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News :: Miscellaneous |
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"Afghanistan: We Didn't Have to Do This" |
Current rating: 0 |
by Stephanie Salter, San Francisco Chronicle
(No verified email address) |
19 Oct 2001
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Here's an excellent opinion piece by Stephanie Salter of the
San Francisco Chronicle. I assume it's copyrighted, but it
was sent to me in e-mail. This chick probably won't have
her job long. JW |
Afghanistan: We didn't have to do this
San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday, October 17, 2001
by Stephanie Salter (her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays)
As long as we still have it, I'm going to make the most of the First
Amendment: What we are doing in, above, and to Afghanistan is
short-sighted, counterproductive and immoral. That I am among a mere 6 or
10 percent of Americans (depending on the poll) who feel this way hurts my
heart.
The amount of nonthink, or flat-out denial, that is required to support
Operation Enduring Freedom is painful to contemplate. Sending thousands of
kids - "our brave men and women in uniform" - to risk their lives for it is
unbearable.
We Americans have NEVER been known for critical thought and analysis.
Context and historical perspective rank low on our national priorities
list, somewhere below foreign language skills but above gas conservation.
Add to that our deliberate myopia and chronic impatience, and you have the
U.S. military trashing big chunks of Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-I-Sharif in
pursuit of a cave-dwelling mass murderer and his worldwide band of suicidal
disciples.
Damn the advice from seasoned experts on terrorism and the Middle East;
full speed ahead with the cruise missiles.
After all, WE HAD TO DO SOMETHING. That phrase. It has been uttered so
many times since Sept. 11, I expect to see it printed on our currency any
day now. People who call themselves pacifists, people who admit that they
are uneasy with the destruction we are raining down on Afghanistan -
who can't see how this frenzy of B-1's is actually going to get
Osama bin Laden - offer up the phrase as if it were a bona fide moral
escape clause: WE HAD TO DO SOMETHING.
Lord, yes. We'd waited more than three weeks before we started dropping
bombs. Such restraint. Why don't we at least cut the b.s., and own up to
exactly what it is we are doing?
First, does the phrase "collateral damage" sound familiar? When Persian
Gulf War veteran Timothy VcVeigh used it to describe the 168 children and
adults he murdered in the Oklahoma City bombing, we took it as proof of his
evilness, as the justification that we needed to execute him.
What is it proof of when U.S. generals use it to describe the Afghan
civilians that our bombs already have killed? How about the untold numbers
who will die from hunger or disease on their way to refugee camps that
can't take them?
Likely, because McVeigh shocked us with the term, "collateral damage" seems
to have given way to a new euphemism. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
put it last week:
"There is no question but that when one is engaged militarily that there
is going to be unintended loss of life." Lest anyone think him cold,
Rumsfeld added, "And there's no question but that I and anyone involved
regrets the unintended loss of life."
When U.S. civilians are killed, it's a travesty. When the dead are from
someplace else -- especially a backward, poverty-stricken country such as
Afghanistan -- it's regrettable.
Second, let's be honest about the blowback, the truly lethal, political
time bombs that we plant with every payload among millions of mainstream
Muslims in the Middle East and Asia. George W. Bush can insist that "the
United States is a friend to Islam." How many regrettable losses of life
do reasonable Muslims tolerate before they begin to doubt our friendship?
Without a doubt, after Sept. 11, we did have to do something, something
that takes time, deep and true coalition-building and patient cunning.
Instead, we've chosen to play into a mass murderer's hands and prove that
our reverence for human life starts diminishing at America's border. |
