What about American foreign policy (i.e., bombs not diplomacy), which in recent history has killed several orders of magnitude more people, a not insignificant proportion of whom have been innocent.

In May 2009, in a testimony to US Congress, US Advisor to Gen. David Kilmulllen, asked the Obama Administration to call off the drone attacks stating, “We have been able to kill only 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders since 2006 and in the same period, killed over 700 Pakistani civilians.”

— Pakistan’s Drone Dilemma

There is absolutely no positive way you can spin a failure rate like that.  So they don’t even try.  The interested individual can find these stories online,but he has to go searching for them.  The news outlets bury the stories if they report them at all, because they are subservient to the State.

In the most recent installment where 20 people were killed, the death toll includes 4 women and 3 children.  Guess they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, right?  The headlines tend to emphasize that 13 militants were killed, but let’s be real, here: 13 suspected militants,were summarily executed by an unmanned drone so that their accusers never had to present evidence in a court of law.

According to Reuters, “US officials say the drones are a highly effective weapon against militant groups. But civilian casualties in the strikes have angered Pakistanis,” but this “highly effective weapon” hasn’t really gotten any high profile terrorists since Baitulla Mehsud (a year ago), and has an alarming propensity to kill indiscriminately, most reports indicating that between 30 and 40% of those killed in drone strikes are objectively non-combatants.

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WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, responded in an interview on Democracy Now. Amy Goodman, conducting the interview, quoted Admiral Mike Mullen from a news conference earlier in the week

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point.

Hear? We’re allowed to “take issue with the policy” and “challenge” the tactical decisions made by the commanders, as long as we leave “the mission” out of the equation, because, you see, they’re just following orders (and so should you). But following orders isn’t an excuse.

“Following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either.” — Andrew Williams (addressing Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, legal advisor to Guantanamo Bay prison)

About those who “willingly” go in to harm’s way? They would rather be driving their kids to soccer practice, finishing college, working their 9-to-5, etc.  How many would’ve “willingly” gone to fight for Empire if the Pentagon had put a C-130 at every airport in the country with suitable runway and said, “Anyone who wants to go to Afghanistan and fight, the door is open!”? My guess: they wouldn’t fill a high school gymnasium.

Assange points out that when, e.g., Robert Gates or Mike Mullen implies that WikiLeaks and its collaborators might have blood on their hands, that these statements “all together, are designed to distract from the big picture,” which is of course the same big picture which Mullen craftily sidesteps in the blockquote above. The big picture is “the mission” itself, the objective consequences of which include the deaths of 20,000 civilian, non-combatant Afghans.

Mr. Mullen can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his forces are doing, but the truth is, they already have on their hands the blood of 4,000 American soldiers, some 20,000 innocent Afghans, and (conservatively) over 100,000 innocent Iraqis. Including “accidents” wherein 150+ children were bombed to death.

Collateral murder, indeed.

Assange and WikiLeaks are exposing the crimes and the criminals like Mullen, Gates, et. Al, who are responsible. If you want to pretend that all that shit never happened, then I guess you can get on your high horse and start spouting off about the “potential” blood Assange might someday be responsible for.  But you’re definitely light-years ahead of him in terms of destroying human lives.

Mr. Mullen & Mr. Gates, You pay lip-service to keeping the troops out of harm’s way, you may fret over tactics, the specific actions you take towards the accomplishment of “the mission you’ve been given”, but tactics do not exist in a fucking vacuum. They exist only in the context of “the mission.”  Every second of your pitiful existence which passes without questioning the morality of the orders you’ve been given, the orders you’ve accepted to undertake, is another second in which you are responsible for the harm those people face, and the harm they may commit.  And if “the mission” is rotten (to the goddamned core), then nothing else matters.

Releasing “secret” military files does not endanger the troops. Putting them in unconstitutional wars and keeping them there for a decade does.

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These monsters have done things that can never be undone and the total consequences will never be known.

You’re right, Don, but I will go one further: It’s not just depleted uranium or agent orange or Nigerian oil spills that nobody in the developed world ever hears about or the other explicit (albeit hidden) costs of imperialism. The stockpiles of nuclear and other weapons of mass- and indiscriminate destruction; the use of such weapons including depleted uranium, etc., the de facto strip-mining of the Earth’s resources — these are globally existential threats to peace and humanity.

