back to Africa"
because he was too closely aligned for American corporate tastes to the
nation's millions of desperately impoverished citizens.  If one of those
citizens is to be believed, and his eyewitness testimony (see the quote
from "Johnny" above) is richly consistent with a long record of U.S.
military conduct (see below), some U.S. Marines are posing for souvenir
photographs with murdered victims of Haiti's new death squads.

Another depressing sign is the United States' failure to include Arab
victims in its ongoing presidential candidate "debate" over the wisdom
and morality of George W. Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of
Iraq.  At the height of his anti-war campaign for the Democratic
nomination, Howard Dean said that "there are now almost 400 people dead
who wouldn't be dead if we hadn't gone to war" (New York Times, November
4, 2003), ignoring careful investigations showing that more than 7800
Iraqi civilian non-combatants died during the invasion.

Another among many warnings along the same discouraging lines is the sad
fact that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry can be put on the
defensive because of some minimally honest testimony he gave to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee more than thirty years ago.  The
candidate's political problem is that he told some basic truth about
what he called "the absolute horror" of U.S. conduct in Vietnam after
two tours of "duty" in Southeast Asia. Kerry's "old words have come back
to haunt him," the New York Times reported two weeks ago, as
"conservative" supporters of  "President" Bush "question whether Mr.
Kerry is 'a proud war hero or an angry antiwar protester.'"

The young Kerry's 1971 testimony noted that American military personnel
there had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable
telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs,
blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion
reminiscent of Genghis Kahn, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food
stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."
According to the Times, Kerry's words "remain a special lightning
rod...especially" because he described military atrocities in Vietnam as
"'not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with
the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.'" (Kerry's 1971
testimony, quoted in Todd S. Purdum, "In '71 Antiwar Words, a Complex
View of Kerry," New York Times, February 28, 2004, A1)

A Nation of Exceptional "Kindness and Good Will"

In uttering these accurate words, Kerry violated two related principles
of dominant US doctrine and culture.  The first principle holds that the
real tragedy of the Vietnam War is all about the trauma it inflicted on
America, not Vietnam - a small peasant nation that lost millions of
lives to US invasion.  Seen (or not seen) through the filters of
America's "mainstream" (really corporate-state) news and entertainment
culture, however, Vietnam's difficulties are nothing compared to the
pain that "pre-modern" state inflicted on the world's most powerful
nation by committing the unpardonable "sin of self-defense," to use one
of Noam Chomsky's sardonic characterizations.

The second principle is a timeworn United States dictum that is "often,"
in Chomsky words, "considered unnecessary to formulate because its truth
is taken to be so obvious."  This narcissistic, self-evident U.S. maxim
holds that, in Chomsky apt paraphrase, "we [the U.S] - or at least the
circles who provide the leadership and advise" the makers of US policy -
"are good, even noble.  Hence our interventions are necessarily
righteous in intent, if occasionally clumsy in execution.  In [former US
President (1912-1918) Woodrow] Wilson's own words, we have 'elevated
ideals' and are dedicated to 'stability and righteousness,' and it is
only natural, then , as Wilson wrote in justifying the conquest of the
Philippines, that 'our interests must march forward, altruists though we
are.'" (Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global
Dominance, 2003, pp. 42-43).

Chomsky's analysis provides useful context for understanding a speech
that George W. Bush delivered last November to the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.  After claiming that U.S. actions during the last three years
had "shown the noble aims and good heart of America," Bush told his
assembled business class compatriots that "the cause we serve is right,
because it is the cause of all mankind": to "promote liberty around the
world."  "The advance of freedom," Bush II elaborated, is "the calling
of our country," which has always "put our power at the service of
principle" - unlike past empires, which sought profit and advantage
(George W. Bush, remarks at the 20th Anniversary of the National
Endowment for Democracy, November 6, 2003).

In a similar vein, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech to U.S. troops
on the USS Abraham Lincoln last May claimed that "American values and
America interests lead in the same direction: ...human liberty." America
is unique, Bush the Second claimed, in the benevolence of its global
power.  "When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen
and women," Bush claimed, "they saw strength and kindness and goodwill"
on the part of armed forces that "achieve military objectives without
directing violence against civilians" and use force only "as a last
resort" ("President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have
Ended," May 1, 2003). In these and other examples, Bush II's orations
are often monuments to the depth and degree of the "national self-love"
(to borrow a phrase from Frederick Engels) that statesmen are capable of
proclaiming.

