A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016.
Maybe we should have cancelled the fireworks this Fourth of July considering the insensitive symbolism of enjoying war.
With the Pentagon's rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air, smashing seven majority Muslim countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen - negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. U.S. drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from supercarriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on June 24 when U.S. bombs destroyed four houses.
Every child killed or maimed by U.S.-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced "Oh-Bomb-Ah") made the point himself May 23, 2013, in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks "raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies ..." And Obama warned that, "U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies."
Whether bombing civilians only "risks" creating enemies or is guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass U.S. military reaction to 9/11 - and the country's demonization of whole groups and religions - to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow deaths of innocents.
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If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital or Sunday market hit by U.S. drones, gunships or F-18s. One Star Tribune headline on April 2 directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, "Civilian deaths a windfall for militants' propaganda." Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.
U.S. offers $6,000 for each dead civilian (sarcasm alert).
In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are attacked indiscriminately by "foreigners." In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: When a U.S. gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016, killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.
The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists and - being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents - Americans want to believe it. The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko, writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to ensure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.
Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others.
"We're expending munitions faster than we can replenish them," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. "Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon's] 2017 budget," Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump's Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis, has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an "annihilation campaign."
Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's February report. It says that half of all U.S. weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May's $110 billion U.S. sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama's $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom's fireworks in Yemen will cause "oooohs" and "ahhhs" of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.
This cheering of faux bombs on the Fourth while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as U.S. drones and jets howl overhead. But "Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto - 'In God is our trust' - And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."
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John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.