Most people are probably aware of nuclear stockpiles, that cold war remnant with which nobody knows exactly what to do. But there is a reason you’ve probably never heard about the Nigerian oil spills or countless other exploitations of a people and an ecosystem; a reason you’ve probably never heard much about depleted uranium or white phosphorous. They do not want you to know.

And so you don’t.

These aren’t naturally occurring, rather the people at large were manipulated in to sowing the seeds (which will probably one day become the source of our collective destruction), all of these threats had their genesis in the ruling classes’ interests, as a means towards achieving some outcome they desired, consequences be damned.

The issue is this: There are simply no means available to deal with or to mitigate the loss or potential for loss attributable to  many of the problems that the State has created.  Even if we could abolish the state tomorrow, these problems they created which nobody wanted in the first place, remain.

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http://www.google.com/images?q=depleted uranium deformities

The US military continues to use depleted uranium in tank armor, ordnance, anti-tank and/or armor-piercing rounds, small arms rounds, etc., despite the fact that DU turns ordinary weapons into radiological dirty bombs, (”They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way,” says Marion Falk, who spent 20 years building nuclear bombs), much of which is “reduced to radioactive dust particles”.

For instance, during a three week period of conflict in 2003 in Iraq, coalition forces used between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of depleted uranium munitions against the Iraqis, mostly in cities.  Add that to a few hundred tons of DU which were dropped on Iraq during Gulf War I and you’ve got a 20-year recipe for disaster. Unfortunately its lethal efficacy ensures that the Military Industrial Complex will do everything within its power to keep the truth under wraps.

DU is highly valued by armies for its ability to punch through armored vehicles. When a weapon made with a DU tip or core strikes a solid object, like the side of a tank, it goes straight through it and then erupts in a burning cloud of vapor. The vapor settles as dust, which is chemically poisonous and also radioactive.” Q&A Depleted Uranium Weapons

One Major Douglas Rokke, a now outspoken critic and former military expert on DU argues that:

The harmful effects of DU exposure include respiratory and neurological problems, rashes, cancers, kidney and lung damage, joint and muscle pain, fibromyalgia, cataracts, memory loss, changes in the RNA in DNA, causing genetic birth defects, and a host of other conditions associated with exposure to heavy metal toxicity and radiation.

It should be noted that about 33% of the 700,000 US soldiers who fought in the first Gulf War now suffer from the ambiguously named “gulf war syndrome“. Rokke and Falk attribute the various maladies comprising GWS  to DU and/or chemical weapons exposure. What fraction of the Iraqi people suffer a similar fate?

A recent study indicates that Iraqis in the areas most heavily hit by depleted uranium during the current conflict suffer from cancer, leukemia, malformations and birth, infant mortality, and even cancer in adults at rates higher than the survivors in Hiroshima.

Dr Chris Busby said “to produce an effect like [are now seen in Fallujah], some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened”.

…while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: “My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside.”

Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults.

Do you notice a pattern?  First, deny everything (as NATO did in Kosovo) and then later they deny or downplay the risks (like the US did with agent orange during and after the Vietnam war).  But the more information becomes available, the worse it looks, and the more it seems that the use of depleted uranium constitutes war crimes (a redundant expression, if there ever was one) is unlikely to cease any time soon.

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America’s chief export is war — and practically all of the countries that “hate us” are running a massive trade deficit in that department.

Without the state using our tax dollars, our sweat, blood and labor, to finance the military-industrial complex and to push capitalist-imperialism all over the globe, how many enemies do you think “we” would really have?

At the end of the day we are talking about a system the sole purpose of which is to make the rest of the world “safe for American interests”. And make no mistake about this: you are emphatically not one of the “American interests” which the military-industrial complex has any interest in safeguarding. You and your family are merely collaterally “safe”, which is more attributable to geography than to military spending.

