It seems that the general ideological picture painted for Americans by their administration and conservative outlets is that the overall so-called war on terror is about the “civilized” world combating “barbarism,” a position Business Week recently voiced. This is historically and politically inaccurate, in terms of the scale and intensity of the crimes committed by USA versus the “barbarians,” presumably Islamists and nationalists in Iraq and Palestine.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states (such as US and Israel) far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

The best current example is in Iraq. Estimates of deaths after the invasion is 100,000 maybe more, maybe less. Take say, the most extensive terrorist act attributed to Islamic terrorists, 9-11. About 3,000 people killed, which is a pretty horrible atrocity. But as atrocities go, does it rank as high as the US crimes?

Another example, what south of the Rio Grande is often called the other 9-11. September 11th, 1973, in which the United States was very indirectly (heavily) involved — that’s the bombing of the presidential palace, the military coup, the death of the president, the destruction of the leading democracy, the oldest democracy, in Latin America. The official death toll for that 9-11 is ­ the official death toll is over 3,000, but that’s just the bodies they can actually count. The estimated toll is probably twice that. If you give that number in comparative terms, comparative population terms, that’d be the equivalent of about 50 to 100,000 people killed in the United States. The numbers of people tortured — is 30,000, that’s 700,000 in the United States, thousands of cases of rapes and other abuse, and many people just lost, disappeared, who knows what happened to them.

Well that’s one event ­ September 11th, 1973. Happens to be one in which the US was only indirectly involved. If we take those which the US carried out itself, then the scale is uncountable. Take the one case where the US was indeed condemned for international terrorism and ordered to terminate the crime, namely the attack on Nicaragua, which went to the World Court. The World Court had to take a very narrow case, because the US had excluded itself from all international treaties. So the US cannot be brought to the World Court for major crimes, for example the supreme international crime, invasion, or violation of the UN Charter, or violation of the Genocide Convention, these are things the US is exempt from, because they exempted themselves from being subjected to international treaties in World Court proceedings.

So the World Court had to deal with Nicaragua case on extremely narrow grounds, just bilateral Nicaragua-US treaties, and customary international law. Nevertheless the Court condemned the US for what it called unlawful use of force, gave a pretty broad judgment, well beyond the actual terms of the case, ordered the US to terminate the crimes, pay substantial reparations. The US ignored the ruling, vetoed two Security Council resolutions affirming it, and went on with the war.

The end result was, again in per capita terms, about the equivalent of 2.5 million people being killed in the United States. More than the number of deaths in all wars including the Civil War in US history, destroyed the country, it’s now the second poorest country in the hemisphere. After the US took it over again in 1990, it went downhill further — by now, it’s estimated that over half the children under 2 are suffering from severe malnutrition, I mean, probable brain damage.

In the early 80’s, when the US started the war, Nicaragua was being praised by international organizations, even international banks, for its substantial progress, won prizes for improvement, UNICEF prizes for ­ awards for improvement in child health and development. Now it’s quite the opposite.

This is a single incident, so it totally outweighs all terrorist activities you can attribute to anyone else, but it’s not even worth discussing.

And that’s only one, I’m not even talking about the major wars like say, Vietnam, which was straight aggression, can’t call it terror, with, who knows, four million people or so killed, and people still dying from the effects of massive chemical warfare started by Kennedy. And that’s just the United States. Take a look at other states, they’re not as powerful as the US, but their violence is extraordinary ­ France in Africa, the British in Kenya and elsewhere, just far beyond the scale of any terrorist activity.

Back to Iraq example. It’s interesting to note that ­ 100,000 casualties in Iraq ­ it’s interesting to note that while much media attention is focused on the sensationalistic and gruesome beheadings of perhaps a few dozen foreigners in Iraq, the same media is more or less silent about the Lancet report ­ Lancet being the British medical journal ­ that said about 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, mostly by US bombing, and also missing in the media is talk about the Iraqi children’s malnutrition rates which have apparently doubled. They’re worse than - at the level of Burundi ­ they’re worse than Uganda and Haiti ­ and that’s since the war.

In fact the way the media treated this Lancet report is kind of interesting. I mean it was mentioned ­ it’s not that you couldn’t find it. But it was either ignored or downplayed. The standard reaction to it was well, that it was just a sample. In fact they did it very conservatively. They excluded Fallujah because that would have raised the estimate!

And in fact, it’s not exactly correct that the media haven’t reported the war crimes. They often report them and celebrate them. So take for example the invasion of Fallujah, which is one of the US major war crimes, it’s very similar to the Russian destruction of Grozny 10 years earlier, a city of approximately the same size, bombed to rubble, people driven out.

Well, with Fallujah, the US didn’t truck out the women and children, it bombed them out. There was about a month of bombing, bombed out of the city, if they could get out somehow, a couple hundred thousand people fled, or somehow got out, and men were kept in.

But what was dramatic about Fallujah was that it was not kept secret. So you could see on the front page of the New York Times, a big picture of the first major step in the offensive, namely the capture of the Fallujah general hospital. And there’s a picture of people lying on the ground, soldier guarding them, and then there’s a story that tells that patients and doctors were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were forced to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the picture described it.

The president of the United States is subject to death penalty under US law for that crime - alone. That’s a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions say explicitly and unambiguously that hospitals must be protected, hospitals and medical staff and patients must be protected by all combatants in any conflict. You couldn’t have a more grave breach of the Geneva Conventions than that.

There’s a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn’t mean the soldier that committed them, that means the commanders. They weren’t thinking about the United States of course, but take it literally, that’s what it means.

