8 Sep, 2013
Chinese commentator asks U.S.: Oh, when will they value the lives of others?
2013-09-07 – Human life seems to have lost its value, outside the United States, of course.
Men in the thousands are killing one another faster and more efficiently in mid-air, on open squares, inside vehicles, behind ruined walls, from windows, during prayers and at burial grounds, and the victims are often women and children.
Those still dreaming of surviving, now at least 2 million from one country alone, huddle in rows of refugee tents in lands neighboring their country, with children uncertain of even their childhood. The remaining have little time to tend to the dead, except perhaps for wrapping some gassed bodies in white shrouds and lining up the motionless and voiceless for a purpose beyond the video display across the world.
Nearby under clear skies, on blue waters warships inch closer, with jet fighters ready to rain death from above.
Media pundits, with their self-proclaimed allegiance to protecting human rights, have been bombarding viewers for weeks with if and when and how the only military deployed across the globe will deal a fatal blow to a part of the world called Syria. Military strategists are counting the targets: the Syrian Republican Guards and troops in towns such as Homs should be wiped out, Damascus International Airport and Dumayr Air Base should be bombed to cut the officials’ escape route. And the attack models in Kosovo, Iraq and Libya have been eulogized.
But the starkest game involves how to destroy and slaughter with state-of-the-art weapons and gadgets. Perish is the only way the targeted people can escape the wrath of the “almighty”. Collateral damage, as the US loves to say, cannot be ruled out, as usual.
Such warmongering almost irritated the intended audience when the commander of the only superpower’s armed forces decisively declared – ironically to the dismay of those who take him as their savior: The US’ winner of Nobel Peace Prize will order a fatal strike on Syrian government targets, when US Congress, not the UN Security Council, okays it.
The fact that the targeted Syrians have never killed or injured an American or French national is not significant. What matters is that the top leaders of the world’s most formidable forces say that some of those Syrians or some of their supporters gassed the videoed dead, and by doing so they crossed the “red line” set by the world’s most powerful man. Crossing the “red line” also poses a threat to US friends in the region, he said.
But haven’t the US’ friends changed or transmuted into enemies in the past? Weren’t Saddam Hussein and even Muammar Gadhafi close to the White House once? And wasn’t Hosni Mubarak a US friend until protests broke out in Egypt?
Moreover, aren’t those the US calls friends in Syria fellow fighters of an opposition strongman, who in a matter-of-fact way tore open the chest of a fallen Syrian soldier, plucked out the heart, stuffed it between his teeth, and had it recorded on video and posted online for billions of earthlings to “admire”?
The US top guns are busy hammering out details of schemes on how to kill more men like the fallen Syrian soldier even if that means lending support to al-Qaida militants embedded in that country. The US leaders say they believe, full-heartedly, the conclusion drawn by their ours-only intelligence on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, even though investigators dispatched by the world’s most authoritative organization are still studying the samples collected from the alleged site of the chemical attack in Damascus.
The same US intelligence, which taps phones and intercepts e-mails of people from anywhere, fooled the world about Saddam Hussein having “huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” a decade ago, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The US politicians have simply used the intelligence to apply their own laws to other countries to further their goals. They still are.
The world’s most advanced military has proven its edge worldwide. In former Yugoslavia, its bombs sent the limbs and bodies of children, women and men flying. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, some US soldiers have single-handedly shot more than a dozen innocent men and women to reach their “target”. In Libya, US planes buried people deep into the desert sand and turned homes into ruins. The only thing they were worried about was not damaging the oil pipes nearby.
And each time they have emerged unscathed, with their commanders assuming higher pseudo-moral grounds. The inveterate idiosyncrasy of these experts in “surgical” operations against the sea of humanity is about to descend with full force again.
Oh, when will they value the lives of others?
But the US export of destruction and bloodshed is coupled with a nightmarish byproduct: fear at home. Just visit the grave of former US ambassador to Libya and ask: How come the life of US citizens is losing value outside the US?
The author is a journalist with China Daily.
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