{"id":102081,"date":"2017-11-20T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=102081"},"modified":"2017-11-17T11:28:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T11:28:26","slug":"americas-renegade-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/11\/americas-renegade-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Renegade Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Claiming the right to launch preemptive wars and fighting an ill-defined \u201cglobal war on terror,\u201d the U.S. government has slaughtered vast numbers of civilians in defiance of international law.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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US military troops in Riga, Latvia. | Photo: Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Nov 2017 – <\/em>Seventy-seven million people in North and South Korea find themselves directly in the line of fire from the threat of a Second Korean War.\u00a0The rest of the world is recoiling in horror from the scale of civilian casualties such a war would cause and the unthinkable prospect that either side might actually use nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Since the first Korean War killed at least 20 percent of North Korea\u2019s population<\/a>\u00a0and left the country in ruins, the U.S. has repeatedly failed to follow through on diplomacy to establish a lasting peace in Korea and has instead kept reverting to illegal and terrifying threats of war.\u00a0Most significantly, the U.S. has waged a relentless propaganda campaign to discount North Korea\u2019s legitimate defense concerns as it confronts the threat of a U.S. war machine that has only grown more dangerous since the last time it destroyed North Korea.<\/p>\n

The North has lived under this threat for 65 years and has\u00a0watched Iraq and Libya destroyed after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs.\u00a0When North Korea discovered a U.S. plan for a Second Korean War<\/a> on South Korea\u2019s military computer network in September 2016, its leaders quite rationally concluded that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only way to guarantee their country\u2019s safety.<\/p>\n

What does it say about the\u00a0role the\u00a0U.S. is playing in the world that the only way North Korea\u2019s leaders believe they can keep their own people safe is to develop weapons that could kill millions of Americans?<\/p>\n

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In this July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified \u201ctop secret,\u201d South Korean soldiers walk among some of the thousands of South Korean political prisoners shot at Taejon, South Korea, early in the Korean War.
(AP Photo\/National Archives, Major Abbott\/U.S. Army, File)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Changing Face of War\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Second World War was the deadliest war ever fought, with at least 75 million people killed, about five times as many as in the First World War.\u00a0When the slaughter ended in 1945, world leaders signed the United Nations Charter to try to ensure that that scale of mass killing and destruction would never happen again.\u00a0The U.N. Charter is still in force, and it explicitly prohibits the threat or use of military force<\/a> by any nation.<\/p>\n

It was not just the scale of the slaughter that shocked the world\u2019s leaders into that brief moment of sanity in 1945.\u00a0It was also the identities of the dead.\u00a0Two-thirds of the people killed in the Second World War were civilians, a drastic change from the First World War, only a few decades earlier, when an estimated 86 percent of the people killed were uniformed combatants.\u00a0The use of nuclear weapons by the United States raised the specter that future wars could kill an exponentially greater numbers of civilians, or even end human civilization altogether.<\/p>\n

War had become \u201ctotal war,\u201d no longer fought only on battlefields between soldiers, but between entire societies with ordinary people, their homes and their lives now on the front line. In the Second World War:<\/p>\n

\u2013Fleets of warplanes\u00a0deliberately\u00a0bombed cities to \u201cdehouse\u201d <\/a>civilian populations, as\u00a0British officials\u00a0described\u00a0their own bombing of Germany.\u00a0\u201cAs I write this,\u201d George Orwell wrote from London in 1941, \u201cHighly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Submarines sank hundreds of merchant ships in an effort to starve their enemies into submission. General Carter Clarke, who was in charge of interpreting Japanese intelligence for President Truman, said in a 1959 interview<\/a> that Japan surrendered\u00a0because it faced mass starvation due to the sinking of its merchant shipping, not because of the gratuitous U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\u00a0It was estimated that 7 million more civilians<\/a> would die of starvation if Japan fought on\u00a0until 1946.<\/p>\n

\u2013Genocidal mass extermination campaigns killed civilians based only on their political affiliation\u00a0or ethnicity.\u00a0Under cross-examination by a young American prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, SS Gruppenfuhrer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf explained patiently to a courtroom<\/a> in Nuremberg why he\u00a0found it necessary for the \u201cpreemptive defense\u201d of Germany\u00a0to order\u00a0the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. He explained that\u00a0even children had to be killed\u00a0to prevent them too becoming enemies of Germany\u00a0when they grew up and found out what happened to their parents.<\/p>\n

