The Democratic Violator.

[M.Asad Tashfeen]

The purpose of this article is to make the readers aware of one of the biggest violators of human rights, personal and national security and conceptual freedom. I am talking about the country we call the United States of America. The reader has to keep in mind that I am not critical of the American populace but of US government in its policies and actions towards other states.
I start my story of American atrocities from the Second World War. The Japanese were given an ultimatum to surrender using a document called the Potsdam Declaration in which the use of atomic bombs was not even mentioned. The Japanese demanded that they be allowed to keep their emperor and that the Soviets not launch their own military invasion on Japan. This was the only indication that gave President Harry S.Truman the opportunity to test their ultimate new weapon and the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was given a go ahead. Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama and Nagasaki were among the probable targets of the atomic bomb. Following were the criteria for target selection:
• The target has to be larger than three miles in diameter and has to be an important target in a large urban area.
• The blast should create effective damage.
• The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945. "Any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.
Just the use of the word ‘urban’ as one of the criteria for attack should strike human morality and make any sane human think of the magnitude of what these people were about to do.
As far as military victory was concerned, an atomic bomb was not needed. Japan had lost most of its military power and all of its Axis allies. The Soviets had also invaded Japan and the Allies had effectively won the war. Yet the Americans proceeded with their attack. It is common knowledge today that there were people in the American government who only wanted to see how much damage the atomic bomb was capable of causing. After the attack on Hiroshima President Truman came on radio and delivered a speech. An extract from his speech is as follows:
“We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war”
It is a mystery how this attack which killed 140,000 in Hiroshima would “Shorten the agony of war” and “save the lives of thousands and thousands of Americans”. Even after seeing how much damage and humanitarian violation the attack had caused, the US government carried out another attack on Nagasaki which killed another 80,000. For more on this issue I would recommend Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Burnt Shadows’. One of the things that Ms.Shamsie talks about is how a second attack was carried out on Nagasaki by the Americans without showing even a whimper of remorse for the thousands of innocents that died in Hiroshima. Kyoto was one of the most probable targets but it was not chosen only because the US Secretary of War, Henry S.Stimson, had become attached to the city ever since his honeymoon there several years ago. This just goes to show how these people were playing with the lives of thousands and choosing randomly which city to devastate, because they had no target, because they needed no target.
The US also carried out fire bombings of Japanese and German cities. Bombings of Tokyo and Dresden are known to be the worst bombings in human history. Fire bombings of Tokyo killed about 125,000 people; almost all of them were civilians. In a single raid 1700 tons of bombs were dropped and the resulting firestorm incinerated hundreds of thousands and many more were rendered homeless. Almost half of Tokyo had been destroyed by the end of World War Two. The German city of Dresden which was a culture center suffered a similar fate. In four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The resulting firestorm destroyed 39 square kilometers of the city centre and according to some estimates killed up to 250,000 people. Destruction of thriving rural centers with such high population densities like Tokyo and Dresden shows the willingness of this country to use any means necessary for the achievement of its goal: winning the war on its own terms.
We have seen the Americans threatening Pakistan, Iran and North Korea and telling them not to even make atomic bombs much less use them if need be. Being the only nation to have ever used an atomic bomb in human history I think it is logical to conclude that either the Americans suffer from chronic memory loss or their rules apply to everyone except themselves.
The US is anything but a peaceful nation. Only 5 years after the end of the Second World War, the US was engaged in a proxy war in Korea supporting the South against the North not for peace but for its own interests, the containment of communism being one of them.
I think it is pertinent to mention that the US has always picked on a foe much weaker than itself and even then has seldom been victorious.
I move now to the Vietnam War. The US launched and continued its invasion on North Vietnam despite great domestic and foreign opposition before and during the war. US interests here were quite similar to those in the Korean War. The war escalated due to intervention of the US and countries from the communist bloc. US troops coined the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese communist resistance, as ‘funny men in pajamas’ although these funny men gave the Americans a run for their money. The Americans showed no concern for countless civilian casualties during the war. They were even involved in things which would only befit the Nazis. The My Lai massacre was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the US Army on March 16, 1968 of nearly 500 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people. Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.
Cambodia, which borders Vietnam, had been declared neutral by Washington till 1969. Richard Nixon wrote to Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia in April 1969 assuring him that the United States respected "the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Cambodia”. But later he decided that communist presence in the country could no longer be tolerated and carried out secret bombings in Cambodia which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians, regardless of the fact that military strikes against locations in a neutral country would be flagrant violations of international laws and treaties. In 1971 the Pentagon Papers leaked out which showed the top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, commissioned by the Department of Defense, detailing a long series of public deceptions. In a conversation with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger about civilian casualties in Vietnam, Nixon said, “I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.” Estimates of civilian deaths caused by American bombing in Operation Rolling Thunder conducted against North Vietnam range from 52,000 to 182,000. After the American invasion a civil war broke out in Cambodia which resulted in the deaths of up to two million Cambodians.
