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90 Civilians Killed by "Good" Uncle Sam in Azizabad
By Paul Street at Sep 14, 2008 |
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So tell me, "progressive" Obama supporters, does the great and wonderful United States apologize for "mistakenly" murdering 90 civilians this summer, in the process of fighting what Obama considers to be George W. Bush's "good" and "proper" war --- the illegal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan?
Please see the terrible Associated Press (AP) story pasted in below - just one of many examples of American mass murder in the terrorist U.S. "war on terror" in Afghanistan.
Remember Obama's words, speaking to CNN''s Candy Crowley after his Berlin speech:
CC: "Do you think that there's anything that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?"
BO: "No, I don't believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards.... The United States...remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world."
Here's the AP piece - read it and weep as you keep your "eye on the ball in Afghanistan"
Afghanistan: US killed civilians after false tip
By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press WriterSun Sep 14, 1:14 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080914/ap_on_re_as/afghanistan
An American bombing that killed up to 90 Afghan civilians last month was based on false information provided by a rival tribe and did not kill a single Taliban fighter, the president's spokesman said Sunday.
The claim contradicted a U.S. contention that the Aug. 22 raid on the western village of Azizabad killed up to 35 Taliban fighters.
"There was total misinformation fed to the coalition forces," Humayun Hamidzada, the spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, told The Associated Press.
Afghan police arrested three suspects accused of giving the U.S. military false intelligence that led to the bombardment, the Interior Ministry has said.
An Afghan government commission found that up to 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, a finding backed by a preliminary U.N. report.
The bombing strained the U.S.-Afghan relationship but the countries remain committed allies, Hamidzada said.
The operation, conducted by U.S. Special Forces and Afghan soldiers, targeted Afghan employees of a British security firm and their family members — the reason the U.S. military recovered weapons after the battle, Hamidzada said.
The U.S. has said its forces were fired on first during a raid that targeted and killed a known militant commander named Mullah Sidiq. But villagers say their homes were targeted because of false information provided by a rival tribesman named Nader Tawakil.
An Afghan parliamentarian has said Tawakil is in the protective custody of U.S. forces. The coalition has declined to comment.
"How the information was gathered, how it was misfed, and their personal animosity led to trying to use the international forces for their own political disputes, which led to a disastrous event and caused a strain on the relationship of the Afghan government and international forces," Hamidzada said.
"Not a single Talib was killed," he added. "So it was a total disaster, and it made it even worse when there were denials, total denials."
The U.S. at first said that 30 militants and no civilians were killed. A formal military investigation found that the operation killed up to 35 militants and seven civilians.
But after video images showing at least 10 dead children and up to 40 other dead villagers surfaced last week, the U.S. said it would send a one-star general from the United States to investigate the strike.
Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said Friday three suspects had been arrested for allegedly giving false information to the American military, but it did not say who they were. Hamidzada and the Interior Ministry spokesman have also declined to say who was arrested.
A U.S. military spokeswoman did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Villagers had gathered for a memorial ceremony in Azizabad to honor a tribal leader named Timor Shah, who had allegedly been killed by Tawakil, the rival tribesman, about eight months ago. Villagers said families had traveled to Azizabad for the ceremony, one of the reasons so many children were killed.
The top NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, has said the U.S. coalition, U.N. and Afghan government would hold a joint investigation, but Hamidzada said the Afghan government would not take part.
"The Afghan government did not agree to a three-way investigation, because we have already completed two investigations," he said.
"There is no need to go around to the village and actually harass people one more time and remind them of the terrible ordeal they went through. We have the facts straight, we have all the information."
Karzai has long pleaded with international forces to reduce the number of civilians killed in operations, and now the government is studying its "status of force" agreement governing U.S. and NATO operations in the country. Afghan officials are also reviewing the use of airstrikes by international forces.
Hamidzada said Azizabad strained a relationship between friends.
"We can be critical of one particular issue but we are still partners," he said, adding there are ways of killing Taliban without hurting civilians.
"If we only rely on air raids, we know these are not accurate, we know the potential for civilian casualties is extremely high," he said. "So there has to be a combination of ground forces and the use of Afghan military forces. But you cannot just conduct operations from the air alone, because you hurt civilians."
In violence Sunday, a suicide car bomber attacked a convoy carrying Afghan doctors working for the United Nations in southern Afghanistan, killing two doctors and their driver, officials said.
The U.N. said it was trying to determine whether the bombing was an explicit attack on the world body or if the doctors were a target of opportunity.
Also in the Afghan south, a British soldier was killed in an explosion on Saturday, the Ministry of Defense said.