Despite the U.N. Charter and international efforts to prevent war, people in countries afflicted by war today still face the kind of total war that horrified world leaders in 1945.\u00a0The main\u00a0victims of total war in our \u201cmodern\u201d world have been civilians in countries far removed from the safe havens of power and privilege where their fates are debated and decided: Yugoslavia;\u00a0Afghanistan; Iraq; Somalia; Pakistan; Yemen; Libya;\u00a0Syria; Ukraine.\u00a0There has been no legal or political accountability for the mass destruction of their cities, their homes\u00a0or their lives.\u00a0Total war has not been prevented, or even punished, just externalized.<\/p>\n

But thanks to billions of dollars invested in military propaganda and public relations<\/a> and the corrupt\u00a0nature\u00a0of for-profit media systems, citizens of the countries responsible for the killing of millions of their fellow human beings live in near-total ignorance<\/a> of the mass killing carried out in their name in these \u201cred zones\u201d around the world.<\/p>\n

People in ever-spreading war zones are living under the very conditions of total war that the world recoiled from at the end of the Second World War.\u00a0Like Orwell in London in 1941, they hear highly civilized human beings flying overhead trying to kill them, human beings who know nothing about them beyond the name of the city where they live and its strategic value in wars that offer them, the victims, nothing but death or destitution.<\/p>\n

In the case of drones, the human beings trying to kill them from the other side of the world are so highly civilized that they can hop into cars and drive home to have dinner with their families at the end of their shifts, while another \u201cteam member\u201d efficiently takes over the \u201cjoy-stick\u201d and carries\u00a0on killing.<\/p>\n

People in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya have been subjected to hunger and starvation under sieges and naval blockades that are as brutally effective as German and American submarines were in World War Two.\u00a0Millions of people in Yemen<\/a> face\u00a0an\u00a0imminent danger of starvation under the U.S.-backed naval blockade and Saudi and Emirati bombing of Yemeni ports<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In retaliation for one missile fired at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, last week, the U.S.-backed coalition completely closed all Yemen\u2019s ports, tightening the blockade on millions of starving people.\u00a0The requirements of necessity and proportionality<\/a>, which have been basic principles of customary international law since the Nineteenth Century, lie buried in the graveyards of Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Is the U.S. Guilty of Genocide?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The U.S. military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq quickly adopted \u201cdivide and rule\u201d strategies that targeted Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Sunni Arabs in Iraq.\u00a0When I pointed this out to a friend who teaches military history in 2005, he asked only, \u201cHow else can you do it?\u201d\u00a0I reminded him that \u201cyou\u201d don\u2019t have to \u201cdo it\u201d at all.<\/p>\n

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American military police pose with naked detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.<\/p><\/div>\n

U.S. and allied forces in Iraq have killed at least 10-15 percent of Iraq\u2019s Sunni Arabs<\/a> and displaced about half of them.\u00a0Sunni Arabs have been relentlessly targeted<\/a> for detention, torture and summary execution since 2004, when ex-Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief Steven Casteel<\/a>, retired Colonel James Steele<\/a> and a CIA team<\/a> reportedly based on the eighth floor of the\u00a0Iraqi\u00a0Interior Ministry recruited, trained\u00a0and equipped\u00a0\u201cSpecial Police\u201d death squads to conduct a reign of terror that tortured and killed tens of thousands of men and boys in Baghdad\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

After training by James Steele\u2019s Special Police Training Teams, each Iraqi\u00a0Special\u00a0Police unit worked closely with a U.S. Special Police Transition Team (SPTT), and their operations were commanded and controlled from a high-tech command center<\/a>\u00a0staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel.\u00a0An SPTT assigned to the notorious Wolf Brigade in Baghdad was from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment,<\/a> the \u201cNightstalkers,\u201d who usually provide helicopter transport<\/a> for U.S. special operations but in this case appear to have used their helicopters mainly to fly detainees to their deaths.<\/p>\n

After the exposure of their Al Jadiriyah torture prison<\/a> in November 2005, the Special Police were rebranded as the National Police (and the Wolf Brigade, incongruously, as the Freedom Brigade). \u00a0But their torture and killing raged on, under cover of an official narrative of \u201csectarian violence\u201d which scrupulously ignored the command and control of these forces by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the CIA and the U.S. military.<\/p>\n

