In the last decade of the 20th century, a nation often hailed (not least by itself) as the “world’s greatest democracy” directed a program of savage economic warfare against a broken, defenseless country. This blockade, carried out with an exacting bureaucratic coldness, killed, by very conservative estimate, at least one million innocent people. More than half of these victims were young children.
Dead children. Thousands of dead children. Tens of thousands of dead children, Hundreds of thousands of dead children. Mountains of dead children. Vast pestiferous slagheaps of dead children. This is what the world’s greatest democracy created, deliberately, coldly, as a matter of carefully considered national policy.
The blockade was carried out for one reason only: to force out the broken country’s recalcitrant leader, who had once been an ally and client of the world’s greatest democracy but was no longer considered acquiescent enough to be allowed to govern his strategically placed land and its vast energy resources. The leadership of both of the dominant power factions in the world’s greatest democracy agreed that the deliberate murder of innocent people — more people than were killed in the coterminous genocide in Rwanda — was an acceptable price to pay for this geopolitical objective. To them, the game — that is, the augmentation of their already stupendous, world-shadowing wealth and power — was worth the candle — that is, the death spasms of a child … >>>
