(updated below - Update II)
Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:
The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.
The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack. . . . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.
This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:
(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all -- and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored -- there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that "in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding" -- as though that's comparable to the U.S.'s dropping bombs on innocent people). We've all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase "collateral damage" cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it's quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that's just how it is. It's all grounded in America's central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
At some point -- and more than a decade would certainly qualify -- the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can't just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That's particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It's woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we're occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America's supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.
(2) Yesterday -- a week after it leaked that it was escalating its drone strikes in Yemen -- the Obama administration claimed that the CIA last month disrupted a scary plot originating in Yemen to explode an American civilian jet "using a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb deployed unsuccessfully in 2009." American media outlets -- especially its cable news networks -- erupted with their predictable mix of obsessive hysteria, excitement and moral outrage. CNN's Wolf Blitzer last night devoted the bulk of his show to this plot, parading the standard cast of characters -- former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and terrorist advocate) Fran Townsend and its "national security analyst" Peter Bergen -- to put on their Serious and Concerned faces, recite from the U.S. Government script, and analyze all the profound implications. CNN even hauled out Rep. Peter King to warn that this shows a "new level" of Terror threats from Yemen. CNN's fixation on this plot continued into this morning.
Needless to say, the fact that the U.S. has spent years and years killing innocent adults and children in that part of the world -- including repeatedly in Yemen -- was never once mentioned, even though it obviously is a major factor for why at least some people in that country support these kinds of plots. Those facts are not permitted to be heard. Discussions of causation -- why would someone want to attack a U.S. airliner? -- is an absolute taboo, beyond noting that the people responsible are primitive and hateful religious fanatics. Instead, it is a simple morality play reinforced over and over: Americans are innocently minding their own business -- trying to enjoy our Freedoms -- and are being disgustingly targeted with horrific violence by these heinous Muslim Terrorists whom we must crush (naturally, the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them, which will certainly fix this problem).
Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. -- one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and "never posed a threat to public safety" -- it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I'd be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).
This is the message sent over and over by the U.S. media: we are the victims of heinous, frightening violence; our government must do more, must bomb more, must surveil more, to Keep Us Safe; we do nothing similar to this kind of violence because we are Good and Civilized. This is how our Objective, Viewpoint-Free journalistic outlets continuously propagandize: by fixating on the violence done by others while justifying -- or, more often, ignoring -- the more far-reaching and substantial violence perpetrated by the U.S.
(3) If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S. -- or if one of the people involved in this Yemen-originating plot were a relative of one of the dozens of civilians killed by Obama's 2009 cluster bomb strike -- what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency.
* * * * *
This point cannot be emphasized enough.
UPDATE: From the comments:
I was just sitting here thinking "I love reading GG, but I think he is being quite harsh here, it was only 5 kids that died, and that happens in war - its hardly as if it was some really major tragedy".
And this is despite the fact that I would describe myself as a staunch anti-Imperialist who shuns the MSM - yet still I seem to be getting conditioned that the killing of these 5 kids is "normal". Scary. Very scary.
We're all subject to that conditioning, which is why it's so necessary to pause every now and then to realize what a "really major tragedy" it actually is: one that could be easily avoided with different choices.
UPDATE II: It is now confirmed that the would-be bomber of the civilian jet was, in fact, a double agent working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence. So just as virtually every "domestic Terror plot" is one conceived, directed, funded and controlled by the FBI, this new Al Qaeda plot from Yemen was directed by some combination of the CIA and its Saudi partners. So this wasn't merely a failed, nascent plot which is causing this fear-mongering media orgy: it was one controlled at all times by the U.S. and Saudi Governments.
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