The US is a country praised for its liberal and democratic values but whenever it has seen its interests being threatened it has not hesitated to violate the very liberal and democratic ideas that it has helped the world to shape.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran from 1941 to the Iranian revolution in 1979, is the kind of man that the US would want to rule every country of the world. The man was pro American to the highest degree. During his reign ideas of modernization, secularization and western liberal thought were introduced into Iran. This however was not the problem. The problem was the methodology of the imposition of these ideas. Anyone opposing the ideas of the ruler was punished in the most violent of ways. American envoys and ambassadors had diplomatic immunity in Iran, meaning no matter what they did they could not be held accountable. They would have anyone opposing US intervention killed or imprisoned. Bodies of those who dared oppose the Shah or his American friends hung for weeks from electric wires in city squares. None, not even students were spared. This went on for quite some time. The Shah was extremely affluent in his life style. While the people suffered with poverty, an extremely extravagant dinner was arranged for world leaders in the royal palace, the cost of which was so high that it was never revealed. There is a limit beyond which the masses do not tolerate oppression. When that limit is crossed it is the time for revolution. It was this threshold that was crossed in the French, the Russian and the Iranian Revolutions. The Iranian revolution was the end of the reign of the profligate Shah and the start of Islamic Shiite rule in Iran. It is the new administration that has been the biggest thorn in the American government’s side till today. The close friend country for nearly thirty years was now a potential foe for the Americans. Now, in order to maintain their influence in the Middle East the Americans needed some other ally. Who could be more suitable than the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein? Saddam had his own animosity against the Ayatollah in Iran and the Americans could use him as a bulwark against Iran and that is what they did. During that time they did not seem to have a problem with Saddam’s killings and human rights violations. The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international borders were ignored. Instead Iraq received economic and military support and the US conveniently overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians and Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. In March of 1988, the Kurdish town of Halabja was attacked with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 civilians, and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more. The United States now maintains that Saddam ordered the attack to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, but Saddam's regime claimed at the time that Iran was responsible for the attack and US analysts supported the claim until several years later. The US not only supported the Iraqi army but itself carried out attacks against Iranian ships and aircrafts. A civilian airplane was also shot down and all on board were killed. A statement released later claimed it to be a mistake.
Saddam’s luck as the US friend was about to run out. His invasion of oil rich Kuwait resulted in a major shift in US foreign policy towards Iraq. The US saw this as a threat to its control of the oil economy and feared an Iraqi invasion on Washington’s great ally Saudi Arabia. Because Saddam had become a threat to America’s economic and strategic interests, he was now the enemy. A U.S.-led coalition launched round-the-clock missile and aerial attacks on Iraq, beginning January 1991 which killed nearly 100,000 Iraqis and more than 175,000 were imprisoned. Due to his opposition of the US Saddam was eventually captured and hanged in 2006.
The US has also been helping Turkey and Iraq in fighting and killing Kurds who are a people fighting for their freedom. The Americans perhaps have nothing to gain from the creation of a Kurdish state.
I come now to the issue of Israel and Palestine. Israel has been receiving all kinds of support and aid from the US and its Western allies. The Jews that moved to the land that was once Palestine after World War 2 thought of having their own state in this contested part of the world. With the help of the US they drove out the Palestinian Muslims from their own land and laid the foundations of a Jewish state. The Israelis today indiscriminately kill Palestinians for demanding a country of their own in a region which was actually their homeland. The US supports Israel to the fullest. During all the conflicts starting from 1948 to the Gaza conflict of 2009 the US and its allies have provided Israel with the most modern of weapons and have not shown any remorse for the humanitarian crises that these weapons have helped the Israelis cause. For example, in the Gaza conflict alone more than 1400 Palestinians died of whom 1200 were civilians and only 13 Israelis died; only three of them were civilians. Despite all this the US support for Israel has not wavered. The US has been criticizing Iran for providing military aid to Palestinian militants while at the same time it provides Israel with not only conventional weapons but also nuclear capable missiles and other nuclear arsenal.
The world is well aware of the US invasion of Afghanistan as part of its ‘war on terror’. The Americans know that when they use their highly advanced and destructive bombs against Afghan militants many innocent civilians are also killed but these casualties are coined as collateral damage and ignored. The incompetence and arrogance on the part of the US has led to an escalation of the so called ‘Jihadi Movement’ rather than putting it to an end, despite this they blindly follow their original policy which has caused havoc. It should also be mentioned now that the motive of US presence in this area is more for strategic reasons than putting an end to terrorism which has since 9/11 only harmed Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
