[Peace-discuss] Obama (like Bush): no apologies needed

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Obama’s Letters of No Apology
	by Paul Street / August 9th, 2008

Should Barack Obama’s volunteers mail “Letters of No Apology” to survivors of 
the large number of people killed by U.S. imperial assault in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Recently Obama was asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley if “there’s anything that’s 
happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms 
of foreign policy?” Obama responded by saying, “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. 
apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn’t keep our 
eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m much 
more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards.” The United 
States, Obama told Crowley, “remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world.”1

“SHOT AS THEY RAN”

I would like the Afghan “war”2 enthusiast3 Barack Obama to write a Letter of No 
Apology to Orifa Ahmed. On October 7, 2001, Orifa’s house in the Afghan village 
of Bibi Mahru was destroyed by a 500-pound bomb dropped by an American F-16 
plane. The explosion killed her husband (a carpet weaver), six of her children 
and two children, who lived (and died) next door. Away visiting relatives when 
the bombing occurred, Orifa returned to find pieces of her children’s flesh 
scattered around the killing site. She received $400 from U.S. authorities to 
compensate her for her losses.4

I would also like Obama to write a “Letter of No Apology” to Gulam Rasul, a 
school headmaster in the Afghan town of Khair Khana. On the morning of October 
21, 2001, the United States dropped a 500-pound bomb on his house, killing his 
wife, three of his sons, his sister and her husband, his brother, and his 
sister-in-law.5

Another “Letter of Apology” should go to Sher Kahn, an old man who lost seven 
relatives when the United States assaulted the Afghan village of Niazi Qala on 
December 29, 2001. Here is how the British author and filmmaker John Pilger 
describes the attack:

     The roar of the planes had started at three in the morning, long after 
everybody had retired for the night. Then the bombs began to fall — 500-pounders 
leading the way, scooping out the earth and felling a row of houses. According 
to neighbors watching from a distance, the planes flew three sorties over the 
village and a helicopter hovered close to the ground, firing flares, then 
rockets. Women and children were seen running from the houses towards a dried 
pond, perhaps in search of protection from the gunfire, but were shot as they ran.6

“Letters of No Apology” should also go from the “antiwar” Obama campaign to 
survivors of:

     * 35 Afghan refugees who were bombed by the U.S. for riding in a bus in 
flight from U.S. assault.
     * 160 Afghanis killed in repeated U.S. bombings of the village of Karam.
     * 93 people killed when U.S. Ac 130 gun-ships strafed the small farming 
village Chowkar-Karaz. (The Pentagon said the community was “supporting 
terrorists” and therefore deserved its fate: “those people are dead,” a Pentagon 
spokesman told reporters, “because we wanted them dead.”)
     * Rampant U.S. torture of civilians and non-combatants employed as part of 
the “war on terror” at the Bagram military base, near Kabul, since the fall of 2001.
     * 64 civilians killed when the U.S. bombed a wedding party in eastern 
Afghanistan in early July of this year (This was the fourth wedding party blown 
up by the U.S.-led “coalition” since the fall of 2001).
     * 19 women who died in the gynecology wing of a Kabul hospital bombed by 
the U.S. in October of 2001.
     * The countless other U.S. attacks on Afghan villages that have added to a 
civilian death toll that certainly goes well into the thousands since the U.S. 
initiated its “liberation” of Afghanistan from a Taliban government the U.S. 
largely put into place during the 1990s.7

The people of Afghanistan can be forgiven for thinking it might not be all bad 
if Uncle Sam has occasionally taken his eye off “the ball in Afghanistan.”

U.S.-”liberated” Afghanistan remains desperately poor and violence-plagued under 
the control of religious extremists, warlords and the deadly U.S. Empire. Women 
are less safe there now than under the Taliban.8

“AS ILLEGAL AS THE INVASON OF IRAQ”

For what it’s worth, prominent legal scholar Marjorie Cohn notes that “the 
invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq.” As Cohn explains:

“The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their 
international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force 
except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 
9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized 
the use of military force in Afghanistan.”

