The Murderous U.S. Government Explained

The Murderous U.S. Government Explained

By Arthur Silber
November 19, 2010

There is one aspect of this Washington Post article that I fear will be appreciated by very few people. Before I get to that, let's set out the basic facts:

The U.S. military is sending a contingent of heavily armored battle tanks to Afghanistan for the first time in the nine-year war, defense officials said, a shift that signals a further escalation in the aggressive tactics that have been employed by American forces this fall to attack the Taliban.

The deployment of a company of M1 Abrams tanks, which will be fielded by the Marines in the country's southwest, will allow ground forces to target insurgents from a greater distance - and with more of a lethal punch - than is possible from any other U.S. military vehicle. The 68-ton tanks are propelled by a jet engine and equipped with a 120mm main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away.

Despite an overall counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes the use of troops to protect Afghan civilians from insurgents, statistics released by the NATO military command in Kabul and interviews with several senior commanders indicate that U.S. troop operations over the past two months have been more intense and have had a harder edge than at any point since the initial 2001 drive to oust the Taliban government.

I give Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the author of this article, tremendous credit for a masterful job of reporting. That is not intended to be in the least sarcastic; I genuinely mean it. You can already see how skillfully he conveys the monstrousness of the U.S. government's actions simply by reporting the facts and, of critical importance, describing them accurately.

Even in these opening paragraphs, note the descriptive phrases that economically convey the extraordinary bloodthirstiness of what the U.S. is doing: "more of a lethal punch," "destroy a house more than a mile away" (marvel at the wonder of it!), "have had a harder edge." The horrifying, sickening irony of the beginning of the third paragraph hits the attentive reader very hard: it's all very well to have an "overall counterinsurgency strategy" designed "to protect Afghan civilians from insurgents" -- but who is going to protect them from the U.S.?

Continued. . .