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dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/04/imperialism-and-the-logic-of-mass-destruction/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/04/imperialism-and-the-logic-of-mass-destruction/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Imperialism and the Logic Of Mass
Destruction</h1>
May 4, 2017</div>
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<p>As throughout much of its war-obsessed history, the
United States is currently engaged in military conflict
– or threatening such action – across a broad contested
terrain. In the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria,
Washington has resorted to its familiar global <em>modus
operandi</em>: sending off barrages of missiles and
bombs, much of it hitting civilian populations and
resources needed for their survival. Death tolls
mount, the largest numbers lately in the protracted
battle for Mosul. Heavier casualties are being visited
upon non-combatants in Yemen, thanks to U.S.-backed
Saudi aerial savagery.</p>
<p>We have been told by the media that President Trump has
apparently relaxed the rules of warfare, thus allowing
civilians to be more easily victimized the midst of
armed conflict. Innocent noncombatants are being made
increasingly vulnerable to ravages of the largest and
most aggressive war machine in history. That, however,
would be a serious misreading of the situation: Trump,
like Obama, the Bushes, and Clinton before him, is
simply operating within an historical pattern of
imperial war making for which rules of engagement matter
little, if at all. There is no deviation from the
norm.</p>
<p>In fact Pentagon elites insist nothing has changed in
their methods of warfare – and they are right. While
the U.S. accuses, threatens, and attacks others for
their (real or imputed) transgressions, its own
apparatus of mass destruction continues with few legal
or moral constraints. In particular, Washington long
ago turned aerial terrorism into a normalized mode of
technowar that reduces civilians to dispensable objects.</p>
<p>In recent weeks U.S. aerial bombardments in Syria alone
have reportedly killed several hundred people, mainly
civilians. Daily raids in Iraq, mostly targeting ISIS
in Mosul, have accounted for more than 3000 civilian
deaths, according to AirWars sources. To believe this
is a departure from the past – or that civilian
casualties are simply an inevitable by-product of combat
– is to ignore the American history of savage warfare,
which since World War II has meant bringing horrendous
death and destruction from the skies.</p>
<p>There is actually nothing “indiscriminate” about this
savagery: all too often it has been planned, deliberate,
systematic – and <em>discriminate. </em> Moreover,
the U.S. has far surpassed any other nation in the
production, deployment, and <em>use </em>of WMD, its
military doctrines now as in the past embracing the
virtues of weaponry designed to bring mass destruction.
Consider that WMD comes in four distinct types: nuclear,
biological, chemical, conventional (mainly saturation
bombing). We could add to this list economic
sanctions of the sort the U.S. (through the United
Nations) imposed on Iraq during the 1990s that killed
hundreds of thousands of civilians. As the U.S.
resorted to sanctions continuously in the postwar era –
targeting Iran, Cuba, Yugoslavia, North Korea, and
Russia as well as Iraq – the civilian death toll (well
past a million) has far exceeded that from nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons <em>combined.</em></p>
<p>Yet it is <em>conventional </em>warfare that has
brought the greatest destruction, for both combatants
and civilians – and it remains the most imposing threat
today. The WMD threat arrives in the form of
strategic (alternatively saturation, area, carpet, or
scorched-earth) bombing, introduced by the British and
Americans during World War II and refined across the
decades. Worth noting is that the U.S. is the only
nation to have manufactured, stored, deployed, and used
<em>all five types of WMD</em>.</p>
<p>In densely-populated centers like Mosul and Raqqa – and
where hundreds of drone strikes are carried out –
efforts to distinguish between combatants and civilians
are virtually impossible; large numbers of civilian dead
and wounded tolls are inevitable. That has never
deterred U.S. military decision-makers at the Pentagon
or in the field, whatever “rules” are set forth in the
Universal Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) or
international statutes. From World War II to Korea,
Indochina, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and beyond, this carnage is
alternately blamed on mistakes, inescapable “collateral
damage”, intelligence failures, enemy use of “human
shields” – all while boasting of the latest “precision
weaponry”. Unfortunately, the U.S. military rarely
conducts genuine investigations into the devastation it
produces, and for good reason: it does want to come
face-to-face with its flagrant war crimes.</p>
