By Matthew Behrens
The
incessant drumbeat of war, accompanied by the harsh propaganda of “barbarism” and “brutality” directed at
individuals in Syria and Iraq, is as wearily familiar as that used to demonize
the German “Hun” a century ago and dozens of other “enemies” in the interim.
The PR industry, which is the landing pad for many politicos from the
conservatives to the NDP, is having a field day, from allegations that “Islamic
militants” are murdering seniors in hospital rooms (perhaps an update of the
Hill & Knowlton-created falsehood that Iraqis ripped babies from incubators
after the 1991 invasion of Kuwait) to claims that a group with no air force,
weapons of mass destruction, overseas military bases, aircraft carriers, and
hundreds of billions in other war infrastructure presents the greatest threat
known to our generation.
Needless
to say, many of the actions of the group known as ISIS, ISIL, and IS (not to be
confused with the folks hawking newspapers at lefty events) are reprehensible,
from the targeting of specific groups based on their identity (i.e., Shia
Muslims) to gross violations against women. And while members of this group
should be condemned for their actions – which, combined with the major gains
they have made over the summer, do raise
significant questions about the future of the region – it is important to note
that they are no different from the actions of NATO and its members whenever
they go to war, with perhaps the difference that much of the “west’s” brutality
is conducted from afar, whether 30,000 feet in the air or 10,000 miles away.
AFGHAN LIVES HAVE NO VALUE
Indeed, as Amnesty International reported in August’s “Left
in the Dark: Failures of Accountability for Civilian Casualties Caused by International
Military Pperations in Afghanistan” (http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA11/006/2014/en),
thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed since 2001 by NATO forces in
everything from bombing strikes to night raids, almost always without follow-up
investigation and accountability. Richard Bennett, Amnesty's Asia Pacific
Director, said “Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has
seemingly been ignored.” That endless reign of terror was added to last week
with yet another U.S. air strike that killed 14 civilians in the eastern part
of the country, with Bennett concluding, “The lack of accountability for
killings of civilians by US/NATO forces in Afghanistan sends a message that
foreign troops have free rein to commit abuses in Afghanistan and that the
lives of Afghan civilians have little or no value.”
Ordering atrocities from
afar has long been standard operating procedure for western governments, including
the torture by proxy that Canada’s intelligence agencies have engaged in with
Egypt and Syria, and Barack Obama’s curt, callous comment, “We
tortured some folks,” an attempt to soften the impact of a U.S. Senate report
on complicity in torture due out soon. One
source who has seen the report told the London Daily Telegraph in early
September that the CIA took some detainees “to the point of death,” noting that
the “waterboarding” euphemism was not simply dropping bits of H20 on a
facecloth, but instead, “They were holding [detainees] under water until the
point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far.
This was real torture.”
Such criminality is
given the executive stamp of approval when Obama says he will not prosecute
Bush or Clinton-era officials for such policies; similarly, no one in Canada
has ever been charged, much less prosecuted, for high-level Canadian complicity
in torture over the same time period. As reported here last month, Canada’s
official policy is to trade information with torturers, in flagrant violation
of all international legal norms.
Acknowledging such
home-grown violence is important in contextualizing (though certainly not
condoning) the actions of ISIS and related groups.
Meanwhile,
in taking a page from the Hill & Knowlton playbook, among others, the boys
from ISIS know the value of a gruesome video, which tends to dramatize and
inspire fear far beyond their actual capacity to do damage to people halfway
around the globe. And so the beheading videos have become a focus for incessant
condemnation from countries like the U.S. (which regularly executes people via
lethal injection) and Canada (which until 1962 murdered over 700 people by the
equally brutal means of hanging, a slower version of beheading). Recent reports
of young men playing soccer with severed heads are unfortunate reminders of the
sickness of militarism and desensitization that comes with warrior societies,
and are reminiscent of the soccer games U.S.-trained and Canadian-supported
soldiers played with dead babies in El Salvador during the 1980s.
OBAMA’S LONG-DISTANCE BEHEADINGS
The
beheading mania sheds a light both on what is patently and obviously barbaric
(youtube videos featuring heads coming off at the hand of a masked individual)
and what is barbarism conducted from the comfort and safety of North American
bunkers. The latter are located in places like New York and California, from
which soldiers operating unmanned aerial drones are able to launch Hellfire
missiles against schools, weddings, and other gatherings, especially those
which include what Barack Obama views as “military-age males” who are likely up
to no good, all of which are justified “unless there is explicit
intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/29/1095594/-WOW-to-avoid-counting-civilian-deaths-Obama-WH-reclassified-Militants-to-include-civilians#
). When the Hellfires explode, they create what
they were named for: severed bodies, including heads, lie scattered about the
towns and villages where thousands have been murdered from afar on Obama’s
direct orders, emerging from his “Terror Tuesday” morning meetings, during
which he approves his kill lists. Indeed, the Assassinator in Chief was quoted
during one of these meetings as stating: “Turns out I’m really good at killing
people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/obama-drones-double-down_n_4208815.html
The
late Gloria Emerson is a former war correspondent whose elegy on the American
invasion and war against Vietnam, Winners and Losers, is a deeply felt cri de coeur
against a society that makes war and carries on as if no slaughters are
committed with our tax dollars and in our name. Emerson noted in the 1970s a
growing trend in which “our military technology is so advanced that
we kill at a distance and insulate our consciences by the remoteness of the
killing.”
