[rad-green] Blood On Whose Hands? In survey after int ernational survey, the US is perennially voted world’ s greatest threat to peace.

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/06/blood-whose-hands
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/06/blood-whose-hands>Common
Dreams          January 6, 2020Blood On Whose Hands?In survey after
international survey, the United States is perennially voted the world’s
greatest threat to peace in most of the world’s nations.by Brett Wilkins*

[image: The price was even higher for Iraqis the second time around, with a
2015 study concluding at least 1.2 million, and possibly more than 2
million, civilians and combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have
died in the ongoing US-led war on terrorism, now in its 19th year. (Photo:
Shutterstock)]

*The price was even higher for Iraqis the second time around, with a 2015
study concluding at least 1.2 million, and possibly more than 2 million,
civilians and combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have died in the
ongoing US-led war on terrorism, now in its 19th year. (Photo:
Shutterstock)*

In 1965, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration backed
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/>
a
military coup by a right-wing Indonesian general named Suharto — who like
many Javanese used only his given name — that overthrew Sukarno, hero of
his country’s freedom struggle against Dutch colonialism and its first
post-independence president. Sukarno, an ardent anti-imperialist, had made
the fatal errors of protecting Indonesian communists and cozying up to the
Soviet Union and China, and was marked for elimination. In service of this,
the US Embassy in Jakarta gave
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/05/21/us-officials-lists-aided-indonesian-bloodbath-in-60s/ff6d37c3-8eed-486f-908c-3eeafc19aab2/>
Suharto’s
forces “shooting lists” of known and suspected communists; US officials
later admitted checking off names of victims who had been killed or
captured.

“It was a really big help to the army,” explained former diplomat Robert
Martens. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot
of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad.” Suharto consolidated his
power and, with US support, ruled Indonesia by 1967. More than half a
million Indonesians died in what the New York Times called
<https://books.google.com/books?id=oBM8UiDYz1MC&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=%252522one+of+the+most+savage+mass+slayings+of+modern%252522+new+york+times&source=bl&ots=Am6mA4i430&sig=ACfU3U0pmBCzJx2beTtmleUH6X8VG8GwgQ&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_jOi7tujmAhUFs54KHVP0DecQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ%2523v=onepage&q=%252522one%252520of%252520the%252520most%252520savage%252520mass%252520slayings%252520of%252520modern%252522%252520new%252520york%252520times&f=false>
“one
of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history.

Of Hands and Blood

Fast-forward 55 years to the present, when amid the crescendoing drumbeat
of war, this time against Iran, one phrase seems to dominate the rhetoric
of warmongering politicians and pundits alike: Qasem Soleimani, the top
Iranian general assassinated along with numerous associates in a US drone
strike in Baghdad on Thursday, “has the blood of Americans on his hands,”
we’re told. And yes, it’s true that hundreds of US troops in Iraq were
killed or wounded by Iran-backed fighters. It’s also true that those troops
were foreign invaders engaged in an illegal war of regime change,
occupation and exploitation, and that Soleimani is seen by many as a hero
who courageously — and successfully — defended his Shia brethren in Iraq
and elsewhere from imperialist domination.

In the post-World War II era, (U.S.) has invaded or attacked, in more or
less chronological order, North Korea, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, Cuba, North
Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Libya, Grenada, Nicaragua,
Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Serbia, Yemen,
Pakistan and Syria. That’s 22 countries.

We’re not here today to debate whether Soleimani was a hero or a villain,
for it is possible to be both, to different people. Nor are we here to
remind that Iran is a country — which  despite being surrounded by hostile
US and allied forces, and despite a long history
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/20/exceptionally-american-historical-amnesia-behind-pompeos-claim-40-years-unprovoked>
of
sometimes extreme US aggression and meddling — that hasn’t started a
foreign war since the early 1700s. Or that the immediate genesis of the
current crisis is Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal with
which everyone agrees Iran was compliant, a move which many warned
<https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/05/08/trump-pulls-us-out-horrible-one-sided-nuclear-accord-iran.html>
could
precipitate fallout of a sort very much like what’s happening now. Or, for
that matter, how President Donald Trump’s act of war will further inflame
the world’s most combustible region.

No, we’re here today to discuss bloody hands. America’s bloody hands, to be
precise. Logic would dictate that the US presumption that having American
blood on one’s hands marks one for what Trump called
<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-soleimani-strike-his-reign-terror-over-n1110226>
“termination”
would apply equally to those touched by America’s bloody hands, and the US
has exponentially more blood on its hands than Iran. In the post-World War
II era, it has invaded or attacked, in more or less chronological order,
North Korea, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, Cuba, North Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican
Republic, Cambodia, Libya, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Bosnia,
Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Serbia, Yemen, Pakistan and Syria.
That’s 22 countries, some of them subjected to two or more US attacks or
invasions.

