Unsurprisingly, Newsweek has emphasized a report that drastically undercounts the victims of Washington’s warmongering in the Middle East.
But if we look back over the records of Trump’s three predecessors alone, we see a virtual holocaust of Arab Muslims (predominantly): millions of innocents whose lives were cut short by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
Consider the toll of Bush/Cheney’s illegal 2003 invasion: The respected British medical journal, The Lancet, has published peer-reviewed studies by Johns Hopkins Medical Center indicating that well over a million Iraqis were killed before Bush even left office. And the fighting has continued long after his departure (not long ago, Donald Trump was reducing much of Mosul to rubble, killing hundreds of civilians with U.S. airstrikes).
CODE PINK’s Medea Benjamin (working with author, Nicolas J S Davies) have written that the best available data shows that nearly 2.5 million Iraqis died as a result of the neocons’ invasion (which was enthusiastically supported by the majority of Democrats and their party’s future presidential contenders, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who spent 2002-03 vociferously amplifying the administration’s pro-war propaganda): https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/16/the-iraq-death-toll-15-years-after-the-us-invasion/
And speaking of morally grotesque war crimes, we should never forget that (years before 9/11) Bill Clinton killed “well over a million” Iraqi civilians, mostly babies and toddlers under five years old, with his draconian sanctions — as the United Nations’ Denis Halliday reported before resigning (he’d overseen the sanctions policy, which sickened him to the point that he and two colleagues resigned in protest, ending a 34-year career at the U.N.): https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/mar/04/weekend7.weekend9
Finally, some 500,000 Syrians have died (and 10 million have become refugees) as a result of President Obama’s unconscionable flooding of Syria — a stable nation, basically at peace — with tens of thousands of Salafist militants, including al Qaeda, armed, coordinated, and supported by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Qatar: https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=944
In short, Newsweek’s minimizing the post-9/11 death toll — erasing the vast majority of the victims of modern genocide — is as appalling as it is typical.
And it is monumentally depressing to see so many Americans behaving as if one party or the other is the problem, when it is abundantly clear that Republicans and Democrats are both willful agents of the same despicably evil agenda, which proceeds apace, no matter which party holds power: war, environmental destruction, plundering profiteering, and the eradication of human rights and democratic institutions across the globe.
There is no “lesser” among evils of this magnitude.
*************** ADDENDUM (the rant that preceded the blog) ****************
There is such a thing as history…
(even in what Gore Vidal famously called “The United States of Amnesia”)
And our history provides ample evidence that the United States of America hasn’t been a law-governed, democratic republic since its citizens let the deep state get away with murdering President John F. Kennedy for trying to end the Cold War and U.S. imperialism. Uncoincidentally, that wanton act of savagery was followed by the ratcheting up of U.S. aggression against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in an illegal war that led to the deaths of 3.5-4 million human beings (including nearly 60,000 U.S. troops, the majority of whom didn’t want to be there in the first place).
Ancient history? Don’t kid yourself.
Consider the recent history of Washington’s anti-Arab/Muslim holocaust in the Middle East, which claimed millions of civilian lives (70-90% women and children, per the United Nations) under Trump’s three abysmal predecessors alone:
On peril of our eternal souls, we should never forget that Bill Clinton killed “well over a million” Iraqi civilians.
(Of course, that was before George W. Bush killed several hundred thousand more — probably well over a million, too — at least, that’s the claim made in a peer-reviewed study which appeared in the respected British medical journal, The Lancet… and that genocidal episode of Bush’s preceded President Obama’s flooding of a stable Syria, basically at peace, with al Qaeda, leading to a conflict that killed some half-a-million Syrians and created 10 million refugees… and that conflict only got going after Assad had met with Syria’s indigenous and peaceful resistance and granted them several concessions, including a multi-party system and term limits for any president.)
But forget, we will.
It’s what Americans do best.
…when not boning up on our hypocrisy and finger-pointing at foreign leaders, in the interest of more and larger wars.
(If only we could work up a little indignation about our own war criminals and call for a modicum of “justice,” here at home, every once in a while! Maybe we wouldn’t have to give so much money to Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Erik Prince & the privateers… so’s they can go out into the world and seek “justice” for the poor, Arab/Muslim people in the undeveloped places — the millions of “democracy” deprived unfortunates who are so in need of our bombs and missiles!)
You may now resume your blather about the “dictator” Maduro and “eeeeevil” Vladimir Putin and the still unproven allegations that Assad “gassed his own people” (claims that are always taken at face value by the corporate media and never challenged — except by multiple-award winning journalists like Robert Fisk, at least one U.N. investigator upon her visit to Syria, the former British ambassador to Syria, and a handful of respected journalists who’ve spent time in the country…).
But first, let’s reflect, once more, on the genocide that Bill Clinton unleashed on Iraq…
FROM THE GUARDIAN’S ARTICLE (from the year 2000 — ancient history, I realize, back when the Western media practiced journalism; nothing to be concerned about in 2019, now that America is “GREAT AGAIN,” and perfectly qualified to judge/jury/execute the rest of the world, according to Republicans and Democrats, alike!):
“A courtly, eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite of senior officials. He had made his career in development, ‘attempting to help people, not harm them’. His was the first public expression of an unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. ‘I am resigning,’ he wrote, ‘because the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that . . . Five thousand children are dying every month . . . I don’t want to administer a programme that results in figures like these.’
“When I first met Halliday, I was struck by the care with which he chose uncompromising words. ‘I had been instructed,’ he said, ‘to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter those responsible.'”
[It sure is a good thing that there is no such thing as “History,” here in the Land of the Free… A wholesome place where our government is openly, and without fear of repercussion, assisting Saudi Arabia’s genocidal campaign in Yemen, as I type these words. But again, don’t let me distract you from important, state-sanctioned diatribes. Official America has enemies — or targets, anyway. You may resume… “Maduro, Maduro, Maduro… Putin, Putin, Putin… Assad, Iranians, Hezbollah…” Go get ’em, Team Genocide! That’ll show Donald Trump!]