The Noble "Determination to Kill Every Native in Sight": A Brief
Chronology of Direct U.S. Atrocities

One of the many difficulties with the Wilson-Bush II way of seeing the
US role in the world is the United States' long record of inflicting
massive, elite-approved military mayhem on noncombatants at home and
abroad. Below, I provide a partial and selective chronology of some of
the better-known U.S. atrocities.   This record places the carnage
hinted at by the youthful Kerry in chilling historical context, helping
us grasp the full extent of the United States' exceptional commitment to
"kindness and goodwill" at home and abroad.

In reviewing these terrible episodes, it is important to remember that
the US prefers whenever possible for atrocities to be carried out
quietly and impersonally - the US-imposed sanctions on Iraq (which
silently killed more than half million Iraqi children) and the
econoterrorist neoliberal mandates of the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank, for example - or indirectly, by non-American proxy
forces like Pinochet's fascist butchers of the Chilean left (1973), the
Central American death squads and contras of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,
the mass-murderous Suharto regime in Indonesia (1965-2001), the racist
occupation state in Israel, and the current gang of fascist thugs (whose
leader expresses admiration for Pinochet) the US has just recently
restored to client-state power in Haiti.

Indirect and silent massacre is not always feasible, however, and there
is thus a rich record of direct US engagement in the infliction of
"absolute horror" on enemies at "home" and abroad, accompanied by a
strong dose of racist rationalization.  Here are some of the highlights:


"The Winning of the West": A Great Work of Civilization By "The
English-Speaking Race"

1776:  Six thousand US troops raze more than 20 Cherokee towns,
"destroying crops, inflicting serious casualties on noncombatants and
sweeping much of the population into Spanish Florida.  Only the
cessation of about a third of the all Cherokee territory brings the
annihilatory campaign to a halt" (Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting
Chickens, p.44)

1800: American troops destroy a slave revolt in Virginia, executing
Gabriel Prosser and 35 accomplices as a deterrent example to blacks that
might seek freedom in the land of freedom.  Already nearly two centuries
old, North-American black chattel slavery will continue for six and half
more decades, an ultra-racist social atrocity that some might consider
as bad as physical eradication and which is followed by successive new
regimes of anti-black racist oppression - Jim Crow
segregation/apartheid, sharecropping and debt-peonage, urban
ghettoization, mass incarceration, etc. - that embody the largely
unacknowledged legacy and un-repaired burden of mass enslavement. Untold
numbers of African-Americans will be murdered by white masters and
overseers for various "reasons," ranging from out-and-out rebellion to
attempted escape, "disrespectful" behavior, and perceived insufficient
work productivity.

1822:  Troops hang 35 rebellious black slaves in South Carolina, leaving
the rotting corpses on prolonged public display as a warning to other
black chattel who might contemplate extending the principles of the
Declaration of Independence to people of African ancestry.

1828-1840: U.S. Army conducts a long and bloody forced removal of the
Cherokee, Choctaw, and Seminole nations to Oklahoma.

1831:  Troops hang 19 rebellious slaves in Virginia.

1850: US troops massacre at least 75 Pomo Indians trapped on an island
in the Russian River area of California.

1863: US Army Colonel Henry Sibley puts down a revolt of starving Santee
Dakota Indians, conducting a mass execution of 38 native leaders.

1864:  U.S. territorial military commander Colonel John Chivington
oversees the quick and brutal murder of as many as 200 Cheyenne and
Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek (Colorado).  The Indians had been led to
believe they had been given sanctuary at Sand Creek.  More than half of
the victims were women and children.

1868:  Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer's Seventh U.S. Cavalry
conducts a dawn assault on a noncombatant Cheyenne village camped along
the Washita River in Oklahoma.  Custer orders and oversees the slaughter
of more than 100 Cheyenne, including women and children and the killing
of 875 ponies.
1876-1877:  The U.S. Army celebrates the 100th anniversary of American
"freedom" and "goodwill" by launching a "Centennial Campaign" to clear
the Black Hills of their original inhabitants.  A winter campaign
targeting mostly defenseless villages shreds away 90 percent of Lakota
territory.  Former Civil War hero and prolific Indian-killer General
Phillip Sheridan proclaims that US Indian policy is one of
"extermination," consistent with his pithy 1868 observation that "the
only good Indian is a dead Indian."

1890/1899:  The U.S. Seventh Cavalry massacres 350 unarmed Lakota -
mainly women, children, and old men - at Wounded Knee creek in South
Dakota. "The ostensible purpose," writes Churchill, "is to end the
'insubordination' embodied in the Indians' practice of the Ghost Dance.
More likely, the troops [were] revenging themselves for the fate of
Custer fourteen years earlier" (Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting
Chickens, p.57) - when Lakota warriors committed the "sin of
self-defense" by decimating Custer and his regiment at Little Bighorn.
The Seventh Cavalry killers received Medals of Honor in recognition of
their courageous actions.

This and other genocidal anti-Indian atrocities that preceded it receive
hearty approval in future US President and Spanish-American War
instigator/hero Theodore Roosevelt's massive, four-volume 1899 study
Winning of the West - a white-supremacist paean to Anglo-America's near-
eradication of North America's original civilizations.  "During the past
three centuries," Roosevelt opined, "the spread of English-speaking
people over the world's waste spaces" (meaning spaces not occupied by
"progressive" capitalist-developmental Caucasians) was a great and
welcome "feat of power," for which the "English-speaking race" could
justly feel proud. No such "feat" of "race power" was more laudable,
however, than "the vast movement by which this continent [North America]
was conquered and peopled" - the "crowning and greatest achievement of a
series of mighty movements."  The Anglo-American pioneers conducted what
Roosevelt called the noble civilizing "work" of "overcoming the original
inhabitants" while at the same time "warding off the assaults of the
kindred [that is European-Caucasian] nations that were bent on the same
schemes."  The North-American settlers performed the most heroic "work"
of all, for they "confronted the most formidable savage foes ever
encountered by colonists of European stock."  Destroying the Indian
"savages," Roosevelt claimed, was white North America's third greatest
work to date, exceeded only by "the preservation of the Union itself and
the emancipation of the blacks" - this as African-Americans suffered
under terrorist Jim Crow regime in the former slave states and faced
countless indignities throughout the U.S (Theodore Roosevelt, The
Winning of the West, Volume I: From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi,
1769-1776 [New York, 1899], pp. 1-22).

1889-1918: 3,224 Americans are lynched within the United States, mostly
in the South. Seventy-eight percent of these atrocity victims are black.
In most cases the victims are hung or burned to death by mobs of white
vigilantes, commonly in front of thousands of gleeful spectators. Many
observes take pieces of the victim's body as souvenirs to memorialize
the event. Photographs of the murdered victims circulate as popular
postcards throughout the South, providing precedent for the imperialist
pornographic exercise observed by "Johnny" and noted at the beginning of
this article.
The Free-Fire Zoning of Asia and the Disciplining of Haiti by "The
Children of the Anglo-Saxon Race"

1898-1905:  The U.S. Army, frequently led by "old Indian fighters,"
seizes the Philippines from its prior colonial master (Spain) and
crushes a Filipino independence movement, killing as many as 600,000
natives of the newly US-acquired Philippine islands.  Few prisoners are
taken and the Red Cross reports an extremely high ratio of dead to
wounded, indicating U.S. "determination to kill every native in sight."
Throughout the barbarian U.S. "pacification" of the Philippines,
American forces refer to the Filipinos as "niggers," "barbarians," and
"savages." America's racist and Social-Darwinist President (1901-08)
Theodore Roosevelt vilifies resisting Filipinos as "Apaches."  The
phrase "gook" makes its first appearance as a U.S. military term to
describe angry and frightened Asians who inhabit lands invaded by
"freedom-loving" Americans. Custer's legendary U.S. Seventh Cavalry
arrives to help suppress "gook Apaches" in 1905.

