Obama's Letters of No Apology
By Paul Street

11/08/08 "Dissident Voice" - -- Should Barack Obama's volunteers mail
"Letters of No Apology" to survivors of the large number of people killed by
U.S. imperial assault in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Recently Obama was asked by CNN's Candy Crowley if "there's anything that's
happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in
terms of foreign policy?" Obama responded by saying, "No, I don't believe in
the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We
didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is
20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking
backwards." The United States, Obama told Crowley, "remains overwhelmingly a
force of good in the world."1

"SHOT AS THEY RAN"

I would like the Afghan "war"2 enthusiast3 Barack Obama to write a Letter of
No Apology to Orifa Ahmed. On October 7, 2001, Orifa's house in the Afghan
village of Bibi Mahru was destroyed by a 500-pound bomb dropped by an
American F-16 plane. The explosion killed her husband (a carpet weaver), six
of her children and two children, who lived (and died) next door. Away
visiting relatives when the bombing occurred, Orifa returned to find pieces
of her children's flesh scattered around the killing site. She received $400
from U.S. authorities to compensate her for her losses.4

I would also like Obama to write a "Letter of No Apology" to Gulam Rasul, a
school headmaster in the Afghan town of Khair Khana. On the morning of
October 21, 2001, the United States dropped a 500-pound bomb on his house,
killing his wife, three of his sons, his sister and her husband, his
brother, and his sister-in-law.5

Another "Letter of Apology" should go to Sher Kahn, an old man who lost
seven relatives when the United States assaulted the Afghan village of Niazi
Qala on December 29, 2001. Here is how the British author and filmmaker John
Pilger describes the attack:

The roar of the planes had started at three in the morning, long after
everybody had retired for the night. Then the bombs began to fall -
500-pounders leading the way, scooping out the earth and felling a row of
houses. According to neighbors watching from a distance, the planes flew
three sorties over the village and a helicopter hovered close to the ground,
firing flares, then rockets. Women and children were seen running from the
houses towards a dried pond, perhaps in search of protection from the
gunfire, but were shot as they ran.6

"Letters of No Apology" should also go from the "antiwar" Obama campaign to
survivors of:

a.. 35 Afghan refugees who were bombed by the U.S. for riding in a bus in
flight from U.S. assault.
b.. 160 Afghanis killed in repeated U.S. bombings of the village of Karam.
c.. 93 people killed when U.S. Ac 130 gun-ships strafed the small farming
village Chowkar-Karaz. (The Pentagon said the community was "supporting
terrorists" and therefore deserved its fate: "those people are dead," a
Pentagon spokesman told reporters, "because we wanted them dead.")
d.. Rampant U.S. torture of civilians and non-combatants employed as part
of the "war on terror" at the Bagram military base, near Kabul, since the
fall of 2001.
e.. 64 civilians killed when the U.S. bombed a wedding party in eastern
Afghanistan in early July of this year (This was the fourth wedding party
blown up by the U.S.-led "coalition" since the fall of 2001).
f.. 19 women who died in the gynecology wing of a Kabul hospital bombed by
the U.S. in October of 2001.
g.. The countless other U.S. attacks on Afghan villages that have added to
a civilian death toll that certainly goes well into the thousands since the
U.S. initiated its "liberation" of Afghanistan from a Taliban government the
U.S. largely put into place during the 1990s.7
The people of Afghanistan can be forgiven for thinking it might not be all
bad if Uncle Sam has occasionally taken his eye off "the ball in
Afghanistan."

U.S.-"liberated" Afghanistan remains desperately poor and violence-plagued
under the control of religious extremists, warlords and the deadly U.S.
Empire. Women are less safe there now than under the Taliban.8

"AS ILLEGAL AS THE INVASON OF IRAQ"

For what it's worth, prominent legal scholar Marjorie Cohn notes that "the
invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq." As Cohn
explains:

"The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their
international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military
force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which
authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan."

