The US war in Afghanistan is now the longest US war: going on 18 years. The few war crimes we know about are too gruesome to describe. The Pentagon & State Department don’t want us to know the scale of war crimes from torture, massacres, indiscriminate carpet bombing so they barred the ICC investigator from getting a visa.
The corrupted antiwar movement is up to its eyeballs campaigning for the Assad regime & Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians & hasn’t been able to mobilize against the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, or for that matter, Syria. Some anti-Assadists choose to ignore other US wars & the entire history of US militarism & call for a humanitarian US bombing campaign in Syria. Drawing from the cesspool of Orientalism, they say ‘Syrians want US intervention so how can anyone disagree?’ After asking which Syrians do not understand US militarism, we can answer that the most compelling reason for scorning the very notion of a humanitarian bombing campaign is that it is Syrian civilians who will die & American young people who are turned into trained killers, who lose their psychological bearings, who commit war crimes, lose their lives & limbs, come home to suicide, homelessness, PTSD, incarceration, brain damage, disability, psychological misery.
How did it happen that so many took their distance from the realities of war & begin to glorify it as liberation against a ‘regime change operation’ or as humanitarian? How did the principles against war get so twisted into service to war mongering? How can we begin to rebuild the antiwar movement rooted in principles, not of pacifism, but of opposition to colonial wars?