The U.S. butchery receives indirect racist approval from leading U.S.
financial authority and Wall Street journalist Charles A. Conant, who
anticipates certain aspects of J.A. Hobson and V.I. Lenin's celebrated
theories of imperialism (see Carl Parrini and Martin Sklar, "New
Thinking About the Market: Some American Economists on Investment and
the Theory of Surplus Capital," Journal of Economic History [September
1983], pp. 559-578) in an essay titled "The Economic Basis of
Imperialism."  Beyond his argument that surplus domestic capital in core
industrial states provides the taproot for modern U.S. and European
imperialism, Conant claims that the US is entering a path of global
expansion "marked out for them as children of the Anglo Saxon race."
The new movement towards overseas imperialism is "the result," Conant
argues, of "natural laws of economic and race development.  The great
civilized people have today at their command the means of developing the
decadent nations of the world," who require benevolent Anglo-Saxon
intervention because they are on the wrong side of the law of the
"survival of the fittest" (Charles A. Conant, The United States in the
Orient, New York, NY, 1900, p. 2)

1915-1934: Haiti lives under the supreme authority of the U.S. Marine
Corps, which dissolves that formerly sovereign country's National
Assembly, restores practical slavery for much of the populace, turns the
economy over to U.S. corporations, and massacres an untold number of
Haitian peasants. During a "battle" at Fort Reviere, the Marines kill 51
Haitians and do not suffer a single casualty, helping U.S. Smedly D.
Butler earn a Congressional Medal of Honor. Reports of U.S. military
abuse and atrocity lead to an investigation by NAACP official James
Weldon Johnson, who finds the charge of extreme cruelty by the
North-American troops to be accurate (J. Damus, "Reparations," National
Black Law Students' Association). This imperial butchery is encouraged
by the rich and toxic racism of the supposedly great moral-idealist
Woodrow Wilson administration, one of whose high diplomatic officials
tells Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing that "Negro blood"
keeps the Haitians "almost in a state of savagery and complete
ignorance." Lansing agrees, claiming that "the African race are devoid
of any capacity for political organization" and "governance" and marked
by "a tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of
civilization which are irksome to their physical nature" (quoted in Noam
Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York, 1996, p.44).

August 1945: the US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fully
aware that Japan was defeated and seeking surrender. These monumental
crimes are perpetrated to demonstrate unassailable U.S. power to the
world and especially to the Soviet Union in the post-WWII era. The only
nation-state to use nuclear WMD against concentrated human populations,
the U.S. murders 150,000 "Jap" civilians to make a threatening statement
to the Russians and other people who might follow the Soviet example by
developing their nations and societies outside the American-based world
capitalist system.

1950:  In one small incident in a broader war that killed perhaps 2
million Koreans, members of the legendary U.S. Seventh Cavalry murder
hundreds of South Korean refugees - mostly women and children - at a
railroad trestle near the village of No Gun Ri.  According to the
Pulitzer Prize-wining authors of a 2002 book recounting this previously
buried U.S. atrocity, "some refugees were shot trying to climb back up
the embankment to fetch food from abandoned bags.  Some were shot when,
desperately thirsty, they ventured outside for stream water."  U.S.
"mortarmen, machine-gunners, and riflemen blasted away" at trapped
refugees "from their ragged holes on the dusty barren hillside, in the
Seventh Cavalry's first big encounter with 'gooks' in Korea."

When they joined the Seventh, recruits were given a pamphlet telling
them that their cavalry unit "firmly established their reputation as
Indian fighters at the battle of Washita."  This pamphlet "did not
explain that the Seventh Cavalry, in the snowstorm at Washita, had
slaughtered more than one hundred Native Americans - mostly unarmed old
men, women, and children - who had been ordered into the area by the
U.S. Army itself."   (Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza,
The Bridge At No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare From the Korean War, N.Y.,
2002, pp. 17, 129-34).

May to November 1967: As a small part of a broader U.S. invasion and
occupation that killed millions of Vietnamese, an "elite" 45-man unit of
the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division known as "Tiger Force" conducts a
murderous march through Vietnam's central highlands.  A detailed and
courageous four-part series published by The Toledo Blade in the fall of
2003 shows that "Tiger Force" killed an untold number - certainly well
into the hundreds - of farmers, villagers, and prisoners. One medic
interviewed by Blade reporters "said he counted 120 unarmed villagers
killed in one month."  According to left writer Mike Davis, who helped
bring the Blade series to national light, "Tiger Force atrocities began
with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then escalated
to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, even small
children... Early on, Tiger Force began scalping its victims (the scalps
were dangled from the ends of M-16s) and cutting off ears as souvenirs.
One member - who would later behead an infant - wore the ears as a
ghoulish necklace... A former Tiger Force sergeant told reporters that
'he killed so many civilians he lost count.'" A Tiger Force private
remembers thinking that the killings were "wrong" but recalls that they
were considered an "acceptable practice" for US military personnel in
the central-highlands' many US-designated "free fire zones," where (by a
former Tiger Force Lieutenant's account) "anything living...was subject
to be eliminated."  The slaughter was sponsored and protected by senior
officers (including one who went by the name of "Ghost Rider" and named
his battalions "Barbarians," "Cutthroats" and the like) and never
resulted in prosecution of any of the perpetrators, despite an extensive
Pentagon investigation that was buried by the White House in 1975.

Asked why the Pentagon's post-atrocity investigation of Tiger Force
never went anywhere, a leading senior office and massacre participant
later recalls being summoned to the Pentagon and told that "there's
wrongdoing there, and we know about it. But basically it's not...in the
best interest of this, that and the other to try to pursue this."
According to this officer, the investigation "was a hot potato.  See
this was after My Lai [see below] and the army certainly didn't want to
go through the publicity thing."  Former Watergate perpetrator and chief
White House counsel (under Nixon) John Dean told the Blade that he was
not surprised the investigation was dropped since "the government
doesn't like ugly stories."

Neither apparently does today's supposedly "left-leaning" mainstream
press, which refuses to pick up and meaningfully disseminate the
shocking Blade findings. The great "liberal" New York Times prefers
months later to prattle on page one about the "controversial" nature of
Kerry's 1971 testimony, leaving cutting-edge investigation into what
really happened in Vietnam to a relatively small paper in the
"conservative" Midwest.

1968: My Lai, the mother of all officially recognized modern U.S.
atrocities: 347 unarmed Vietnam civilians, including 12 babies, are
slaughtered in the hamlet at Song My by a company of the U.S. Army 23rd
("Americal") Division.  While belated U.S. media attention focuses in
1969 and 1970 on the company's deranged commander (Lieutenant William
Calley) and treats the incident as an anomaly within the broader
benevolent (if occasionally "clumsy") conduct of US policy, the massacre
provides what Ward Churchill calls "a lens through which to examine the
de-facto rules of engagement under which U.S. ground forces operated for
nearly 7 years (1965-1972).  "Known as the 'Dead Gook Rule' - that is,
if a corpse is Vietnamese it is counted as a slain 'enemy combatant' on
that basis alone - it points to a process of unremitting massacre, both
large-scale and small, of the civilian population.... More than a score
of such operations during the course of the U.S. 'commitment,' and this
is not even to begin to count the toll taken by such routine measures as
the declaration of whole swaths of the country to be 'free-fire zones,'
in which anything that moved could be killed with impunity."
(Churchill, pp. 140-141).  Colonel Oran Henderson (who shares the duty
of covering up the My Lai killings with an up-and-coming military
bureaucrat named Colin Powell), noted in 1971 that "every unit of
brigade size" that "served" in Vietnam "has its My Lai hidden someplace"
(Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People's History, 1988, p.226).

1969: Future US Senator (D-Nebraska) and current president of New York
City's New School University Bob Kerry joins other Navy SEALS in the
massacre of a score of unarmed villagers, mainly women and children.  He
later says it's "pretty close to being right" to call this massacre "an
atrocity."

"We Annihilated That Target, Let's Move On:" Killing Innocent Arabs,
Africans, and Afghanis, 1987-2004

1986: The U.S. bombs the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, killing
hundreds, including Libyan dictator Muamar al Quadaffi's infant
daughter.  There is no evidence for the White House's claim that Libyan
agents had been involved in the earlier bombing of a German disco in
which seven U.S. military personnel were killed.

