[R-G] Genocide from 30,000 feet

[Anthony Fenton]

August 15, 2007
						
							
								Genocide from 30,000 feet
							
						
							
								By Vijay Prashad
							
						Hamid
Karzai is finally angry. The U. S. government and its NATO front have
been unable to consolidate control across Afghanistan, and into the
tribal borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In lieu of
effective on the ground strength, the NATO forces have taken refuge in
their means of first and last resort: aerial bombardment. In one week
in late June, NATO forces killed 90 Afghan civilians. The actual count
of total civilian deaths is not available. This is itself scandalous.
The United Nations' press officer in Kabul said (on June 2, 2007), "The
number of [civilian] deaths attributed to pro-government forces [i.e.
NATO] marginally exceeds that caused by anti-government forces."
Without a public tabulation of figures, this is simply verbiage. I
still have the clipping from the "Guardian" which shows that as a
consequence of the invasion of 2001 between 20,000 and 49,600 people
died (May 20, 2002). By that measure, it is impossible for the Taliban
and its associated allies to have wrought as much death as the U.S.
forces and NATO. It is this context that led Karzai, normally very
pliant, to complain in the strongest words, "Innocent people are
becoming victims of reckless operations." To those who defend U.S.-NATO
tactics, Karzai had this to say, "You don't fight a terrorist by firing
a field gun 37 km [24 miles] away into a target. That's definitely,
surely bound to cause civilian casualties." 
In response, NATO's Jaap de Hoop Scheffer quietly blandly pointed out,
"Each innocent civilian victim is one too many. Unfortunately it
happens." He knows a thing or two about aerial bombardment: in the
1970s, he used to be in the Royal Netherlands Air Force. De Hoop
Scheffer is one of those Old European establishment people who eagerly
climbed on to the Iraq invasion (he is a member of the conservative
Christian Democratic Appeal party). The phrase "unfortunately it
happens" is an assault on reason and the imagination. If you know that
your actions will carry "unfortunate" results (such as the deaths of
vast numbers of civilians), is the action worth it? What price is worth
paying for such an act and who will pay the price? This callousness is
reminiscent of U. S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's response
to Lesley Stahl on the half million children dead as a result of U.S.
led sanctions against Iraq, "I think this is a very hard choice, but
the price we think the price is worth it." 
In the NYT Book Review (July 29, 2007), liberal establishment scholar
Samantha Power made a more sophisticated, but substantially similar
defense of aerial bombardment. Power, who teaches at Harvard
University, quoted Columbia University anthropologist Talal Asad's
claim that there is "no moral difference between the horror inflicted
by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states
that are unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted
by insurgents." Then Power responded, "There is a moral difference
between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and
killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a
military objective." Power, whose book on the genocide in Rwanda is a
forceful attempt to defend the concept of "humanitarian
interventionism," perhaps relies for her claim on the word "intent" in
the 1951 Genocide Convention. It defines genocide as "acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group." How does one establish "intent," given the
lack of a smoking gun in most such cases? Neither Hoop Scheffer nor
Albright say that they intend to wipe out the Afghan or Iraqi people,
but both recognize that vast numbers of people are killed because of
their policies. If they knew that their policy would result in death of
this scale, then did they not "intend" to kill so many people,
regardless of their motivations? They are not motivated to kill, but
they surely intended to kill the thousands or hundreds of thousands? 
We don't have a fly on the wall of the Clinton White House when the
"humanitarian interventionists" discussed the sanctions on Iraq or the
war on Kosovo. Nor do we have a fly on the wall of NATO headquarters,
to hear Hoop Scheffer talking to his team of advisors. But we do have
the tapes from the Nixon-Kissinger conversation and the paper trail of
Kissinger's phone call to General Alexander Haig (Kissinger's military
assistant, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army). When the U. S. war in
Vietnam continued to falter, Nixon and Kissinger cooked up Operation
Menu to blast Cambodia. Nixon wanted to unleash the beast, to use the
full power of the U.S. to "crack the hell out of them," to use aerial
bombardment "to hit everything." Kissinger told Haig, "He wants a
massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. It's an order. It's to be done.
Anything that flies on anything that moves." There is an established
pattern for this kind of racist disregard. A senior officer in General
Douglas MacArthur's command hoped that the U. S. bombing of the
northern Korean peninsula would "give these yellow bastards what is
coming to them." Assaults by air destroyed irrigation dams that
provided three quarters of North Korea's food. A U.S. air force
document took the time to tally up the consequences, "The subsequent
flash flood waters wiped out [supply routes]. The Westerner can little
conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian
starvation and slow death." [I document some of the long history of the
consequences and intentions of aerial bombardment in ZNET column from
November 2001: http://www.zmag.org/aerialprashad.htm]. 
Power's defense of aerial bombardment is obscene given the context
within which it occurs. We're not talking about an abstract or
theoretical campaign, but of campaigns that are ongoing and genocidal
in consequence. Afghanistan is ruined, as much as Lebanon was ruined by
the Israeli assault (total cost will be up there between $4 billion and
$15 billion). We have new concepts for this: if not genocide, then
sociocide or politicide, whose consequences are no less shattering. The
destruction of the ability of a people to create a society or to craft
a polity is a slow death sentence. The 1951 document does not include
the intent to destroy a people who are united by a politics (so that
the U. S. backed and Indonesian-run massacre of a million Communists
and sympathizers in 1965 does not count as a genocide). We need to
revisit and clarify the concept "genocide" which has been muddied by
the powerful and their complicit liberals (viz. in the case of the
ongoing troubles in Darfur). Power hides behind the motivations of the
powerful, which we are always to assume is benevolent. This is what is
most shocking, that a liberal intellectual would once more peddle the
dangerous view that we, the public, should put our trust in the good
faith of those who have the reins of power. Karzai has to be
accountable to his population, which seethes with anger at the ongoing
assault on their lives and society. He too has turned to outrage.
Samantha Power is protected from such accountability. When will she see
through the eyes of the victims, many of whom already know that the
architecture of U. S.-NATO military assaults inevitably result in the
deaths of many, too many civilians?