Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 39 November 11 - 17, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
The Coming Apocalypse BY
GEOV PARRISH Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index Does
anybody in this country get it? Does
anybody understand what the United States is on the verge of doing? Experienced,
respected food aid organizations warn that even before the bombing of
Afghanistan began on October 7, some 7,500,000 Afghans were -- through a
gut-wrenching combination of poverty, drought, war, dislocation, and repression
-- at risk of starving to death this winter. When the bombing began, almost all
delivery of food from the outside world stopped. Now, roads and bridges are
destroyed, millions more people are dislocated, and the snow is steadily
approaching from higher elevations and from the north. For
weeks, aid organizations, along with voices from throughout the region, have
been begging the United States to call off its bombing campaign, at least for
long enough so that aid agencies can conduct the massive transfer of food into
and throughout Afghanistan that is necessary to prevent death on a scale the
world has not seen in a long, long time. On our newscasts, it's politely
referred to as a "humanitarian crisis." That's a euphemism that makes
"collateral damage" seem humane. Seven
and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months. That's three
times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times the
number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September
11 (a number that reports are now suggesting is vastly inflated), we're talking
the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150
days. Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths. Deaths whose sole cause
is not the United States, but most of which can still be prevented -- except
that the United States is refusing to allow them to be prevented. It
repulses me to say this, but I suspect a lot of Americans don't care. They'd
rather see the United States "get" Osama bin Laden (though there's no
actual evidence that we're any closer to that today than we were two months ago,
and probably the task is harder as he becomes more popular and protected). A lot
of people in this country do not care that a staggering number of innocent
people are on the verge of being condemned to death, or that most of the world
will blame the United States. Correctly. We
should care. If the object of this war was to thwart terrorism -- to bring
existing terrorists to justice, and to isolate them politically and culturally
so that others won't throw in their lot -- in less than a month, the United
States has perpetrated one of the most abject failures in military history. It
still does not know where any of Al-Qaeda's leadership even is. It is on the
verge of succeeding in its goal of creating a unified Afghanistan government --
unfortunately, Afghans are uniting behind the Taliban, as warlord after warlord
sets aside long-standing differences to stand shoulder to shoulder to fight the
American invaders. Tens of thousands more young Muslim men are lining up to
cross the borders into Afghanistan to join them. The ones that survive the
experience will carry a lifetime of hate: living, breathing proof that within a
month, America bombed a country but lost its war in spectacular fashion. That's
today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter? How much future
terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush Administration have inspired then? If
several million Islamic sisters and brothers starve to death, innocent civilians
trapped between winter and the rage of America, how many of Islam's 1.2 billion
adherents -- or the five billion other people on earth -- are going to take
George Bush's proclamations about eradicating "terrorists" and
"evildoers" to heart, and label him, and us, as the prime examples? In
less than two months, the United States government has gone from the moral high
ground of being victimized by one of the most heinous crimes in world history,
to being within a week or two of quite visibly committing a crime so much larger
as to obliterate the world's memory of September 11. Remarkably, almost nobody
in the United States seems to have either noticed, understood, or cared. While
even progressives wring their hands over the ambiguity of a war fought under the
auspices of America's legitimate right to defend itself, a situation is
unfolding in which there is absolutely no moral ambiguity at all, and for which
many people will want to hold each of us as accountable as the world held
post-war Germans. Where were you? What did you say? How could you allow this to
happen? Or, a more likely reaction in the Islamic world: Why should millions of
you not die as well? America will have set out to isolate one man, and instead
killed millions and isolated itself. And much of the world will not rest until
we are brought to our knees. Seven and a half million people. The snowline is creeping down the mountainsides. The food is almost gone. The infrastructure is in shambles. There will be no "independent verification" of the body count. There wasn't in the Holocaust or Rwanda or Cambodia, either. The judgment of the world did not need one. The clock is ticking. Where were you? Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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