KAMALIKA PIERIS

USA has continued to invade, bomb and kill in foreign countries, undeterred by the Vietnam defeat in 1975. US methods are now  more sophisticated USA now uses smart bombs and drone-guided missiles instead of B-52s and napalm,  but US  is as brutal and ruthless  as ever, said critics.

 US says it is waging war for humanitarian” reasons,  but US  is utterly indifferent to the welfare of the public in the country it has invaded.US shows contempt and arrogance toward the people it is trying to ‘save’ and   its wars have much savagery, said critics.  

Critics have argued that the US has waged wars in violation of international law. There is no legal justification for US interference in other countries they said. These wars have been made on shaky grounds. They have been launched without the permission or knowledge of the US Congress and the wars lack a clear military objective. They are waging war inside a foreign country and the reason given is ‘self-defense.’  

 The United States attempts to establish fragile, dependent regimes to serve its global hegemony have crippled regional countries’ efforts to independently explore their development paths and caused a series of disastrous consequences, said critics.

Such acts of toppling the governments of other countries by force, interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and forcible export of the so-called “democracy” not only violated the basic norms of international relations such as prohibiting the use of force and non-interference in internal affairs, but also seriously violated the rights of the people of the relevant countries to choose their own development paths as well as their basic human rights, said critics.

The wars launched by the US in the 21st century were mainly in Middle East. USA’s forced transformation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya has disrupted political order, and destroyed social and national cohesion in these countries, declared China. These wars have had an adverse effect on the population in those countries.  In Iraq US used depleted uranium munitions in large quantities, causing enormous damage to the health of the local population.

USA waged war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.  US wanted to crush the Taliban. Instead Taliban won and US withdrew in 2021. The Afghanistan war went on for six months more than the Vietnam War (1955–1975) so it is USA’s longest war. It was also USA’s second spectacular failure.

US took   the war into every corner of Afghanistan as well as across the border into Pakistan, said analysts. US army   carried out night raids on Afghan villages and these devastated the villages. On Aug. 29, 2021, a drone attack by the U.S. military in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, killed 10 local civilians, including seven children.

US army had also engaged in behavior offensive to Muslims, such as urinating on corpses, taking fingers and other body parts of murdered Afghans as trophies,” and burning the Koran at Bagram Air Base.

Brown University’s Costs of War Project (est. 2011) pointed out that more than 174,000 people died directly in the war in Afghanistan, of whom more than 47,000 were civilians. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2.6 million Afghans have fled abroad and another 3.5 million were displaced.

US invaded Iraqon the bogus charge that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. War lasted from 2003 to 2011. Then in 2014 at the request of Iraq, US sent soldiers to Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces to fight ISIS. This was followed by an agreement to station 5,200 soldiers in Iraq. But in 2020, the Iraqi Parliament ordered all foreign troops to leave the country. US President Trump objected and threatened Iraq with sanctions.

The Iraq War caused regime change, social unrest and prolonged conflicts in Iraq.  Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, was plunged into a state of anarchy, and the Iraq Museum, which is listed by UNESCO as one of the top 11 museums in the world, was plundered of 170,000 artifacts. The Director of the Museum openly blamed the US military.

US-Iraq war had many civilian deaths. In 2007, employees of the American Blackwater Company,   which had been under contract to US, carried out a massacre in Nisour Square in Baghdad, killing 14 civilians, including two children, and injuring at least 17 others.

On Aug. 12, 2005, a U.S. armored patrol vehicle shot at people coming out of a mosque in the suburban town of Ramadi, killing 15 Iraqis, including eight children, and injuring 17 others. On Nov. 21 of the same year, the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq opened fire on a civilian vehicle in northern Baghdad, killing a family of five, including three children. Nine of the 13 hospitals In Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city were destroyed.

According to Statista, a global statistical database, from 2003 to 2021, about 209,000 Iraqi civilians died in wars and violent conflicts, and about 9.2 million Iraqis became refugees or were forced to leave Iraq.

