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Knut Rognes
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The Coming Apocalypse
By Geov Parrish
WorkingForChange.com
Does anybody in this country get it?
Does anybody understand what the United States is on the verge of
doing?
Experienced, respected food aid organizations warn that even
before the bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, some
7,500,000 Afghans were -- through a gut-wrenching combination of
poverty, drought, war, dislocation, and repression -- at risk of
starving to death this winter. When the bombing began, almost all
delivery of food from the outside world stopped. Now, roads and
bridges are destroyed, millions more people are dislocated, and the
snow is steadily approaching from higher elevations and from the
north.
For weeks, aid organizations, along with voices from throughout the
region, have been begging the United States to call off its bombing
campaign, at least for long enough so that aid agencies can conduct
the massive transfer of food into and throughout Afghanistan that is
necessary to prevent death on a scale the world has not seen in a
long, long time. On our newscasts, it's politely referred to as a
"humanitarian crisis." That's a euphemism that makes "collateral
damage" seem humane.
Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of
months. That's three times the number of people Pol Pot took years
to kill. Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September 11 (a number that
reports are now suggesting is vastly inflated), we're talking the
equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day,
for 150 days. Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths.
Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States, but most of which
can still be prevented -- except that the United States is refusing to
allow them to be prevented.
It repulses me to say this, but I suspect a lot of Americans don't
care. They'd rather see the United States "get" Osama bin Laden
(though there's no actual evidence that we're any closer to that today
than we were two months ago, and probably the task is harder as he
becomes more popular and protected). A lot of people in this country
do not care that a staggering number of innocent people are on the
verge of being condemned to death, or that most of the world will
blame the United States. Correctly.
We should care. If the object of this war was to thwart terrorism -- to
bring existing terrorists to justice, and to isolate them politically and
culturally so that others won't throw in their lot -- in less than a
month, the United States has perpetrated one of the most abject
failures in military history. It still does not know where any of Al-
Qaeda's leadership even is. It is on the verge of succeeding in its
goal of creating a unified Afghanistan government -- unfortunately,
Afghans are uniting behind the Taliban, as warlord after warlord sets
aside long-standing differences to stand shoulder to shoulder to fight
the American invaders. Tens of thousands more young Muslim men
are lining up to cross the borders into Afghanistan to join them. The
ones that survive the experience will carry a lifetime of hate: living,
breathing proof that within a month, America bombed a country but
lost its war in spectacular fashion.
That's today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter?
How much future terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush
Administration have inspired then? If several million Islamic sisters
and brothers starve to death, innocent civilians trapped between
winter and the rage of America, how many of Islam's 1.2 billion
adherents -- or the five billion other people on earth -- are going to
take George Bush's proclamations about eradicating "terrorists" and
"evildoers" to heart, and label him, and us, as the prime examples?
In less than two months, the United States government has gone
from the moral high ground of being victimized by one of the most
heinous crimes in world history, to being within a week or two of
quite visibly committing a crime so much larger as to obliterate the
world's memory of September 11. Remarkably, almost nobody in the
United States seems to have either noticed, understood, or cared.
While even progressives wring their hands over the ambiguity of a
war fought under the auspices of America's legitimate right to
defend itself, a situation is unfolding in which there is absolutely no
moral ambiguity at all, and for which many people will want to hold
each of us as accountable as the world held post-war Germans.
Where were you? What did you say? How could you allow this to
happen? Or, a more likely reaction in the Islamic world: Why should
millions of you not die as well? America will have set out to isolate
one man, and instead killed millions and isolated itself. And much of
the world will not rest until we are brought to our knees.
Seven and a half million people. The snowline is creeping down the
mountainsides. The food is almost gone. The infrastructure is in
shambles. There will be no "independent verification" of the body
count. There wasn't in the Holocaust or Rwanda or Cambodia,
either. The judgment of the world did not need one. The clock is
ticking. Where were you?
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