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The US killed 3-5,000,000 people in Vietnam and surrounding countries (mostly civilians) and created over 5,000,000 refugees (about a third of the population of South Vietnam at the time) because 'we had no choice but to finish the job we started'. This was a heinous, terrorist war crime many orders of magnitude greater than anything that has happened since--almost 1,000 times (!) as many civilians as were tragically killed in the WTC. It barely seeps into the consciousness of the newly hawkish 'baby bombers' who witnessed it in the 60's from college campuses. Reasoning by analogy with the recent US military action, perhaps Vietnamese air strikes on US student unions, radio stations, and hospitals could have stopped it. It would have been a small price to pay to avoid the needless slaughter of 3-4,000,000 other living humans and the mutilation and burning of that many more--along with 60,000 American deaths and 60,000 subsequent suicides of Vietnam vets who fought there. The US carpet bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1975 is estimated to have killed over half a million Cambodians--mostly civilians. Obscene US war crimes were perpetrated in Laos in the same years. What rationale is there for putting those deeds into a different category than the 'killing fields' (or the recent events) engineered by the other bad guys? Because we killed them from a distance as opposed to using knives? (letter to NPR). The Kerrey (not Kerry!) revelations suggest that knives were used, too. Which level of the civilian and military hierarchy is most at fault for his particular deed can be disputed. But let's cut the crap about 'war is hell'. Much of the 'American war' as the Vietnamese call it involved US servicemen slaughtering unarmed women, children, and old men in their home towns during a protracted invasion of their country halfway across the world. Kerrey's unit was likely part of the infamous Phoenix program. What he did was a war crime, period. If a Serb or an Iraqi did something like Kerrey did, wouldn't he be a war criminal? Milosevic and Saddam are small-time next to the likes of Kissinger and McNamara. Then to top it off, the US, through its IMF economic hit men, forced through a neoliberal 'reform' program in the mid-80's that caused a dramatic drop in real salaries, demanded repayment of debts incurred by the US-supported puppet government, increased malaria, left all the Agent Orange on the ground, and preempted ng any liability for it. Disgusting. Someday in the future, the world may savor the 'favor' being returned.
The US killed 3,000,000 civilians in Korea (out of a population of 30 million). That's about 700 WTC's in terms of people or 7,000 WTC's as a percentage of the population.
The main scene of the Nazis' defeat wasn't Normandy or anywhere else Americans fought, but rather the Eastern Front, where the conflict was the most terrible war fought in human history. It claimed perhaps as many as 50 million Soviet civilian deaths and almost 30 million Soviet military casualties (the actual numbers, amazingly, are not known to within plus or minus 10 or 15 million people). But more to the point, Americans should recall that about 88% of all German casualties fell in the war with Russia. (Benjamin Schwarz in the LA Times) The death of one million children in Iraq as a result of US-imposed sanctions (on top of the 130,000 civilians the Red Cross estimates to have been killed in the initial bombing) and the starvation of an entire people hardly rates a comment these days. This unbelievable genocidal violence against an innocent civilian population didn't resulted in getting Saddam Hussein, our former handsomely paid ally, to step down. When the history of the end of the twentieth century is written 100 years from now, I'm afraid the 'good Americans' who let this happen with a slightly uncomfortable yawn, will be remembered for who we really are.
The US State Dept had the opportunity to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 1991, following the Gulf War, and chose not to. The Bush administration explained that it did not want Iraq to become fragmented and that it felt the Baath party was the only group that could hold it together. They continue to want the current regime to be strong internally and weak externally. They want to keep Saddam Hussein in power, crippled, but as a convenient excuse to maintain the economic sanctions and US dominance in the region. This is their policy, but they don't want to verbalize it. This is what they've achieved, but they've achieved it at a terrible price for Iraqi children.
--Kathy Kelly, Voices in the Wilderness The Russian Defense Budget is $4 Billion, the American--$284 Billion" (New York Times 1/16/2000). We should transfer at least a billion of that to the study of the brain! More than $1 billion in military aid has made its way to Columbia. Not a peep out of the press sheep following the candidates. In my dreams, I imagine Clinton and his advisors being banished to rural Columbia for a few months next year. In reality, Clinton needed 5000 (!) soldiers and police, and 6 helicopter gunships overhead to survive an 8 hour stay. He was too afraid to even spend one night. And so soon after 'feeling the pain' of the victims of our previous adventure in Guatemala... What a sickly, gutless, cowardly thing you are (now, were), Bill. Americans now spend $120 billion a year on fast food, more than on higher education, PCs, computer software or new cars, or on magazines, going to see films, recorded music, newspapers, videos and books combined. --Fast Food Nation Half of the people in the world survive on $2 a day. In the past year, 90% of Iraqi oil output has been bought by the US. The current military budget is $344 billion--8 times as much as what we spend for education ($42 billion). 2.5 million people have died in the past 3 years as a result of an ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The carnage has barely registered on the world's stage. The WTC disaster was evil, but not the greatest evil of our time, by far. 95% of people living with AIDS reside in developing countries; 95 percent of AIDS prevention money is spent in industrial countries. My speech at the Feb 15, 2003 downtown San Diego anti-war demonstration.