After detailing the manifold experiments with LSD, radiation, chemical and biological agents undertaken by the US government and the Pentagon on American servicemen and women, often without their consent and without legal recourse, the exposure of American servicemen and woman to chemical weapons in the first Gulf War (expressly denied until fairly recently by the Pentagon), the existence and continue denial of Gulf War syndrome, and more recently in the Bush administration’s Iraq War, the fact that families have been forced to purchase bullet proof vests, GPS equipment and other paraphernalia in order to better the chances of their sons and daughters’ survival, because the standard of equipment provided to military personnel has proven to be astoundingly inadequate, and unnecessarily cost a great many lives, the famous political commentator and ex-State Department official, William Blum, in his book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, writes:
“The moral of this little slice of history is simple: If the United States government does not care about the health and welfare of its own soldiers, if American leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain and suffering of the wretched warriors they enlist to fight the empire’s wars, how can it be argued, how can it be believed, that they care about foreign peoples? At all.”
So in this context I would like to ask a question to which many of us almost intuitively know the answer: is an Iraqi life worth as much as an American life? Madeleine Albright, the first woman Secretary of State clearly didn’t think so. Albright was more than happy to sacrifice 500,000 Iraqi children to keep the UN sanctions regime in place, spearheaded by the administration of Bush Snr, and buttressed by the firm ‘resolve’ of the Clinton administration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuNxtok_A54
And they say that a woman president might let her ’emotions’, ‘sensitivities’ or even ‘innate compassion’ cloud her judgement to prevent her acting decisively in a time of ‘national emergency’ or god forbid, from pushing ‘the nuclear button’.
If we weren’t already disabused of this deeply ingrained and inveterate misconception, then Hillary certainly put it to bed when she threatened to ‘obliterate’ Iran in the event of an Iranian nuclear strike against Israel (a scaremongering ploy pulled right out of the Karl Rove playbook, which has no place in a presidential campaign, not only because Iran has no nuclear weapons program according to even the US’s own most recent intelligence estimate, but because such a scenario is so far detached from the reality of the region’s geopolitics, which is foremost rooted in the ‘ethics’ of realpolitik, to warrant serious discussion and be anything more than a clumsy invocation of the ‘politics of fear’ to net a couple of cheap votes).
This trend of indifference to the lives of Iraqis has of course been continued by the Bush administration, all under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the latest metamorphosis of imperial ideology. Just turn on the tube and we’re incessantly bombarded with the prattling of Bush administration officials who from the comfort of plush studios in Washington have the gall to tell us that ‘Iraqi civilian causalities are a necessary part of war’, ‘collateral damage is inevitable’, ‘Iraqis must die so they can one day be free’, ‘Iraqi lives are the price that needs to be paid for stability’, and all the many other platitudes trotted out to justify mass-death.
And (some) Iranians, please don’t except yourselves and be fooled into subscribing to the racial-supremacist ideology of Aryanism and the many other pseudo-scientific myths and mumbo-jumbo, which pass for polite conversation in some circles. One gentleman who was a former general in the Shah’s army even confessed to me once that he wished Hitler had won WWII since Iran would today be in a much better position as a result, because ‘we’ share the same ‘pure and unsullied racial descent’!. This is the startling level of self-delusion which possesses many and continues to grip those Iranians calling for a military strike against their country and compatriots. Sorry to shatter (some of) your ‘lofty’ vision of yourselves but as far as the administration is concerned, you’re not the scions of ‘the glorious Aryans of yore’ (yeah, right), you’re just a bunch of ‘brown skinned savages’…and it is of absolutely no consequence how many must die in order to ensure American interests i.e. access to plentiful energy resources, Israel’s regional hegemony and the preponderance of Pax Americana.
We need to come to terms with the fact that the Bush administration and other hawks (including a vast swathe of so-called ‘native informers’ are calling for an attack on Iran and how they couldn’t care less about Iranian lives and the sacrifice that must be borne out, solely by the Iranian people, mind you, in order to fulfil their agenda and their vision for the ‘redrawing’ of Middle East i.e. a bunch of compliant client regimes which function as little more than American bases and gas stations…Civilian deaths in the Bush administration’s imperial wars of aggression and amoral calculus have been reduced to statistics and virtual bodies without families, feelings, dreams or ambitions…
This is exactly what the German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. Though much of the Bush administration’s chicanery is the result of orchestrated plans for global hegemony, at the lower levels of bureaucracy and the media’s depiction of events, there remains a clear disconnect and dissonance between the bureaucrats who perpetuate the war in the terms of their own careerism and instincts to ‘self-preservation’ and the deeply human tragedy which befalls the victims of what, when all is said and done, is a man-made catastrophe…