“American interests” in this context means almost exclusively multinational corporations and their shareholders, who grease the wheels of politics around the world in order to look out for their own interests.  Aside from full-scale invasions (like an un-winnable war with neither objective nor identifiable enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan) or exporting prohibition (another un-winnable war) to lands near and far (like Mexico and Afghanistan), the Empire has other means at its disposal:

• Flooding lesser-developed countries with “capital investments” in the form of loans from the IMF/World Bank which are then used to finance large-scale construction/infrastructure projects in what amounts to a kickback scheme writ large (contracted out to “American interests” like your pals at Halliburton, etc., of course), resulting in unsustainable debt-burdens which are eventually leveraged for political favors and further exploitation of the native people, lands, and resources.  Just look at the track-record of countries on the receiving-end of the IMF butt-ram stick: “Any list of countries ‘helped’ by IMF programs reads like a casualty list.”

• Financing coups or paramilitary hit-squads in order to assassinate political leaders who are not willing to suck American c*ck, and then hand-picking the new “leaders” (those willing to sell out their constituency) for the puppet governments of those banana republics. The people of Ecuador or of Nigeria, doubtless, would never have agreed to the programs which now destroy their ecosystems and livelihoods while simultaneously siphoning all that lucrative crude straight in to the pocketbooks of BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, etc.
  

  “The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years”

• Or as in Afghanistan, where the mainstream media has reported that there are an estimated $1 Trillion worth of valuable minerals under the country’s soil. Under the terms of the mineral rights belong to the puppet government put in place by the U.S., they do not belong to the people of Afghanistan or their provincial/municipal governments. The history of occupied nations lends credence to Justin Raimondo’s theory, that the Afghan government will probably sell these minerals, or lease the rights thereto, to U.S. corporations at a fraction of their fair-market prices. That’s why the U.S. can’t abandon Afghanistan: there is too much money buried beneath the soil, and the people who want that money have sufficient sway in American politics and foreign policy.

The price tag for imperialism is over half a trillion dollars a year — not so much less than last year’s Bank Bailout, which was rejected by a near unanimity of the public-at-large. The military-industrial complex spends that much money every year, and nobody bats an eye.

This enormous sum only pays for the explicit military costs of imperialism, the true costs of American empire, which would reckon the costs in human live (yes, brown people in Nigeria and Mexico count, too) and destruction of the environment, the fomenting of terrorist factions which “hate us”, and the productivity gains which we could’ve realized had that military budget been reduced or eliminated (anyone else in favor of a 20-hour work week?), etc., are several orders of magnitude greater.

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Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.

There is nothing exceptional or extraordinary about a Statesman practicing “diplomacy”. So it seems that Obama has been literally handed the Nobel Peace Prize for the singular virtue of not being George W. Bush.

Since the deadline for nominations was only about two weeks after Obama took office earlier this year, we can surmise that he was nominated based on what he was trying to do.  Up until that point, (other than order drone missile attacks on some goat-herders in rural Pakistan) he hadn’t done a goddamn thing.  Never you mind, though.

Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and a former prime minister of Norway, said the president had already contributed enough to world diplomacy and international understanding to earn the award.

“We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future, but for what he has done in the previous year. We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.” [NYT]

With no respect due this mockery, Mr. Jagland’s two sentences here are at odds with one another, and with reality. Let’s consider Obama’s record.  During the course of the past nine months, Obama has presided over the following reality:

1. Afghanistan has not been liberated after nine years of U.S. intervention (with no end in sight).
2. Obama’s “diplomacy” involves giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban.
3. Obama has been escalating American commitment in Afghanistan, and today, the morning on which his Peace Prize is announced, he is scheduled to commit another 40,000 soldiers to that godforsaken quagmire.
4. Approximately 3,000 civilians have been killed by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan between February and August, 2009.
5. Obama has increased the number of drone missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan; ordering his very first murders via drone attack in Pakistan, a mere three days after assuming the Presidency. 
6. Obama protects war criminals, sanctioning war crimes and violating the Geneva Convention rules.
7. The U.S. still maintains and staffs approximately 700 military bases throughout the world. [wiki]

This is by no means an all-inclusive list of actions and records, any one of which I would think, ought to remove one from consideration for any prize named after peace.  Welcome to 1984.

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