1988: The U.S.S. Vincennes shoots down a clearly marked civilian Iranian
airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 civilians and possibly
motivating Iran to become involved in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103
over Scotland. The ship's captain, who illegally crossed into Iran's
territorial waters before shooting the defenseless commercial plane,
later receives a "combat action ribbon" for this action.  His "air
warfare coordinator" even receives the Navy's Commendation Medal for
"heroic actions" and "ability to maintain poise and confidence under
fire."

1991: US forces kill as many as 250,000 Iraqis, including large numbers
of noncombatants during "Operation Dessert Storm," ostensibly launched
to punish its longstanding dictator-client Saddam Hussein for invading
Kuwait, a neo-feudal U.S. oil protectorate - an action Saddam had reason
to think the U.S. approved.  The U.S. military mercilessly slaughtered
more than 2000 Iraqi troops, many waving surrender flags, who are moving
defenselessly out of and away from Kuwait on what became known as "the
Highway of Death."  Numerous war crimes are committed by US forces
(including the dropping of cluster bombs in areas where civilians are
present) in an onslaught that is absurdly excessive relative to the
force required to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. The Jordanian Red Crescent
society counts 120,000 civilian casualties.  The White House initially
encourages Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Saddam but then
permits the Iraqi dictator it supposedly reviles as a "butcher" to
pitilessly slaughter his domestic opposition.
1998: The Bill Clinton White House orders the bombing of the only
pharmaceutical plant in the deeply impoverished Sudan, killing thousands
of bystanders and an untold number of others. There is no evidence for
White House claims that the plant was manufacturing illegal weapons.

2001-2004: Thousands of innocent Afghans and Iraqis are killed by U.S.
forces.  Among other things, these murders reflect racist superpower
payback for the jetliner attacks carried out on 9/11/01 by a small
number of predominantly Saudi-Arabian Islamic extremists against
innocent noncombatants at the World Trade Center and military personnel
at the Pentagon.  Resisting majority global sentiment insisting that the
U.S. respect established global norms and procedures for responding,
U.S. authorities answer the 9/11 atrocities with proportionately far
greater terrorism directed at people who had nothing to do with any
attacks on the United States. During one of many incidents where the US
"mistakenly" murders innocent/noncombatant Iraqis in the spring of 2003,
the Air Force blows up 18 ordinary civilians in a house thought to be
sheltering Saddam Hussein.  Left dead in the rubble is "Abdul M's"
"entire family," including his daughter and his wife.  "I dug them out,"
Abdul tells researchers a Public Broadcasting system "Frontline"
documentary that appears in February 2004, "with my own bare hands.  I
carried them out with my own bare hands.  I buried them with my own bare
hands."  "Emotionally," a U.S. officer involved in this glorious,
freedom-loving act of imperial butchery notes, "it was, 'we annihilated
that target, ok we did that, let's move on."

Regarding butchered Iraqi soldiers, the "Frontline" documentary tells
viewers that, "in the end, it was [Iraqi] street gangs versus [American]
soldiers": poorly equipped Iraqi troops, including large numbers of teen
conscripts, versus the most powerful military force in world history.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom," it appears, was another "turkey shoot," to
use Dessert Storm veterans' common description of the first George
Bush's one-sided Iraqi "war," which ushered in a US-imposed sanctions
regime that killed more than half a million Iraqi children, exacting a
"price worth paying," in the immortal words of Clinton's Secretary of
State Madeline Albright, who once claimed that that the United States
"stands taller and sees farther than other nations."

The White House and Pentagon justifies its imperial orgy in Iraq during
2003 with falsely concocted arguments about imminent WMD threats to the
security of the United States - of increasing official prominence as the
WMD threat claims are disproved - and America's supposed desire to
export democracy to the Middle East.  The American imperial state seizes
upon 9/11 as a glorious opportunity to launch a permanent, open-ended
"war on terrorism" and unfurl a long-planned doctrine of pre-emptive war
and unilateral world domination that seeks among other things to tighten
the US grip on pivotal Persian Gulf and South Asian petroleum and gas
resources and demonstrated US capacity to rule the world on the basis of
preponderant military force.  By "the latest conservative estimate,"
John Pilger notes, the bloody U.S.-British invasion has killed "between
21,000 and 55,000," causing the "death every month of 1,000 children
from cluster bombs" (John Pilger, interview by the Australian
Broadcasting System, March 11, ZNet).

