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When the super effective reach of U.S. military killing power begets astronomical numbers a Colin Powell is wont to quip "it's not a number that I am particularly interested in," or a Gen. Tommy Franks will pipe in with, "We don't do body counts." But Associate Press keeps giving us daily body counts of US designated enemy or suspected enemy combatants, a tradition that dates back to the counting of Korean bodies.
The American-Empire-protecting media cartel makes sure we don't read the words of the more famous Marine General Smedley Butler regarding attacking foreign populations, "as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket ...Only a small "inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
When relatives of the dead who got in harms way of attacking U.S. military in foreign lands get angry, they shouldn't hate Americans and curse them, because most Americans believe they are always the good guys doing good while protecting American freedoms, and many returning sensitive American soldiers have nervous breakdowns for having witnessed so much killing.
Unwarranted attacks upon others runs deep in the American psyche and traces back to its colonial beginnings. No man of any of the many indigenous nations of America ever sailed over to invade and attack England and Europe. No Africans came across the ocean to attack and enslave the English colonists or the citizens of the new United States.
In the 19th and early 20th century Americans, in general, were taught to be proud of attacking people that had not attacked it - Filipinos, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Dominican, Cubans, Spanish.
Now in the space age and era of instant planetary communications, as Afghanis and Pakistanis look down on bodies of their children, or a child stares at the body of a parent, or neighbors search for the remains whole families, where is the U.S. clergy? Where is the conscience of those in suits and ties when, incredulously, we point out this orgy of ignorant self-righteous carnage?
When in 1993, President Carter accepted a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Palestine, he was aware that his ordered cruel CIA attack on a friendly Afghan government had already caused fourteen years of death and severe destruction for that largely pastoral population. Subsequently, Carter had to watch what he so cleverly began empower and motivate the attackers of 9/11, engulf other nations and continue into its thirtieth year in Afghanistan.
Destiny accepting Buddhists of Vietnam have a saying, "Big nations attack little ones." Gentle Buddhism teaches them to have compassion for the few citizens of those "big nations" that suffer for being awake to their self-condemnable complicity in merciless mass-murder of innocents.
Islam, apparently, seems to dictate a more dangerous reaction to unprovoked attacks, and we wonder why, with all the increasingly available technology, our power elite seems to count on preventing a massive violent response of equal mass-destruction. After all, it has already occurred spectacularly, though on a limited scale, on 9/11/2001.
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