Trump admits US killed millions in war based on
lies
By Bill Van Auken
October 10, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" - Amid the storm of
denunciations—extending from right-wing Republicans
to the Democratic Party, the New York Times
and the pseudo-left Jacobin magazine—of his
decision to pull US troops out of Syria, President
Donald Trump issued an extraordinary tweet on
Wednesday in defense of his policy:
“The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION
DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East.
Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been
badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the
other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST
DECISION EVER MADE ... IN THE HISTORY OF OUR
COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now
disproven premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.”
Trump’s Twitter account has dominated the US news
cycle ever since he took office. Tweets have
introduced fascistic new policies on immigration,
announced the frequent firings of White House
personnel and cabinet members and signaled shifts in
US foreign policy.
Last month, amid the mounting of an impeachment
inquiry, which the Democratic leadership in Congress
has focused exclusively on “national security”
concerns stemming from Trump’s July 25 phone call
with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US
president set a new personal record, tweeting 800
times.
Yet the corporate media has chosen to ignore
Trump’s tweet on the protracted US military
intervention in the Middle East.
From the standpoint of the bitter internecine
struggle unfolding within the US capitalist state,
the tweet expresses the sharp divisions over US
global strategy. While those around Trump want to
focus entirely on preparation for confrontation with
China, layers within the political establishment and
the military and intelligence apparatus see the
continuation of the US intervention to assert its
hegemony over the Middle East and countering Russia
as critical for American imperialism’s drive to
impose its dominance over the Eurasian landmass.
But aside from these disputes over geo-strategic
policy, the admission by a sitting US president that
Washington launched a war under a “false” and
“disproven” premise that ended up killing “millions”
has direct political implications, whatever Trump’s
intentions.
It amounts to an official admission from the US
government that successive US administrations are
responsible for war crimes resulting in mass murder.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Trump acknowledges that Washington
launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the
“false premise” of “weapons of mass
destruction.” In other words, the
administration of George W. Bush lied to the
people of the United States and the entire
planet in order to facilitate a war of
aggression.
Under international law, this war was a criminal
action and a patently unjustified violation of
Iraq’s sovereignty. The Nuremberg Tribunal, convened
in the aftermath of the Second World War, declared
the planning and launching of a war of aggression
the supreme crime of the Nazis, from which all of
their horrific atrocities flowed, including the
Holocaust. On the basis of this legal principle,
Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top US
officials, as well as their successors in the Obama
and Trump administrations who continued the US
intervention in the Middle East—expanding it into
Syria and Libya, while threatening a new war against
Iran—should all face prosecution as war criminals.
The real basis for the war was the long-held
predatory conception that by militarily conquering
Iraq Washington could seize control of the vast
energy resources of the Middle East—giving it a
stranglehold over the oil lifeline to its principal
rivals in Asia and Europe—and thereby offset the
decline of US imperialism’s global hegemony.
The World Socialist Web Site described
the consequences of the US assault on Iraq and its
people as “sociocide,” the deliberate destruction of
what had been among the most advanced societies, in
terms of education, health care and infrastructure,
in the Middle East (see: “The
US war and occupation of Iraq—the murder of a
society”).
The casualties inflicted by this war were
staggering. According to a comprehensive 2006 study
done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health and published in the prestigious medical
journal The Lancet, the death toll
resulting from the US invasion rose to over 655,000
in the first 40 months of the US war alone.
The continued slaughter resulting from the US
occupation and the bloody sectarian civil war
provoked by Washington’s divide-and-rule tactics
claimed many more direct victims, while the
destruction of basic water, power, health care and
sanitation infrastructure killed even more. The mass
slaughter continued under the Obama administration
with the launching in 2014 of what was billed as a
US war against ISIS. This war, which saw the most
intense bombing campaign since Vietnam and reduced
Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities to
rubble, claimed tens if not hundreds of thousands
more lives.
Recent estimates of the death toll resulting from
16 years of US military intervention in Iraq range
as high as 2.4 million people.
The Iraq war has had its own disastrous
consequences for US society as well. In addition to
claiming the lives of more than 4,500 US troops and
nearly 4,000 US contractors, the war left tens of
thousands of US troops wounded and hundreds of
thousands suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder and traumatic brain injuries.
What of all the families in the United States who
lost children, siblings or parents in a war that
Trump now admits was based upon lies? Together with
the veterans suffering from the wounds of this war,
they should have the right to sue the US government
for the results of its criminal conduct.
The cost of the US wars launched since 2001 has
risen to nearly $6 trillion, the bulk of it stemming
from Iraq, while interest cost on the money borrowed
to pay for these wars will eventually amount to $8
trillion.
These grievous costs to US society are compounded
by the social and political impact of waging an
illegal war, resulting in the shredding of
democratic rights and the wholesale corruption of a
political system that is ever more dominated by the
military and intelligence apparatus.
The media’s silence on Trump’s admission of war
crimes carried out by US imperialism in Iraq, Syria
and elsewhere in the Middle East is
self-incriminating. It reflects the complicity of
the corporate media in these crimes, with its
selling of the lies used to promote the aggression
against Iraq and its attempt to suppress antiwar
sentiment.
Nowhere was this war propaganda developed more
deliberately than at the New York Times
which inundated the American public with lying
reports about “weapons of mass destruction” by
Judith Miller and the noxious opinion pieces by
chief foreign affairs commentator Thomas “I have no
problem with a war for oil” Friedman.
By all rights, the media editors and pundits
responsible for promoting a criminal war of
aggression deserve to sit in the dock alongside the
war criminals who launched it.
The corporate media has also ignored Trump’s
indictment of the US wars in the Middle East because
it speaks for those sections of the US ruling
establishment that want them to continue.
Trump’s cynical nationalist and populist rhetoric
about ending US wars in the Middle East is aimed at
currying support with a US population that is
overwhelmingly hostile to these wars, even as his
administration—backed by the Democrats—has secured a
record $738 billion military budget in preparation
for far more catastrophic wars, including against
nuclear-armed China and Russia.
If the fascistic occupant of the White House is
able to adopt the farcical posture of an opponent of
imperialist war, it is entirely thanks to the
Democrats, whose opposition to Trump is bound up
with the concerns of the US intelligence agencies
and the Pentagon over his conduct of foreign policy.
While there was mass opposition to the invasion
of Iraq, the pseudo-left in the United States,
together with the media, worked might and main to
channel it behind the Democratic Party, which
provided uninterrupted support and funding for the
war. Today, it is the most pro-war party, aligned
with the opposition to Trump by the likes of John
Bolton, Lindsey Graham and Bush.
Trump’s admission about the criminality of the
Iraq war only confirms what the World Socialist
Web Site stated from its very outset. The
struggle that it has waged for the building of a
mass antiwar movement based upon the working class
and armed with a socialist and internationalist
program to unite the workers of the United States,
the Middle East and the entire planet against the
capitalist system provides the only way forward in
the struggle against war.
This article was originally published by "WSWS"-
-
Copyright © 1998-2019 World
Socialist Web Site
==See Also==
Note To ICH Community
We ask that you assist us in
dissemination of the article published by
ICH to your social media accounts and post
links to the article from other websites.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment