"Delivering a message.
"Forty years ago, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said it was necessary to drop bombs on North Vietnam in order to deliver a message to the Communist leaders in Hanoi. The former war correspondent Chris Hedges, in his book 'War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,' recalls that when he was reporting from El Salvador, one morning he and other reporters woke up at their hotel and discovered that death squads had dumped corpses in front of the building overnight, and in the mouths of those corpses were written messages threatening the journalists.
"In Yugoslavia, during the spring of 1999, the bombs fell with the U.S.-led NATO forces delivering a message. And when, at noontime one Friday in the city of Nis, cluster bombs fell courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and ripped into the body of a woman holding a bag of carrots from the market, that too was an instance of sending a message.
"Time after time, leaders send messages by inflicting death. On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden sent a message at the World Trade Center. And in the fall of 2001 the U.S. military sent a message to Afghanistan, where the civilians who died, if we are going to count numbers, were at least as numerous as those who died at the World Trade Center.
"And now, George W. Bush continues to send a message . . . ."
From Norman Solomon's "Why Are We Here?" at BuzzFlash.
