America's exalted capacity for murder-"It is ultimately fatal to create too many victims."

[kpete]

America's exalted capacity for murder

The west's war now stretches from Waziristan to Connecticut.
There will be no victors in this desert of bewilderment
* Pankaj Mishra

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A car bomb in Times Square wasn't what Obama may have been expecting when, fulfilling his presidential campaign promise, he expanded the war on terror into north-west Pakistan. Last year more soldiers and civilians died in this almost unnoticed new theatre of war than in Iraq and Afghanistan put together. It was also last year that the American-backed Pakistani assaults on the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas turned an astounding 3 million people into refugees.

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Meanwhile, as the civilian casualty rate declines in Afghanistan, it shoots up in north-west Pakistan. According to one recent estimate by Pakistani officials, the CIA's predator drone strikes killed 700 civilians, the majority women and children, during Obama's first year in office. A more conservative estimate last year by the New America Foundation puts civilian casualties at about 30% of the total fatalities in these strikes. Obama has ramped up the killing spree in recent weeks, firing 18 missiles on 10 May alone. And the normalisation of these almost everyday massacres proceeds apace.


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This blowback, and the mushrooming worldwide of many unlikely and reluctant fundamentalists, was widely predicted, even by such Iraq-hardened counterinsurgency experts as David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum. "Every one of these dead noncombatants," Kilcullen and Exum wrote in the New York Times last year, "represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement."



And the ranks of the homicidally enraged will swell as long as the CIA and the Pentagon seek to achieve victory through an exalted capacity for murder and destruction. For as the American writer James Baldwin, no counter-insurgency expert, wrote: "It is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him but to the victims. They belong to the people he is fighting. The people know this and as inexorably as the roll call – the honour roll – of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable; they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor; on the contrary, all his energies, his life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win."

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more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/may/21/america-murder-waziristan-connecticut

[customerserviceguy]

1. It was indeed a deep irony

that while the Times Square bomber was doing his thing, the President was making jokes about predator drones at a fancy dinner.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

2. Militarism and Corporatism

are consuming this country at an ever increasing pace.