Hiroshima Day 2010

For the interested my thoughts anent Hiroshima can be found on my post from August 2009. I think it's a good thing that, for the first time, we're sending a relatively high ranking representative - the U.S. ambassador to Japan - to the commemorative ceremony but I feel there's still a long way to go before we own up to the consequences of our choice to drop the A-bomb in the first place.

Actually, this year's anniversary brings to mind the recent revelations from WikiLeaks concerning the failing occupation in Afghanistan and the continued existence of the same moral blinkers that made Hiroshima possible. Tom Engelhardt's latest TomDispatch asks the question about just whose hands are bloody - hypothetically Mr. Assange's or the architects of the Afghan War's whose casualties are all too real. The following are all examples of the real blood on the real hands of the real war criminals in this affair:

• July 2008 - An American plane or planes "take out" an Afghan bridal party -- 70 to 90 strong and made up mostly of women -- on a road near the Pakistani border.
• August 2008 - A memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province is hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that kill at least 90 civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children.
• April 2009 - Members of the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, are killed in a U.S.-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan. Among them are his "schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department.” Another daughter is wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin is shot five times in the abdomen.
• November 2009 - Two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, are shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a Special Operations night raid.
• February 2010 - U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters strike a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children.
• February 2010 - In a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, are shot to death in their home.
• July 2010 - Residents of a small town in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan claim that a NATO missile attack killed 52 civilians.

I am reminded of something I just read in Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians: As a result of Roman diplomatic and military policy along its frontiers (which included, among other things, periodic incursions to install "good" leaders/depose "bad" and destroy the means of production), the empire sowed the seeds of its own destruction by fostering the growth of anti-Roman, organized polities.

Except for the actors, what's really changed in 2,000 years?