Thursday, February 09,
2017
The Mass
Grave We Call Collateral Damage
“Lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our
country’s so innocent? You think our country’s so innocent?”
We have carnage and we have irony.
The speaker is
the president, of course. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is,
generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares to compare American
collateral damage over the years with (as a chorus of shocked critics
exclaimed) Vladimir Putin’s remorseless homicides. This happened during a
pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly last Sunday, after O’Reilly had
challenged Trump’s coziness with Russia and called Putin a killer.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of
Nebraska summed up the outrage thus: “There is no moral equivalency between the
United States of America, the greatest freedom-loving nation in the history of
the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his
cronyism.”
Too bad we can’t ask 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki for
her opinion on whose killings are worse, America’s or Russia’s. She apparently
bled to death from a neck wound a week before the Trump interview, during the
disastrous U.S. raid on Yemen that left a Navy SEAL — and maybe 23 civilians —
dead. This was a Trump authorized raid, the first of his presidency, but had
been planned many months earlier. A newborn baby was also killed in the raid,
according to the British humanitarian organization Reprieve,
along with other women and children.
How many children have been buried thus far in the mass grave we
call collateral damage? Nawar was the sister of Abdulrahman Awlaki, a 16-year-old
boy killed in a 2011 drone strike, two weeks after the children’s father, an
alleged al Qaeda leader (and U.S. citizen), was killed, also in a drone strike.
“Why kill children?” Nawar’s grandfather asked after the girl’s death.
But the politics of our drone assassinations and our air strikes
and our wars justify and soften the murders we commit. Even now, as consensus
consigns the Iraq war to the status of “mistake,” we still refuse to take
official responsibility for its consequences. The shattered country, the dead,
the dislocated, the rise of terrorism — come on, cut us a little slack, OK? We
were bringing democracy to Iraq.
The unpredictable Trump spews out a fragment of
spur-of-the-moment truth in a Fox News interview — “you think our country’s so
innocent?” — and the consensus critics can only writhe in outrage. “One can
argue that’s the most anti-American statement ever made by the president of the
United States,” retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey exclaimed on MSNBC, defending
American exceptionalism as though it’s God.
What a strange game this president is playing. Fervid belief in
this exceptionalism is the foundation of Trump’s support. The raw meat he
throws to his supporters is fear and hatred and clearly defined enemies:
Muslims, Mexicans, refugees and immigrants from everywhere (except Europe). His
allegiance to white nationalism and corporatocracy and war, the unacknowledged
beneficiaries of this exceptionalism, is serious, and reflected in his cabinet
choices.
“Everyone on Trump’s national insecurity team seems to agree on
one thing: the United States is in a global war to the death,” Ira Chernus writes
at TomDispatch, for instance, quoting the crusading militarism of a number of
his advisors and appointees, such as Deputy National Security Advisor K.T.
McFarland.
“If we do not destroy the scourge of radical Islam, it will
ultimately destroy Western civilization . . . and the values we hold
dear,” she has said.
“For her,” Chernus noted, “it’s an old story: civilization
against the savages.”
And, indeed, Trump’s ascension to the presidency was cited by
the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists as the reason they set the Doomsday Clock —
Planet Earth’s largest, most ominous metaphor — ahead by thirty seconds in
January, to two and a half minutes to midnight. The Bulletin’s Science and
Security Board explained:
“This already-threatening world situation was the backdrop for a
rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a U.S.
presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made
disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and
expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate
change.”
I note all this in the context of Trump’s Fox News tease — that
the United States is no more innocent in its wars and murders than Russia is —
and his perplexing, perhaps business-related friendliness with Putin, which
seems to address one of the major concerns of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists. The Board, in its Doomsday Clock statement, noted with alarm: “The
United States and Russia—which together possess more than 90 percent of the
world’s nuclear weapons—remained at odds in a variety of theaters, from Syria
to Ukraine to the borders of NATO.”
Trump is a walking maelstrom of racism, arrogance, greed,
incompetence and political incorrectness. He approved the Navy SEAL raid in
Yemen with a shrug, as he ate dinner. Children died. The smiling face of Nawar
al-Awlaki now haunts the mission.
As Bonnie Kristian wrote
recently at Business Insider: “President Trump promised real change in U.S.
foreign policy, and in at least one clear regard he has already delivered:
Where President Obama spent six years waging covert drone warfare in Yemen and
nearly two years quietly supporting brutal Saudi intervention in the Gulf
state’s civil war, Trump drew national outrage to this heretofore ignored
conflict in nine days flat.”
In his own racism and hypocrisy, is Trump exposing the hypocrisy
of the media and the military-industrial complex? Is the new president somehow
holding hands with the children whose deaths he will continue to order?
This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Robert Koehler is
an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer.
His new book, Courage Grows
Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his
website at commonwonders.com.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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