Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity

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By Intercept

Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable — maybe heroic — and must not cease.

My education in wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000.

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Categories: Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Military

3 replies »

  1. If I was the anarcho-dictator of America I’d put everyone who’s ever been in a foreign war, and every cop, under investigation as though they were ordinary private citizens and hold them liable for every single property crime and act of violence committed in any circumstance other than strict self defense.
    “we were just following orders!”
    Were going to need a lot of rope and sturdy trees.
    Normiecons get so mad when I say this. Because murder is honorable when you’re wearing a gay hunting outfit and being paid by the government.
    These people are low rent mercenaries and most of them are McDonald’s rejects.

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  2. Also worth mentioning is Otto Strasser, who proposed a radically decentralized Germany with local industry and free trade in “Germany Tomorrow”. Unlike Hitlerism, which was Keynes + Stalin + Friedrich Lisst, Strasserian national socialism was retained the corporate models of self government for social orders.

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