"The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article
51 of the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks,
not 'armed attacks' by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the
United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the
United States after September 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks
before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for
self-defense must be 'instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and
no moment for deliberation.' This classic principle of self-defense in
international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N.
General Assembly."9

Sold as a legitimate defensive response to the jetliner attacks of September
11, 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken without definitive
proof or knowledge that that country's largely U.S.-created Taliban
government was responsible in any way for 9/11. It occurred after the Bush
administration rebuffed efforts by that government to possibly extradite
accused 9/11 planners to stand trial in the U.S. The U.S. sought to destroy
the Taliban government with no legal claim to introduce regime change in
another sovereign state. The invasion took place over the protest of
numerous Afghan opposition leaders and in defiance of aid organizations who
expected a U.S. attack to produce a humanitarian catastrophe. And, as Noam
Chomsky noted in 2003, U.S. claims to possess the right to bomb
Afghanistan - an action certain to produce significant casualties - raised
the interesting question of whether Cuba and Nicaragua were entitled to set
off bombs in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S. provided shelter to
well-known terrorists shown to have conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban
and Nicaraguan people and governments.10 Under Bush's rationale for
launching his assault on Afghanistan (an attack that Obama wishes to
significantly expand), citizens of Latin American states whose dictatorships
were schooled in torture at the School of the Americas (Ft. Benning,
Georgia) would be free to attack American cities and villages.

"IRAQ HAS BEEN KILLED"

As for the U.S. "mistake" in Iraq, where to begin with the Letters of No
Apology that Obama and his staff need to write? The U.S. has undertaken a
highly criminal occupation of that country against the wishes of the
"liberated" nation's own populace. In a marvelous example of what Obama
called (in Berlin last week) U.S. "sacrifice" for "freedom,"11 the U.S. has
inflicted a bloody Holocaust on Mesopotamia, killing (directly and
indirectly) as many as 1.2 million Iraqis and maiming and displacing many
millions more. According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen last
December, "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American
occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked
Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There
is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."12

I wonder what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment
offered by Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant
in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state's
Democratic primary: "It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week
trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting
America back together."13

"We should support the millions of Iraqis," Obama told 200,000 rapt
listeners in Berlin, "who seek to rebuild their lives even as we pass on
responsibility to the Iraqi government."14

"Rebuild their lives" from exactly what, pray tell? Senator Obama did not
elaborate on the two U.S. military attacks, the decade plus of murderous
"economic sanctions" (which killed more than half a million children - a
cost that the current Obama advisor and supporter Madeline Albright called a
"price worth paying"), and the ongoing invasion's ever-climbing death toll.
Obama will continue the occupation as president, something known by those
who care to read between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign
rhetoric.

Reading Obama's line about "freedom"-loving America's overseas "sacrifice"
in his Berlin Address, I was reminded of something he said in a speech to
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: "The American
people have been extraordinarily resolved [in alleged support of the Iraq
"war" - P.S.]. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in
the streets of Fallujah.15

This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for
colossal U.S. war atrocity - the crimes included the indiscriminate
slaughter of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and
the practical leveling of an entire city - by the U.S. military in April and
November of 2004. The town was designated for destruction as an example of
the awesome state terror promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power.
Not surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of American
imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It was a deeply provocative and
insulting place to choose to highlight American "sacrifice" and "resolve" in
the brazenly imperialist occupation - described as "a colonial war" by the
grand U.S. imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski (an Obama foreign policy
advisor) - of Iraq.16

Recycling the imperial discourse of elite Democratic "doves" during and on
the Vietnam War,17 Obama insists that the monumentally illegal and
transparently petro-colonial occupation of Iraq was a "strategic blunder"
resulting from "our" over-zealous "good intentions" (sometimes we just get a
little crazy with our noble passion to spread liberty).

Not true: Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) is an imperial CRIME
(aggressive warfare was the top crime for which Nazi leaders were executed
at Nuremburg) obviously dedicated to deepening U.S. control over
hyper-strategic oil resources in the world's energy heartland while serving
the ongoing interests of the American military-industrial complex.18

Barack No Apology (Because We Are Good) Obama wants badly to expand what he
calls George W. Bush's "good" and "proper" war on Afghanistan while claiming
to want to reduce America's "mistake[n]" presence in Iraq.

