January 5, 2006
Maybe New York Times
columnist and corporate globalization champion Thomas Friedman should
consult his paper’s news desk before crafting his creepy,
power-worshipping editorials.
THE UNITED STATES AS A BENEVOLENT "ELEPHANT"
On
page A21 of yesterday’s Times, Friedman praises the supposedly
benevolent United States for "provid[ing] the basic governance that
keeps the world stable and on a decent track." America provides
this noble service, Friedman argues, "through its vast military
deployments, diplomatic engagements, and vital role buttressing
the global economy and its rules" ("Social Insecurity Crisis," 4
January 2005).
In
support of this nationally self-congratulatory thesis, Friedman cites
leading academic foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum’s claim that
(in Friedman’s words) "most countries in the world like" American
global dominance. "They like it," Friedman says, "because they
know that the U.S. is not a predatory power" and that American rule "is
helpful to every country in the world."
Friedman
gives a lovely quote from the professor’s recent book, "The Case for
Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st
Century." The U.S., Mandelbaum writes (to Friedman’s applause), "is not
the lion of the international system, terrorizing and preying on weaker
animals in order to survive itself. It is, rather, the elephant, which
supports a wide variety of other creatures – smaller mammals, birds,
and insects- by generation nourishment for them as it goes about the
business of feeding itself."
"The
best evidence" for this benevolent "elephant" thesis, Friedman feels,
"is the fact that no military coalition has ever formed to counter
America’s global governing role – as happened with other hegemonic
powers in history."
DESTROYING ANOTHER INNOCENT FAMILY
After
reading Friedman’s ode to Mandelbaum and Uncle Sam, readers of
Wednesday’s Times could turn to page A8 to find a jarring and curious
example of the "nourishment" and "stability" the noble American
"elephant" gives to the world system’s "weaker animals" through
virtuous "military deployments" and "diplomatic engagements."
According to Times correspondents Richard A. Oppel and Omar Al-Neaml,
"American F-14 warplanes killed nine members of an Iraqi family,
including women and young children, during a bombing and cannon strike
on Monday night that obliterated a home near the northern industrial
city of Baiji,…American officials said the warplanes had been pursuing
insurgents who had been observed setting up a roadside bomb. They fled
to a building, and the American planes struck the building and
destroyed it. The attack enraged Iraqi officials in Baiji, about 150
miles north of Baghdad, who said that the airstrike was unjustified and
that it had destroyed an innocent family."
By
Oppel and Al-Neaml’s account, "a preliminary investigation indicated
the blast had killed the wife of the home's owner, his daughter-in-law
and seven children and grandchildren, including one son who worked for
the police." "The owner of the house is a very simple man," an Iraqi
official reported, adding that "the American forces did not provide us
with any justification for the attack. Agence France-Presse in Baiji,"
Oppel and Al-Neaml note, "reported that eight bodies had been pulled
from the rubble along with three survivors - two unconscious women and
an 8-year-old boy whose cry for help alerted rescuers. A Baiji police
colonel," the reporters ad, "told Reuters that the family members
killed in the bombing did not include any suspected insurgents" ("U.S.
Strike on Home Kills 9 in Family," 4 January, 2006).
"THIS IS YOUR FREEDOM?"
The
American Empire’s deadly attack on a family home in Baji (a story that
actually belongs on the Times’ front page) is all-too consistent with
its record of "terrorizing and preying on weaker animals" in its
illegal, diplomatically disengaged occupation of Iraq. Iraq Body
Count (IBC)'s recently published "Dossier of Civilian Casualties in
Iraq, 2003- 2005" (www.iraqbodycount.org.press/pr12.php)
reports that roughly 30,000 - 1 in every 1000 ---- Iraqis was
violently killed between March 20, 2003 (the day after the beginning of
the U.S. invasion) and March 19, 2005. By IBC's tabulation,
42,500 Iraqis have been wounded by violence during that period.
