[Peace-discuss] [ufpj-activist] Fwd: We should all be screaming in outrage......

Fri Apr 14 15:10:37 UTC 2017

my piece in the Guardian today re MOAB. Medea

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/14/the-mother-of-all-bombs-big-deadly-ineffective
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/14/the-mother-of-all-bombs-big-deadly-ineffective>*

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 10:01 AM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> I guess we should be calling on the local Democrat Party to organize a
> protest against Trump, and the bombing. Knowing that the bombing takes a
> back seat to Party Politics. At least it will get the people out into the
> streets, making their voices heard, better than nothing.
> We had 3,000 marchers with “pink pussy hats” in January this year in our
> town. Now the best those of us who are anti-war, can accumulate is
> approximately thirteen.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>    - Print
>    <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/14/pers-a14.html?view=print>
>    - Leaflet
>    <http://intsse.com/wswspdf/en/articles/2017/04/14/pers-a14.pdf>
>    - Feedback
>    <http://www.wsws.org/en/special/contact.html?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsws.org%2Fen%2Farticles%2F2017%2F04%2F14%2Fpers-a14.html&t=US%20drops%20largest%20non-nuclear%20weapon%20on%20Afghanistan%3A%20A%20crime%20against%20humanity>
>    - Share » <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/14/pers-a14.html#>
>
> US drops largest non-nuclear weapon on Afghanistan: A crime against
> humanity 14 April 2017
>
> The US military’s dropping of the largest non-nuclear weapon in its
> arsenal on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border Thursday is a crime against
> humanity. Even as the US government and the mass media were engaged in a
> lying propaganda campaign denouncing Syria and Russia for the use of poison
> gas, the American military was positioning the monstrous weapon—the Massive
> Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB)—for use in Afghanistan.
>
> While the Pentagon has released few details about the impact of the
> bombing, one can be certain that the total number of deaths resulting from
> the dropping of the MOAB is a massive multiple of the number killed in the
> alleged Syrian gas attack, assuming—and this is by no means certain—that
> the gas attack even took place.
>
> Seventy-two years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
> American imperialism has proven once again that it is the most ruthless and
> criminal force on the planet.
>
> The use of the MOAB has implications that extend beyond Afghanistan. It
> demonstrates—and this is, in fact, the principal aim of the attack—that
> there are no restraints on what the US military is prepared to do in
> pursuit of the interests of American imperialism.
>
> In the context of mounting military tensions from the Korean peninsula to
> Syria to eastern Europe, the detonation of the massive bomb over
> Afghanistan represents a warning to Russia, Iran, North Korea and any
> country that dares to challenge Washington’s interests that there is no
> limit to the level of violence that US imperialism will unleash against
> them.
>
> The weapon, officially known as the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast,
> designated by the Pentagon as MOAB, or “mother of all bombs,” detonates
> nearly 20,000 pounds of explosives in mid-air, igniting the atmosphere and
> creating a massive concussion that obliterates everything within a radius
> of 1,000 yards. Its shock waves are capable of killing people within a
> radius of up to 1.7 miles. The impact of the explosion is the equivalent of
> a nuclear weapon for those caught in the target zone.
>
> Designed for use in the “shock and awe” campaign unleashed with the 2003
> US invasion of Iraq, it was never utilized in combat over the course of 14
> years. Even as the Pentagon carried out a war and occupation that claimed
> some one million Iraqi lives, the weapon was seen as too destructive to
> serve US strategic purposes.
>
> Planning for the use of this horrific weapon in Afghanistan began under
> the Obama administration.
>
> According to the Pentagon command, this genuine “weapon of mass
> destruction” was dropped for the first time on a remote district of
> Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province in order to obliterate alleged
> caves and tunnels used by elements of the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic
> State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
>
> There is no immediate tactical, much less strategic, justification for the
> dropping of such a massive weapon on a small, poorly armed band of Islamist
> guerrillas—a Pakistan-based group that merely adopted the ISIS logo.
> Instead, the attack has all the earmarks of a calculated demonstration of
> American military might, the most terrifying one that could be staged short
> of a nuclear attack.
>
> The bombing comes just one week after Washington carried out a naked act
> of military aggression against Syria, firing 59 cruise missiles into a
> government airbase and killing at least 15 Syrians, the majority of them
> civilians.
>
> That attack was justified in the name of retaliation for an alleged
> chemical weapons attack blamed on the Syrian government. Damascus denied