The Iraq war was also part of the ‘war on terror’. The justification given for the invasion on Iraq was that Saddam Hussain was producing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that he was a dictator and must be brought down from power. This however turned out to be rubbish as not even a single weapon of this sort was found at the end of the war and The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) had found no evidence of any WMDs prior to the war. I strongly doubt if the Americans actually suspected Iraq of having any WMDs. The initial plan was to rain down 3000 missiles on Iraq in a course of six hours which would kill more than half a million people. How can the lives of half a million people be equal to one man, Saddam Hussein? If America was able to go into Panama and pull out General Manuel Noriega, why could it not do the same for Saddam Hussein? They needed to go into Iraq because in a matter of months the oil prices would start to fall. Twenty seven American mega-companies were bidding for contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq even before the invasion. What does this have to do with Saddam Hussein and democracy? An edition of the Oil and Gas Journal in 2002 reported that US forces had secured all of Iraq’s oil reserves a year before the invasion. These reserves remain under American control even now. Different sources have reported the number of casualties during the war. As of December 2009 the number of casualties reported by the Lancet medical journal is 1,366,350. This is more than 6 times the number of deaths caused by the atomic bombings of Japan. Destruction of human life of this magnitude has left Iraq a ravaged country. In December 2007, the Iraqi government reported that there were 5 million orphans in Iraq - almost half of the country's children.
Both in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars there are reports of US troops doing inhumane things to the locals. Some of these reports have also managed to make their way into the news but nothing has ever been done about them. The US has used weapons with depleted uranium in Iraq which have resulted in the deaths of more than 50,000 Iraqi children due to radiations. When human rights organizations told this to Madeleine Albright, the ex-US Secretary of State, she is known to have said very calmly:”US policies for Iraq are worth the lives of 50,000 Arab children”. 70 percent of children in Iraq are suffering from trauma-related symptoms according to a study of 10,000 primary school students in the Shaab section of north Baghdad, conducted by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists and the World Health Organization. There has been an elevation of mental health disorders in children -- emotional, conduct, peer and attention deficit and many of them are even resulting in suicide. How is it possible for these children who have seen their families literally destroyed right before their eyes to not become terrorists?
The American politicians spend half their time speaking of national security and state sovereignty yet drone attacks continue in Pakistan despite protests from the Pakistani army and civilian government. On her visit to Pakistan, Hillary Clinton, the current US Secretary of State, was asked this very same question by a student during her address in the Government College University, Lahore and she plainly refused to answer.
The US has detention and torture camps in many parts of the world. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the prison in Bagram are some of them. Accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in these prisons have been coming to attention. These acts are committed by personnel of the United States Army and by contractors hired by the US government. There are also prison camps called Black holes so named because if someone goes into them he is never heard from again. When President Obama took office he promised a paradigm shift in US policies. He promised specifically to close down Guantanamo bay. While that prison is still operational, the one in Bagram has been expanded. He also promised in his speech in Cairo to be friends with the Muslim world and take steps to address their concerns. The building of Jewish settlements along the West Bank, which is rightfully the territory of the Palestinian people, has been given the green light by Hillary Clinton and the Muslim World’s dream of a friendly and just US administration has been turned to ash.
The US government also employs private armies which operate through private contractors hired by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Blackwater/Xe and Dyncorp are among these nefarious armies. These armies have no official documentation and their soldiers who die in combat are not even counted in casualties. They basically carry out their operations in different places with the help of local warlords and criminals. Because they are outside the official chain of command their conduct does not have to be in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Such kind of operatives can be very effective in assassinations and covert operations. On September 16, 2007 Blackwater gunmen killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The organization is alleged to have paid a million dollars in bribes to Iraqi officials because of the outcry resulting from these killings. This is only one incident that came to light. Most of the times the people responsible for such operations are never caught. US involvement in these actions can never be proved because they can simply deny employing any such operatives. The number of private soldiers in Afghanistan is more than those that are officially present.
The US supports corrupt governments and dictators without faltering when it sees its interests being met by their support. Hamid Karzai has been elected President of Afghanistan for a second term. Even the UN has claimed that the polls were rigged. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major player in Afghanistan’s booming illegal opium trade, is a thug in every sense of the word and gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. On the other hand the American’s blamed without any proof the election of Ahmadinejad as president of Iran for a second term as a result of poll rigging without any evidence whatsoever just because he is one of the few who can look the Americans in the eye and say whatever he sees fit.
