Moral Equivalency: Bombs = Barbarism

(Below, Afghan civilians collecting the earthly remains of some of their fellows.)


I cannot imagine how the following commentary by the redoubtable Chris Hedges, at Bob Scheer's TruthDig, escaped the attention of the SoCalledUnbiasedMedia (SCUM), but it did.

By Chris Hedges

The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown into a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

Theirs is a more personal sort of barbarity, ours a more detached sort, but there is barbarity enough to go around, certainly. There is a cautionary note to conclude:

The U.S. fuels the bonfires of war. The more troops we send to Afghanistan, the more drones we send on bombing runs over Pakistan, the more air-strikes we carry out, the worse the unraveling will become. We have killed twice as many civilians as the Taliban this year and that number is sure to rise in the coming months...“If the Americans step up the war in Afghanistan, they will be sucked into Pakistan,” Dr. Fournot warned. “Pakistan is a time bomb waiting to explode. You have a huge population, 170 million people. There is nuclear power. Pakistan is much more dangerous than Afghanistan. War always has its own logic. Once you set foot in war, you do not control it. It sucks you in.”

Obama is the--perhaps unwitting--tool of the forces he (wrongly) thinks he can contain. This hubris will certainly bite us in the ass...which is, of course, what hubris does.