### - a rather intelligent/observant article that nicely rounds things up,
the Albert Camus quote being what initially grabbed my attention heh,
which albeit fairly long imho is well worth reading ;)

***

The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat,
Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran
suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert
Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”

This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20th, 2023, that he
believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather
than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for
diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in
World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more
casualties.

“So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved …
seize the moment,” Milley told the Economic Club of New York.

https://countercurrents.org/2023/03/blood-does-not-wash-away-blood/

Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and
internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base
for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance
of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged
us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response,
we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve
years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by
unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government
officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace
groups longing to prevent a looming war.

In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The
International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared
that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might
drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we
were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that
Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be
fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough
credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing
campaign.

Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day
and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive
ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old
girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to
mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns..

Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they
recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an
emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I
tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was
undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but
also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali
Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later
reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his
arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?”

I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger
and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring,
“Will we always be this way?”

Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the
military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an
insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left
behind after “ending” a war of choice.

Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan
Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt
overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.

“I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed
everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our
way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams
between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily
crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth
had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers
became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The
images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and
disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”

“War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me
during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He
pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an
earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions,
prolonging the agony.

He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing
surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense
inert metal explosives lop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t
repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human
flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons
trying to remove the sinister material.

“You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is
that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in
Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it’s worse than an
earthquake.”

As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia,
some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a
cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the
pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming
uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a
nuclear war?

U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose
wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022,
four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one
being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just
to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians
will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will
starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating
the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a
livable human existence.”

UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement
affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and
deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale
and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other
civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or
destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”

Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have
suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed
or wounded.

Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s
government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons
used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money
bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons
manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war
began.

In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military
assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker
armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles,
Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose
Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for
Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.

Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and
Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy
Sak, spoke confidently about getting F-16 fighter jets next. “They didn’t
want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give
us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now
they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left
that we will not get,” he told Reuters.

Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war
was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January
24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the
metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the
Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear
danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change.
“Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their
supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment
in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”