> using any such weapon and, the endless lies of the Western media
> notwithstanding, all objective evidence points to a provocation staged by
> the CIA and the Al Qaeda-linked fighters that it supports in Syria.
>
> Even as the US government and media churned out war propaganda over the
> fabricated “chemical weapons” attack in Syria, Washington was preparing to
> drop its largest non-nuclear weapon on Afghanistan.
>
> The Pentagon has claimed that it “took every precaution to avoid civilian
> casualties with this strike.” Such promises, made repeatedly as the US
> military has killed millions across the Middle East, are utterly worthless.
> According to initial reports, there are several villages near the target
> area and, in all likelihood, civilian deaths and injuries will be massive.
>
> At this point, no one knows what the real toll from this attack is, and,
> if left to the US media, no one will ever be told. The same editorialists
> for CIA house organs like the *New York Times,* and television news
> talking heads who have parroted the government’s denunciations of the Assad
> regime over the chemical weapons provocation in Syria, are completely
> indifferent to the loss of life caused by the massive US bomb dropped on
> Afghanistan.
>
> Similarly, the media largely ignores the ongoing carnage inflicted by US
> bombs and missiles upon the people of Iraq and Syria. On Wednesday, a US
> airstrike in western Mosul killed 13 civilians while injuring another 17,
> most of them seriously. On the same day, a UN agency described the
> devastation wrought by the US siege of the Iraqi city, where hundreds, if
> not thousands, of men, women and children have died: “Homes are being
> destroyed. Schools and health centers are damaged and crucial public
> infrastructure including electricity and water stations are in ruins,”
> according to the report, with the destruction turning over 300,000 people
> into homeless refugees.
>
> Meanwhile, in northern Syria, US warplanes carried out a “friendly fire”
> airstrike that killed 18 Kurdish fighters, while the Syrian government
> reported that a US bomb hit an Al Qaeda weapons depot, spreading chemical
> agents that may have killed hundreds of civilians. None of these incidents
> are given any significant coverage; much less do they provoke the moral
> outrage of those crying crocodile tears over the victims of the alleged
> chemical attack for which the Syrian government has been framed.
>
> Who are these people to lecture anyone on “human rights,” much less to
> posture as opponents of “terrorism?” Once again, US imperialism has
> demonstrated to the world that it is bound by absolutely no constraints of
> international law, much less morality. Its violent and predatory actions on
> the world stage are a direct expression of the criminal and parasitic
> character of the American capitalist ruling class, personified in the
> loathsome figure of Donald Trump.
>
> This latest atrocity comes fifteen and a half years after the US invaded
> Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban government, installing its own puppet
> regime and carrying out a bloody war and occupation ever since.
> Conservative estimates put the Afghan death toll since 2001 at some
> 200,000, with hundreds of thousands more wounded and millions turned into
> refugees. From the outset, the purpose of this intervention was to
> subjugate the Afghan people to semi-colonial American domination and to
> further US imperialism’s drive to assert its hegemony over the energy-rich
> region of Central Asia.
>
> The timing of the bombing was significant. It came on the very eve of
> talks called for April 14 in Moscow on a peace settlement in Afghanistan.
> Russia has called the meeting together with China and Pakistan, with the
> participation of nine other countries, including India and Iran. The
> Taliban has indicated that it may join the talks. While invited, Washington
> failed to confirm whether it will attend, and US military commanders have
> made repeated baseless allegations of Russian support for the Taliban.
>
> Whether an armed confrontation takes place between US and Russian
> warplanes in the skies over Syria, in a military strike against North Korea
> or in a provocation on Russia’s western borders, the next step from the
> weapon dropped on Afghanistan is the launching of nuclear missiles.
>
> Workers and young people in the US and internationally must respond to
> these ominous events with utmost seriousness and a determination to stop US
> and global capitalism from engulfing the planet in a third, nuclear world
> war.
>
> Protests must be organized across the United States and around the world
> against the latest US atrocities in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq as part of
> the struggle to build a mass antiwar movement based upon the working class
> and the program of socialist internationalism. At the very center of this
> struggle lies the need to build the Socialist Equality Party and the
> International Committee of the Fourth International—the only consistent
> political opponents of world imperialism—as the revolutionary leadership of
> the working class.
>
> Bill Van Auken and David North of the WSWS.ORG <http://wsws.org/>
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-- 

*Medea Benjamin *

*CODEPINK <http://codepink.org> Co-founder*
*(415) 235-6517 *
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