What the War of Terror Has Cost Us So Far
Malika Ahmadi, two, died in a U.S. drone strike on Kabul today, her family says. Has the war of 20 years cost us the ability to care?
Malika Ahmadi, two, died in a U.S. drone strike on Kabul today, her family says. Has the war of 20 years cost us the ability to care?
Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.
Australia seems to hold more inquiries into itself than almost any other country. We inquire into everything, from Indigenous deaths in custody, child sexual abuse, and same sex marriage to bank misdemeanours, casino operations, pandemic responses, and alleged war crimes. There’s one exception to our obsession with self-scrutiny: Australia’s wars.
In many ways, war is ever more and less visible. Of course in U.S. academia, the Pinkerist pretense that we are living through a period of great peace is accomplished by all sorts of statistical manipulation, but first and foremost by declaring civil wars to not be wars, and declaring U.S. wars to be civil wars
The media outlets are blaming Biden for the withdrawal, but assessing no blame to anyone for starting the war in the first place, Leah Bolger, president of World Beyond War, told IRNA on Tuesday.
America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
The U.S. and other governments are not making the priority of rescuing endangered people from Afghanistan that a consumer of Hollywood movies might imagine being made were the endangered people Jews in Nazi Germany.
Here’s the Youtube.
It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar. Gathered around our homeroom lunch menu, we were horrified to find that the golden, perfectly crisped French fries we adored had been replaced with something called “freedom fries.”