<p>Since late 2014 U.S. (or Coalition) planes have carried
out more than 20,000 strikes in Iraq and Syria,
resulting in an estimated 70,000 “militant” deaths – a
number that surely includes civilian losses that will
never be known and based on a calculus that is routinely
understated. According to AirWars, at least 3325
civilians were killed from a total of 566 air strikes in
the region, but that is only where evidence is clearly
available. Meanwhile, recent non-combatant deaths in
Mosul alone have reached more than 2500, as reported by
AirWars. Important civilian objects – residences,
public buildings, markets, etc. – have been repeatedly
hit with high-explosive weaponry. The bombing raids
have only intensified.</p>
<p>What is taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria
replicates a familiar disregard for long-established
international law, as even the corporate media
unwittingly acknowledges by attributing a “loosening of
rules” to the out-of-control Trump. California
Representative Ted Lieu recently sent a letter to
Defense Secretary James Mattis seeking clarification of
American global behavior: “The substantial increases in
civilian deaths caused by U.S. military force in Syria
and Iraq brings into question whether the Trump
administration is violating the Laws of War.” Trump is
indeed violating such laws – specifically the 1949
Geneva Protocol prohibiting wanton attacks on civilians
– but, as noted, he is simply following
deeply-entrenched American practices.</p>
<p>For more than a century American imperialism has been
fueled by a combustible mixture of national
exceptionalism, militarism, racism, and pursuit of
global supremacy. Civilian inhabitants and their
necessary supports have never stood in the way of these
powerful forces, even where it has meant resort to
WMD. Demonized Asian populations have been
mercilessly targeted, with impunity – and unbelievably
savage consequences. Looking at the apparent
willingness of the Trump administration to consider
nuclear warfare on the Korean peninsula, with its
unthinkable horrors, we can readily see that little has
changed over the decades.</p>
<p>As Washington looks to reassert economic, political,
and military leverage in the Asia-Pacific region – the
so-called “Asian Pivot” to contain China – escalating
U.S. threats should be taken seriously. Whether
conventional or nuclear, the Pentagon is poised to
strike first against North Korea. For several months,
indeed years, the U.S. has done everything short of
all-out war to intimidate and subvert the Kim Jung Un
regime: large-scale military exercises, economic
sanctions, cyberattacks, new troop deployments, constant
threats of attack. There is much talk in Washington
and the media of “preemptive war”, including efforts to
“decapitate” the regime. A supposedly impenetrable
missile-defense system (THAAD) is being installed across
South Korea.</p>
<p>Koreans already know far more than they would prefer
about the horrors of mass destruction emanating from the
U.S. What can only be called a war of annihilation,
carried out by the U.S. to secure battlefield victory
over endless stalemate, in the face of strong Chinese
and North Korean forces, left a death toll on the
peninsula with estimates reaching as high as five
million, nearly 80 percent civilian. Political, legal,
and moral constraints were routinely tossed aside, as
American military culture eagerly took up the World War
II code that mass killing of civilians was legitimate –
actually vital – to the kind of war of attrition the
U.S. had waged against the Japanese.</p>
<p>When the U.S. Army was forced into a perilous retreat
in fall 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered his air
force to destroy “every means of communication, every
installation, factory, city, town, and village” in
Korea. Food sources and water facilities were
systematically targeted and obliterated. Nonstop
raids, employing napalm and other incendiary devices,
left the main centers of human life (including the
capital Pyongyang) in smoking ruins. Stephen Endicott
and Edward Hagerman, in their eye-opening book <em>The
United States and Biological Warfare, </em>write: “As
it had been in World War II, strategic bombing was
extended to the mass destruction of civilian
populations, and as in World War II the reservations
that the U.S. had about saturation bombing of Europeans
in that earlier war were not extended to Asians.”</p>
<p>In December of 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed
President Truman’s readiness to use atomic bombs in
Korea to avoid further stalemate or defeat. This
“option” was retained throughout the war, finally to be
jettisoned by President Eisenhower in 1953. White House
and Pentagon officials also favored employing both
chemical and biological weapons in a theater where mass
destruction was already far advanced.</p>
<p>In fact the U.S. <em>did </em>launch a phase of
biological warfare in Korea, a criminal project the
warfare state has tried to keep secret. Evidence
uncovered by the Koreans and Chinese revealed a U.S.
military campaign to disseminate a wide variety of
deadly biological agents, hoping to create epidemics,
panic, and social breakdown in the north. In late 1950
large outbreaks of plague, cholera, smallpox, and
encephalitis were reported in Pyongyang and several
provinces, according to Endicott and Hagerman. This
was part of a scorched-earth policy U.S. troops employed
as they retreated southward throughout 1950 and 1951.</p>
<p>Endicott and Hagerman add: “The U.S. had substantial
stocks of biological weapons on hand. Moral qualms
about using biological or atomic weapons had been
brushed aside by top leaders and biological warfare
might dodge the political bullet of adverse public and
world opinion if it were kept secret enough to make
plausible denial of its use.” Moreover, Washington had
not signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning such
weaponry. Later investigations and reports found the
U.S. guilty as charged, a finding naturally dismissed by
Americans as “Communist propaganda”.</p>
<p>The Pentagon’s biological program was kept intact until
early 1953. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force was busy
destroying every Korean target in sight, including
agricultural fields and hydroelectric dams, dropping an
endless supply of fragmentation bombs, napalm, and
high-explosive devices. In August 1952 Pyongyang was
leveled by a series of saturation-bombing raids. Still
unable to break the military stalemate, the USAF
transferred a large stock of atomic weapons to Okinawa
as it prepared for a new phase of warfare that,
fortunately, was never set in motion.</p>
<p>Embracing the great benefits of WMD, the U.S. military
was able to revitalize its strategy of total war,
understood by many at the summits of power as God’s
work. General Matthew Ridgway, Eighth Army commander,
could say in 1951: “The real issues are whether the
power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it
to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and
defeat Communism . . . [and] whether we are able to
survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to
perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.”
Before Korea, the God of a privileged imperial nation
had similarly blessed the American takeover of the
Philippines at a cost of several hundred thousand lives
– and before that the massacre of Indian tribes (by
Andrew Jackson’s troops) at Horseshoe Bend and (by
Colonel John Chivington’s marauders) at Sand Creek,
among many other atrocities.</p>
<p>An imperialist ideology that embellished, even
celebrated, warfare against civilians reached its first
methodical expression during World War II. In the
Pacific, this meant a war of annihilation against the
Japanese, who at that time stood for the “Asian masses”
or “hordes”. In such a war everything was
permissible, starting with the deliberate and ruthless
obliteration of entire cities, including those with
little or no military significance. Saturation bombing
launched by waves of the most technologically-developed
warplanes raised barbarism to new levels. Admiral
William Halsey, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, vowing
revenge for Pearl Harbor, promised that Japanese would
henceforth be spoken only in hell while ordering his
personnel to “kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”
(Worth noting: only <em>military </em>targets were hit
at Pearl Harbor.) <br>
</p>
<p>The remarkable American hatred of Japanese was destined
to produce, in John Dower’s words (<em>War without Mercy
</em>“a spellbinding spectacle of brutality and death.”</p>
<p>On March 9-10, 1945, U.S. planes dropped 1,665 tons of
incendiary bombs on Tokyo, with the aim of destroying
the city; at least 100,000 civilians were instantly
killed. Aerial terrorism then turned to Osaka, Nagoya,
Kobe, and more than 60 other cities, targeting mostly
defenseless civilian areas with vengeful frenzy. A few
cities remained – Hiroshima and Nagasaki among them –
until they were obliterated by the new superweapon
developed at the Manhattan Project, leaving another
150,000 dead amid unimaginable mass destruction.</p>
<p>There could be no justification for such criminality.