So our barbarism
is a few steps removed, but it remains no less stomach-churning. We don’t see
the bloodied and dismembered victims on the ground after Canadian and U.S.
bombers drop cluster bombs, “daisy cutters,” napalm, white phosphorous, and
thousand-pound bombs on villages with thatched huts, but our fellow citizens
show up by the hundreds of thousands for annual war shows in which these same killing
machines are flown above our heads to great applause and appreciation. We
rightfully condemn anyone cheering on scimitar-based beheadings, yet think
nothing of our neighbours clapping for a B-52 bomber back from the mass beheading
of whole villages.
TARGETING WATER, PROMOTING DISEASE
The barbarism
that is ISIS has its roots in the barbarism that was Canadian and “coalition”
war policy in the obliteration of Iraq in the 1991 “Gulf” war and subsequent
sanctions, which claimed millions of lives in what some UN experts called a
genocidal campaign against the Iraqi people. When Canadian CF-18s went on their
bombing runs over Iraq in 1991, it was a particularly barbarous mission that
consciously, deliberately targeted Iraq’s civilian infrastructure and
electricity supply, knowing this would eliminate the desert country’s ability
to provide clean drinking water to its citizens. One January, 1991 U.S.
military document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,”
noted that wiping out Iraq’s water purification systems “could lead to
increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease [cholera, hepatitis, and
typhoid]” http://www.progressive.org/news/2001/09/5166/secret-behind-sanctions-how-us-intentionally-destroyed-iraqs-water-supply#sthash.3qG9ouWy.dpuf
Another
related document, “Effects of Bombing on Disease Occurrence in Baghdad,” bluntly
concluded: “Increased incidence of diseases will be attributable to degradation
of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification/distribution,
electricity, and decreased ability to control disease outbreaks. Any urban area
in Iraq that has received infrastructure damage will have similar problems.”
The document notes that “particularly children” will be adversely affected.
Of
course, by 1996, some half million Iraqi children had been murdered by the slow
and steady constriction imposed by the US, Canada and other nations, which then
US Ambassador to the UN (and seriously under-rated war criminal) Madeleine
Albright told CBS’ 60 Minutes “was worth it.” (The slow destruction of whole
peoples by poisoning their waters and then preventing the provision of proper
purification systems is well known to Canada, where First Nations boil water alerts
have gone on for decades. A report last week reminded us that almost 50% of
Ontario’s 133 First Nations communities continue to exist under boil water
alerts lasting as long as 20 years. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/10-first-nations-with-more-than-10-years-of-bad-water-1.2755728
HARPER SUPPORTS THE SAUDIS WHO BEHEAD PEOPLE
But the Harper
government is not interested in solving decades-long water pollution problems,
preferring to focus on ISIS beheadings. But it is a very selective view, for Canada
blithely ignores Saudi Arabia for carrying out the same atrocities.
During
August 2014, the Saudi government publicly executed almost one person a day, including
at least 8 beheadings for alleged apostasy, adultery, drug-offences, and
“witchcraft.” The response of Harper and company to such a regime, which also
refuses women the right to drive or do much of anything without the permission
of male guardians, is to reward the beheading leader of the Middle East with two
of the largest weapons contracts in Canadian history, totalling $14.8-billion.
The contracts were brokered by the Canadian Commercial Corporation for General
Dynamics Land Systems in London, Ontario, making Saudi Arabia the largest
recipient of Canadian military products for perhaps a decade to come. Such Canadian-made
armoured vehicles have been used to repress freedom demonstrations in
neighbouring Bahrain and will no doubt be used to clamp down on any visible
signs of dissent in the Saudi kingdom.
The deal for
Saudi war materiel also conveniently ignores that country’s role in supporting
ISIS and similar groups. As Patrick Cockburn writes in The London Review of
Books, the Saudis, other Gulf monarchies and Turkey are literally the “foster
parents” of ISIS, and without their financial support, the group could not have
made the gains it did this past summer, taking over both a wide swath of
northern Iraq and becoming the dominant opposition to the Assad regime in
Syria. Will the possibility of an ISIS takeover of Syria turn Assad’s regime
back into the “friend” of Canada, a role it so clearly played when, on behalf
of CSIS and the RCMP, it tortured Canadians Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar, Ahmad
El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin?
QUESTIONING THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE
As
ISIS proves itself the latest wet dream of weapons manufacturers the world over
(another crisis to spur arms sales!) and offers macho photo ops for politicians
of all stripes who “visit the front lines” of this “new war,” it does provide
Canadians with many opportunities to question and act upon the roots of
violence in our own society, from the despair and destruction wrought by our centuries
of colonial domination of First Nations to the thousands of workers in London,
Ontario who churn out military equipment for one of the globe’s worst human
rights pariahs. Our distance from most of this becomes that insulating blanket
Emerson wrote about; our willingness to do anything about it is a true reflection
of our values.
