Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 23:11:56 +0200
Moral Obscenities and American Hypocrisy
Southeast Asia
by <http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/author/timlarocco/> Tim LaRocco |
on September 3rd, 2013
|
As I watched Secretary of State John Kerry stand before the lectern last
Monday afternoon and give an impassioned speech decrying the use of chemical
weapons in Syria, I was briefly transported back in time to about two years
ago. I was in the Vietnamese town of Gia Nghia in the province of Dak Nong,
casually strolling through the bustling streets and markets of this former
war-ravaged city in an attempt to find some iced coffee.
That was when I saw her. A small child, a little girl who couldn't have been
more than three or four years old. She had the face of a tiny angel, with
long, raven black hair that almost touched the ground. She was dressed in
nothing but her underwear, but that wasn't what made the sight of her odd.
No, it was her three legs that caused me to stop and stare, unable to look
away.
I doubt the girl was an unfortunate victim of a random birth defect. Many
Vietnamese were and still are victims of chemical weapons
<http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ranch_hand.htm> dumped on their
heads by the United States military. And the Vietnamese children of this
generation are still falling prey to the radiation fallout of those attacks.
Vietnamese children were the furthest thing from Secretary Kerry's mind
during this speech, however. As Mr. Kerry pontificated about "moral
obscenities" and essentially accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of war
crimes, I was reminded of his own words to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in April 1971 when the former Democratic candidate for President
said he had "committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others"
in Vietnam. He talked of burning villages to the ground and spraying no-fire
zones with bullets.
Usually it is men of the uniform who are the most apprehensive of heading
into another war if they rise to a position of leadership in the country.
And yet political actors such as Secretary Kerry and Senator John McCain,
the latter having spent five years as a prisoner of war in the infamous
Hanoi Hilton, seem to be the biggest war mongers there are. Maybe they have
forgotten the picture of that little girl above, her skin dripping off of
her as she tried to run away from a napalm attack from the U.S. Air Force.
Yes, we all care about innocent people being killed. No one is in favor of
killing civilians. The images coming out of Syria, which clearly show some
type of chemical weapons attack, are hard to stomach. But the question which
needs to be asked is what will American meddling do?
Our meddling in Vietnam did not make the lives of the Vietnamese any better;
in fact, it made it much worse. Our intervention and war in Iraq resulted in
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, more than half a million
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR200610100
1442.html> according to some sources. That was a war launched against
another dictator, Saddam Hussein, whom
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_ame
rica_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran> the U.S. had previously furnished
chemical weapons to which were then used against Iran and later against
Iraq's Kurdish population. And then there was the "Arab Spring," which
created the current monstrosities in Libya and Egypt.
I'm not going to speculate on the potential geopolitical endgame to the
Syrian conflict: the anticipated U.S. intervention, the al Qaeda terrorists,
<http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/13310> mostly from Saudi Arabia and Africa,
who comprise the majority of the "Syrian rebel army" that Senator McCain
wants to
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/john-mccain-syrian-rebels_n_336803
6.html> arm and fund, the
<http://rt.com/op-edge/syria-gas-attack-chemical-propaganda-796/> alarming
amount of influence that the puppet presidents and corrupt kings of the Gulf
states have over American foreign policy, the roles of other important
states such as Iran, Russia and Israel, and of course the
military-industrial-complex that is always in the background.
But if the desired outcome is to put a halt to the bloodshed - and that is
probably not the top priority for the war-makers because there is bloodshed
in other places in the world that has been
<http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2013/03/18/none-dare-call-it-a-genocide/>
written about in this space previously and which continues to go unnoticed -
then one couldn't possibly choose intervention as the best option. Even a
cursory reflection on American military history can tell you that it usually
doesn't end well: <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/28> for
innocent civilians nor for America's reputation. And you know what they say
about forgetting history.
<http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2013/09/03/moral-obscenities-and-american-hyp
ocrisy/vietnam1/> vietnam1
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