A.J. Grayling, in his book <em>All the Dead Cities, </em>surveyed
the history of strategic bombing and concluded that
World War II pilots should have refused orders to carry
out such raids. (None in fact did.) General Curtis
LeMay, architect of the firebombing attacks on Japanese
cities, later conceded: “If we had lost the war we would
all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Allied
prosecutors at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals moved
to exclude that very possibility, so aerial mass murder
was exempted from wartime culpability.</p>
<p>World War II set in motion an elevated trajectory of
imperial atrocities that would continue throughout the
postwar years. While nations were generally expected
to follow international law and wartime rules of
engagement, and the vast majority have chosen to do so,
the U.S. simply took another path: contempt for the
norms of universality. To this day Washington
steadfastly refuses participation in the International
Criminal Court (ICC), understandably fearing prosecution
of its own government and military personnel for war
crimes. The plain fact is that American elites can
routinely launch wars against peace and target civilian
populations without even the pretense of any legal
rationale.</p>
<p>Less than a decade after the Korean War the U.S.
commenced a new phase of barbarism in Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia, dropping eight million tons of bombs compared
to the two million tons dropped on all countries in
World War II. This was equivalent to 640 Hiroshimas.
Saturation bombing was perfected beyond its usage
against Japan and Korea: B-52s systematically
carpet-bombed large zones, followed by a torrent of
anti-personnel weapons including cluster bombs,
white-phosphorous, and a specially-upgraded napalm. By
1974, the U.S. military had dropped seven bombs for
every person in Indochina. As for napalm, a staggering
373,000 tons was unleashed in Vietnam, compared to
32,000 tons in Korea.</p>
<p>In Vietnam, the Pentagon relied heavily on chemical
warfare: roughly 6500 flights to spray Agent Orange and
other toxic agents were carried out between 1962 and
1971, the intent being to destroy crops and foliage.
Operation Ranch Hand contaminated more than 31,000
square kilometers, poisoning at least four million
people and leaving hundreds of thousands afflicted with
cancer, lung diseases, and birth defects. Such warfare
could never distinguish combatants from civilians, nor
did the U.S. military command make any real efforts to
do so.</p>
<p>In more recent decades, civilian death tolls resulting
from U.S. military operations in the Middle East and
beyond have easily surpassed one million. Harsh
economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran,
Syria, Cuba, and others could have reached that same
figure. Aerial bombardments have devastated large,
densely-populated areas of Iraq, Panama, Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, Libra, and Syria. Weapons “upgraded”
with depleted uranium (DU) have left a toxic legacy in
Iraq and Serbia, overwhelmingly harming civilians.</p>
<p>Back to Korea: the Trump administration says it has
“lost all patience” with North Korean leaders and their
“reckless behavior”, and has (again) “opened the door”
to military attack while seemingly holding out prospects
of diplomacy that, however, depend on rigid
stipulations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said
that for any talks to occur North Korea would first have
to “exhibit good faith commitment” by jettisoning its
nuclear program – a complete non-starter. Given such
imperial arrogance, can mounting confrontation be
avoided?</p>
<p>With all that is at stake – perhaps one million people
killed within the first day or so of a new Korean War,
vast urban centers decimated, a potential nuclear
exchange – rational leadership might be expected to
retreat from such a nightmarish scenario and consider a
more peaceful <em>modus vivendi.</em> (For the U.S.,
a peaceful option is exactly what is “off the
table”.) From the standpoint of Washington,
“rational” pursuits are also imperial pursuits and
imperial pursuits generally lead to military pursuits,
as history demonstrates. <br>
</p>
<p>Technowar managers are not especially sensitive to the
prospects of massive civilian losses. Normal behavioral
assumptions therefore do not apply to U.S. war
calculations, whoever occupies the White House.</p>
</div>
<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Carl Boggs </strong>is
the author of The Hollywood War Machine, with Tom
Pollard (second edition, forthcoming), and Drugs, Power,
and Politics, both published by Paradigm. </em> </p>
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