“The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of 
the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not 
‘armed attacks’ by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United 
States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, 
there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 
September 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his 
October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be ‘instant, 
overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’ This 
classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the 
Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.”9

Sold as a legitimate defensive response to the jetliner attacks of September 11, 
2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken without definitive proof 
or knowledge that that country’s largely U.S.-created Taliban government was 
responsible in any way for 9/11. It occurred after the Bush administration 
rebuffed efforts by that government to possibly extradite accused 9/11 planners 
to stand trial in the U.S. The U.S. sought to destroy the Taliban government 
with no legal claim to introduce regime change in another sovereign state. The 
invasion took place over the protest of numerous Afghan opposition leaders and 
in defiance of aid organizations who expected a U.S. attack to produce a 
humanitarian catastrophe. And, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2003, U.S. claims to 
possess the right to bomb Afghanistan — an action certain to produce significant 
casualties — raised the interesting question of whether Cuba and Nicaragua were 
entitled to set off bombs in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S. provided 
shelter to well-known terrorists shown to have conducted murderous attacks on 
the Cuban and Nicaraguan people and governments.10 Under Bush’s rationale for 
launching his assault on Afghanistan (an attack that Obama wishes to 
significantly expand), citizens of Latin American states whose dictatorships 
were schooled in torture at the School of the Americas (Ft. Benning, Georgia) 
would be free to attack American cities and villages.

“IRAQ HAS BEEN KILLED”

As for the U.S. “mistake” in Iraq, where to begin with the Letters of No Apology 
that Obama and his staff need to write? The U.S. has undertaken a highly 
criminal occupation of that country against the wishes of the “liberated” 
nation’s own populace. In a marvelous example of what Obama called (in Berlin 
last week) U.S. “sacrifice” for “freedom,”11 the U.S. has inflicted a bloody 
Holocaust on Mesopotamia, killing (directly and indirectly) as many as 1.2 
million Iraqis and maiming and displacing many millions more. According to the 
respected journalist Nir Rosen last December, “Iraq has been killed, never to 
rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the 
Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of 
solutions now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage 
can be contained.”12

I wonder what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment offered by 
Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in Janesville, 
Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state’s Democratic primary: 
“It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back 
together and start spending the money putting America back together.”13

“We should support the millions of Iraqis,” Obama told 200,000 rapt listeners in 
Berlin, “who seek to rebuild their lives even as we pass on responsibility to 
the Iraqi government.”14

“Rebuild their lives” from exactly what, pray tell? Senator Obama did not 
elaborate on the two U.S. military attacks, the decade plus of murderous 
“economic sanctions” (which killed more than half a million children — a cost 
that the current Obama advisor and supporter Madeline Albright called a “price 
worth paying”), and the ongoing invasion’s ever-climbing death toll. Obama will 
continue the occupation as president, something known by those who care to read 
between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign rhetoric.

Reading Obama’s line about “freedom”-loving America’s overseas “sacrifice” in 
his Berlin Address, I was reminded of something he said in a speech to The 
Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: “The American people have 
been extraordinarily resolved [in alleged support of the Iraq "war" - P.S.]. 
They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of 
Fallujah.15

This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for 
colossal U.S. war atrocity — the crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter of 
civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical 
leveling of an entire city — by the U.S. military in April and November of 2004. 
The town was designated for destruction as an example of the awesome state 
terror promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not surprisingly, 
Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of American imperialism in the 
Arab and Muslim worlds. It was a deeply provocative and insulting place to 
choose to highlight American “sacrifice” and “resolve” in the brazenly 
imperialist occupation — described as “a colonial war” by the grand U.S. 
imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski (an Obama foreign policy advisor) — of 
Iraq.16

Recycling the imperial discourse of elite Democratic “doves” during and on the 
Vietnam War,17 Obama insists that the monumentally illegal and transparently 
petro-colonial occupation of Iraq was a “strategic blunder” resulting from “our” 
over-zealous “good intentions” (sometimes we just get a little crazy with our 
noble passion to spread liberty).

Not true: Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) is an imperial CRIME (aggressive 
warfare was the top crime for which Nazi leaders were executed at Nuremburg) 
obviously dedicated to deepening U.S. control over hyper-strategic oil resources 
in the world’s energy heartland while serving the ongoing interests of the 
American military-industrial complex.18

Barack No Apology (Because We Are Good) Obama wants badly to expand what he 
calls George W. Bush’s “good” and “proper” war on Afghanistan while claiming to 
want to reduce America’s “mistake[n]” presence in Iraq.

The world should beware. Superpower may be getting ready to take on some 
outwardly new faces, but its dangerous national narcissism will live on along 
with its empire of bases, bullets, and bombs.

