Kings of Carnage

All eyes on Paris. The reality of terrorism hits one of the world’s major cities again. How will the French government react? For now the borders are locked down and a curfew has been imposed in Paris. ISIS is reported to claim responsibility, retribution for France’s role in Syria and Iraq. The Middle East cauldron bubbles over.

Such carnage is sobering. It should be. Carnage is a fact of life in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and the Occupied Territories in Israel. The carnage of 9/11 instigated the global war on terror, and 14 years later the US reserves to itself the right to murder anyone, anywhere, it deems an actual or perceived threat. In many parts of the world, US drones are perceived the same way we perceive the people who killed scores in Paris.

US barbarism is always justified – we only hunt down the “bad” guys, never the innocent, and our tools of death are so sophisticated that we can kill a bad guy (just the bad guy, no one else) hiding in a crowd of women and children. Believing thus helps us – those relatively few Americans who give what our country does around the world a second thought – sleep better at night.

The untroubled sleep of the righteous.

Our inalienable “right” to kill people is never debated, it’s a given. We are not obligated to adhere to international laws or norms, though we insist that others, like Iran, for example, must or face the wrath of the international community.

For the most part, Americans have lost interest in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite having poured more taxpayer money into the latter country than we did to rebuild Europe after World War II. This fact should disturb our sleep and cause us to act, to question, and to demand answers from our rulers. How is it that the US is still involved in Afghanistan 14 years after we invaded, when almost everything we have done in that fractured country has failed? Why don’t we talk about this? Why do we talk more about Donald Trump’s hairstyle than about the 700 military installations we operate around the world, or the dozens of countries where our special operations forces are deployed?

It’s interesting to me – infuriating, too – when American politicians insist that social programs are simply too expensive, and yet they never hesitate to pour more money into the military machine. We can always afford bullets and bombs, never medical care or education or job training or a livable minimum wage. Poll after poll shows that the public wants these social programs, and in a democracy you would think that politicians would respond to the will of the people, but year after year the will of the people is completely ignored; the people may as well be mute.

But enough of this. All eyes on Paris, the innocent people murdered, the lives upended and forever altered, the grief and disbelief and anger and desire for revenge and retribution.

These are sad times.