Elsewhere, seven children died after ordnance they were playing with exploded, and militants ambushed and killed seven police, officials said
Re: 90 Civilians Killed by "Good" Uncle Sam in Azizabad
By Furcsik, Jarrod at Sep 25, 2008 11:38 AM
Obama\'s comment that he doesn\'t "believe in the U.S. apologizing" for its horrible atrocities reminds me of something George H.W. Bush said regarding the accidental downing of an Iranian airliner by the U.S.S. Vincennes in 1988, resulting in the deaths of its 290 civilian passengers. He said "I will never apologize for the United States. I don\'t care what the facts are."
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\"This Isn
By Street, Paul at Sep 16, 2008 16:00 PM
Well said Minot. Earlier today, Obama responded to McCain\'s pathetic call for setting up "a commission" to "study what might have caused the current financial meltdown" by saying "this isn\'t 9/11, we don;t need a commission to figure out what happened. We know how we got into this" (I paraphrase...do not have the exact quote).
Well, score one for BO on economic policy but the line about needing to study the supposed great mystery behind how 9/11 might have occurred is revealing. People who critically investigated and followed U.S. imperial behavior in the Middle East knew very well how we got into that 9/11 mess - chickens do come home ro roost, as Reverend Wright dared to observe .
The top Dems\' best efforts on domestic policy (never close to adequate from a left perspective, to be sure) have long been undermined by their deep complicity in --- and mandatory and doctrinal outward blindness to --- Empire. The classic case is LBJ\'s "War on poverty,\' strangled in its cradle by LBJ\'s war on SE Asia. John Edwards\' semi-progressive campaign (emphasizing poverty and class inequality and union rights and denouncing corporate Democrats as well as the GOP) was severely damaged from the start by his support of the criminal US invasion of Iraq. Obama\'s critical success in Iowa (something I saw up close and personal and in fact fought against with little expectation of success) was crucially enabled by the simple fact that he was not yet part of the imperialist ruling class when the Iraq occupation ws launched. He enjoyed a novelty dividend (recently approproated by the proto-fascist hit lady Sarah Palin) in that and other ways but subsequently admitted that he might well have voted the same as Edwards, Biden, and Hillary (not to mention the GOP Senators). He then proceeded to behave the same as war ciminal Hillary Clinton on Iraq in the U.S. Senate, prompting wild Bill\'s accurate "fairy tale" line.
The Dems refuse to go into the Pentagon budget to convert funds to social use. Their commitment to Empire helps make them servants of inequality (and repression) at home as well as abroad.
This is a problem across the board with Superpower\'s inauthentic opposition party - hardly unique to Obama
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Re: 90 Civilians Killed by "Good" Uncle Sam in Azizabad
By minot, Minot at Sep 16, 2008 13:39 PM
Your comment on Obama supporters apologizing for empire is on target - progressive support for Obama has not moved him to the left, it\'s moved the left to the right.
Obama supporters should ask themselves: If Obama suggested slaughtering my friends and families, carpeting my neighborhood with explosives, torturing my brothers, sisters, children , grandparents, ensuring that no one would ever be held accountable for these crimes, my would I still vote for him because his Supreme Court nominees might be a little better? Or is it OK because they are, maybe, ... Iraqi, or Afghans, or Pakistani?
The first step is to refuse to be complicit with these crimes against humanity, and to discard the deranged delusion that support of charismatic war criminals is the way to a better world.
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I Have No Resolution for You
By Street, Paul at Sep 16, 2008 12:42 PM
Well, your sort of sentiments are part of why I\'m not actually putting up a lot of pieces on the Obama experience right now...at least not a lot by my standards. It isn\'t worth the liberal-left grief, to be honest. I should have a Sustainer piece up on the dangers of McCain-Palin soon - I think ZNet has it. It is consistent with my long record of ruthlessly criticizing Republicans.
I\'ve explained what I\'m doing in many of my articles. There and in the book I advance the very basic notion that there\'s a more urgent politics beneath and beyond the quadrennial corporate- crafted personality-and candidate-centered extravaganzas the ruling class stages for us every 4 years, telling us "that\'s politics, folks." (Please see the wonderful Z Magazine essays by Laurence Shoup on the presidential campaign)
U.S. narrow-spectrum candidate-centered politics is something of a trap that destorys the more urgent and real politics of popular mobilization
I never tell people NOT to vote for Obama and I give indications of how and why McCain and Pailin are terrible, which should be obvious to anyone on the left.
I am working to demystifiy what exactly will have lost when and if Obama gets defeated (corporate-imperial centrism, NOT the people and not the Lef)t. This is critical for keeping progressive hope alive if he gets defeated, which he may because of the sort of centrist campaign he\'s running. Demystification of Obama also needs to expand now -- the more and the sooner the better --- for progressives to be ready to respond producrtively if he wins. An Obama ascendancy will also pose huge problems for what\'s left of a left, believe it or not John Pilger and other radical writers have noted the risk of left pacifiication and guilt-ridden stand-down and so forth. This is part of what has made Obama\'s (illusory) "progressive" identity and related novelty, color and nomenclature so attractive to sophisticated members of the ruling class.
