by BRUCE A. DIXON
Maintenance of the US empire has cost millions of human lives in recent years. A cursory count might start with Vietnam, with two or three million dead, and another million in Iraq since the Bush invasion alone. Madeline Albright didn’t quibble with the figure of half a million dead Iraqi children sacrificed by the US blockade during the Clinton years. A US-engineered civil war in Colombia has taken a six figure death toll, and a series of murderous US-backed regimes in Central America, and the wars to protect them took another six figures in the Reagan era alone. A series of civil wars and invasions of Somalia have been fomented by the US, as well as the invasion and plunder of the Congo, with perhaps a higher death toll than any conflict since World War II. A decisive factor in the HIV-AIDS epidemic on the African continent has been US-imposed policies of structural adjustment, which have prohibited African countries from using their own resources to extend the education and health care to their population which might have saved ten or twenty million lives. Calling this genocidal enterprise “foreign policy” doesn’t help us understand it. Calling it what it is —- empire — is a good, an indispensable place to begin.
Black Agenda Report for more