The world should beware. Superpower may be getting ready to take on some
outwardly new faces, but its dangerous national narcissism will live on
along with its empire of bases, bullets, and bombs.

1.. "Transcript of Obama Interview on CNN" (July 25, 2008), The Page.
Regarding "force for good": never mind that the hyper-consumerist
automobile-addicted U.S. is home to 5 percent of world's population but
generates a quarter of the planet's climate-baking carbon emissions. Forget
the brazenly imperial 720-plus U.S. military bases that are stationed in
nearly country on Earth, the threat and recurrent reality of U.S. military
assault, the U.S.-spread mass culture of commodified nothingness, and the
dedicated U.S. advance of a negative (corporate) globalization model that
consigns billions to extreme poverty while the ever richer planetary Few
enjoy spectacular opulence (and related political hyper-power) and you begin
to get a sense of why many world citizens might think "America is part of
what has gone wrong in the world." [?]
2.. It is getting tiresome to hear Obama repeatedly refer to the United
States as living "in a time of war." The U.S. is engaged in one-sided
imperial violence against Iraq and Afghanistan. The "force for good" is
"waging a colonial war" (Zbigniew Bzrezinski) on relatively defenseless
others in distant imperial hinterlands. Ordinary Americans are not living
through "wartime conditions" and are in fact being encouraged to stay soft,
consumerist, spectator-ized, and demobilized, though a relatively small and
disproportionately working-class segment of the U.S. populace is enlisted
into the hard culture of militarism (the U.S. power elite having learned
from Vietnam not to involve the general populace in ugly colonial campaigns
abroad). For some useful reflections, see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and (on class, Vietnam,
and military recruitment) Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, Imperial
Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan,
2005), pp. 133-134. [?]
3.. For some interesting details from the primary campaign trail, see Paul
Street, "Obama's Good and 'Proper' War," ZNet (March 5, 2008). [?]
4.. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation
Books, 2007), pp. 284-85. [?]
5.. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp.285-86. [?]
6.. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, p. 286. [?]
7.. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 287-293; John Pilger, "Obama, The
Prince of Bait and Switch," The New Statesman, July 26, 2008. For details on
sources on hundreds of U.S. and related "coalition" and Northern Alliance
attacks leading to many civilian deaths between the fall of 2001 and the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, see University of New Hampshire professor Marc
Herold, "Daily Casualty Account of Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S. Bombing
and Special Forces Attack, October 7 [2001] Until Present Day" (March 15,
2003). [?]
8.. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 264-293. [?]
9.. Marjorie Cohn, "End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan," ZNet
(July 30, 2008). [?]
10.. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America's Quest for Global
Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206. See also Rajul
Mahajan, The New Crusade: America's War on Terror (New York: Monthly Review,
2002), p. 21. [?]
11.. Remarks of Barack Obama: "A World That Stands As One," Berlin,
Germany (July 24, 2008). [?]
12.. Nir Rosen, "The Death of Iraq," Current History (December 2007), p.
31. [?]
13.. WIFR Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois, "Obama Speaks at General
Motors in Janesville," February 13, 2008. [?]
14.. Obama, "A World That Stands As One." [?]
15.. Barack Obama, "A Way Forward in Iraq," Speech to Chicago Council on
Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006). [?]
16.. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Five Problems With the President's Plan,"
Washington Post (January 12, 2007). On Fallujah, see Michael Mann,
Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2005, p. xii; Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The
Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 27-28; Paul Street,
"Vilsacking Iraq," ZNet Magazine (December 22, 2006). [?]
17.. Noam Chomsky, "'Good News': Iraq and Beyond," ZNet (February 16,
20088); Noam Chomsky, "The Mechanisms and Practices of Indoctrination"
(1984), pp.207-208 in Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed.
C.P. Otero (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003). [?]
18.. For details and sources, see Paul Street, "Largely About Oil:
Reflections on Empire, Petroleum, Democracy, and the Occupation of Iraq," Z
Magazine (January 2008): 38-42. [?]