Discours de Chris Hedges au Sanctuary for Independent Media à Troy, dans l'État de New York, le 21 octobre 2022. Il présentait son dernier livre, intitulé “The Greatest Evil is War” (« Le plus grand mal, c'est la guerre », Seven Stories Press, 20.09.2022).
Cette condamnation sans concession de l'horreur et de l'obscénité de la guerre s'appuie sur son expérience et des entretiens, fondements d'un ouvrage qui examine les coûts cachés de la guerre et ses conséquences pour les individus, les familles, les communautés et les nations.
À la mémoire de Meghan Marohn, 1980-2022
TRANSCRIPTION (Les liens et les contenus entre crochets sont de mon cru) :
I didn't really want to write another book on war. My first one was a force that gives us meaning was not cathartic, was extremely difficult to cope with and process, but the kind of sickening euphoria over the war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile and so, I have this book here…
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Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise, by Washington, not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on Russia's border, and the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia's border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. The invasion of Ukraine would —I expect— never have happened if these promises had been kept, Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry, but to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine —under post Nuremberg Laws— is a criminal war of aggression.
I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent, Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno. I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight, you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from, and the hopes you can avoid being hit.
I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which years later descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.
I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language: Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Dinka, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers.
I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes and stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell: the smell of death. The Supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.
I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police, I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base, in Honduras, to see if they should kill me, and again, in Basra, after the first Gulf War, never knowing if I would be executed under constant guard and, often, without food, drinking, out of mud puddles.
The primary lesson in war is that we, as distinct individuals, do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.
“We were expendable!,” Eugene Sledge wrote of his experiences as a Marine in the South Pacific in World War II. “It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.”
The landscape of war is hallucinogenic, it defies comprehension, you have no concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours… War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life.
You cannot comprehend what you see. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about Liberty and Democracy, and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor, and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe which, on some level, will never make sense again.
War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life-familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social. Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly.
There are no good wars. None. And this includes World War II, which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American heroism, purity and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with crippling sanctions meant to bring down Putin's government is infantile and dangerous.
The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours.
There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo, when we were being hit with hundreds of Serbian shells a day and under constant sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city, it made sense to kill or be killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar, Srebrenica had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians and the wholesale rape of women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from the poison of violence, the soul-destroying force that is war. I knew a Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a 12-year-old girl. His daughter was 12. He never recovered.
Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony, of the god-like power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes, and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems, and L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions more.
The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for 2023. The Biden Administration has asked Congress to provide over 50 billion dollars to Ukraine in weapons and aid. The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in the Middle East and it is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict one that now flirts with nuclear Holocaust.
The same cabal of war mongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, decade after decade, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protein, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican party to the Democratic party and then, back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons, to liberal interventionists. Pseudo-intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery, as they sell perpetual fear and a racist world view, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence. They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state. And the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks project for The New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council, and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized, or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any Empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.
I reported on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded.
My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams, convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran Contra affair, and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, so, he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War, and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department's Public Diplomacy Office in Latin America, were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded.
Their job was to discredit our reporting. They and their coterie of fellow war lovers went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe.
They are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel's interests with our own.
They advocated for airstrikes in Serbia, calling for the U.S to, quote, “take out Slobodan Milošević” [Слободан Милошевић]. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April [15,] 2002 that, quote, “the road that leads to real security and peace" is "the road that runs through Baghdad.” We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure —including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity generating plants, and nearly all the water pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period, when 90 000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country—, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and the proliferation of failed States.
The war in Iraq along with a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan shredded the illusion of U.S military and Global hegemony. It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, wholesale slaughter of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the Middle East.
They continue to call for war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating, quote, “there is nothing we can do, short of attacking, to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons”.
They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and they have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua.
They embrace a pure blind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences or its inevitable blowback.
They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration.
They believe in the Divine Right to impose their quote-unquote “values” on others by force, fiasco after fiasco, and now, they are stoking a war with Russia.
The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus —Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš [Данило Киш] observed —. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The Nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell – it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image – as nationalists. [A comfortable standpoint, as we noted. Fear and envy. A commitment and engagement needing no effort. Not only is hell other people, in a national key of course, but also: whatever is not mine (Serbian, Croatian, French…) is alien to me. Nationalism is an ideology of banality. As such, nationalism is a totalitarian ideology.]The Biden Administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden's Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. Anthony Blinken is the Secretary of State. Jack Sullivan is National Security advisor.
They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded the Institute for the Study of War. William [Bill] Kristol, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum and others.
Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever-expanding military. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”
They once railed against liberal weaknesses and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a big fat mistake.
Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.
These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust.
They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military, but they eagerly ship young American men and women to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of Empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide the weaponry and logistical support, so Ukrainians and Russians can bleed in perpetuity.
Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the U.S during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General Renee Schneider, and president Salvador Allende), the Bay of Pigs, the atrocities and war crimes that define the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.”
The world, the late Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All U.S interventions are a fight for Freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.
The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then, wait for a crisis —they call it the next Pearl Harbor— to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment in Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the, quote, “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.” Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dare to be seen as soft on National Security. The act stated that the U.S government would work to, quote, “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq War during the administration of George W. Bush.
The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knew nothing about the Muslim world, wrote, quote, “the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory… The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again… is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the Middle East is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.” Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would, quote, “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.”
It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the United States.
They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that, quote, “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now” [author’s emphasis].
They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israel Palestine morass.
In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and right-wing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred Kagan, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of U.S troops in Gaza so we could, quote, “take the war to these people.”
They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “We need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.”
His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the U.S ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected president ViKtor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for U.S troops to be sent to Syria to assist quote-unquote “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Bashir al-Assad. Instead, the interventions spawned the Caliphate. The U.S ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad's de facto Air Force.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will.
“It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. “But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”
In short, don't worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won't use the bomb.
I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are the useful idiots of the War Industry. They are never dropped from the networks, they rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institute, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as in the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable.
When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Doctor Strangeloves, if we don't stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.
The ruling class divides the world into worthy and unworthy victims. Those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of Modern Warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed or ignored. The terror we in our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinians, Syrian, Libyans, Somalian and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war.
We —echoing the empty promises from Moscow— claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar artillery, tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns. This bifurcation into worthy and unworthy victims, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky pointed out in Manufacturing Consent, is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. The Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, to Moscow, are worthy victims. Russia is their savior. The 7.6 million refugees and the millions more Ukrainian families cowering in basements, car parks and subway stations are unworthy “Nazis”.
Worthy victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just. Worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity. Mention the provocations carried out by the Western Alliance, with the expansion of NATO and the missile batteries in Eastern Europe, the U.S involvement in the 2014 ouster of Yanukovych, which led to the civil war in the East of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine's Army, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and you are dismissed as a Putin apologist. It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims and, by extension, ourselves.
We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred: a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the cause to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts used to fuel the conflict.
Celebrities, who like the powerful carefully orchestrate their public image, pour out their hearts to worthy victims. Hollywood stars, such as George Clooney, made trips to Darfur to denounce the war crimes being committed by Khartoum. At the same time, the U.S was daily killing scores of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was as savage as the slaughter in Darfur, but to express outrage what was happening to unworthy victims was to become branded as the enemy.
Saddam Hussein's attacks on the Kurds, considered worthy victims, saw an international outcry, while Israeli attacks on the Palestinians, subjected to relentless bombing campaigns by the Israeli Air Force, and its artillery, and tank units, with hundreds of dead and wounded, was at best an afterthought. At the height of Stalin's purges in the 1930s, worthy victims were the Republicans battling the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Soviet citizens were mobilized to send aid and assistance. Unworthy victims were the millions of people Stalin executed, sometimes after tawdry, show trials, and sent to the gulags.
While I was reporting from El Salvador in 1984, a Catholic priest [Jerzy Popiełuszko] was murdered by the communist regime in Poland. His death was used to excoriate the Polish communist government, a stark contrast to the response of the Reagan Administration to the rape and murder of four Catholic missionaries in 1980 in El Salvador by the Salvadoran National Guard. Reagan, the Reagan Administration, sought to blame the three nuns and lay worker for their own deaths. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's ambassador to the U.N., said, “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.” Secretary of State Alexander Haig speculated that “perhaps they ran a roadblock.” [Cited in Raymond Bonner, “The Diplomat and the Killer,” The Atlantic, February 11, 2016]
For the Reagan Administration, the murdered Church women were unworthy victims. The right-wing government in El Salvador, armed and backed by the United States, joked at the time: “Haz Patria, mata un cura” (“Be a patriot: kill a priest”). Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in March of 1980. Nine years later, the Salvadoran death squads would gun down six Jesuits and two others at their residence on the campus of Central American University, in San Salvador. Between 1977 and 1989, death squads and Salvadoran soldiers killed 13 priests.
It is not that worthy victims do not suffer, nor that they are not deserving of our support and compassion. It is that worthy victims alone are rendered human, people like us, and unworthy victims are not. It helps, of course, when, as in Ukraine, they are white. But the missionaries murdered in El Salvador were also white and American, and yet it was not enough to shake U.S support for the country's military regime.