There\'s also a subtext in my writing that goes unnoticed. I\'\'m telling the Obamanists/Dems how to win. If they want to win stop acting like Dukakis and Kerry and Bill Bradley and Adla Stevenson etc. then maybe they could win.. ZNet does this every four years: tells them how to to win and of course they don\'t listen. And then they like to blame the left...it\'s hilarious.
Still, my key dichotomy isn\'t the binary choices in November: Instead, it\'s the candidate-centered corporated-crafted narrow-spectrum quadrennial-extravaganza political culture ("that\'s politics") versus democracy and grassroots activism.
For the full argument at this stage, you should buy the book. In doing the book (Internet essays are nothing compared to an actual book) I went a little bit of the way down the path of your lesser evil argument (and not just on foreign policy), like I did in 2004. But my heart wasn\'t really in it because it is not just self-evidently clear that Obama is better in the long run. I wish it was just black and white and not complex.
A guy just wrote me from a Red state and said people were trying to get him to do some phone canvassing for Obama and he wanted to know how to proceed. Here\'s what I wrote back:
". Guess it is a philosophical dilemma: which bothers you the most - the immediate danger of McCain-Pailin, which is very real and severe (these people are proto-fascists) or the longer-term risk of Obama re-legitimizing the political order and empire for quite some time perhaps? This second is also no small risk. Parts of the power elite are licking their chops about being able to wrap Empire and Inequality Inc. up in new clothes of \'change\' and \'progress.\' Yes: repressive-de-sublimation and restoring faith in an unjust order that needed to pass away a long time ago. I\'m sure others would talk about the long-run price of Republican rule - the deepening of the hole we have to dig out of to get anythng progressive done ever again. I see both sides and actually have no resolution to offer you at all. I guess what I do is say \'hey, do what you want election-wise but the bigger thing is what are you willing and ready to do on issues and in terms of movement-building before and after the big corporate-crafted candidate-centered election spectacle, whatever its outcome?\' And while we all now the danger of McCain, don;t pretend that there\'s no downsides with Obama - there\'s plenty."
One small part of the downside: I was on some black talk radio stations weeks ago and it was horrifying to hear a surprisingly large # of African-Americans all of a sudden ready to defend the invasion of Afghanistan and Democrats\' waffling and complicity on Iraq (very pronounced with Obama) and so on. Very sad: the Obama phenomenon made that happen, Black Americans are by far the nation\'s leftmost population and the Obama phenomenon\'s got more of them wiling to embrace or at least excuse criminal U.S. white-/world-supremacist Empire than any time in memory. Candidate-centered politics produce that sort of perversity.
As for potentially increasing Afghan casualties by indirectly helping McCain, BO has made his efforts to step up the "good" war on Afghanistan very clear. He also promises to restore the American Empire\'s credibility in the world, something that could actually end up costing more lives --- and extending a terrible history ---- on the whole. What\'s so great about more competent, sophisticated, and attractive imperialists?
You can\'t expect someone with my record to respond any other way to someone who is so grotesquely willing to endorse Uncle Sam\'s butchery (and Israel\'s butchery). I give numerous examples in my book\'s foreign policy (Chapter 4, titled "How \'Antiwar\'? Obama, iraq, and the Audacity of Empire").
Surely you saw my answer to Jonas\' comment that it would be political suicide to apologize for our criminal mass murder. Well, you guys need to worry about the moral suicide involved in muzzling the truth about imperial violence for political reasons.
The notion that I could cost Obama a significant number of votes is pretty much of a reach at this stage of the game.
We need to foster a different and more responsive, truly demorcatic political culture from the bottom up to take us past these sickening Devil\'s Choices....and that\'s a long-term project that goes far beyond and the current election cycle and the quadrennial intra-leftist blood-letting over how to best respond to the limited candidate choices offered by two parties both standing to the right of the populace on issue after issue....
The other thing I\'m trying to accomplish is to help push Cal Davidson over the edge. His comments on this blog and ony my ZNet articles have offered a scary window on the moral suicide to which I just referred.
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Re: 90 Civilians Killed by "Good" Uncle Sam in Azizabad
By Kritisdasgupta, Kritis at Sep 16, 2008 10:12 AM
Mr. Street,
I read your writings often and I admire your brilliant insights as well as your passion. I find I agree with much, if not all, of your thoughts. I share your outrage at the deaths of these civilians in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
I would, however, raise a question which no doubt has been raised to you many times before – at this stage of the election, what is the ultimate purpose, and what will be the ultimate effect, of so much criticism of Obama?
I am planning to vote for Obama, not out of a starry-eyed idealism or a belief that Obama is an antiwar progressive, but simply because I believe an Obama administration would be less murderous in its foreign policy than a McCain administration.
