The U.S. Empire Provokes Terrorism

[99th_Monkey]

The U.S. Empire Provokes Terrorism
By Sheldon Richman * OpEdNews * 8/10/2013 at 16:51:26

Perhaps we'll never know if intercepted chatter between al-Qaeda leaders -- which prompted the U.S. government to close dozens of diplomatic missions in the Muslim world and to issue a worldwide travel alert -- was serious or not. But mischief shouldn't be ruled out. Without cost or risk, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's successor, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen), can have a big laugh as they send American officials running around as though their hair were on fire. Why should they attempt to pull off some spectacular but risky action when they can disrupt things -- closing embassies is no small deal -- so easily? As a bonus, President Obama's claim about al-Qaeda's degradation is revealed as an empty boast. (Yemeni officials claim they foiled a plot. But who knows?)

The United States has been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for a dozen years, but not because the former rulers are a direct threat to the American people. Rather, the Bush and Obama administrations insisted, if the Taliban was not defeated, Afghanistan would again become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda. Now we see (if we hadn't already) that this was a mere rationalization for the projection of American power. Al-Qaeda doesn't need Afghanistan. Bin Laden wasn't found there. Al-Zawahiri presumably isn't there. And the latest alleged unspecified threat comes from Yemen, 2,000 miles from Kabul. Doesn't that expose the 12 years of American-inflicted death and destruction, not to mention the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, as a monumental waste of life and treasure?

~snip~

Does (the 9/11/01 attack on the WTC) mean the U.S. government must maintain a global empire in order to eradicate the sources of anti-American terrorism? Absolutely not -- quite the contrary. It is the global empire that provoked the al-Qaeda attacks in the first place. Contrary to the popular notion that the organization struck U.S. "interests" out of the blue while our country minded its own business, the U.S. government for decades has supported violent regimes in the Middle East and North Africa: from Saudi Arabia's corrupt and brutal monarchy, to the Egyptian military dictatorship, to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to Israel's unconscionable occupation of Palestine.

American administrations, Republican and Democrat, have directly inflicted death and suffering on people in the Muslim world -- through the 1990s economic sanctions on Iraq, for example. (Today's sanctions on Iran now impose hardship on another group of Muslims.) Every time an al-Qaeda official or operative has the chance, he points out that his hatred of America stems not from its "freedoms" but from this bloody record. Unrelenting U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia, in which noncombatants are killed, don't win friends. They recruit enemies bent on revenge.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-U-S-Empire-Provokes-T-by-Sheldon-Richman-130810-784.html

[indepat]

1. Who woulda' ever thunk that violence begats more violence, that terraist actions begat

more terraist actions in response? We learn something every day.

[xchrom]

2. du rec.

[KittyWampus]

3. I have to laugh when DU'ers post stuff like this that completely ignore Saudi complicity.

Cause unless you really follow the money and understand the depth of the collaboration between the NeoConservatives/PNAC'ers & Saudis etc you miss what's going on.

And from the paragraphs you posted… the Saudi's (for instance) get only a passing mention.

And "every time an al-Qaeda official or operative has the chance"… maybe they could point out where their money comes from.

Teh evil US and its global empire is not the sole root of the situation.

If Richman wanted to really cover the issue, he'd go much further than just throwing red meat to the USA sucks crowd.

And at the end of the article he condemns the US for its sanctions on Iraq…. which most liberals back in the dark days of Bush the Junior, argued WERE WORKING hence no need to invade.

[99th_Monkey]

4. I don't think the author needed the Saudi connection to make his point

but you make a good point, that the Saudi involvement in 911 (and other
terrorist activity) needs to be factored into our collective thinking on the
subject.

[leveymg]

6. Sanctions and embargoes are economic warfare. People seem to think there's no human costs

attached to them, but in Iraq they appear to have ended up killing more civilians than the actual US bombardments and cross-fire civilian casualties in war. Yet, we again hear the same similar blithe claims about sanctions on Iran being the only alternative to war.

Compare these figures for sanctions on Iraq with those below for war casualties:

Estimates of deaths due to sanctions

Estimates of excess deaths during the sanctions vary widely, use different methodologies and cover different time-frames.[32][39][40] Some estimates include (some of them include effects of the Gulf War in the estimate):

Mohamed M. Ali, John Blacker, and Gareth Jones estimate between 400,000 and 500,000 excess under-5 deaths.[41]
UNICEF: 500,000 children (including sanctions, collateral effects of war). "[As of 1999] [c]hildren under 5 years of age are dying at more than twice the rate they were ten years ago." (As is customary, this report was based on a survey conducted in cooperation with the Iraqi government and by local authorities in the provinces not controlled by the Iraqi government)[42]
Former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq Denis Halliday: "Two hundred thirty-nine thousand children 5 years old and under" as of 1998.[43]
"Probably ... 170,000 children", Project on Defense Alternatives, "The Wages of War", 20 October 2003[44]
350,000 excess deaths among children "even using conservative estimates", Slate Explainer, "Are 1 Million Children Dying in Iraq?", 9. October 2001.[45]
Economist Michael Spagat: "very likely to be [less than] than half a million children" because estimation efforts are unable to isolate the effects of sanctions alone due to the lack of "anything resembling a controlled experiment",[46] and "one potential explanation" for the statistics showing an increase in child mortality was that "they were not real, but rather results of manipulations by the Iraqi government."[46]

