HOW FOOD BECAME A LETHAL WEAPON
By Deirdre Griswold
It's the opposite of beating swords into plowshares. It's taking food and using it as a lethal weapon.
That's what the Bush administration is doing as it airdrops 37,500 packaged meals on Afghanistan, a token gesture in a land where millions face severe hunger and even starvation as they are uprooted by war. But now the generals can get in front of the cameras and talk of hey, hey, how many meals they dropped today.
Even the French organization Doctors Without Borders, which usually works in tandem with Western military forces, condemned the action, saying it "isn't in any way a humanitarian aid operation, but more a military propaganda operation, destined to make international opinion accept the U.S.-led military operation. What sense is there in shooting with one hand, and giving medicine with the other?"
This operation may bamboozle some in the U.S. who only know what the corporate media tells them, but it will only deepen the disgust and hatred of those in the Middle East who understand the full cynicism behind the photo ops.
This is not the first time that the U.S. rulers have used food as a cover for intervention in a Muslim country. In 1993 U.S. Marines were sent to Somalia in the middle of a civil war there, supposedly for the purpose of delivering food to the people.
Their real goal was to eliminate the forces of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who someone in Washington had dubbed "the bad guy" in the internal struggle. Once the U.S. troops were entrenched in a base near the airport of the capital city, Mogadishu, they began making forays into the city to "take out" leaders from Aidid's grouping.
Imagine if, during the U.S. Civil War, Britain had been powerful enough to send teams to Washington to assassinate Lincoln and his cabinet. That's how the Somalis looked at the U.S. intrusion.
The whole operation blew up on Oct. 3, 1993. As Black Hawk helicopters circled above and Humvees topped with heavy- gauge machine guns brought in backup squads, teams of Rangers and Delta Force elite troops encircled a building in the middle of the city, near the teeming Bakara Market, where a meeting of Aidid supporters was supposedly taking place.
The book "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden is by no means written from a progressive outlook. But it describes in vivid detail what happened. These helicopters, whose rotors created such a powerful downdraft that they actually would rip the clothes off of women on the street below and lift the tin roofs off dwellings, had been invulnerable death machines of the occupation. But when the Somalis saw them hovering over the downtown area and realized they were carrying out a military operation right in their capital city, they ran in by the thousands, mostly unarmed, to resist.
Women and children shielded men with their bodies as the men, some armed with World War I rifles, crawled out in the street to fire on the 17 copters and their crews. Old men rode in on horses and even cows to fight the invaders.
The heavy guns of the U.S. forces killed at least 500 Somalis in the 15-hour battle that followed, most of them civilians. But with all their vastly superior weaponry, the elite U.S. troops were eventually overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and passion of the Somali resistance. Nearly 100 were surrounded and trapped by the crowds after two Black Hawks were shot down.
This event, in which 18 U.S. elite troops were killed and nearly 80 injured, led to the hasty withdrawal of the Pentagon from Somalia. A military operation that had begun under the cover of "humanitarian aid" ended in a shameful rout after a bloody battle that still burns in the hearts of the people of the Middle East.
Posted 10/10/01
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