{"id":49583,"date":"2014-11-10T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=49583"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:33","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:33","slug":"how-many-muslim-countries-has-the-u-s-bombed-or-occupied-since-1980","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/11\/how-many-muslim-countries-has-the-u-s-bombed-or-occupied-since-1980\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Muslim Countries Has the U.S. Bombed or Occupied since 1980?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barack\u00a0Obama, in his post-election press conference yesterday, announced<\/a> that he would seek an Authorization for\u00a0Use of Military Force (AUMF) from the new Congress, one that would authorize Obama\u2019s\u00a0bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria\u2014the\u00a0one\u00a0he began three months ago<\/a>. If one were being generous, one could say that seeking congressional authorization for a war that commenced months ago\u00a0is at least better than fighting a war even after Congress explicitly rejected<\/em>\u00a0its authorization, as Obama lawlessly\u00a0did<\/a> in the now-collapsed<\/a> country of Libya.<\/p>\n

When Obama began bombing\u00a0targets inside Syria in September, I noted<\/a> that it\u00a0was the seventh predominantly Muslim country that had been bombed by the U.S. during his presidency (that did not count Obama\u2019s bombing of the Muslim minority in the Philippines<\/a>).\u00a0I also previously noted<\/a> that this new bombing campaign meant that Obama had become the fourth consecutive U.S. President<\/em> to order bombs dropped on Iraq. Standing alone, those are both\u00a0amazingly revealing facts. American\u00a0violence is so ongoing and continuous that we barely notice it any more. Just this week, a U.S. drone launched a missile that killed 10 people in Yemen<\/a>, and the dead were promptly labeled \u201csuspected militants\u201d (which actually just\u00a0means<\/a> they are \u201cmilitary-age males\u201d); those killings\u00a0received almost no discussion.<\/p>\n

To get a full scope of American violence in the world, it is worth asking a broader question:\u00a0how many countries in the Islamic world has the U.S. bombed or occupied since 1980? That answer was provided in a recent\u00a0Washington Post<\/em> op-ed<\/a>\u00a0by the military historian and former U.S. Army Col.\u00a0Andrew Bacevich:<\/p>\n

As America\u2019s efforts to \u201cdegrade and ultimately destroy\u201d\u00a0Islamic State militants extent into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed<\/strong>, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that\u2019s just since 1980.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bacevich\u2019s\u00a0count excludes the bombing and occupation\u00a0of still other predominantly Muslim countries by key U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, carried out\u00a0with crucial American support. It excludes coups against\u00a0democratically elected governments, torture, and imprisonment of people with no charges. It also, of course, excludes all the other bombing and invading and occupying that the U.S. has carried out\u00a0during this time period in other parts of the world, including in Central<\/a>\u00a0America<\/a> and the Caribbean<\/a>, as well as various proxy wars in Africa.<\/a><\/p>\n

There is an awful lot to be said about the factions in the west<\/a> which devote\u00a0huge amounts of their time and attention<\/a> to preaching against<\/a> the supreme primitiveness and violence\u00a0of\u00a0Muslims. There are no gay bars in Gaza, the obsessively anti-Islam polemicists\u00a0proclaim<\/a>\u2014as though that\u00a0(rather than levels of violence and aggression unleashed against the world) is\u00a0the most important metric for judging a society. Reflecting their single-minded obsession with demonizing Muslims (at exactly the same time, coincidentally, their governments wage a never-ending war on Muslim countries and their societies marginalize Muslims<\/a>), they notably neglect to note thriving gay communities\u00a0in places like Beirut<\/a> and Istanbul<\/a>, or the lack of them in Christian Uganda<\/a>. Employing\u00a0the defining tactic of bigotry, they love to highlight the worst behavior of individual Muslims as a means of attributing it to the group as a whole, while ignoring (often expressly<\/a>) the worst behavior of individual Jews and\/or their own groups (they\u00a0similarly cite the most extreme precepts of Islam while ignoring similarly extreme ones from Judaism). That\u2019s because,\u00a0as Rula Jebreal told Bill Maher last week<\/a>, if these oh-so-brave rationality warriors\u00a0said about Jews what they say about Muslims, they\u2019d be fired.<\/p>\n

But of all the various points to make about this group, this is always the most\u00a0astounding: those same people, who love to denounce\u00a0the violence of Islam as some sort of ultimate threat, live in countries whose governments unleash far more violence, bombing, invasions, and occupations than anyone else by far<\/em>. That is just a fact.<\/p>\n

Those who sit around in the U.S. or the U.K. endlessly inveighing against the evil of Islam, depicting\u00a0it\u00a0as the root of violence and evil (the \u201cmother lode of bad ideas<\/a>\u201c), while spending very little time on their own societies\u2019 addictions to violence and aggression, or their\u00a0own religious and nationalistic drives, have reached the peak of self-blinding tribalism. They really are akin to having a neighbor down the street who constantly murders, steals and pillages, and then spends his spare time flamboyantly denouncing people who live thousands of miles away for their bad acts. Such a person would be regarded as pathologically self-deluded, a term that also describes those political and intellectual factions which replicate that behavior.<\/p>\n

The sheer casualness with which Obama yesterday called for a new AUMF is reflective of how central, how commonplace, violence and militarism are in the U.S.\u2019s imperial management of the world. That some citizens of that same country devote themselves\u00a0primarily if not exclusively\u00a0to denouncing the violence and savagery of others<\/em> is a testament to how powerful and self-blinding tribalism is as a human drive.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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

Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed. Let\u2019s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49583","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=49583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}