Decades of military adventurism have done more to destabilize the world than any of the
This piece first appeared at Alternet.
A few years ago, I asked a retired Iraqi Air Force officer what it felt like to be bombed periodically by the United States in the 1990s. Whenever U. S. President Bill Clinton felt irritated, I joked, he seemed to bomb Iraq. The officer, a distinguished man with a long career serving a military whose political leadership he despised, smiled. He said with great lightness—“When our leadership said something threatening those words itself were taken to be terrorism; when the United States bombs, the world does not even blush.”
To me this is an intuitive statement.
I was thinking about it as I watched the parade in Pyongyang (North Korea) to celebrate the birth of Kim Il-sung. The imagery from North Korean television was grand—the vast Kim Il-sung Square packed with soldiers as the massive arsenal of North Korea was paraded past its leadership. On Twitter, amateur arms experts gave a run-down of this undersea missile and that trans-continental one. It was breathtaking to watch the performance and feel the anxiety in the Western media that North Korean would launch an attack on someone, somewhere. North Korea watchers poured over the sights, building fanciful theories based on what was being presented. Belligerence, it seemed, was on display here.
It is always the “rogue state” that is the threat to the world order—Iraq here, North Korea there. And in that “rogue state” it is always the dictator who commands the entire monstrosity. Mockery is the guise with Kim Jong-Un as it was with Saddam Hussein. These men have no taste: Saddam with his garish disco mustache and anachronistic military uniform and Kim with his New Wave haircut and his strangely out of proportion laughter. Threats are made to emanate from them—they itch to attack and are only held back by the democratic role of the United States, who sanctions the countries till they starve or patrols their waters with massive war ships to intimidate them into surrender. But the United States is not a threat. It is merely there to ensure that the real threats—Iraq then, North Korea now—are kept in check.
The author, in other words, is always the Eastern Despot.
Amnesia is the mode of thought in the United States. Cluelessness about its belligerent history is now general. It would sound strange to ask why the North Koreans feel such palpable threat from the United States. Odd to raise the fact that it was the United States that brutally bombed North Korea in the 1950s, targeting its towns and cities as well as farms and dams. The data is inescapable. The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea. This includes 32,557 tons of napalm—essentially a chemical weapon. As a comparison, it is fitting to see that in all of the Pacific sector of World War II, the United States dropped a mere 503,000 tons of bombs. The United States, in other words, dropped more bombs on North Korea during the ill-named “limited war” than it dropped during the entire engagement against Japan during World War II. Three million Koreans died in that war, the majority in the North.
