How America Is Treating Hundreds of Thousands of Civilians Whose Homes and Businesses It Destroyed in the Middle East: BENIGN NEGLECT!
by John Lawrence, December 12, 2018
Nick McDonell's latest book, "The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars" details the destruction of civilian lives, homes and businesses that America has brought to the Middle East and the lack of compassion or compensation following in that wake. America knows how to destroy a country; it doesn't know or doesn't care to know how to rebuild it. Is it any wonder when America spends a trillion dollars a year on its machinery of destruction, the US military, and only $410 million on its Peace Corps, which if funded at the same level as the military might be able to rebuild what the military has destroyed?
McDonell writes in Time magazine:
It is fall in Mosul, the season’s first cool breezes blow off the Tigris, and I am walking around a 12th century castle with my friend Safwan. We have spent the morning scouting on behalf of an NGO dedicated to direct cash assistance. The surrounding blocks are destroyed, but several families are trying to move back anyway, clearing the wrecked Ottoman courtyards, stone by stone. They are excellent candidates for support, but Safwan, a soft-spoken 29-year-old engineer, remains frustrated. “There is no progress with the mass of destruction,” he says. “It needs effort from foreign countries and serious work from the government. Until now, we haven’t seen that.”
Safwan’s frustration is common in Mosul. Though the city was liberated from ISIS in 2017, millions of tons of rubble are yet to be cleared; 40% of old Mosul remains disconnected from any water network; electricity is erratic; in certain neighborhoods, corpses and IEDs remain on the roadside. Sixty-five percent of the city’s housing stock was damaged or destroyed; in the less damaged quarters, spiking rents drive families into debt, while a lack of jobs leaves young men idle in tea shops. The surviving hospitals and schools cannot support the population of 1.5 million; in the street, children orphaned in the battle beg for change, then curse those who refuse them.
This is how America leaves the cities it has "liberated." What's the old saying: "We had to destroy the village in order to liberate it."? Students for Liberty write on their website:
During the Vietnam War, a U.S. major justified bombing and shelling civilian areas in Bến Tre by saying “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” This statement evolved into the famous phrase “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” This quote explains a litany of state actions. Government officials and their supporters embrace a mindset of humanitarian imperialism and justify violence against innocent people, claiming that it is necessary to save those they brutalize.
This mindset is most obvious during wars of aggression euphemistically termed “humanitarian interventions.” For example, the U.S. government fired depleted uranium at Iraqi civilian areas in the name of “Iraqi Freedom.” This process of “liberating” Iraq also involved thousands of civilian casualties, as well as torture of detainees.
In order to fulfill their “responsibility to protect” Libyan civilians from Muammar al-Qaddafi’s violence, Western governments bombed civilians. This “responsibility to protect” also apparently entailed supporting forces that engaged in mass executions of political enemies and arbitrarily arrested and abused black Africans based on their race.
Others are saying it far better than I can. The US destroys countries - in the case of Iraq, the invasion was based on a lie - and then honors the President - in this case George W Bush - who lied America into war just because he wanted to be a war time President and surround himself with glory. Then America takes no responsibility for the lives it has destroyed. Instead, under Trump, it wants to keep the less fortunate out of the country club as only the more fit of humankind are deserving of the benefits thereof, certainly not any peons from "shithole" countries.