“The mass media never explain why Andreas Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera —he was a brilliant Uruguayan, a mathematician who was imprisoned— is unworthy,” [Herman and Chomsky write. They continue:]
The attention and general dichotomization occur “naturally” as a result of the working of the filters, but the result is the same as if a commissar had instructed the media: “Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.” Reports of the abuses of worthy victims not only passed through the filters, but they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns. If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful, as well as dramatic, they focus on it, intensively, and use it to enlighten the public.This was true, for example, of the shooting down by the Soviets of the Korean Air Lines KAL007 in early September 1983 —269 passengers and crew were killed—[, which permitted] an extended campaign of denigration of an official enemy and greatly advanced Reagan administration's arms plans. As Bernard Gwertzman noted complacently in the New York Times of August 31st, 1984, U.S. officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” In sharp contrast, the shooting down by Israel of a Libyan civilian airliner in February 1973 —108 civilians were killed— led to no outcry in the West: no denunciations of “cold-blooded murder,” no boycott.
This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility in a 1973 editorial: “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai Peninsula last week.” There was a very “useful purpose” served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. [Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 32.]
It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched on lies and fabrications.
Imagine if America's largest banks —J.P Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo— were, like Russian banks, cut off from the international banking system.
Imagine if our oligarchs —Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon [JPMorgan Chase CEO], Bill Gates, Elon Musk… they are certainly as venal as Russian oligarchs— had their assets frozen, and estates and luxury yachts seized. Bezos's yacht, by the way, is the largest in the world, it cost 500 million dollars, and it is 57 feet longer than a football field.
Imagine if leading political figures, such as George W Bush and Dick Cheney, along with oligarchs, were suspended, were blocked from traveling under visa restrictions. Imagine if the world's biggest shipping line suspended shipments to and from the United States.
Imagine if the U.S international media news outlets were forced off the air.
Imagine if we were blocked from purchasing spare parts for our commercial airliners, and our airliners were banned from European airspace.
Imagine if our athletes were barred from hosting or participating in international sporting events.
Imagine if our symphony conductors and opera stars were forbidden from performing, unless they denounced the Iraq War and, in a kind of perverted loyalty oath, condemned George W. Bush.
The rank hypocrisy is stunning. Some of the same officials that orchestrated the invasion of Iraq, who under international law are war criminals for carrying out a preemptive war, are chastising Russia for its violation of international law.
The U.S bombing campaign of Iraqi Urban centers, called “Shock and Awe,” saw the dropping of 3,000 bombs on civilian areas that killed over 7,000 non-combatants in the first two months of the war —even Russia has yet to go this far.
“I have argued that when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime”, a Fox News host [Harris Faulkner, 28.02.2022] said (with a straight face) to Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's National Security adviser during the Iraq War.
“Well, it is certainly against every principle of international law and international order, and that is why throwing the book at them now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also part of it.” Rice said, “And I think the world is there. Certainly, NATO is there. He's managed to unite NATO in ways I didn't think I would ever see after the end of the Cold War.”
Rice inadvertently made a case for why she should be put on trial with the rest of Bush's enablers. She famously justified the invasion of Iraq by stating, quote, “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Her rationale [for preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal war of aggression,] is no different than that peddled by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who says the Russian invasion is being carried out to prevent Ukraine from obtaining nuclear weapons.
What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up till now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact the press, a wash and moral posturing, will not address.
No one has mastered the art of techno war and wholesale slaughter like the U.S.
military. When atrocities leak out, such as the My Lai massacre [16.03.1968] of [more than five hundred unarmed] Vietnamese civilians or the [torture of] prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty, by branding them ‘aberrations’. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military. Infantry units, assisted by long-range artillery, fighter jets, heavy bombers, missiles, drones and helicopters, level vast swaths of “enemy” territory, killing most of the inhabitants. The U.S. military, during the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, created a six-mile-wide free-fire zone that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis. The indiscriminate killing ignited the Iraqi insurgency.
When I entered Southern Iraq in the first Gulf War, it was flattened. Villages and towns were smoldering ruins. Bodies [of the dead], including women and children, lay scattered on the ground. Water purification systems had been bombed. Power stations had been destroyed. Schools and hospitals had been flattened. Bridges had been obliterated.
The United States military always wages war by “overkill”, which is why it dropped the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs on Vietnam, most actually falling on the south, where our purported Vietnamese allies resided. It unloaded in Vietnam more than 70 million tons of herbicidal agents, three million white phosphorus rockets —white phosphorus will burn its way entirely through a body— and an estimated 400,000 tons of jellied incendiary napalm. [Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 79.]
“35 percent of the victims,” Nick Turse writes of the war [in Vietnam], “died within 15 to 20 minutes. “Death from the skies, like death on the ground, was often unleashed capriciously. “It was not out of the ordinary for US troops in Vietnam to blast a whole village or bombard a wide area in an effort to kill a single sniper.” [Ibid., 91.]
