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The recent unprovoked attacks on Iran by the United States (US) and Israel, assassinations of Iranian leaders and brutal murders and burning of schoolgirls in the country were deliberate acts of mass murder to terrorise the people. To bomb schools, hospitals and refugee shelters “accidentally” has become the Standard Operating Procedure in all US and Israeli campaigns, as we saw in the destruction and mass murders in Gaza.

The US and Israel believe that the Iranian people would welcome them as liberators. In the last eighty years since the Second World War, the US has attempted several regime changes and repeated the same script. In none of these countries were they welcomed as liberators. America did not win a single war or succeed in a regime change despite all the death and destruction it unleashed on innocent civilians and the lakhs it killed.

Finally, in every situation, they had to run with their tails between their legs, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan, to mention just these two. The most recent instance of its historical behaviour is the brazen abduction of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife Cilia Flores.

The gory televised hanging of Saddam Hussein, blamed for the deaths of Shias in 1982, and the killing of Muammar Gaddafi – raw footage of the operation repeatedly telecast on TV – and the shooting of Osama bin Laden by US forces entering Pakistan – brought home the urgency to recalculate the arithmetic of hanging and retribution. These high-visibility killings serve as a declaration – a precedent – that all those who are directly or indirectly responsible for crimes against humanity will have to face death. Let us say that a certain parameter for justice has been clearly established in our univocal world.

Saddam’s neck was broken for allegedly giving the nod to retribution. The US was Saddam’s best friend and arms supplier. Having not protested at the time, the US continued its arms business and supplied, along with Germany, the chemical warfare facilities that were used to kill hundreds of Kurdish civilians.

Eric Draper for the Office of the Press Secretary of the President of the United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

If the Baghdad equation of responsibility were applied consistently, presidents Reagan and Bush Sr would have had to hang for the murder of those Kurdish civilians. Why did the buck stop at Saddam? It should have gone all the way to Washington and Bonn.

The list runs endlessly. Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, Robert McNamara and Richard Nixon should have been hanged for Vietnam War crimes. None of them was ever tried. Political assassinations of Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Salvador Allende of Chile, Che Guevara of Cuba, the central committee of Indonesia’s Communist Party and its ten lakh members and sympathisers, 25 lakh civilians in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, under CIA supervision.

No US president was hanged or even tried for supporting the Taliban or creating Al-Qaeda, but the whole of Afghanistan got blown up instead.

Every single US administration has the blood of Palestinians, in their thousands, on its hands. In the league tables, the worst mass murderers of the twentieth century were all great allies of the US, barring Hitler. They were overthrown by popular revolt and fled to the US with tons of plundered national wealth on board their private aircraft – the Marcoses of the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua and Batista of Cuba. They and many others were all politely escorted and protected by the CIA under guarantees from successive US presidents.

For being accomplices to thousands of murders worldwide, most US presidents should have been tried and hanged along with their friends. Pinochet of Chile is known to have authorised the killing and torture of at least 35,000 intellectuals and others and was never even barred entry into the US. He could always travel to the country and consult the presidents and deposit millions of dollars embezzled from Chile. Several thousand disappeared. Hundreds of thousands were imprisoned.

And Nixon and Kissinger were directly handling the Chile issue from the CIA headquarters in Langley.

By the Baghdad equation, General Pinochet and his generals should have been hanged over 200 times along with all the successive US presidents and CIA chiefs from the 1970s till recent years. This may sound horrific, but this is the equation the US applies to the rest of the world. Israel’s then defence minister, Ariel Sharon, who enjoyed continued support from the US, was held personally responsible for allowing the murder of Palestinian civilians at the Shatila and Sabra camps in Lebanon and should have been hanged along with his US friends. No, he was not.

None of Israel’s prime ministers, defence ministers or soldiers have been hanged for brutal atrocities against the Palestinian population for 70 years.

The (not so) free US and allied media are acting as the mouthpiece of this war machine and dehumanising the victims of this unjust war. An Iranian mother, whose house has been firebombed by allied ‘precision bombs’ and whose child has been blown apart and stuck to the walls as mutilated, charred lumps of flesh, does not grieve any less than an English or American mother under similar circumstances. Of course, she may not cry in English in a comfortable Anglo-Saxon accent, with blow-dried hair, make-up and manicured nails and in convenient sound bites. She may wail inconsolably in a burqa in a foreign language that may be incomprehensible. But her tears, agony, anguish, heartbreak and anger are just as real and intense.

The real tragedy is that the so-called free world stands in silence watching it happen. The US is not invincible. Ordinary people can prevail. A boycott of every US company and product in protest against this crime against humanity will bring the clay-footed colossus to its knees. Under the carefully crafted benign video imagery and euphemisms lies the most inhuman and bloodthirsty death machine ever known to humankind, under the pseudonym of the US administration.

If the Baghdad equation were applied, Pennsylvania Avenue would not have enough trees or telegraph poles to hang the criminally responsible US presidents, vice presidents, CIA chiefs, generals and military personnel for their crimes against humanity. Trump and Netanyahu would be heading the queue.

Whenever the US administration and CIA have tried to establish democracy, freedom and justice, they have come away killing at least 1,00,000 to ten lakh people.

The US and their allies owe the world a huge debt in heads of state. (Pun intended).

© The Wire