US has involved itself in the Syrian Civil war from   very beginning in  2011 US  supplied aid and intelligence  to the rebels fighting  President  Assad. CIA  established an extensive program to train and equip the rebels.

Since 2014, the United States has conducted periodic airstrikes and maintained hundreds of troops in Syria as part of its war against Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda   and Syrian government forces. In 2015, the United States sent a small number of ground troops to train, advice, and assist the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their fight against IS. Since 2016, US army has also fought Iranian-backed militia groups such as Kait’ib Hezbollah, Kait’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada and Russian mercenaries.

Since 2016, the US has controlled al-Tanfbase, in a remote area of Syria, near where the borders of Syria, Jordan and Iraq meet. U.S. troops are stationed there. US troops are also in Hassakeh.

In 2017, USA and Syria fought vigorously. There was a missile strike on Shayrat Airbase. In 2017, the U.S. military attacked Raqqa. On March 18, 2019, U.S. drones killed at least 64 civilian women and children in an attack on the town of Baghouz on the Syrian-Iraqi border.

In 2021 there were 900 U.S. soldiers operating in Syria, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. In February 2021 US ordered airstrikes against Iranian-backed militia groups in eastern Syria in response to attacks against U.S.troops. In February 2022, the U.S. military launched a raid in Syria’s Idlib province, killing at least 13 people, including six children and three women.

The New York Times reported that based on an investigation of classified Pentagon documents, it had found that frequent U.S. airstrikes in Syria caused a large number of civilian casualties. They were due to “mistargeting.” Times noted that the Pentagon covered up these actions and did not punish those responsible.

According to data released by the United Nations, U.S. military intervention has claimed at least 350,000 lives in Syria, displaced more than 12 million people, and left 14 million civilians in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The Syrian refugee issue has been called by the United Nations “the biggest refugee crisis of our time.”

US has no plans to retreat from Syria but analysts observed that Islamic State (IS) has now turned to long-term, low-intensity insurgency, and there is now the question whether the US can fight this and indeed, whether it should continue at all. 

US has also waged war in another way. The United States is the only “sanctions superpower” in the world, said critics. According to the US Treasury 2021 sanctions review, the United States has had more than 9,400 sanctions in effect by the 2021 fiscal year. In 1996, it issued the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, forbidding foreign companies from investing in Iran’s and Libya’s energy industry.

The unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States against countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have hurt the ordinary people, and seriously undermined development   U.S. government imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, Syria and other countries, during COVID-19 pandemic,   making it difficult for the sanctioned countries to obtain medical supplies needed to fight the pandemic. Iran was unable to import essential medicines and medical equipment, and that has seriously affected the health of millions of Iranians.

From 1980 to 1992, the United States imposed unilateral sanctions on Libya, and from 1992 to 2003, it made US allies also impose unilateral sanctions against Libya. The World Bank said the Libyan economy has lost 18 billion dollars due to sanctions, while an official Libyan estimate put the loss at 33 billion dollars.

Since 1979, the United States has imposed various unilateral sanctions on Iran. US imposed more and more sanctions on Iran as the years went by. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration cost Iran at least 200 billion U.S. dollars in economic losses.

United States imposed brutal unilateral sanctions on Iraq with severe consequences. From August 1990 to May 2003, sanctions cost Iraq 150 billion dollars in losses of oil revenues. To date, Iraq’s per capita annual income has fallen short of its 1990 level (7,050 dollars).

In addition, the sanctions have caused a serious humanitarian disaster in Iraq, with the infant mortality rate doubling and the under-five mortality rate increasing sevenfold. Iraq’s education, health and social security systems were destroyed, and its literacy rate fell from 89 percent in 1987 to 57 percent in 1997.

After withdrawing its troops from Afghanistanin 2021, the United States has not only imposed economic sanctions on Afghanistan, but also frozen billions of dollars of foreign exchange reserves of the Afghan central bank, bringing the Afghan economy to the brink of collapse and worsening the life of the people. World Food Program officials pointed out that the U.S. economic sanctions on Afghanistan has exacerbated the local food crisis.