Meanwhile the U.S. can't develop the capacity to include Arab victims in
its election arguments over "Operation Iraqi Freedom."  Dean makes the
critical oversight (including 8000 dead Iraqi noncombatants) mentioned
at the beginning of this article. In a pivotal anti-war address he makes
to the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2003, the most outspokenly
anti-war of the serious contenders renders Iraqi victims invisible,
except - maybe - insofar as their suffering harms America's damaged
"moral authority in the world." Dean proclaims his desire to restore
that supposed "authority," which he identifies with president Harry
Truman (1945-52), who ordered the two most barbarian acts in human
history (the racist atom-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and who
grossly exaggerated the "Soviet threat" to launch a half-century
campaign of hyper-militarization and racially disparate global
devastation called "the Cold War."

Those Who Fail to Acknowledge the Crimes of the Past...

Seen against, and as part of, the vast historical canvass of U.S.
racist-imperial slaughter, the monumental US crimes in Southeast Asia
that John Kerry hinted at in his 1971 testimony are part of a larger
story that renders self-delusional many Americans' notion that their
nation-state is some sort of great exceptional moral and ethical city on
a global hill.

It is especially important to appreciate the significance of the
vicious, often explicitly genocidal "homeland" assaults on
native-Americans, which set foundational racist and national-narcissist
patterns for subsequent U.S. global butchery, disproportionately
directed at non-European people of color. The deletion of the real story
of the so-called "battle of Washita" from the official Seventh Cavalry
history given to the perpetrators of the No Gun Ri massacre is no small
detail. Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US
savagery at Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in
the Philippines, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Korea,
the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial of
which (and all before) has recently encouraged US savagery in
Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a vicious circle of recurrent violence, well
known to mental health practitioners who deal with countless victims of
domestic violence living in the dark shadows of the imperial homeland's
crippling, stunted, and itself-occupied social and political order.

Power-mad US forces deploying the latest genocidal war tools, some
suggestively named after native tribes that white North American
"pioneers" tried to wipe off the face of the earth (ie, "Apache,"
"Blackhawk," and "Comanche" helicopters) are walking in bloody footsteps
that trace back across centuries, oceans, forests and plains to the
leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who
Roosevelt acknowledged as America's "original inhabitants."  Racist
imperial carnage and its denial, like charity, begin at home.  Those who
deny the crimes of the past are likely to repeat their offenses in the
future as long as they retain the means and motive to do so.

It is folly, however, for any nation to think that it can stand above
the judgments of history, uniquely free of terrible consequences for
what Ward Churchill calls "imperial arrogance and criminality."  Every
new U.S. murder of innocents abroad breeds untold numbers of
anti-imperial resistance fighters, ready to die and eager to use the
latest available technologies and techniques to kill representatives -
even just ordinary citizens - of what they see as an American Predator
state. This along with much else will help precipitate an inevitable
return of US power to the grounds of earth and history.

As that fall accelerates, the U.S. will face a fateful choice, full of
potentially grave or liberating consequences for the fate of humanity
and the earth. It will accept its fall with relief and gratitude, asking
for forgiveness, and making true reparation at home and abroad,
consistent with an honest appraisal of what Churchill, himself of
native-American ancestry, calls "the realities of [its] national history
and the responsibilities that history has bequeathed":  goodbye American
Exceptionalism and Woodrow Wilson's guns. Or Americans and the world
will face the likely alternative of permanent imperial war and the
construction of an ever-more imposing U.S. fortress state, perpetuated
by Orwellian denial and savage intentional historical ignorance.  This
savage barbarism of dialectically inseparable empire and inequality will
be defended in the last wagon-train instance by missiles and bombs
loaded with radioactive materials wrenched from lands once freely roamed
by an immeasurably more civilized people than those who came to destroy.


Paul Street (pstreet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) writes on imperialism, racism, and
thought control. His book Empire and Inequality: Writings on America and
the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm Publishers) will be released in the
summer of 2004.