The United States of Terror

BY WILLIAM BYRD

Imagine for the moment that you are getting into your car to go to work. Your wife waves to you as you buckle your seatbelt, you’ve just had a hearty breakfast, and you’re looking forward to watching your child’s school-play in the late afternoon. As you’re backing out of your driveway, you hear helicopter rotor blades above you and the next thing you know-Boom! Your house has been obliterated into mere wooden shards.

The United States Government likes to believe that it is fighting a global war on terror. Our elected representatives decide which countries and regions of other nations are evil, and with a phone call from our President, our military intervenes wherever our Chief of Staff chooses, with the supposed aim of fighting injustice. In October, after a military strike on a suspected al Qaeda cell in Syria, which killed eight civilians, the Syrian Government condemned the United States’ military attack as “criminal and terrorist aggression.”

In less than eight years, the Bush Administration’s crusade throughout the Middle East racked up a death toll of well over 500,000 civilians. Bush is not the only President responsible for causing such atrocities. The consequences of the 1998 bombing of the Sudanese Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, under the Clinton Administration, left tens of thousands of people to die by destroying preventative vaccines for treating malaria and tuberculosis. Further down the line of atrocities, Bush Senior’s brief Gulf War charade accumulated an estimated 100,000 civilian casualties. Even the martyred JFK was responsible for sparking the US involvement in Vietnam, which eventually amassed a staggering two million civilian casualties. The list goes on! Democrat and Republican Presidents have at least one thing in common: they both have committed horrific crimes which violated human rights, international security, and international law.

How proud should we feel when we see the American Flag raised high, flapping in the wind with its crisp stripes and scintillating stars? The 9/11 attacks affected all of our lives, some much worse than others, but it would be parochial and arbitrary to think that our government didn’t provoke the attacks. Chapter VII, Article 51 of the UN Charter, grants UN countries’ the right of self-defense against “armed attack.” The United States certainly defended itself, but at a cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, and its assaults hardly brought about any feeling of international harmony. The attack on the Twin Towers was only the tip of the iceberg, and it would not be foolish to expect more awful meltdowns of vengeance in the future.

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Posted by Ronnie Black on Nov 23, 2008 Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry