One of life’s truisms is the powerful get to kill who they want.
Israel proved this again with days of murderous air strikes on Gaza that began on March 9. By March 13, at least 25 Palestinians were dead and more of Gaza’s devastated infrastructure ruined.
This latest carnage was justified by the fact the first strikes killed members of the Popular Resistance Committee.
Israel blames the group for the murder of eight Israelis last year, despite the fact the Israeli army’s own investigation pointed the finger at unrelated people in Egypt — not Gaza — and the Egyptian authorities caught the alleged mastermind in November.
This is not the sort of logic us mere mortals get to use. If I stood up in court and said, “The bastard spilled my beer, your Honour, so I stabbed everyone at the next table and burned down a school”, it is unlikely the judge would respond: “Oh that’s alright Sands, why didn’t you say so? You are free to go — oh, and take the Golan Heights with you.”
But it is not just Israel that gets to kill who it wants. It is Western powers in general — a club Israel gets to join despite being, as its spokespeople never tire of telling us, positively surrounded by Arabs.
The club has many benefits for Israel, including the right to nuclear weapons and being let into the Eurovision Song Contest.
The world’s only superpower also gets to kill who it wants. The US president can, and has, ordered drone strikes against US citizens overseas — on no basis except the president’s say so.
We don’t have this right. If the upstairs flat responds to the demise of Whitney Houston by playing her “greatest” hits at full volume all night, we can’t order a drone strike and, when asked by the cops about the carnage that includes the bastard with the stereo, a friend, a visiting aunt and a budgerigar, say: “It was a terrorist threat so serious I couldn’t possibly show you the evidence.”
It is fucking hypocrisy.
Another advantage of being a superpower is you never commit crimes, but merely make mistakes.
Being a superpower means you only ever have to say you’re sorry. In fact, a litmus test for how badly the latest imperial adventure is going is how many times they apologise for another “mistake”.
Such was the position Barack Obama found himself in, again, when a “rogue” US soldier slaughtered 16 civilians in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Exactly what Obama said when he called US puppet Hamid Karzai about the incident is not for the likes of us to know until WikiLeaks publishes the transcripts. But presumably, Obama reassured Karzai that US soldiers all have strict instructions not to massacre civilians until a superior gives the order, and measures will be taken to ensure this slip-up in the command structure never occurs again.
Oh, and “sorry”.
We bombed your wedding, slaughtering three dozen of your guests — sorry, that was an error. And we keep doing it. God, how useless are we?
We gunned down a whole bunch of civilians and a couple of Reuters journalists from a helicopter while laughing manically — oh, shit, sorry! Didn’t see you there, screaming in agony.
A million dead in Iraq? Oops, well, we’ll be off. Sorry about the rubble.
One obvious question is, if all this killing committed by the US is accidental, and they really are just trying their best to help and are not mercenary bloodsuckers raping the planet for US corporate interests, then how did such a incompetent, accident-prone nation get to be the world's only superpower?
But perhaps there is another question. Does it really matter?
After all, I just watched that YouTube clip about this evil Black guy in Africa and am now fully convinced the most important thing to do is buy a wristband and back US military intervention in Uganda. I mean, you can’t catch a war criminal without the US military.
True, they can’t seem to help but massacre foreigners. But someone has to help the famously humanitarian Ugandan People’s Defence Force catch Lord’s Resistance Army head Joseph Kony, who hasn't even been in Uganda since 2006 and is hiding with a few hundred soldiers somewhere in the central African jungle.
Sure, Al Jazeera reported on March 14 that when the African Youth Initiative Network NGO screened the film in the northern Ugandan town of Lira, the event “ended with the angrier members of the audience throwing rocks and shouting abusive criticism, as the rest fled for safety, leaving an abandoned projector, with organisers and the press running for cover until the dust settled”.
But on the other hand, that cute kid wants Kony stopped.
There is no question the huge numbers of people “liking” and posting the “KONY 2012” clip are doing so because they are genuinely outraged at Kony’s crimes. But we must remember: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And US cruise missiles. In fact, especially US cruise missiles.
