No One
Cares: America Kills And Kills And Kills - Afghanistan,
Iraq, etc.
05 May 2010By Chris Hedges
We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and
the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and
Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have
been driven into squalid displacement and refugee
camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have
died or been crippled physically and psychologically.
We sustain these wars, which have no real popular
support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can
never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go
into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our
infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans
are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment
approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia
rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the
collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace
movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of
groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the
Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.
The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound
divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well
educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose
sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent
jobs with benefits, have few options besides the
military. Liberals, whose children are more often to
be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did
not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in
1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base.
They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two
years later and stood by as our banks were turned over
to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by
supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the
corporate rape carried out in the name of
globalization and endless war, and they ignored the
plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have
little interest in the moral protestations of
liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly
hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate
assault on workers and their families.
Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than
imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A
slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented
into place a neofeudalism in which there are only
masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot
be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of
electoral politics.
Last Thursday I traveled to Washington to join Rep.
Dennis Kucinich for a public teach-in on the wars.
Kucinich used the Capitol Hill event to denounce the
new request by Barack Obama for an additional $33
billion for the war in Afghanistan. The Ohio Democrat
has introduced H. Con Res. 248, with 16 co-sponsors,
which would require the House of Representatives to
debate whether to continue the Afghanistan war.
Kucinich, to his credit, is the only member of
Congress to publicly condemn the Obama
administration’s authorization to assassinate Anwar
al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and cleric living in Yemen,
over alleged links to a failed Christmas airline
bombing in Detroit. Kucinich also invited
investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill,
writer/activist David Swanson, retired Army Col. Ann
Wright and Iraq war veteran Josh Stieber to the event.
The gathering, held in the Rayburn Building, was a
sober reminder of our insignificance. There were no
other Congress members present, and only a smattering
of young staff members attended. Most of the audience
of about 70 were peace activists who, as is usual at
such events, were joined by a motley collection of
conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was an inside
job or that former Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a
plane crash, was assassinated. Scahill and Swanson
provided a litany of disturbing statistics that
illustrated how corporations control all systems of
power. Corporations have effectively taken over our
internal security and intelligence apparatus. They run
our economy and manage our systems of communication.
They own the two major political parties. They have
built a private military. They loot the U.S. Treasury
at will. And they have become unassailable. Those who
decry the corporate coup are locked out of the
national debate and become as marginalized as
Kucinich.
“We don’t have any sort of communications system in
the country,” said Swanson, who co-founded an anti-war
coalition (AfterDowningStreet.org) and led an
unsuccessful campaign to impeach George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney. “We have a corporate media cartel that
overlaps with the war industry. It has no interest in
democracy. The Congress is bought and paid for. It is
absolutely corrupted by money. We kick ourselves for
not being active enough and imposing our demands, but
the bar is set very high for us. We have to try very,
very hard and make very, very big sacrifices if we are
going to influence this Congress prior to getting the
money out and getting a decent media system.
Hypocritical Congress members talk about money all the
time, how we have to be careful about money, except
when it comes to war. It is hypocritical, but who is
going to call them on that? Not their colleagues, not
their funders, not the media, only us. We have to do
that, but we don’t in large part because they switch
parties every number of years and we are on one team
or the other.”
Scahill—who has done most of the groundbreaking
investigative reporting on private contractors
including the security firm Blackwater, renamed Xe—laid
out how the management of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan is being steadily transferred by the
Pentagon to unaccountable private contractors. He
lamented the lack of support in Congress for a bill
put forward by Rep. Jan Schakowsky known as the Stop
Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, H.R. 4102, which would
“responsibly phase out the use of private security
contractors for functions that should be reserved for
U.S. military forces and government personnel.”
“It is one of the sober realities of the time we are
living in that you can put forward a bill that says
something as simple as ‘we should not outsource
national security functions to private contractors’
and you only get 20 members of Congress to support the
bill,” Scahill said. “The unfortunate reality is that
Rep. Schakowsky knows that the war industry is
bipartisan. They give on both sides. For a while there
it seemed contractor was the new Israel. You could not
find a member of Congress to speak out against them
because so many members of Congress are beholden to
corporate funding to keep their House or Senate seats.
I also think Obama’s election has wiped that out, as
it has with many things, because the White House will
dispatch emissaries to read the riot act to members of
Congress who don’t toe the party line.”
“The entire government is basically privatized,”
Scahill went on. “In fact, 100 percent of people in
this country that make $100,000 or less might as well
remit everything they owe in taxes to contractors
rather than paying the government. That is how
privatized the society is, that is how much of
government has been outsourced in this society. There
are 18 U.S. intelligence agencies on the military and
civilian side and 70 percent of their combined budget
is outsourced to for-profit corporations who
simultaneously work the United States government as
well as multinational corporations and foreign
governments. We have radically outsourced the
intelligence operations in this country because we
have radically outsourced everything. Sixty-nine
percent of the Pentagon’s entire work force, and I am
not talking only about the battlefield, is now
privatized. In Afghanistan we have the most staggering
statistics. The Obama administration is infinitely
worse in Afghanistan in terms of its employment of
mercenaries and other private contractors than the
Bush administration. Right now in Afghanistan there
are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors
alongside 68,000 U.S. troops. There is almost a 2-to-1
ratio of private-sector for-profit forces that are on
the U.S. government payroll versus the active-duty or
actual military forces in the country. And that is not
taking into account the fact that the State Department
has 14,000 contractors in Afghanistan.”
“Within a matter of months, and certainly within a
year, the United States will have upwards of 220,000
to 250,000 U.S. government-funded personnel occupying
Afghanistan, a far cry from the 70,000 U.S. soldiers
that those Americans who pay attention understand the
United States has in Afghanistan,” Scahill said. “This
is a country where the president’s national security
adviser, Gen. James Jones, said there are less than
100 al-Qaida operatives who have no ability to strike
at the United States. That was the stated rationale
and reasoning for being in Afghanistan. It was to hunt
down those responsible for 9/11.”
Josh Stieber spoke at the end of the event. Stieber
was deployed with the Army to Iraq from February 2007
to April 2008. He was in Bravo Company 2-16, which was
involved in the July 2007 Apache helicopter attack on
Iraqi civilians depicted on the video recently
released by WikiLeaks. Stieber, who left the Army as a
conscientious objector, has issued a public apology to
the Iraqi people.
“This was not by any means the exception,” he said of
the video, which showed helicopter pilots nonchalantly
gunning down civilians, including a Reuters
photographer and children, in a Baghdad street. “It is
inevitable given the situation we were going through.
We were going through a lot of combat at the time. A
roadside bomb would go off or a sniper would fire a
shot and you had no idea where it was coming from.
There was a constant paranoia, a constant being on
edge. If you put people in a situation like that where
there are plenty of civilians, that kind of thing was
going to happen and did happen and will continue to
happen as long as our nation does not challenge these
things. Now that this video has become public it is
our responsibility as a people and a country to
recognize that this is what war looks like on a
day-to-day basis.”
I was depressed as I walked from the Rayburn Building
to Union Station to take the train home. The voices of
sanity, the voices of reason, those who have a moral
core, those like Kucinich or Scahill or Wright or
Swanson or Stieber, have little chance now to be
heard. Liberals, who failed to grasp the dark
intentions of the corporate state and its nefarious
servants in the Democratic Party, bear some
responsibility. But even an enlightened liberal class
would have been hard-pressed to battle back against
the tawdry emotional carnivals and the political
theater that have thrust the nation into collective
self-delusion. We were all seduced. And we, along with
thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan
and beyond, will all be consumed.
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