Afghan Hospital Bombing: Its Meaning

This headline and the following story (New York Times 4/10/2015) underlines the vast criminal role of the U.S. government and its military throughout Afghanistan and the Middle East. I grew up chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ. How Many Kids Have You Killed Today” but no similar chant or mass movement has arisen to call out President Obama for his criminal international policies and war crimes, including the murder of children. We can be sure that the nature of the U.S. military and the role of the POTUS in maintaining the de facto imperial domination of the U.S. has not changed from the days of LBJ and the mass murder of children and other civilians will continue as long as our present political and economic system exists.

The U.S. is already spinning the bombing and mass killing of medical personnel and patients at the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. The U.S. military is going to “investigate” itself. It has already suggested that the Taliban was using the hospital. It also claims there was fighting nearby and an errant bomb was possible. Neither of these two claims appears to be true: they are just so much dust tossed into the eyes to obscure the facts.

The U.N. and international community is rightly outraged since the U.S. was given the precise location of the hospital and its international protected status was well known. This information was provided to prevent any attack. Since the attack was carried out with unrelenting accuracy over a thirty minute period one suspects the information was used to pin point the target. Mass terrorist tactics against civilians, adopted, it seems, by the U.S. from the example of the Israeli military’s treatment of Palestinians, has of course, the exact opposite outcome than is planned — it makes resistance to U.S. policy grow not decrease, yet it is the nature of the beast to be unreformable.

This widespread policy of state sponsored terrorism is conducted by POTUS and his military either directly (Afghanistan, Iraq) or indirectly by supplying money and weapons to other criminal governments so that they can commit war crimes against others (Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States in Yemen, Turkey against the Kurds, “covert’ and open aid to jihadists and “moderates” in Syria prolonging a proxy war that would have ended long ago without U.S. meddling, NATO intervention in Libya– the list goes on and on and at least as far back as the Korean War.

I will stress, however, that this is not a personal failure on the part of President Obama. It is simply the institutionalized function of his office to carry out such actions as they are the logical outcome of the system of advanced monopoly capitalism we live under and which is fueled by the profitability of war and the domination of the 1% over the levers of government and the continued faith in our “democratic” government held by a brainwashed public. Only by engaging in mass political struggles, such as the movement currently led by Bernie Sanders, can the Left hope to educate and radicalize the American people and build a real movement for progressive political change.

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This post was written by Thomas Riggins