America needs to change the way it does business with the rest of
the world.
And there’s one business in particular we should get
out of: Selling arms to tyrants who wish to kill their neighbors.
In fact, to judge our intentions by our actions, the
United States is no longer building weapons of war for the purpose of defending
ourselves against potential enemies. We’re inventing wars in order to sell
weapons.
That’s the conclusion drawn by Kathy Kelly, who has
visited our war zones all over the world, founded the nonprofit Voices for
Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org), and in recent weeks has been speaking to
small groups meetings in Massachusetts churches.
Here is one of her conclusions:
“We in the United States have yet to realize both the
futility and immense consequences of war even as we develop, store, sell, and
use hideous weapons. The number of children killed is rising.”
We heard Kelly speak at a church in Walpole, Mass.,
where she came to put a spotlight on the current, ongoing example of America’s
willingness to support a war by a rich country on a poor country — for no justifiable
cause — but out of an apparent desire to keep business flowing for our
prosperous armaments industry.
The victim of this war is Yemen, a poor Middle Eastern
country of nearly 30 million people, often described as ‘backward,’ that has
the misfortune to the be the neighbor of a large, wealthy, disastrously
governed sheikdom called Saudi Arabia.
A few days after we heard Kelly, she posted this news:
“At 9:30 in the morning of March 26, the entrance to a rural hospital in
northwest Yemen supported by Save the Children was teeming as patients waited
to be seen and employees arrived at work. Suddenly, missiles from an airstrike
hit the hospital, killing seven people, four of them children.”
Those missiles and the explosives inside them were
almost certainly supplied to the Saudi government by the US. We also sold the
Saudis the absurdly expensive aircraft which poured death upon patients waiting
at a hospital to see a doctor.
One might ask: How do we live with that?
When we heard Kelly speak in a church hall in Walpole,
a Boston suburb, she also suggested this motivation for America’s continued and
destructive meddling in the affairs of other countries. Since the end of the
Cold War we have assumed the right to throw our weight around, both openly and
covertly when and wherever we choose: If a government doesn’t run its country
in a way we approve of, the United States will do what it can to take that
government down.
And we don’t care what the damage is. Ask Afghanistan.
After the Taliban government of that country provided
protection for Al Queda terrorists who attacked America on nine-eleven, we had
cause to invade and overthrow a terrorist-protecting government. But once that
goal was accomplished, we refused to go home.
We’re still there today, throwing fuel on that unhappy
country’s domestic fires in the form of endless weaponry, protection money and
occasional bribery, while holding out the delusional hope of crushing the
Taliban opposition.
Afghanistan has paid a steep price for our continued
intervention. In the eighteen years of what Afghans call ‘the American war’
more than 150,000 Afghans have been killed, an estimated 40,000 of them
civilians.
American casualties are almost 2,400 military deaths,
plus another 1,700 civilian and contractor deaths. The financial cost is
measured in the trillions. Last year the Congressional Budget Office put the
cost at $2.4 trillion.
Ask the Venezuelans.
Because Washington disapproved of their popularly
elected Socialist government that raised the standard of living for the
country’s poor and even provided low-cost heating oil for American fuel
assistance programs in the 1990s, the Bush administration took part in a failed
coup attempt to remove President Hugo Chavez, back in 2002. Under Obama,
American sanctions exacerbated Venezuela’s economic problems (initially caused
by falling oil prices and its government’s mismanagement of currency exchange
rates), even though current President Maduro was popularly elected in 2013 to
continue Chavez’s policies. Now, of course, we have a bombastic
blowhard-in-chief who has basically called for a military coup by Maduro’s
opponents.
Meanwhile civilians line up for food. Many seek to flee
the county and become refugees.
Or, ask the Iraqis. Because some Islamic country (other
than Afghanistan) had to pay for the nine-eleven attack by an terror
organization founded and headed by Saudi leaders, and mounted by Saudi
nationals, GW Bush invented a pretext to invade Iraq.
That country is still trying to recover from the war’s
disastrous consequences. Estimates of Iraq’s death toll range from half million
dead to a catastrophic 2.4 million. ISIS, which arose after the US war threw
the country into chaos, contributed some of these.
On the American side, the casualty toll is 4,425 deaths
and near 32, 000 wounded in action. The financial cost to the US taxpayers is
again estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Now it’s Yemen’s turn.
What did Yemen do to us? (you may ask). Absolutely
nothing.
Why then do we support with airplanes, armaments, active
involvement in combat missions, and huge war machinery and armament transfers
to the blatant aggressor state, Saudi Arabia, in its wholly unjustified war
knowingly waged on Yemen’s civilian population.
International organizations with worldwide credibility
such as Save the Children estimate that 85,000 children under age 5
alone have been killed by Saudi attacks and disruptions of Yemen’s economic and
social system. Thousands of children have starved to death.
According to UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and other
international organizations, a cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000
people and infected almost a million.
The famine caused by Saudi attacks on Yemen’s food
supply system has put millions of people, including 400,000 children, on the
edge of starvation.
Only recently, after three years of this war on
children and other living things, has the obscene slaughter moved the American
Congress to express its disapproval of our role in enabling these daily war
crimes.
Reporting on her decades of visiting overseas war
zones, protesting wars and weapons of mass destruction, and backing
humanitarian measures, Kathy Kelly came to Massachusetts with a local message.
The conflagration in Yemen may appear far way, she told us, but its fires are
lighted “right in our backyard. Massachusetts-based Raytheon Company is a key
player in the war crimes being committed in this epic human disaster.”
Raytheon has headquarters in Waltham, and weapon-making
labs and factories in Cambridge, Burlington, Woburn and five other Eastern
Massachusetts communities. It’s as American as apple pie. Only the pies blow up
in people’s faces, and kill them.
After a laser-guided 500-pound bomb stuck a
water-drilling site in Yemen, killing 31 civilians, the debris included a piece
of the bomb’s wing assembly, with a stock number and date of date of
manufacture that showed it was built by nobody but Raytheon.
Proud supplier of this murderous moment, we ask: What
do you say when history calls you to account for the use made of your fine
products?
As ‘host’ to this hub of America’s military industrial
complex, Massachusetts is the technology hive for preparing the deadly bombs,
missiles, planes and targeting systems for Saudi Arabia’s war crimes against
people who pose no threat to America. Nor, for that matter, have they done any
harm to the Saudis — except to refuse to knuckle under.
In this last respect, Saudi Arabia has done nothing
more than model its egregious might-makes-right policies on those of other powerful
countries — a leading example being the USA.
American ‘foreign policy’ needs a complete
top-to-bottom shake-out. It didn’t happen during the eight years of the Obama
administration. In mitigation of the former President’s backing of Saudi
Arabia’s war on Yemen, Kelly said that Obama had reduced American support for
Saudi aggression before the end of his term. The arrival of the current
bellicose Pretender, however, signaled a green light for war-makers of all
description:
Saudis, Israel, CIA contractors and clients: Take what
you want, kill all you need to.
Even better if you’re willing to buy our latest,
high-priced, deadly swag.
A final thought from Kathy Kelly:‘Every War Is
a War Against Children.’
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