At the peak of this campaign in July-October\u00a02006, supported by the\u00a0U.S. Operations Together Forward\u00a0I & II,\u00a0National Police death squads flooded the main morgue in Baghdad with up to\u00a01,600 bodies per month<\/a>.\u00a0Thousands more Iraqis were killed\u00a0and buried elsewhere or just disappeared,\u00a0while\u00a02\u00a0million people were displaced inside Iraq and another\u00a02\u00a0million fled the country<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0ethnic cleansing\u00a0campaign<\/a> has continued under the U.S-backed Shiite government and has\u00a0kept driving Sunni Arab Iraqis into armed\u00a0resistance\u00a0groups, of which Islamic State is only the latest, creating pretexts for endless\u00a0violence against them.\u00a0Kurdish military intelligence reports<\/a> have estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed in the recent U.S.-led assault on Mosul, by\u00a0tens of\u00a0thousands<\/a> of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S. and \u201ccoalition\u201d warplanes,\u00a0U.S. Marine 220-lb HiMARS rockets<\/a> and U.S., French and Iraqi heavy artillery.\u00a0This is still only an estimate, and the\u00a0true number of civilians killed\u00a0in Mosul\u00a0was probably higher<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From 2004 on, the ethnic cleansing of Iraq\u2019s Sunni Arabs has been a deliberate, calculated element of the U.S.\u2019s \u201cdivide and rule\u201d policy in Iraq, with the \u201cintent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.\u201d\u00a0That\u00a0is the legal definition of genocide in\u00a0Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention<\/a>.\u00a0The working title of my book<\/a> about the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq was\u00a0From Aggression to Genocide<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As for the killing of \u201cenemy\u201d children, President Obama justified the murder of 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki<\/a> in Yemen in October 2011, two weeks after the assassination of his father, the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.\u00a0In one of Donald Trump\u2019s first acts as president, he authorized a U.S. special operations attack that killed Abdulrahman\u2019s 8-year old sister Nawar<\/a> and other family members in January 2017 \u2013 after Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to kill the families<\/a> of suspected terrorists.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Ferencz, the by then 81-year-old American lawyer who prosecuted SS Gruppenfuhrer Ohlendorf and his accomplices at Nuremberg, was interviewed by NPR<\/a> eight days after the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done,\u201d Ferencz insisted. \u201cWe must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don\u2019t approve of what has happened\u2026 I say to the skeptics, \u2018Follow your procedure and you will see what happens.\u2019 \u2026 We will have more fanatics and more zealots deciding to come and kill the evil, the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in the courtroom of American politics, hopelessly corrupted by the CIA\u2019s politicized intelligence and manufactured crises<\/a> and the \u201cunwarranted influence\u201d<\/a> of the Military Industrial Complex, our leaders chose Ohlendorf\u2019s logic over Ferencz\u2019s. Neither the millions of people killed<\/a>\u00a0in 16 years of war, nor its legacy of ruin and chaos in country after country, nor the utter failure of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d on its own terms have led to any change in this illegitimate, criminal and, in the case of Sunni Arabs in Iraq, genocidal U.S. policy.<\/p>\n

The Geneva Conventions<\/strong><\/p>\n

As well as the unfulfilled promise of peace in the U.N. Charter, the post-World War II effort to prevent\u00a0the\u00a0future mass slaughter of civilians led to a major revision of the Geneva Conventions in 1949.\u00a0That included a brand new convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention<\/a>, dedicated entirely to the protection of civilians in wartime or under military occupation.<\/p>\n

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High-ranking Nazis on trial at Nuremberg<\/p><\/div>\n

Two additional protocols<\/a> were added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, to adapt them to the changing nature of war and to provide even greater protections to civilians.\u00a0\u00a0The First Additional Protocol has been signed and ratified by 174 countries and the Second by 168 countries.\u00a0The United States has not ratified either of the Additional Protocols, but it is legally bound by them because treaties that have been ratified by large majorities of countries automatically become part of customary international law, which is universally binding.<\/p>\n

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1949 Conventions in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross\u00a0(ICRC)\u00a0conducted a survey of 17,000 people in 17 countries to see how well people around the world understood \u201cthe rules and limits of what is permissible in war\u201d under the Geneva Conventions.\u00a0The study was titled\u00a0People on War \u2013 Civilians in the Line of Fire<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The 17 countries surveyed included 12 where wars had recently been fought, four of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Switzerland, where the ICRC is based.\u00a0The introduction to the\u00a0People on War<\/em>\u00a0report noted that 90 percent of the people killed in recent wars were civilians and that, in today\u2019s world, \u201cwar is war on civilians.\u201d\u00a0But the report went on:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026the more these conflicts have degenerated into wars on civilians, the more people have reacted by reaffirming the norms, traditions, conventions and rules that seek to create a barrier between those who carry arms into battle and the civilian population\u2026 Large majorities in every war-torn country reject attacks on civilians in general and a wide range of actions that by design or default could harm the innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n

People interviewed in Switzerland and the four Security Council permanent member countries were asked to choose between a firm statement that armed forces \u201cmust attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone,\u201d and a weaker statement that, \u201ccombatants should avoid civilians as much as possible.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0About three-quarters of respondents in the U.K., Russia, France and Switzerland chose the first statement, which correctly summarizes the rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while 26 percent in the U.K. and 16-17 percent in Russia, France and Switzerland chose the weaker one.<\/p>\n

When it came to the United States, though, a very different pattern emerged.\u00a0Only 52 percent of Americans understood that attacking civilians is strictly prohibited, while 42 percent chose the weaker option, twice as many as in the other four countries.\u00a0The ICRC\u00a0report noted that, \u201cAcross a wide range of questions, in fact, American attitudes towards attacks on civilians were much more lax.\u201d<\/p>\n

The survey also asked whether it is lawful to attack \u201cenemy combatants in populated villages or towns in order to weaken the enemy, knowing that many civilians would be killed.\u201d\u00a0Once again, while only 20-29 percent of people in the other four countries thought this was allowed, that increased to 38 percent among Americans. Since 1999, this question has arisen again and again across America\u2019s war zones, most recently in the U.S.-led massacres<\/a> of Iraqi and Syrian civilians in Mosul and Raqqa.<\/p>\n

During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, U.N. human rights reports repeatedly reminded U.S. officials of their duty as an occupying power to protect civilians, and notified them that U.S. military operations in civilian areas were routinely violating international humanitarian law.\u00a0John Pace, who headed the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, compared U.S. efforts to police Iraq by military force to \u201ctrying to swat a fly with a bomb,\u201d<\/a> a fitting metaphor for the entire \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0People on War<\/em>\u00a0survey also found large discrepancies in attitudes to the Geneva Conventions themselves.\u00a0In countries that had recently experienced war, only 28 percent of people agreed with a statement that the Conventions \u201cmake no real difference\u201d to the brutality of war.\u00a0\u00a0But in the U.S. (57 percent) and U.K. (55 percent),\u00a0twice as many people agreed with that statement.<\/p>\n

U.S. War Crimes<\/strong><\/p>\n

We could speculate on why Americans are so exceptionally \u201clax\u201d in their attitudes toward protecting civilians in wartime.\u00a0But in practice, the real-world impact of these exceptional attitudes could be overcome if Americans who joined the armed forces received serious training in their responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention.\u00a0Tragically, they do not.<\/p>\n

U.S. military recruits receive only a 50-minute class<\/a> on the laws of war, focused mainly on the Third Geneva Convention and the rights of POWs, and a refresher of the same 50-minute class before deployment. A retired JAG officer who taught law of war classes and veterans who have sat through them have all told me that the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rights of civilians as \u201cprotected persons\u201d were barely mentioned, if at all.<\/p>\n

The lax attitude of Americans toward the killing of civilians and the poor training of U.S. troops in their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions have combined to make invasion and occupation by\u00a0American\u00a0<\/em>forces especially deadly, dangerous and terrifying for\u00a0civilians in\u00a0Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever U.S. forces are deployed.<\/p>\n

In practice, U.S. forces operate under much lower standards than those of the Geneva Conventions, and civilians whose countries have fallen prey to U.S. aggression do not enjoy the protections guaranteed to them under the laws of war.\u00a0As I wrote in an article in 2016, this is a classic case of the \u201cnormalization of deviance,\u201d<\/a> a sociological term for the way that powerful institutions like the U.S. military tend to develop weaker, looser norms of conduct than the formal or legal rules that officially apply to them.<\/p>\n