One of the biggest issues in the world today is climate change. Not a day goes by when you don’t see something related to the changing environment and its consequences in the news. The US along with many of its allies has been criticizing many countries especially those where the rate of industrial development is high for not doing enough to protect the environment. China and India are among the many that are criticized by US government officials for their high level of carbon emissions while not really doing anything substantial about its own contribution to global warming. The US rejected the ratification of the Kyoto protocol, an agreement among 140 countries of the world which came into effect on February 16, 2005 because its compliance could cause potential damage to US economy. Until quite recently the United States has been the biggest carbon emitter of the world replaced now by China. While criticizing the Chinese today the US seems to forget the fact that China is responsible for 21.5% of the world’s carbon emissions while being 19.65% of the world’s population whereas the US is responsible for 20.2% of the emissions while being only 4.54% of the population. There is stark contrast in the population-emission ratio of these countries.
The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy released a 188-page report which analyzes the U.S. response to eight major international agreements, including the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The report says that the United States has violated, compromised or acted to undermine in some crucial way every treaty that had been studied. Initially the US also rejected the ratification of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has at the same time killed millions in the rest of the world in its quest to purge the world of weapons, both nuclear and conventional. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research the US spending on military is 41.5% of the entire world’s expenditure.
I will also talk about certain American actions in relation with Pakistan. Ever since its creation Pakistan has sided with the US. Pakistan has received large amounts of military and non-military aid from the US when the US has seen Pakistan to be a vital actor in achieving its foreign policy interests. Luckily for the US, it has mostly found cooperative rulers in Pakistan who have helped in all times. The first challenge came in the time of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Mr. Bhutto along with some of his allies including Shah Faisal of Saudi Arabia was building a Muslim Bloc and a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was held in Lahore. This and the fact that Pakistan had started work on building an atomic bomb, after India’s nuclear test in 1972, were hard to swallow for the US. Shah Faisal was assassinated on March 25, 1975 by the son of his half brother who had just come back from the US the previous day. In August 1976, the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger came to Pakistan and warned Mr. Bhutto to stop building a nuclear weapon otherwise they would “make a horrible example” of him. These are the exact words which were used by Kissinger. When Ziaul Haq came to power Mr. Bhutto was hanged despite pressure from international organizations to keep him alive but it was not to be. Ziaul Haq was very appropriate because he helped in the proxy war against the Soviets. Pakistani intelligence agencies-the Military Intelligence (MI) and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) - were used to train the Afghani Mujahedeen against the Russian forces. It was these very same Mujahedeen which later became the Taliban. Ziaul Haq died in a plane crash in August 1988. The contents of the Black Box of that plane were never revealed. After the end of the Soviet-Afghan war the US withdrew all support from Pakistan. It came back only when Pakistan was needed again in the war on terror. Pervez Musharraf was Ziaul Haq part two. He vowed allegiance to the US and gave them all the support that he could muster with total disregard to what this association would cost Pakistan, just like his predecessor had done. When anti-Musharraf sentiment in Pakistan had risen very high and Musharraf’s usefulness had run its course, the Americans pulled out their support. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was blamed on Al-Qaeda and Asif Zardari became the President of Pakistan. I will not blame anyone for being involved in the murder of Ms. Bhutto but I will mention that Mr. Zardari and the Americans have been the biggest beneficiaries of Ms. Bhutto’s demise.
What drives me towards writing this is not any personal animosity that I might have for the US. What makes me say such things as I have stated above is the shock that one often experiences when one see’s the US doing anything that it wants and getting away with it. The reason for that is power. It is power that allows the violation of treaties, the breaking of promises, the breaching of codes, the killing of innocents, the infringement of sovereignty and much more. The US can be aptly described as an international dictator which can force most countries to do what it wants, failure to obey often results in severe consequences. The US along with most of its Western friends has imposed its ideology and thought on many countries of the world and has in the process separated the people of these countries from their culture and values for its own interests. In order to prevent nations from advancing it has most surreptitiously prevented intellectual training and ideas in these countries by denying the freedom of thought and introducing and emphasizing the need for technological and objective knowledge alone. This is conceptual machination. . This is terrorism. While pretending to spread values like equality, democracy, liberty, freedom and justice in the rest of the world the US has in some way or the other found a way to get done what it wants even if it is in direct violation of these values by giving its actions different names like collateral damage in place of killing of little children, preventive action in place of murder, global security in place of foreign invasion and matrix for measurement of development instead of economic conditions etc. The irony in the whole situation is that the US has blamed 190 countries of the world of committing many of these actions at different times. The ability to accomplish such a task comes solely from the power that this country has held in the international society. That, I think and I hope, is probably about to change.
Oscar Wilde said this a long time ago, it might still be apposite:
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”

 

[hembo]

WTH!! You're posting same article again and again in all forums.

post reported.

 

[Hussein]

Oscar Wilde said this a long time ago, it might still be apposite:
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”

He said as well:
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious"
you agree with this?