Who
has done the killing and wounding? By IBC's meticulous account,
based on multiple verifiable media reports, anti-occupation forces have
killed less than 10 percent of the total number of the nearly 25,000
dead for whom killers can be identified. "Criminal elements," who
have thrived in the lawless environment created by the destruction of
Iraqi civil authority, killed 8,935 or 36 percent.
The
biggest killers have been U.S.-led armed forces, who ended the lives of
9,270 Iraqis or 37.3 percent. And "at least 21,000 of the 45,000
reported injuries," IBC adds, "were caused by U.S.-led forces."
In
separate databases that include real-time observations from reporters
on the ground, IBC presents a number of journalistic accounts of Iraqis
killed by their supposed American "liberators." IBC's "Falluja Archive"
contains (to give one among many examples) an April 2004 Associated
Press (AP) story relating how more than 600 Iraqis, "mostly women,
children, and the elderly," were butchered during Uncle Sam's massive
"retaliatory" (after the resistance killed U.S.-funded Blackwell
Security mercenaries) campaign in Falluja. "Iraqis in Falluja," the AP
noted, "complained that civilians were coming under fire by U.S.
snipers."
In
a May 7th (2004) dispatch reproduced by IBC, New Standard correspondent
Dahr Jamail reported that "rows and rows of fresh graves" occupied by
civilians killed by their American "liberators" "filled the football
stadium in Fallujah. Many of [the graves]," Jamail noted, "are smaller
than others. My translator Nermim reads the gravestones to me:
'This one is a little girl.’ We take another step. 'This is
one is her sister.’ Next to them is their mother."
"We
walk," Jamail continued, "slowly under the scorching sun along dusty
rows of humble headstones. She continues reading aloud to me:
'Old man wearing jacket with black dishasho, near industrial
center. He has a key in his hand.’ Many of the bodies were
buried before they could be identified. Tears are welling up in
my eyes as she quickly reads: 'Man wearing red track suit.’ She
points to another row: 'three women killed in car leaving city by
American missile.’"
Jamail quoted an Iraqi man who "’saw American snipers shoot a woman while she was hanging her clothes’
"Another
man" interviewed by Jamail pointed to a mosque and recalled that
"Marines entered the mosque before they bombed it and slit the throats
of refugees. This," the man asked Jamail, "is their
democracy? This is their freedom?’"
"One
of the bodies brought to the [Falluja] clinic," wrote Jamail on April
14th, 2004, "was that of a 55-year old man shot in the back by a [U.S.]
sniper outside his home, while his wife and children huddled wailing
inside. The family could not retrieve his body for fear of being
shot themselves. His stiff corpse was carried into the clinic,
flies swarming above it. One of his arms was half raised by rigor
mortis" (www.iraqbodycount.org/resources/falluja/index.php)
ROGUE STATE AMERICA AND THE "PRICE WORTH PAYING"
Even
before the re-initiation of formal U.S. military hostilities in Iraq in
March 2003, it is worth recalling, the economic sanctions imposed on
that devastated nation by Friedman’s beloved Clinton administration
murdered at half a million Iraq children. Friedman’s favorite
Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, publicly described this massive
juvenile body count as "a price worth paying" in the advancement of
benevolent, U.S.-imposed global order.
Of
course, Uncle Sam’s terrorization of Iraq under Clinton and the two
Bushes is part of a broad and venerable pattern of American imperial
depredation that fosters (contrary to Friedman’s notion of a world that
"likes" American power) rampant global fear and hatred of "rogue state
America."
Most of
the planet’s politically cognizant populace actually sees Friedman and
Mandelbauam’s friendly elephant the U.S. as the single greatest threat
to world peace and prosperity. The preponderant majority of the world’s
citizenry, we can be sure, supports the development of effective
international institutions and rules to "counter America’s global
governing role," which consigns more than 2 billion people to life on
less than a dollar a day. Absent such institutions and rules,
military coalitions to check deadly Uncle Sam are a certainty in the
21st century.
Paul Street (pstreet@niu.edu)
is a writer, teacher, and activist in Iowa and Illinois. He is
the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (www.paradigmpublishers.com) and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005)