[lbo-talk] Fidel: El asesinato de Bin Laden/The assassination of Bin Laden

[Carrol Cox]

Doug is just having his usual fun of pretending that a 100 word post 
represents the whole of what the writer knows of the world. A good deal 
of hard work and research goes into lbo and the radio show, and there 
mkust not be much time left over to read anything on lbo-talk very 
carefully. Using the same method a reviewer might write, "According to 
the author of Wall Street the U.S. is the only nation with a stock market."

The major non-u.s. perpetrated  mass murders (and it is mass murder, not 
merely violence at issue) are Rwanda, East Timor, Cambodia,  and 
Guatemala. One would also need to throw in the major famines around the 
world (1950-2000). Then there was the Iraq-Iran War. These account for 
huge numbers of deaths, but of course the U.S. hand is visible in a 
number of them-the Cambodian massacre is unthinkable outside the context 
of the U.S.s invasion. It is at least doubtful that Iraq would have 
launched the attack on Iran without at a minimum tacit U.S. approval. I 
would welcome a serious argument that U.S. meddling was not essential to 
the mass murders in Guatemala. France was probably the major villain in 
Rwanda, but then I allowed for "U.S. allies" in my casual narrative of 
world violence. Probably, were the U.S. to withdraw its military and its 
arms shipments from the rest of the world there would be substitutes (EU 
primarily: it would take a while for China or Russia to regear their 
military for worldwide cop duties). But however that might be, the fact 
remains that a huge proportion of the violence and the misery flowisng 
from violence or the threat of violence is either directly imposed by 
the U.S. or made possible by its support or concurrence.

And the point of departure for all of this is the question of 9f11 as a 
"crime against humanity," and there can be no doubt that the worldwide 
U.S. presence, and especially its presence in the Middle East, dwarfs 
the violence of 911. Doug noted that were some other nation to conduct 
in the U.S. a raid similar to that which led to the murder of Bin Laden 
the response would involve missiles.

How are the peoples of the Middle East to respond to over half a century 
of violence and oppression most of which is directly traceable to the 
U.S.? Even if one were to radically minimize u.s. violence in the Middle 
East, it would still dwarf 911. That is why I found repellant the 
labeling of 9f11 as a "crime against humanity."

Carrol

C. G. Estabrook wrote:

Given the disparity in resources, economic & military, that's more 
nearly true than the reverse.

On 5/5/11 9:01 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:

It seems that for Carrol, the USA has a monopoly on the bad shit in the 
world, and everyone else is just fighting back.