    1. “Transcript of Obama Interview on CNN” (July 25, 2008), The Page. 
Regarding “force for good”: never mind that the hyper-consumerist 
automobile-addicted U.S. is home to 5 percent of world’s population but 
generates a quarter of the planet’s climate-baking carbon emissions. Forget the 
brazenly imperial 720-plus U.S. military bases that are stationed in nearly 
country on Earth, the threat and recurrent reality of U.S. military assault, the 
U.S.-spread mass culture of commodified nothingness, and the dedicated U.S. 
advance of a negative (corporate) globalization model that consigns billions to 
extreme poverty while the ever richer planetary Few enjoy spectacular opulence 
(and related political hyper-power) and you begin to get a sense of why many 
world citizens might think “America is part of what has gone wrong in the 
world.” [↩]
    2. It is getting tiresome to hear Obama repeatedly refer to the United 
States as living “in a time of war.” The U.S. is engaged in one-sided imperial 
violence against Iraq and Afghanistan. The “force for good” is “waging a 
colonial war” (Zbigniew Bzrezinski) on relatively defenseless others in distant 
imperial hinterlands. Ordinary Americans are not living through “wartime 
conditions” and are in fact being encouraged to stay soft, consumerist, 
spectator-ized, and demobilized, though a relatively small and 
disproportionately working-class segment of the U.S. populace is enlisted into 
the hard culture of militarism (the U.S. power elite having learned from Vietnam 
not to involve the general populace in ugly colonial campaigns abroad). For some 
useful reflections, see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy 
and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 2008) and (on class, Vietnam, and military recruitment) Noam Chomsky and 
David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (New 
York: Metropolitan, 2005), pp. 133-134. [↩]
    3. For some interesting details from the primary campaign trail, see Paul 
Street, “Obama’s Good and ‘Proper’ War,” ZNet (March 5, 2008). [↩]
    4. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation 
Books, 2007), pp. 284-85. [↩]
    5. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp.285-86. [↩]
    6. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, p. 286. [↩]
    7. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 287-293; John Pilger, “Obama, The Prince 
of Bait and Switch,” The New Statesman, July 26, 2008. For details on sources on 
hundreds of U.S. and related “coalition” and Northern Alliance attacks leading 
to many civilian deaths between the fall of 2001 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 
see University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, “Daily Casualty Account 
of Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S. Bombing and Special Forces Attack, October 7 
[2001] Until Present Day” (March 15, 2003). [↩]
    8. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 264-293. [↩]
    9. Marjorie Cohn, “End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan,” ZNet (July 
30, 2008). [↩]
   10. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America’s Quest for Global 
Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206. See also Rajul Mahajan, 
The New Crusade: America’s War on Terror (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), p. 
21. [↩]
   11. Remarks of Barack Obama: “A World That Stands As One,” Berlin, Germany 
(July 24, 2008). [↩]
   12. Nir Rosen, “The Death of Iraq,” Current History (December 2007), p. 31. [↩]
   13. WIFR Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois, “Obama Speaks at General 
Motors in Janesville,” February 13, 2008. [↩]
   14. Obama, “A World That Stands As One.” [↩]
   15. Barack Obama, “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Speech to Chicago Council on 
Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006). [↩]
   16. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Five Problems With the President’s Plan,” 
Washington Post (January 12, 2007). On Fallujah, see Michael Mann, Incoherent 
Empire (New York: Verso, 2005, p. xii; Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of 
Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 27-28; Paul Street, “Vilsacking 
Iraq,” ZNet Magazine (December 22, 2006). [↩]
   17. Noam Chomsky, “‘Good News’: Iraq and Beyond,” ZNet (February 16, 20088); 
Noam Chomsky, “The Mechanisms and Practices of Indoctrination” (1984), 
pp.207-208 in Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. C.P. Otero 
(New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003). [↩]
   18. For details and sources, see Paul Street, “Largely About Oil: Reflections 
on Empire, Petroleum, Democracy, and the Occupation of Iraq,” Z Magazine 
(January 2008): 38-42. [↩]

Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian and 
independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa City, IA. He is 
the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 
2005); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era 
(Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis 
(Rowman&Littlefied 2007). Street's new book Barack Obama and the Future of 
American Politics can now be ordered. Read other articles by Paul.

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