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Combs: U.S. squanders credibility, good faith & human lives

By Britt Combs | The McDowell News

Published: November 24, 2009

Before the dust settled on 9/11, government officials announced that 19 al-Qaeda operatives had carried out the atrocity. Their methods being what they were, the 19 were necessarily all dead. It would not be possible to capture, try, convict and punish or kill any of them. That was terribly frustrating.

Fortunately, we soon learned that America had some living enemies. Osama bin Laden was alive and well, the president told us, and laughing at us from his stronghold in a godless land of evil and shadows known as Afghanistan. All we had to do was go get him.

If there's one drawback to ending the draft and maintaining a volunteer army, it's the fact that the people in general are now far more willing to see their soldiers sent around the world on hare-brained, half-baked missions.

The obvious consequences of the United States' policy of "preemptive strikes" ( a code name for killing anyone who looks at us the wrong way) and "nation building" (a code name for overthrowing the civil order in far-away lands and replacing it with gangs of thugs and criminals backed by U.S. soldiers) is the terrible loss of credibility and good faith we squandered around the world. A world united in sympathy soon came to regard America as a bull in a china shop. But there was a deeper tragic loss -- the terrible human suffering and loss of life experienced by both our soldiers and the wretched peasants whose only crime was to be poor and oppressed.

The angel of death has harvested many souls in Iraq. Exact numbers are lost to the constraints of political and military propaganda, as tends to be the case in war. The New England Journal of Medicine reported 60,481 "documented Iraqi civilian deaths" between 2003 and 2008.

Estimates of the number of Afghan non-combatants killed in the initial invasion in 2001 range from 3,000 to 20,000. In 2002 a U.S. bombing raid killed about 44 people at a wedding in an incident that became notorious the world over as an example of American indiscriminate killing. That war has claimed between 12,000 and 32,000 human souls, experts say. Those are people who will never ever come back, never get another chance at life, never know the joy and peace of a happy life free from government oppression and foreign aggression.

We took the word of President Bush, a known liar and oath-breaker, a man who disregarded the constitution he swore to uphold and defend. We took his word and sent our soldiers on a foreign adventure. Thousands have died as a result.

A generation of Afghans had known nothing but death and slaughter under the Soviet invasion and under the lawless crime waves they left when their government collapsed. America served them yet another heaping helping of blood and fire. Iraqis who had suffered under the bloody fist of Saddam have endured searches, arrests, torture and midnight raids and bombing ever since America came to liberate them.

And for all that, still no sign of bin Laden. There are vague tales that other "9/11 masterminds" are in prison in Cuba, but again, we have to take it on faith. The government in Washington, which has never once proved trustworthy, asks that we trust them now. Ironically, a great number of Americans are gullible enough to fall for it. There are calls on the fringe of the right wing demanding that the accused 9/11 collaborators should never have their guilt proven in open court -- we should just execute them and be done, kind of like the 9/11 hijackers did to all their innocent victims.

Although it's not polite to say it, there is a distinct possibility that the entire group of men who planned 9/11 are already dead. It doesn't take hundreds of men and a high level of sophistication to hijack four airplanes. We very well may have had all the revenge we're gonna get. Indiscriminately killing thousands more might make us feel important and reinforce our bad boy image, but it won't do much good for our immortal souls.

American military personnel come from fine stock. They are good neighbors, decent, law-abiding people who submit themselves willingly to the horrible hierarchy of military discipline, knowing they may be ordered to their deaths. Our government has a sacred obligation not to squander those lives defending the honor of megalomaniac politicians. Our government has betrayed that trust. Tens of thousands of corpses, snuffed out human lives, are all the evidence you need to know that ours is a government without any more legitimacy or honor than Saddam Hussein or the Taliban had.

President Obama, having won his office on his anti-war stance, has followed Bush's game plan almost to the letter. His handlers say he is on the brink of deciding to send as many as 40,000 more Americans into the Afghan grinder in an effort to win a war that he himself has said was ill-advised. His escalation of the war will radicalize a new generation, not just in Afghanistan, but in neighboring, nuclear Pakistan. Isn't that comforting?

Nothing can bring back all those wasted lives, but Obama can stop the carnage now. In the coming days he will choose either to distinguish himself from his monstrous predecessors or join them in the priesthood of death.