Syira

Since 9/11, the United States has launched more than 94,000 air strikes, mostly on Afghanistan and Iraq, but also on Libya, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Rumsfeld's plan has undoubtedly achieved his goal of changing the way people live in those countries, killing a million of them and reducing tens of millions more to lives of disability, disfigurement, dislocation, grief and poverty. A sophisticated propaganda campaign has politically justified 13 years of systematic U.S. war crimes, exploiting the only too human failing that George Orwell examined in his 1945 essay, "Notes on Nationalism." As Orwell wrote, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Orwell listed "torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations,imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians." The U.S. has committed all these atrocities in the past 13 years, and Americans have responded exactly as the "nationalists" Orwell described.