I believe you have quoted Noam Chomsky previously in your works and are very familiar with his ideas. I recall reading one of Chomsky’s thoughts in which he said that one must realize the ultimate effect of one’s actions when it comes to protesting human rights violations. As I recall, he gave an example - during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, if one were to write about the atrocities committed by the Afghans against the Soviets, the overall effect might be to support and prolong the Soviet occupation.
Chomsky also said, in another interview, that although the Democrats and the Republicans are in effect two sides of the same coin, there were some real killers in the Reagan administration whom it was important to vote out of office.
(I apologize if I have misrepresented Chomsky’s thoughts in any way through my paraphrasing.)
Putting this together, my question again is this – what do you hope to accomplish with your criticism of Obama at this stage? I doubt that many people who are on the progressive Z Net will go vote for McCain, but perhaps some progressives will decide it’s not worth voting for Obama. McCain is already leading and the chance of his getting into office will increase.
If we look at Afghani (and Iraqi) civilians, are they safer under a McCain administration? It is extremely unlikely. It seems much more likely that there will be more senseless deaths of innocent people, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps Iran, as McCain and Palin carry out their mission from “God.” If we have a genuine concern for the people of the Middle East, even a marginally less hawkish administration could lead to many fewer innocent lives lost.
As far as Obama not apologizing to his CNN interviewer, I am sure you are aware that it would be political suicide for him to do so. I listen to right-wing radio at times, painful as it is, to hear how the other side thinks. I have heard several times the criticism that it was “unpatriotic” for Obama to go to Berlin and “apologize” for the actions of the US. Though you and I may fault Obama for not being progressive enough, to these people he is already a far left anti-American radical.
Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright said he had told Obama that if he gets elected, “I’m coming after you.” This seems to make sense to me – to doing everything at this stage to keep the dangerous McCain from getting into office, and then exerting pressure on an Obama administration for genuine change.
These are just my thoughts, many of which I am sure you have heard before.
Thank you for your excellent writings.
Kritis
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Re: Kritis
By McGehee, Michael at Sep 19, 2008 09:02 AM
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Total disagreement on this
By Street, Paul at Sep 15, 2008 22:52 PM
Jonas - the "accidental" civilian killings are well-known highly predictable outcomes of the U.S. actions taken and the overall policy of invasion, occupation, and global hegemony. It\'s been this way for ages. The daths of Iraqi and Afghan civilians are viewed by U.S. policy pretty much on par with the killing of some ants as you drive your car on a dirt road. As far as our imperial overlords and most Americans are concerned, Uncle Sam is an inherently good driver and never kills the human ants on purpose. Our masterrs want us to shrug and say "oh, well, it\'s just a sad reality of how good we are. People should get over things like the killing of whole families and wedding parties and so on. Shit happens when you are as good and benevolent as we are!"
When you start getting over this kind of stuff and even rationalizing Obama\'s avoidance of it, you have gone to a very dark and spiritually dangerous place
If the presidential political culture is in fact so reactionary that top politicians can\'t even apologize for killing 90 (or however many) civilians "by accident," then maybe there are better things to do with one\'s efforts than getting into morally toxic narrow-spectrum presidential campaigns.
Citing and quoting the grotesque sentiments of the unmitigated imperialist asshole Bush 41 doesn\'t make Obama any less of an imperialist asshole.
You are sliding down a very dangerously slippery moral slope with "No Shock" Barracks Obomba, whose top-down missions include giving new legitimacy to the American Empire. Not to see this when you have the ability and resources to see it is to deserve being caught in the blowback.
Of course, one thing that gets lost here is that there\'s nothing all that progressive or honorable about how we could expect Uncle Sam to apologize with either a Dem or a Repu in the White House. Any U.S. apology would be in the mode of saying "sorry, we were guilty of some malpractice in the process of being good and noble surgeons in your country. This was a tragic mistake in our broadly noble endeavor to heal and liberate you. We are so very good, as you know."
No, sorry, we are imperial butchers. These "accidents" are murders that are built into the logic of monumentally criminal imperial invasion.
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Re: 90 Civilians Killed by "Good" Uncle Sam in Azizabad
By Cacioppo, Jonas at Sep 15, 2008 21:52 PM
Seriously, do you think it actually *wasn\'t* accidental and that the United States intended to kill 90 civilians, including all of those children? And to address the politics of it, if Obama said, "Yes, I think we should apologize" he would have been done. No chance.
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Re: to Jonas
By McGehee, Michael at Sep 19, 2008 08:51 AM
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By Cacioppo, Jonas at Sep 15, 2008 21:50 PM
Human intelligence error. "There was total misinformation fed to the coalition forces"
Regrettable. Acceptable range of casualties. Collateral damage. "I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don\'t care what the facts are" (G.H.W. Bush)
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