[Peace-discuss] The Coming Apocalypse

[pfmueth]

This is powerful and could possible fit on a legal size page...

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=12276

The Coming Apocalypse
Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com
November 5, 2001


Does anybody in this country get it?


Does anybody understand what the United States is on the verge of doing?


Experienced, respected food aid organizations warn that even before the 
bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, some 7,500,000 Afghans were -- 
through a gut-wrenching combination of poverty, drought, war, dislocation, and 
repression -- at risk of starving to death this winter. When the bombing 
began, almost all delivery of food from the outside world stopped. Now, roads 
and bridges are destroyed, millions more people are dislocated, and the snow 
is steadily approaching from higher elevations and from the north.


For weeks, aid organizations, along with voices from throughout the region, 
have been begging the United States to call off its bombing campaign, at least 
for long enough so that aid agencies can conduct the massive transfer of food 
into and throughout Afghanistan that is necessary to prevent death on a scale 
the world has not seen in a long, long time. On our newscasts, it's politely 
referred to as a "humanitarian crisis." That's a euphemism that makes 
"collateral damage" seem humane.


Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months. That's 
three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times 
the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on 
September 11 (a number that reports are now suggesting is vastly inflated), 
we're talking the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, 
every day, for 150 days. Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths. 
Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States, but most of which can still 
be prevented -- except that the United States is refusing to allow them to be 
prevented.


It repulses me to say this, but I suspect a lot of Americans don't care. 
They'd rather see the United States "get" Osama bin Laden (though there's no 
actual evidence that we're any closer to that today than we were two months 
ago, and probably the task is harder as he becomes more popular and 
protected). A lot of people in this country do not care that a staggering 
number of innocent people are on the verge of being condemned to death, or 
that most of the world will blame the United States. Correctly.


We should care. If the object of this war was to thwart terrorism -- to bring 
existing terrorists to justice, and to isolate them politically and culturally 
so that others won't throw in their lot -- in less than a month, the United 
States has perpetrated one of the most abject failures in military history. It 
still does not know where any of Al-Qaeda's leadership even is. It is on the 
verge of succeeding in its goal of creating a unified Afghanistan government 
-- unfortunately, Afghans are uniting behind the Taliban, as warlord after 
warlord sets aside long-standing differences to stand shoulder to shoulder to 
fight the American invaders. Tens of thousands more young Muslim men are 
lining up to cross the borders into Afghanistan to join them. The ones that 
survive the experience will carry a lifetime of hate: living, breathing proof 
that within a month, America bombed a country but lost its war in spectacular 
fashion.


That's today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter? How 
much future terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush Administration have 
inspired then? If several million Islamic sisters and brothers starve to 
death, innocent civilians trapped between winter and the rage of America, how 
many of Islam's 1.2 billion adherents -- or the five billion other people on 
earth -- are going to take George Bush's proclamations about eradicating 
"terrorists" and "evildoers" to heart, and label him, and us, as the prime 
examples?


In less than two months, the United States government has gone from the moral 
high ground of being victimized by one of the most heinous crimes in world 
history, to being within a week or two of quite visibly committing a crime so 
much larger as to obliterate the world's memory of September 11. Remarkably, 
almost nobody in the United States seems to have either noticed, understood, 
or cared. While even progressives wring their hands over the ambiguity of a 
war fought under the auspices of America's legitimate right to defend itself, 
a situation is unfolding in which there is absolutely no moral ambiguity at 
all, and for which many people will want to hold each of us as accountable as 
the world held post-war Germans. Where were you? What did you say? How could 
you allow this to happen? Or, a more likely reaction in the Islamic world: Why 
should millions of you not die as well? America will have set out to isolate 
one man, and instead killed millions and isolated itself. And much of the 
world will not rest until we are brought to our knees.


Seven and a half million people. The snowline is creeping down the 
mountainsides. The food is almost gone. The infrastructure is in shambles. 
There will be no "independent verification" of the body count. There wasn't in 
the Holocaust or Rwanda or Cambodia, either. The judgment of the world did not 
need one. The clock is ticking. Where were you?