Casualties of Empire: Whose Counting?

Americans can look today at their history and ask something like: "How could an enlightened nation tolerate their Constitution declaring certain persons as 3/5 of a person, dehumanizing them as property?......Why was ratifying a constitution so important that non-slave states needed to appease slave states that wanted to count slaves in order to boost their congressional representation?" Hopefully, in another 100 years Americans will ask how could their preceding generation allow their leaders to abuse its status as the world's superpower, killing hundreds of thousands to possibly a million people? Just like those 3/5 of persons/non-persons were property, the victims of U.S. imperialism are expendable. 

Several examples of U.S. imperialism warrant their being added to the history of crimes against humanity of which its planners and executioners commit them with impunity. The invasion of Iraq qualifies as such a crime. The estimated  number of casualties in Iraq resulting from the U.S. invasion range widely. This number even at the lowest end of the range should stir the collective conscience of the U.S., awakening them from their somnambulism to its empire who carries out such crimes under false pretexts. Such an awakening has not reached critical mass yet.

Yemen is the latest nation to descend from a state whose history is a continuum of Saudi meddling to another failed state like Libya and Syria. U.S. foreign policy shows a trend of creating failed states. When asked to comment on an unconfirmed report of Qaddaffi's death, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton  stated jovially, "we came, we saw, he died." 

In this case the only difference is that Yemen's dictator is being protected in a Saudi sponsored exile. Another proxy war, another failed state. Casualties of empire. 

No viable constituency appears on the political hustings here yet galvanized around withdrawing its passive consent of this empire. Also, the mass media are mostly just sycophants broadcasting the empire's constructed narratives. Thus, they will discuss important questions like examining Hillary Clinton's foreign policy credentials? And, will she overcome any hits to her image suffered from the Benghazi fiasco? Of course, no credible causal link will be acknowledged whereby the same forces reducing Libya to a failed state have also destabilized Syria and Iraq. To the degree such a causal claim is made it will suggest U.S. involvement is more necessary.

2016 campaign will feature candidates who all concur that U.S. involvement is necessary. They will express disagreements on how to execute such involvement. They will attempt to distinguish themselves using rhetoric filled with vague platitudes. None of them will question the underlying assumption that U.S. involvement is necessary and worthwhile. In that mindset U.S. involvement is only bad when executed poorly, but is never seen as intrinsically harmful.

No postmortem will occur that encourages and implores the elite and the masses to remember the one million casualties buried and forgotten from March 2003 onward in the land of ancient Babylon. Or not to mention the 200,000 dead in Syria. Before either of the two aforementioned figures irritate our collective conscious or lack thereof, we should also remember the number of children deaths in Iraq resulting from economic sanctions imposed on Iraq from 1991-1996. Our elites and their docile and insouciant public feel no collective guilt over sanctions imposed on Iraq that contributed to mass deaths of Iraqis. The increase in child and maternal mortality in Iraq that followed the implementation of economic sanctions should cause the U.S. to reevaluate what benefit(s) could justify causing such a humanitarian crisis. For example, Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. Secretary of State during the Bill Clinton administration, while being interviewed on 60 Minutes on May 12, 1996 expressed a brief moment of soul-searching followed immediately thereafter by her stating that in regard to the 500,000 children who died in Iraq because of sanctions imposed on them: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it."

The U.S. public continues accepting its empire's inflicting collateral damage on the defenseless. Even when on the rare occasion major media outlets question elites about their actions causing such collateral damage, no mass movements emerge demanding an end to their leaders' imperial hubris.  

Instead, the masses will be instructed by the media to watch for signs that Hillary is becoming more "likeable" to the voting public.  Moreover, this same American public will likely not demand that Hillary demonstrate that she possesses the courage and wisdom to slow down the rush to war. Such demands are important today given that during her Senate career in October 2002 Hillary voted in favor of the Iraq War Resolution. They should demand she possess sufficient strength to stand athwart the empire, withstanding the predictable accusations of being an "isolationist" or an "appeaser" or every neocon's favorite strawman, Neville Chamberlin. Such courage rarely motivates aspiring emperors.

The Emperor has no Clothes but equally critical and unacknowledged is that the Empire harms those most who have the least food, water, clothing, and shelter. Just ask the poorest nation in the middle east, Yemen, now facing continued Saudi bombing. We should ask ourselves this question because our propagandist war-promoting complex won't.