America's
March Madness
By Mickey Z.
01 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Last
month, I touched on a fraction of February's forgotten history vis-à-vis
America's long history of global brutality. Here's a small taste of
March's madness:
March 1945
In WWII's Pacific theater‹cheered
on by the likes of Time magazine, which explained that "properly
kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves"‹U.S.
General Curtis LeMay's Twenty-first Bomber Command, laid siege on the
poorer areas of Japan's large cities. On the night of March 9-10, 1945,
the target was Tokyo, where tightly packed wooden buildings took the
brunt of 1,665 tons of incendiaries. LeMay later recalled that a few
explosives had been mixed in with the incendiaries to demoralize firefighters
(96 fire engines burned to ashes and 88 firemen died). The attack area
was 87.4 percent residential. By May 1945, 75 percent of the bombs being
dropped on Japan were incendiaries and LeMay's campaign took an estimated
672,000 lives. In a confidential memo of June 1945, Brigadier General
Bonner Fellers, an aide to General MacArthur, called the raids, "one
of the most ruthless and barbaric killings on non-combatants in all
history." Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared it was "appalling
that there had been no protest over the air strikes we were conducting
against Japan which led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life."
Stimson added that he "did not want to have the United States get
the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities." After the "good
war," LeMay admitted: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I
would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the
winning side."
March 1946
After learning of the horrors
his bomb had wrought on Japan, atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer
began to harbor second thoughts, and he resigned in October 1945. In
March of the following year, Oppenheimer told President Truman: "Mr.
President, I have blood on my hands." Good ol' Harry replied, "It'll
come out in the wash." Later, the president told an aide, "Don't
bring that fellow around again."
March 1968
"In all my years in
the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings,"
said U.S. Lieutenant William Calley. "We were there to kill ideology
carried by-I don't know-pawns, blobs of flesh. I was there to destroy
communism. We never conceived of people, men, women, children, babies."
The date was March 16, 1968.
"Under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company
of the Americal Division's Eleventh Infantry had 'nebulous orders' from
its company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, to 'clean the village
out'," explains historian Kenneth Davis. All they found at My Lai
were women, children, and old men...no weapons, no signs of enemy soldiers.
Calley ordered villagers to be killed and their huts destroyed. Women
and girls were raped before they were machine-gunned. By the end of
the massacre, hundreds of villagers were dead.
When the truth about My Lai
was eventually revealed by reporter Seymour Hersh, Henry Kissinger sent
a note to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman: "Now that the
cat is out of the bag, I recommend keeping the President and the White
House out of the matter entirely." Nixon, for his part, blamed
the New York Times, what he called "dirty rotten Jews from New
York," for covering the story. Perhaps what had the White House
on edge was best articulated by Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with
covering up the My Lai killings, who explained in 1971: "Every
unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."
March 1988
While it was subsequently
cited as one of the many spurious pretexts for the second Gulf War,
the U.S. and Britain did not call for a military strike after Iraq's
gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March 1988. "When Saddam bombed
Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas,
sarin, tabun, and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed
Iran, before acknowledging that the culprits were Saddam's own forces,"
explained reporters Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas. "There
was only token official protest at the time. Saddam's men were unfazed.
An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds, records Saddam's cousin
Ali Hassan al-Majid talking to his fellow officers about gassing the
Kurds." On that tape, al-Majid, a.k.a. Chemical Ali, asks: "Who
is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!"
Right on cue, Washington stepped up arms supplies to and diplomatic
activity with Iraq.
March 2003
March 17: President George
W. Bush declares, "The United States and other nations did nothing
to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat
it."
March 18: On Good Morning
America the president's mother asks: "Why should we hear about
body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen? It's
not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like
that?"
March 20: The day mistakenly
considered the "beginning" of the Iraq War. This "war"
began when the Security Council imposed comprehensive sanctions against
Iraq on August 6, 1990, four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait...and has
continued unabated (via bombings, sanctions, invasion, and occupation)
since then
Postscript: Some of the reactions to my February article demonstrated
shameful ignorance of and/or tacit support for transparent crimes against
humanity. Many chose to fall back on excuses along the lines of "every
country has such episodes in its history" and/or "you have
to break some eggs to make an omelet." For example: "What
modern nation state isn't like this? If a nation has power, it abuses
it. Why would we be any different?" It seems the decency bar has
been lowered (to say the least). Also, since no other nation claims
moral superiority with more frequency than the U.S., to nonchalantly
absolve America of its myriad transgressions is to conveniently disregard
such reprehensible rhetoric and arrogance.
Mickey Z. can
be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.