EDITORIAL
Casualties of U.S. war: truth & civilians
After poor reviews and reactions to his talks on the
economy, Bush was happier giving his recent "make war first"
speech in front of 2,000 soldiers from the 10th
Mountain Division at Fort Drum in New York. They had recently
returned from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan, where the Pentagon
will now even guard the U.S. puppet president, Hamid
Karzai.
Everyone cheered, whether they wanted to or not. But Bush,
the Pentagon and the officers leading the cheers had butchered
the Afghans just as Ken Lay and Bush's other corporate cronies
pillaged the workers at home. Even Washington's own assessment
of the Afghan war, made July 20, shows that the Pentagon
occupation is ruthless and brutal.
By their own confession, U.S. bombing from a distance, false
information and a cavalier attitude toward civilians have
killed at least 400 civilians in the Afghan campaign. This is a
conservative, minimum figure. A New Hampshire professor who has
made an independent investigation of the U.S. bombing campaign
now says the U.S. has killed between 3,115 and 3,557 civilians,
many of them children.
These numerous civilian deaths grow straight out of the
character of U.S. imperialism and the Pentagon.
First of all, the White House and the top Pentagon generals
have nothing but contempt for civilians in their line of fire.
They have killed civilians from Iraq to Panama to
Yugoslavia--and even more in Vietnam and Korea--and dubbed it
"collateral damage."
Second, the average U.S. soldier has no real political
interest in risking life and limb for U.S. imperialism. Why
should working-class youths want to risk their life so that Ken
Lay can rip off millions, or the owners of oil monopolies can
rip off billions?
That reasonable attitude has forced the Pentagon generals
since Vietnam to try to limit U.S. casualties. Not because they
love their troops. They simply fear that U.S. casualties will
arouse mass opposition to the war, including from the troops
themselves.
This means military strikes are from great distances and
with big bombs. Often the Pentagon purposely hits civilian
targets to try to demoralize the "enemy." But even when the
Pentagon is not purposely killing civilians, indiscriminate
rockets and bombs kill them anyway.
The day following this Afghan revelation, we learned that
Tom Ridge wanted to consider using the Pentagon to "fight
terrorism" inside the United States. He didn't mention the
Afghan model for Pentagon activity, but it was right there in
front of us.
It brings home the need to fight against Pentagon
involvement anywhere, and everywhere, in the world.
Reprinted from the Aug. 1, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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