A Month of Mournful Anniversaries
This month is chock-full of mournful anniversaries.
Most prominent today is the initiation of the Bush administration’s
bombing campaign and invasion of Iraq in 2003, observed today by
Antiwar.com’s very own Justin Raimondo. The anniversary has also been commemorated in writing by Seymour Hersh and Richard Falk, both featured in our Viewpoints section today, and earlier in the month by Eric Margolis, Stephen Zunes, Andrew Bacevich and many more. John Tirman is worth a read as is this great piece by Robert Taylor.
Saturday, March 16th, marked the 45th anniversary of the My Lai
massacre, wherein US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese
civilians. It remains one of the most shocking and memorable war crimes
of the conflict, but, as Nick Turse writes at the Daily Beast, there were many others like it that most Americans have yet to hear about. Turse’s new book is a history of those appalling atrocities.
Saturday also marked the ten year anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie,
who was killed in the Gaza Strip when the Israel Defense Forces ran
over her with a bulldozer on its way to demolish a Palestinian home.
Rachel’s father wrote a piece for The Hill
to commemorate the anniversary and lament how shamefully little has
been done to prevent further Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes on
Palestinian land.
Less noticed in the world of political media and Op-Ed topics is the
two year anniversary of the NATO bombing of Libya, which passed
yesterday. The Obama administration and their European counterparts
started that war on the basis of dubious humanitarian rationales, claiming former strongman Gadhafi was poised to slaughter unarmed Libyans wholesale. They then used a rather limited United Nations Security Council Resolution for a no-fly zone, circumventing Congress and in violation of the War Powers Resolution, as a springboard to impose regime change on a dispensable dictator who had been Washington’s ally months earlier,
but who quickly turned into the embodiment of pure evil once war was
decided upon. Really, this was just another example of the US
interfering in a civil war for the sake of its own perceiving
geo-political interests. Libya’s armed rebels were fast heralded as
freedom fighters by war advocates, despite the fact that many of them committed horrendous crimes
in the course of the war and significant portions of them had ties to
al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants. In countless articles, columns, and
blog posts, Antiwar.com refuted the basic justifications for the war and
warned of impending consequences. The war did produce extremely
negative consequences beyond the human costs of the war itself, including destabilizing the country and the region, planting the seeds for another civil war to the south in Mali, and perhaps most infamously getting weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda-linked extremists who retaliated against covert US military raids by attacking the US consulate in Benghazi and killing four Americans. Libya today remains very unstable, with rebel groups refusing to disarm or cede control to the “government,” which has now begun to aid and abet the very Islamic militant groups that attacked the US consulate.
A sorrowful commemorative month indeed.
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