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Becoming What We Seek to Destroy by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
May 11, 2009

The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown [in] a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

[…]

via Truthdig

Chris Hedges’ new book, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will be out in July and can be preordered on Amazon or at your local bookstore.

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig

Chris Hedges, who is an Arabic speaker and spent seven years in the Middle East, was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.

see

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Desperate Pakistanis flee violence in Swat

After US Strikes, Afghans Describe “Tractor Trailers Full of Pieces of Human Bodies” By Jeremy Scahill

Civilians Pay Price of War from Above By Robert Fisk

Why We Fight – U.S. Troops Die For Rapists By Ted Rall + Afghanistan Women Protest

Pepe Escobar: Killing them softly with air strikes

Buying Brand Obama by Chris Hedges

Pakistan: “The Most Dangerous Country” (Full Video)

Afghanistan on Dandelion Salad

8 thoughts on “Becoming What We Seek to Destroy by Chris Hedges”

  1. We are going to repeat, yet again, the same mistake we did in Vietnem – Almost certainly!

    For a superpower that was gifted with so much, we sure lack so much in wisdon, forsight and common sense. We haven’t learnt a thing from history, or even our own past, and I have serious doubts that we will any time soon.

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