Vietnamese villagers, including women, children, and the elderly, were often herded into tiny barbed-wire enclosures known as “cow cages”. They were subjected to electric shocks, gang-raped, and tortured by being hung upside down and beaten —a practice euphemistically called “the plane ride”— until unconscious. Fingernails were ripped out. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives. They were beaten senseless with baseball bats and waterboarded. Targeted assassinations, orchestrated by CIA death squads, were ubiquitous.
Wholesale destruction, including of human beings, to the U.S military, perhaps any military, is orgiastic. The ability to unleash sheets of automatic rifle fire, hundreds of rounds of belt-fed machine gun fire, 90-millimeter tank rounds, endless grenades, mortars, and artillery shells on a village, sometimes supplemented by gigantic 2,700-pound explosive projectiles fired from battleships along the coast, was a perverted form of entertainment in Vietnam, as it became later in the Middle East. U.S. troops litter the countryside with claymore mines. Canisters of napalm, daisy-cutter bombs, anti-personnel rockets, high-explosive rockets, incendiary rockets, cluster bombs, high-explosive shells, and iron fragmentation bombs —including the 40,000-pound bomb loads dropped by the giant B-52 Stratofortress bombers— along with chemical defoliants and chemical gases dropped from the sky: these are our calling cards. Vast areas are designated free-fire zones (a term later changed to the more neutral-sounding “specified Strike Zone”), where everyone, in these zones, is considered an enemy, even the elderly, women, and children.
Soldiers and Marines who attempt to report war crimes risk their lives. On September 12, 1969, Nick Turse writes in his book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, George Chunko sent a letter to his parents explaining how his unit had entered a home that had a young Vietnamese woman, four young children, an elderly man, and a military-age male inside. It appeared the younger man was AWOL from the South Vietnamese army. The young man was stripped naked and tied to a tree. His wife fell to her knees and begged the soldiers for mercy. The prisoner, Chunko wrote, was “ridiculed, slapped around and [had] mud rubbed into his face.” [Ibid., 224-225] He was then executed.
A day after he wrote the letter, Chunko was killed. Chunko's parents, Turse writes, “suspected that their son had been murdered to cover up the crime.” [Ibid., 226]
I carry within me death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blast. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then, the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouth around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.
It is only the broken and the maimed that no war. And we ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war, is captured in the long vacant stairs, in the silences, in the trembling fingers, in the memories most of us get buried deep within us, in the tears.
It is impossible to portray war. Narratives, even anti-war narratives, make the irrational rational. They make the incomprehensible comprehensible. They make the illogical logical. They make the despicable beautiful. All words and images, all discussions, all films, all evocations of war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the scars and wounds that we carry within us. Those we cannot articulate. The horror. The horror.
I wander through life with this deadness of war within me. There is no escape. There is no peace. All of us who have been to war know an awful truth. Ghosts. Strangers in a strange land.
Who are our brothers and sisters? Who is our family? Whom have we become?
We have become those whom we once despised and killed. We have become the enemy. Our mother is the mother grieving over her murdered child, and we murdered this child, in a mud-walled village of Afghanistan, in a sand filled cemetery in Fallujah or Mariupol. Our father is the father lying on a pallet in a hut, paralyzed by the blast from an iron fragmentation bomb. Our sister lives in poverty in a refugee camp outside Kabul, widowed, desperately poor, raising her children alone. Our brother, yes, our brother, is the Taliban, the Iraqi insurgent, Al-Qaida and Russian soldiers. And he has an automatic rifle. And he kills. And he is becoming us. War is always the same plague. It imparts the same deadly virus. It teaches us to deny another's humanity, worth, being, and to kill or be killed.
There are days I wish I was whole. I wish I could put down this cross. I envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war, and celebrate what we know is despicable. Sometimes it makes me wish for death, for the peace of it. But I know the awful truth, as James Baldwin wrote, that “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” And I would rather be maimed and broken and in pain than a monster.
I will never be healed. I cannot promise that it will be better. I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation — this plague of war.
Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child a long ways from home, a long ways from home. It is death I defy, not my own death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark primeval lusts for power and personal wealth, the hyper masculine language of war and patriotism used to justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent, and to mock justice... I do not use these words of war.
We cannot flee from evil. Some of us who have been to war have tried through drink and drugs and self-destructiveness. Evil is always with us. It is because we know evil, our own evil, that we do not let go, do not surrender. It is because we know violence that we are non-violent. And we know that it is not about us; war taught us that. It is about the other, lying by the side of the road. It is about reaching down in defiance of creeds and oaths, in defiance of religion and nationality, and lifting our enemy up. All acts of healing and love — and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love — allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not yet helpless, however much we despair we are not yet without hope, however weak we feel, we will always, always, always resist. [And it is in this act of resistance that we find our salvation.]
Thank you.
[Applaudissements]