And then they went onto explain why they carried out this war crime in the general hospital. New York Times explained calmly that it was done because the US command described the Fallujah general hospital as a propaganda outlet for the guerrillas because they were reporting casualties. I don’t know if the Nazis produced things like that. Of course the Times said it was “inflated” casualties - how do we know it was inflated?

And then it went on, destroying the whole city. Finally they end up saying well the Marines are going to face a serious challenge of regaining the confidence of the people of Fallujah after having destroyed their city. Yeah, it’s going to be a pretty serious challenge. It’s also described how they’re going to do it by instituting a police state.

By the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which the US initiated and carried out, it concluded that the supreme international crime is invasion, aggression, and that supreme crime includes within it all the evil that follows. So therefore the doubling of malnutrition rates, the maybe 100,000 casualties, the grave war crimes in Fallujah, they’re all footnotes, they’re footnotes to the supreme international crime.

And that crime is taken pretty seriously. In Nuremberg they did not try soldiers, and they didn’t try company commanders, the people who were on trial and hanged were the top command. Like the German Foreign Minister was hanged. Because of participation in the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows.

Do we hear anything about that?

Furthermore if Americans go a step further and ask themselves ­ speaking of barbarism ­ “what kind of society do we live in where the only way we can think of preventing Rwanda-level killing among children everyday is by bribing private tyrannies to do something about it?”

That itself is beyond barbarism.

But they accept that, they don’t think about it, they prefer not to think about it. It’s not that they worry about small crimes rather than big ones, it’s that attention is focused on anything that’s done against them. What they do to others just doesn’t matter. And it’s not specific to the United States, it’s quite general. It’s an unfortunate part of dominant cultures and powerful societies.

With all the grandiose rhetoric about “barbarism,” it’s also interesting to note that the Pentagon’s own Defense Science Board, composed of top military commanders and intelligence figures, issued a report about two months ago declaring that resentment in the Islamic world is mainly due to US support for Israel and US support for Arab dictatorships, and not about an inner hatred or hatred of Western values themselves. But if the top people in the Pentagon and the military understand this, then why is there such a large disconnect in what they themselves concede and what they say ­ I mean what are the strategic imperatives that are so great that they are willing to incur the wrath?

This report was a repetition, almost a verbatim repetition of a report by the NSC in 1958 when President Eisenhower raised the question with his staff, why there is a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world, and not among governments but from the people. That’s Eisenhower, 1958, why is there a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. An answer was given in an analysis by the National Security Council in 1958: it’s because there’s a perception in the Arab that the United States supports brutal and repressive regimes and blocks democracy and development, and US do it because they want to get control of oil and resources ­ their oil. That’s 1958. And they went on to say, yes the perception’s accurate, and we’re going to continue doing it. That’s been perfectly well known for years that that was the case.

It’s exacerbated further by specific policies. Right after 9-11, as far as I know one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world, the Wall Street Journal. They kept to the people they cared about, what they called moneyed Muslims, managers of multinational corporations, international lawyers, you know ­ their type of people ­ so there’s no concern about globalization or anything else, they’re part of the US-run system. But they had the same results they had as in 1958, as the Pentagon just reported. They hate and fear Bin Laden, who’s trying to destroy them, but nevertheless they express understanding for the position that he articulates, and they hate US policy, because it supports brutal and oppressive regimes, blocks democracy and development, because of the support for Israeli aggression and atrocities at that time, because of the Iraq sanctions, which were killing hundreds of thousands of people, devastating society, and caused enormous anger.

The Pentagon report is just repeating what anybody knew who had their eyes open. The fact that it was regarded as a surprise in the United States just shows how much intellectuals prefer to keep their eyes closed. What they said is correct, furthermore you can read it - it’s articulated almost the same way in 1958, it’s found in every study since. Furthermore you can find it in any book on terrorism ­ any serious book on terrorism, not just anyone ranting and screaming ­ but someone taking it seriously, say, Jason Burke’s study of al-Qaeda, which is the best one around, or just about anyone you pick.

We don’t hate their freedom, what we hate is US policies, and for good reason, because those policies have been crushing us for years. So yeah, we hate the policies. Pentagon just discovered ­ re-discovered ­ what everybody with eyes open already knew, and these 1958 reports have been declassified for about 15 years. They decided just better not to ­ it’s easier to just stand on a pedestal and scream about Islamic fascism and how it’s trying to destroy USA. It doesn’t require thinking about the policies and doing something about them.

Furthermore that’s true of what’s called terrorism in general, it doesn’t come out of nowhere. I’ll not take Bin Laden as an example, but take say the IRA - which the US was pretty much supporting, it was being funded ­ IRA terrorism, which was pretty serious was being funded from the United States including church collections, FBI knew about it, wouldn’t do anything about it. It was pretty awful, but it was not without reasons, it did draw on a reservoir of sympathy among the population, who understood the grievances that they were talking about were real… In fact when the British finally responded not by greater violence, but by paying some attention to the grievances, it led to significant improvements. In fact, big improvements. Of course, Belfast is not heaven, but it’s enormously improved over what it was ten years ago.

So is Israel. Why they are not willing to incur the wrath?

Israeli intelligence, the former heads of this Shin Bet have spoken about this - the current ones can’t but the former ones have - the former heads of military intelligence, and they all said the same thing: until you treat the Palestinians with respect, until you grant them their elementary rights, you’re never going to stop terrorism. That’s the way to do it ­ they have grievances, the grievances are real, we’re treating them with contempt and humiliation and destruction, we’re stealing their land and resources. There’s something like a near-universal consensus on this, among people who care about the topic.