Monday, November 14, 2005

Darkness Over Empire

Why is it that the US military's use of napalm in Fallujah is a surprise? It does symbolize whopping moral hypocrisy in that the US government insisted the casus belli for invading Iraq was that country’s asserted possession of weapons of mass destruction; so what does the US military do? They use the self-same weapons on Iraqi civilians: napalm is a banned chemical weapon.

But hypocrisy drenched in evil is not new to US politicos, nor was it new to history's miscreants. Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf wrote: "... the world will be governed by the law of natural distribution of power, and then those nations will be victorious who are of more brutal will and are not the nations who have practiced self-denial." The US embodies this pre-Straussian philosophy close to its breast. It is for the world to see, as the US regime continues to pressure Iran and northern Korea over their alleged nuclear intentions while defying nuclear treaties, upgrading their own nuclear arsenal, and ignoring the possession of nuclear weapons by US client states such as Israel.

Why should the use of napalm surprise anyone when the US authorities approve the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs? Why should the use of napalm surprise when it uses depleted uranium-laced weapons that are strongly linked to the ill health of US troops (rendering them to the status of cannon fodder)? Heavy bombing and a wholesale disregard for Iraqi civilians (over 100,000 of which have been slaughtered), undeniably adduces a callous insouciance for human life.