[R-G] The War to Promote Terror

[Anthony Fenton]

Published on Friday, October 3, 2008 by Common Wonders
The War to Promote Terror
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/03-2
by Robert C. Koehler

The "necessary war" in Afghanistan, which both presidential candidates  
support - the one, you know, that's really about terrorists and Osama  
and all - raises as many troubling questions about who we are as the  
other war we're fighting and losing.

Consider the details of this war. The aggregate civilian death toll,  
at the hands of the U.S. and NATO - between 6,800 and more than 8,000,  
according to economics professor Marc Herold of the University of New  
Hampshire - is a start. But Herold's about-to-be-released report on  
the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, "The Matrix of Death," is a  
disturbing analysis not only of the collateral damage churned up by  
our terrorist-hunt in this broken nation, but of the attitude and  
rationality that are driving it. The report is subtitled: "The  
(Under)Valuation of an Afghan Life."

This is a report on the flawed premise from which ultimate failure  
flows - the flawed premise that keeps hell active and guarantees an  
endless supply of enemies. And the more of these "enemies," and their  
children, that we kill, the less safe we are, and we know this, so we  
lie about the numbers of dead. Most of all we lie about what we are,  
in fact, doing, which is fighting an irrational war, most accurately  
called the war to promote terror. We will not win it unless we revert  
to the morality of Ancient Rome: "create a wasteland and call it  
peace." But that's not winning, either.

What it is, indeed, is racism, especially the use of what is called  
close air support: In order to protect the lives of American and NATO  
(mostly white) troops, we do much of our fighting from the air, with  
500- and 2,000-pound bombs, lacerating a (non-white) Afghan population  
we don't even have to face.

Herold quotes John MacLachlen Gray in the U.K. Globe and Mail: ". . .  
the slaughter of innocent people, as a statistical eventuality is not  
an accident but a priority - in which Afghan civilian casualties are  
substituted for American military casualties." Herold adds: "What I am  
saying is that when the 'other' is non-white, the scale of violence  
used by the U.S. government to achieve its stated objectives at  
minimum cost knows no limits."

This is a description of U.S. policy stripped of the pretense in which  
it is usually cloaked. Not only are the numbers of dead downplayed  
significantly in official military statements and the sympathetic  
(mainstream) media, but those civilian dead who are acknowledged are  
instantly rendered "regrettable, but not our fault" by the circular,  
all-purpose justification that they were not deliberately targeted.

When you bomb a village, the dead are random and anonymous - and  
therefore, thanks to some legalistic moral loophole, no one's fault.  
And this is one of the military advantages of air war, as far as I can  
tell. However horrific the results it produces on the ground - "I saw  
pieces of bodies scattered around . . . I couldn't even make out which  
part was which . . . it was just flesh everywhere" - the perpetrators  
maintain an easy moral purity that forestalls self-doubt and revulsion.

Aerial bombardment, therefore, because of the psychological insulation  
of distance that it provides - especially when added to the  
psychological insulation of racism, which makes non-white deaths  
matter little or not at all - is a particularly insidious form of  
warfare, and its perfection is in and of itself a dire threat to  
humanity's future.

And, as Herold writes: "The recent increasing reliance upon unmanned  
drones to dispense death and destruction in the border regions is in a  
sense the penultimate disconnect between killing them and saving ours."

To put this all another way, the simple math of conventional national  
security - the zero-sum game of kill or be killed, our lives matter  
and theirs don't - is terrifyingly counterproductive in the 21st  
century. It always has been, of course, but we used to be protected  
from its consequences by distance and ignorance. Humanity is connected  
now like never before, and possesses the technology of self- 
annihilation. Such technology cannot be contained, and thus true  
security has nothing to do with national borders. We cannot afford to  
devalue any portion of the human race.

For that reason, the most disturbing part of Herold's report may have  
been his discussion of the "condolence" money paid, occasionally, to  
the survivors of Afghan civilians killed by our actions. These payouts  
have ranged from as low as $400 per dead civilian to several thousand  
dollars.

Herold puts this into perspective: "Approximately $80,000 was spent on  
the rehabilitation of every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil  
spill, that is, ten times the condolence amount offered by the U.S.  
military to the family of an Afghan killed."

This does not make me feel safe. I can't even fathom the values that  
are operating here, even though they are stamped: "U.S.A." We are  
already reaping what the Bush legacy has sown, but there's a lot more  
that awaits us, and we have no right to be surprised when it comes.


(c) 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an  
editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You  
can respond to this column at bkoehler at tribune.com or visit his Web  
site at commonwonders.com.