{"id":86765,"date":"2017-02-13T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=86765"},"modified":"2017-02-12T18:05:00","modified_gmt":"2017-02-12T18:05:00","slug":"the-mass-grave-we-call-collateral-damage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/the-mass-grave-we-call-collateral-damage\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mass Grave We Call Collateral Damage"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Nawar al Awlaki<\/p><\/div>\n

8 Feb 2017 – <\/em>\u201cLot of killers. We\u2019ve got a lot of killers. Boy, you think our country\u2019s so innocent? You think our country\u2019s so innocent?\u201d<\/p>\n

We have carnage and we have irony.<\/p>\n

The speaker<\/a> is the president, of course. It\u2019s Super Bowl Sunday and here he is, generating another eyeball-popping headline as he dares to compare American collateral damage over the years with (as a chorus of shocked critics exclaimed) Vladimir Putin\u2019s remorseless homicides. This happened during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O\u2019Reilly last Sunday, after O\u2019Reilly had challenged Trump\u2019s coziness with Russia and called Putin a killer.<\/p>\n

Republican Sen. Ben Sasse<\/a> of Nebraska summed up the outrage thus: \u201cThere is no moral equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom-loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin\u2019s defense of his cronyism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too bad we can\u2019t ask 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki<\/a> for her opinion on whose killings are worse, America\u2019s or Russia\u2019s. She apparently bled to death from a neck wound a week before the Trump interview, during the disastrous U.S. raid on Yemen that left a Navy SEAL \u2014 and maybe 23 civilians \u2014 dead. This was a Trump authorized raid, the first of his presidency, but had been planned many months earlier. A newborn baby was also killed in the raid, according to the British humanitarian organization Reprieve<\/a>, along with other women and children.<\/p>\n

How many children have been buried thus far in the mass grave we call collateral damage? Nawar was the sister of Abdulrahman Awlaki, a 16-year-old boy killed in a 2011 drone strike, two weeks after the children\u2019s father, an alleged al Qaeda leader (and U.S. citizen), was killed, also in a drone strike. \u201cWhy kill children?\u201d Nawar\u2019s grandfather asked after the girl\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

But the politics of our drone assassinations and our air strikes and our wars justify and soften the murders we commit. Even now, as consensus consigns the Iraq war to the status of \u201cmistake,\u201d we still refuse to take official responsibility for its consequences. The shattered country, the dead, the dislocated, the rise of terrorism \u2014 come on, cut us a little slack, OK? We were bringing democracy to Iraq.<\/p>\n

The unpredictable Trump spews out a fragment of spur-of-the-moment truth in a Fox News interview \u2014 \u201cyou think our country\u2019s so innocent?\u201d \u2014 and the consensus critics can only writhe in outrage. \u201cOne can argue that\u2019s the most anti-American statement ever made by the president of the United States,\u201d retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey exclaimed on MSNBC, defending American exceptionalism as though it were God.<\/p>\n

What a strange game this president is playing. Fervid belief in this exceptionalism is the foundation of Trump\u2019s support. The raw meat he throws to his supporters is fear and hatred and clearly defined enemies: Muslims, Mexicans, refugees and immigrants from everywhere (except Europe). His allegiance to white nationalism and corporatocracy and war, the unacknowledged beneficiaries of this exceptionalism, is serious, and reflected in his cabinet choices.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone on Trump\u2019s national insecurity team seems to agree on one thing: the United States is in a global war to the death,\u201d Ira Chernus<\/a> writes at TomDispatch, for instance, quoting the crusading militarism of a number of his advisors and appointees, such as Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we do not destroy the scourge of radical Islam, it will ultimately destroy Western civilization . . . and the values we hold dear,\u201d she has said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor her,\u201d Chernus noted, \u201cit\u2019s an old story: civilization against the savages.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, indeed, Trump\u2019s ascension to the presidency was cited by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/a> as the reason they set the Doomsday Clock \u2014 Planet Earth\u2019s largest, most ominous metaphor \u2014 ahead by thirty seconds in January, to two and a half minutes to midnight. The Bulletin\u2019s Science and Security Board explained:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis already-threatening world situation was the backdrop for a rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a U.S. presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

I note all this in the context of Trump\u2019s Fox News tease \u2014 that the United States is no more innocent in its wars and murders than Russia is \u2014 and his perplexing, perhaps business-related friendliness with Putin, which seems to address one of the major concerns of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Board, in its Doomsday Clock statement, noted with alarm: \u201cThe United States and Russia\u2014which together possess more than 90 percent of the world\u2019s nuclear weapons\u2014remained at odds in a variety of theaters, from Syria to Ukraine to the borders of NATO.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is a walking maelstrom of racism, arrogance, greed, incompetence and political incorrectness. He approved the Navy SEAL raid in Yemen with a shrug, as he ate dinner. Children died. The smiling face of Nawar al-Awlaki now haunts the mission.<\/p>\n

As Bonnie Kristian<\/a> wrote recently at Business Insider: \u201cPresident Trump promised real change in U.S. foreign policy, and in at least one clear regard he has already delivered: Where President Obama spent six years waging covert drone warfare in Yemen and nearly two years quietly supporting brutal Saudi intervention in the Gulf state\u2019s civil war, Trump drew national outrage to this heretofore ignored conflict in nine days flat.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his own racism and hypocrisy, is Trump exposing the hypocrisy of the media and the military-industrial complex? Is the new president somehow holding hands with the children whose deaths he will continue to order?<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

<\/a>Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

But the politics of our drone assassinations and our air strikes and our wars justify and soften the murders we commit. Even now, as consensus consigns the Iraq war to the status of \u201cmistake,\u201d we still refuse to take official responsibility for its consequences. The shattered country, the dead, the dislocated, the rise of terrorism \u2014 come on, cut us a little slack, OK? We were bringing democracy to Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86765","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=86765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}