Illegal\u00a0U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan have included:\u00a0systematic, theater-wide use of torture<\/a>; orders to\u00a0\u201cdead-check\u201d<\/a>\u00a0or kill wounded enemy combatants; orders to\u00a0\u201ckill all military-age males\u201d<\/a>\u00a0during certain operations; and \u201cweapons-free\u201d zones that mirror Vietnam-era \u201cfree-fire\u201d zones.\u00a0A U.S. Marine corporal told a court martial prosecuting one of his men for \u201cdead-checking\u201d a wounded Iraqi civilian\u00a0that \u201cMarines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency,\u201d nullifying the critical distinction between combatants and civilians that is the very\u00a0basis of the Fourth Geneva Convention.<\/p>\n

When junior officers or enlisted troops have been charged with war crimes against civilians, they have often been exonerated or given light sentences because courts martial\u00a0have found that they were acting on orders from more senior officers.\u00a0But the senior officers implicated in these crimes have been allowed to testify in secret or not to appear in court at all, and have almost never been charged.<\/p>\n

To make matters even worse for civilians in Iraq, U.S. military and civilian\u00a0officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell<\/a>,\u00a0misled the troops they sent to kill and die in Iraq with lies about shadowy connections between the people of Iraq and the young Saudis who committed the crimes of September 11th. In 2006, three years into the war, a Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq found that 85 percent of them\u00a0still\u00a0believed that their mission in Iraq was to \u201cretaliate for Saddam\u2019s role in the 9\/11 attacks.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

A million Iraqis have paid with their lives for\u00a0these\u00a0American lies\u00a0and the war crimes they have served to justify, while the U.S. officials involved are still walking free, and in many cases still climbing the twisted ladder of success inside the U.S. Military Industrial Complex.\u00a0Colonel Jeffrey Buchanan, who headed a Special Police Transition Team<\/a> in Iraq at the time of the exposure of the Al Jadiriyah torture prison in 2005, has been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General and is currently in charge of hurricane relief to Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n

A New Body of Research<\/strong><\/p>\n

After 16 years of ever-spreading and intractable war, a significant body of research is finally emerging to clarify who exactly the U.S. is fighting in its ever-expanding war zones and what drives civilians to join armed groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Islamic State.<\/p>\n

In the looking-glass world of U.S. propaganda, U.S. forces are \u201cfighting them there\u201d so that we don\u2019t have to \u201cfight them here.\u201d\u00a0But researchers are learning that, like the Iraqis who rose up to resist the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of their country, most of the people joining armed groups across Africa and the Middle East are only fighting\u00a0at all\u00a0because U.S. and allied forces\u00a0are \u201cfighting them there,\u201d in their\u00a0countries, cities, villages and homes.<\/p>\n

Researchers have interviewed people who have joined armed resistance groups in countries across the world to ask them about what drove them to join an armed group and take part in guerrilla warfare\u00a0or terrorism.\u00a0In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya in a report titled,\u00a0The People\u2019s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0One of its main findings was that, \u201cThe most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.\u201d<\/p>\n

If most of the people fighting U.S. forces and their allies across the world, from Niger to Ukraine to the Philippines,\u00a0are just trying to defend themselves and their families\u00a0against our \u201ccounterterrorism\u201d operations, that turns the whole basis of the U.S. \u201cwar on terror\u201d on its head.\u00a0The most effective way to reduce violence and terrorism would obviously be to stop\u00a0putting them in such an intolerable position\u00a0in the first place.<\/p>\n

Also in 2015, Lydia Wilson, a researcher for the Center for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University, was allowed to interview a number of captured Islamic State fighters<\/a> in Kirkuk, Iraq.\u00a0Wilson\u2019s fellow researchers included retired U.S. Major General Doug Stone, who managed U.S. military prisons in Iraq during the U.S. occupation and did some of the first serious Western research<\/a> into the motivations of Iraqi resistance fighters.<\/p>\n

It was hard for Wilson to find captured Islamic State fighters to interview, because Kurdish and U.S.-backed Iraqi government forces\u00a0summarily execute Islamic State fighters that they capture.\u00a0But the police in Kirkuk were at least putting prisoners on trial before killing them, so Wilson got permission from the police chief to talk to some prisoners who were\u00a0awaiting execution.<\/p>\n

The first prisoner Lydia Wilson interviewed was captured, tried and sentenced to death for exploding at least four car-bombs and a scooter-bomb in Kirkuk.\u00a0But his interview was not exceptional \u2013 Wilson found that his account of his motivations was repeated by every other prisoner.\u00a0He explained that his first loyalty was to his wife and two children, and that he joined ISIS (as Islamic State is commonly known) to support his family.\u00a0He told Wilson, \u201cWe need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war\u2026 all I want is to be with my family, my children.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the interview, Wilson asked the prisoner if he had any questions.\u00a0By then he knew that General Stone, one of Wilson\u2019s colleagues, was ex-U.S. military, and, instead of asking a question, he just exploded in anger at him, \u201cThe Americans came.\u00a0They took away Saddam but they also took away our security.\u00a0I didn\u2019t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn\u2019t have war.\u00a0When you came here, the civil war started.\u201d<\/p>\n

General Stone was not surprised.\u00a0\u00a0This was the same outraged speech he had heard from nearly every prisoner since he started interviewing his own prisoners in Iraq in 2007, identifying the poisonous and blood-soaked legacy of the U.S. invasion and occupation as the driving force behind their actions.<\/p>\n

Lydia Wilson summarized what she learned about the prisoners in Kirkuk in an article for\u00a0The Nation<\/em><\/a>:\u00a0\u201cThey are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death by execution or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government.\u00a0They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family and tribe.\u00a0This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity, but cultural, tribal and land-based, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The recent killing of four U.S. soldiers in Niger surprised many\u00a0Americans, but the U.S. has 6,000 troops in 53 countries in Africa<\/a>, so we should be ready to welcome home flag-draped coffins from seemingly random countries across the continent.\u00a0But before our deluded leaders reduce the entire continent of Africa to a new U.S. \u201cbattlefield,\u201d Americans should take note of a new report published by the U.N. Development Program\u00a0(UNDP), titled\u00a0Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

This report is based on 500 interviews with militants from across Africa.\u00a0As its title suggests, the interviewers questioned the militants specifically about the \u201ctipping point\u201d that decided each of them to actually join an armed group such as Boko Haram, Al-Shabab or Al Qaeda. By far the largest number (71 percent) said that some kind of \u201cgovernment action,\u201d such as \u201dkilling of a family member or friend\u201d or \u201carrest of a family member or friend,\u201d was the final straw that pushed them over the red line from civilian life to guerrilla war.\u00a0By contrast, religious ideology was generally not a decisive factor\u00a0in that decision.<\/p>\n

The report concluded, \u201cState security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse.\u201d\u00a0In its section on \u201cPolicy Implications,\u201d it added, \u201cThe\u00a0Journey to Extremism<\/em>\u00a0research provides startling new evidence of just how directly counter-productive security-driven responses can be when conducted insensitively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the world, it is obvious, and now well-documented, that U.S. aggression and militarism are causing\u00a0the very problems they claim to be trying to solve.\u00a0By design or default, U.S. policy is confusing cause and effect to justify military operations that turn civilians into combatants, fueling an ever-escalating, ever-spreading cycle of increasingly global\u00a0violence and chaos.<\/p>\n

As the world confronts critical problems and demands on its resources, from climate change to poverty and inequality, it can no longer afford to follow the pied piper of\u00a0American \u201cleadership\u201d that leads only to war and chaos.<\/p>\n

U.S. leaders often raise the specter of \u201cappeasement\u201d to guilt-trip reluctant allies into supporting U.S.-led\u00a0wars. But maybe it is time for world leaders to recognize that the real appeasement they have been engaged in is the appeasement of the United States, by\u00a0actively or\u00a0tacitly encouraging it in an illegal policy of militarism and\u00a0serial aggression\u00a0that is spreading violence and chaos across the world.<\/p>\n

Surely the real lesson of the 1930s and the Second World War, now reinforced by the experience of the past 20 years,\u00a0is that it is not enough to simply sign treaties that prohibit aggression\u00a0and war crimes.\u00a0The world must be ready to actually enforce the prohibition against the threat or use of military force in customary international law, the 1928 Kellogg Brand Pact and the U.N. Charter \u2013 by uniting peacefully and diplomatically to stand up to U.S.\u00a0aggression\u00a0and militarism\u00a0before they lead to\u00a0a cataclysmic total war that will kill tens\u00a0or even hundreds\u00a0of millions of civilians, in Korea or somewhere else.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Blood on Our\u00a0Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. \u00a0He also wrote the chapter on \u201cObama at War\u201d in <\/em>Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama\u2019s First Term as a Progressive Leader.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Claiming the right to launch preemptive wars and fighting an ill-defined \u201cglobal war on terror,\u201d the U.S. government has slaughtered vast numbers of civilians in defiance of international law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}