"Richard Garfield, a Columbia University nursing professor ... cited the figures 345,000-530,000 for the entire 1990-2002 period"[9] for sanctions-related excess deaths.[47]
Zaidi, S. and Fawzi, M. C. S., (1995) The Lancet British medical journal: 567,000 children.[48] A co-author (Zaidi) did a follow-up study in 1996, finding "much lower ... mortality rates ... for unknown reasons."[49]
[Source: Wike]

Major studies of war mortality
http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/

Three major studies of war mortality have been done in Iraq. Two appeared in The Lancet, the British medical journal, and one appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. They bear strong similarities in their findings, but have some important differences, too.

The first household survey that appeared was published in The Lancet in October 2004, measuring the war-related mortality in the war's first 18 months. The researchers--mainly epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and medical personnel in Iraq--estimated 98,000 "excess deaths" due to war. Read

The second household survey, conducted by the Hopkins scientists again, was completed in June 2006 and published four months later in The Lancet. Its findings: 650,000 people (civilians and fighters) died as a result of the war in Iraq. Read

Another household survey, this one conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health at the same time as the second Hopkins study, found 400,000 excess deaths, 151,000 by violence. As is the case with most such surveys conducted during time of war, there were problems in data gathering and the analysis tended to minimize violent death estimates. But the survey generally confirmed the very high mortality reported in The Lancet. Read

It should be noted that both the second Lancet article and the New England Journal of Medicine article were based on studies that were completed at the height of war-related violence in Iraq. Large-scale fighting continued for another year and slowly subsided for a year after that to lower but continuing levels. So their estimates are a fraction of the total caused by the war.

In 2008, the peer-reviewed journal, Conflict and Health, published "Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review," and found that the household survey method was superior to other forms of counting.
Other Estimates

Several other attempts have been made to estimate the war dead, and particularly civilians killed by violence. Iraq Body Count is the most well known. It counted individuals reported in English-language newspapers, mainly, which severely limited its scope. Similarly, the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index and the U.N. office in Iraq used "passive surveillance" methods (reports from morgues as well as newspapers). The problem with these methods is that they only capture part of the total picture (as with morgue statistics), their "surveillance instrument" (i.e., newspapers) change over time, and so on. (See the discussion of methods in the Conflict and Health article cited above.) They are mainly useful for viewing trends. Wikileaks also released U.S. military data in 2010, but this was also quite partial--reports from U.S. military personnel.

In 2013, a group of scholars at Columbia University's School of Public Health published a comparison of the Wikileaks and Iraq Body Count estimates, and found a small percentage of single reported deaths overlapping--indicating that the total dead was significantly higher than either estimate held.

[bvar22]

14. When asked about the 1/2 MILLION Iraqi child deaths due to the sanctions,

Bill Clinton's Secretary of State , Madeleine Albright callously replied,
"It was worth it."
!!!?????
500,000 CHILDREN????

[Egalitarian Thug]

7. I have to laugh when people forget or are not aware that the Saud regime doesn't exist

without the U.S. We made them and we keep them in power. If the U.S. were to stop supporting them the "royal" family in-country would be gone within 24 hours and the rest would be hunted down anywhere in the world they tried to hide.

The Europeans created a complete clusterfuck all over Africa and we came along and gave it steroids. All in the name of corporate profits.

[LuvNewcastle]

12. Exactly.

We keep the Saud family in power, they give money to terrorists, and we buy weapons from military contractors to fight those terrorists. That's why certain people like the Bush family have always had close ties to the Saudis. The Saudis help keep the parts of the war machine greased and running smoothly.

[DirkGently]

5. We're sounding a lot like the old Soviet regime. "We must conquer

to protect ourselves."

Drone strikes alone will give Islamic groups all the recruiting power they need for decades to come.

Which, you have to imagine, may be the point.

[n2doc]

8. We are terrorists

We terrorize the world. And they respond in kind. And the MIC makes money both ways.

[PowerToThePeople]

9. when * was president

I was kicked out of my parent's house for saying the same thing. No family holiday's for years after. If not for the birth of my child, their grandchild, I believe they would still be ostracizing me.

We have continued the policies of terror that */Cheney got rolling after 9/11. These are policies that we were so against back then. But now, unless you are "ra-ra go third way dems!" on every issue, you are labeled a libertarian or disparaged in some other fashion. It is sad.

[n2doc]

10. The adage that "if you have to resort to insults you have lost the argument" holds

I won't say I am blameless in that regard either. It is maddening when one sees the "greatest president ever" and " all this spy stuff is right wing lies" type posts, and sometimes I lose it. All I can say is that there are a lot of folks who saw Obama as the culmination of a dream, the Icon, the man who would bring us to the promised land. And they still feel that way, no matter what the facts may point to.

[Katashi_itto]

11. How about it's a false flag operation so they can say "See "NSA" is doing it's job!" Bush did it.

Why not now?

[woo me with science]

13. K&R

[woo me with science]

15. kick