‘Life Is Cheap’

While it is impossible to tell precisely how many people have been killed
by a country that  infamously
<https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/02/world/nation-war-casualties-us-military-has-no-count-iraqi-dead-fighting.html>
“doesn’t
do body counts,” contemporary accounts and historical analyses paint a very
bloody picture. After the Korean War, US strategic air commander Gen.
Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay acknowledged
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-war-crime-north-korea-wont-forget/2015/03/20/fb525694-ce80-11e4-8c54-ffb5ba6f2f69_story.html?utm_term=.eb16699b0c55>
that
“we killed off 20 percent of the population” of North Korea. That’s nearly
1.9 million men, women and children. In comparison, the Nazis killed 17
percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. At least half a
million—and perhaps as many as a million—North Korean and Chinese troops
also died.

At least one million <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23427726> North
Vietnamese soldiers, civilians and allied Viet Cong fighters, along with at
least 150,000
<https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/cambodia/tl02.html> Cambodians
and a similar number of Laotians
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/laos-us-bombing-vietnam-cold-war> were
killed by US and allied bombs and bullets during the Vietnam War. Hundreds
of millions of bombs were dropped
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/laos-vietnam-war-us-bombing-uxo/>
on
the peasants of Laos, the most heavily-bombed nation in history, and more
than 20,000 Laotians, many of them children, have been killed
<https://www.maginternational.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/laos/> by
unexploded ordnance since the bombing ended in 1973. President Richard
Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, along with a US-backed coup, ushered in
the horrific era of Khmer Rouge rule and an ensuing genocide that claimed
another 1.5 to 2 million lives.

Such bloodletting was a secondary concern for Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, who in November 1975 told
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/khmer-rouge-cambodian-genocide-united-states/>
Thailand’s
foreign minister to inform the Khmer Rouge that the United States would not
oppose its rule. “We will be friends with them,” Kissinger said. “They are
murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.” A month later,
President Gerald Ford and Kissinger were in Jakarta green-lighting
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/> another genocidal campaign,
this time in East Timor. By the time it was over, 200,000 of the
territory’s 700,000 people were dead.

“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,”
Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, explained
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huFh760p-MA> in 1974. “Life is cheap in
the Orient.”

Although not quite Oriental, life was also cheap in Iraq, where US forces
killed
<https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/30/world/greenpeace-count-puts-dead-from-war-in-gulf-at-200000.html>
an
estimated 200,000 Iraqi troops and civilians, at a cost of only 292
coalition troops, during the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations later
acknowledged
<https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/01/world/iraq-sanctions-kill-children-un-reports.html>
that
subsequent sanctions were to blame for the premature deaths of more than
half a million Iraqi children. When journalist Lesley Stahl noted that this
was “more children than died in Hiroshima,” then-US ambassador to the
United Nations Madeleine Albright replied
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8>, “we think the price is worth
it.”

The price was even higher for Iraqis the second time around, with a 2015
study concluding
<https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf> at least
1.2 million, and possibly more than 2 million, civilians and combatants in
Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have died in the ongoing US-led war on
terrorism, now in its 19th year. Thousands more people have died in Syria,
Somalia, Yemen and Libya.

A World of Hurt

Those were just the big wars. Thousands of men, women and children have
been killed by US bombs and bullets in Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
Grenada, Panama and Yugoslavia. Proxy forces have killed at least hundreds
of thousands more on every inhabited continent save Australia. In Iran
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/20/exceptionally-american-historical-amnesia-behind-pompeos-claim-40-years-unprovoked>,
the US has overthrown the most popular government Iranians have ever known,
supported a brutal monarch and trained his forces in torture and
repression, shot down a civilian airliner killing hundreds of civilians and
trained terrorists who have carried out deadly attacks against Americans
and Iranians alike.

Perhaps this sanguinary legacy is why, in survey after international
survey, the United States is perennially voted
<https://brilliantmaps.com/threat-to-peace/> the world’s greatest threat to
peace in most of the world’s nations. After Soleimani’s assassination,
Trump boasted that “his bloody rampage is forever gone.” If only the same
were true of Trump, who continues to fulfill his campaign promise to “bomb
the shit out of” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_35yJpVyAA> Islamist
militants and “take out their families” as the US wages war in seven
countries
<https://www.defenseone.com/news/2018/03/the-d-brief-march-15-2018/146688/>
 and kills thousands
<https://theintercept.com/2019/10/02/trump-impeachment-civilian-casualties-war/>
of
civilians and combatants alike. So much more so than Iran’s, America’s
hands are drenched in blood.

*Brett Wilkins <https://www.commondreams.org/author/brett-wilkins> is a San
Francisco-based freelance author and editor-at-large for US news at Digital
Journal. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human
rights, is archived at www.brettwilkins.com <http://www.brettwilkins.com/>.*

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