Robert Fisk: Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:




Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-nine-years-two-wars-hundreds-of-thousands-dead-ndash-and-nothing-learnt-2076450.html

[Luminous Animal]

1. Every person on this board as lived through American imperialistic wars.

WWW2
Korea
Viet Nam
Nicaragua
Granada
Bosnia
Iraq
Afghanistan
Iraq
Afghanistan

[EFerrari]

2. We're spending millions to wage war by proxy still

all over Latin America, millions from NED alone in Venezuela because they have elections coming up.

[Luminous Animal]

3. Yep.

[chimpymustgo]

4. And North Africa. Endless war.

[G_j]

5. Thank you again

Robert Fisk
:applause:

[Toots]

6. He sounds almost sane, better lock him up..

I wonder if there are more insane folks living in America now, than sane ones? When the sane become the minority they will be treated as such... Count on it..

[xchrom]

7. Recommend

[lonestarnot]

8. Not a thing learned either.

[marmar]

9. British spelling.

nt

[lonestarnot]

10. I'm not British.

:evilgrin:

[Bigmack]

11. "Remember 9-11"...

for a lot of people in the US, that phrase is a call to hate and revenge.

I just feel sad. Sad for the victims... sad for the deluded fucks that did it... sad for a world that seems crazier than I can remember it being.

Fisk... what you said... and more so.

[superduperfarleft]

12. Fisk is probably one of the last real journalists out there.

It used to be that journalists weren't afraid to call a spade a spade. He's one of the few that still reports with a sense of moral outrage when the situation calls for it, regardless of appeals to be "fair and balanced" at the expense of the truth.

[another saigon]

14. John Pilger is still plugging away

There are actually quite a few, it just so happens our media are loathe to let them be heard.

[another saigon]

13. excellent

thank you!

-snip-

And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives – and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the 'war on terror". There can be no "equivalence". "They" kill innocents because "they" are evil. "We" kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents – we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.

This is why we created the obscene definition of "collateral damage". For if "collateral" means that these victims are innocent, then "collateral" also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would. "Collateral" is our exoneration. This one word is the difference between "them" and "us", between our God-given right to kill and Bin Laden's God-given right to murder. The victims, hidden away as "collateral" corpses, don't count any more because they were slaughtered by us. Maybe it wasn't so painful. Maybe death by drone is a more gentle departure from this earth, evisceration by an AGM-114C Boeing-Lockheed air-to-ground missile less painful, than death by shards from a roadside bomb or a cruel suicider with an explosive belt.

That's why we know how many died on 9/11 – 2,966, although the figure may be higher – and why we don't "do body counts" on those whom we kill. Because they – "our" victims – must have no identities, no innocence, no personality, no cause or belief or feelings; and because we have killed far, far more human beings than Bin Laden and the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.