US tight economic sanctions are much like a medieval siege, says the CounterPunch
CounterPunch has argued that the US military interventions in the affairs of several countries in the world under the pretext of fighting terrorism is based on killing and starving civilians through imposing tight economic sanctions on these countries.In an article entitled ” From Aerial Strikes to Starvation, Afghanistan’s People Bear the Brunt of the West’s Failed Taliban Tactics“, the writer says: ” They are inevitable outcome of a supposedly new kind of warfare, which pretends to avoid civilian casualties, but only conceals them. As a military and political strategy, it grew out of a recognition by Washington and London that foreign military intervention no longer enjoys sufficient public support in the wake of the debacle of the Iraq war. The drip-drip of dead and wounded soldiers coming home from military conflicts in far-away places is no longer acceptable.”
He adds: “The response of the US and allied governments was to turn to two fresh strategies, one military and one economic, that seemed to solve their problem. They would allow them to wage war on the cheap, so to speak, reducing their own military casualties, avoiding civilian loss of life, but still inflicting war-winning losses on an enemy. This new approach had the further advantage that it could be sold as low-key and even humane – devastating though its real outcome on the ground has been.
Air forces have always oversold the accuracy and effectiveness of their bombardments. In the 1920s, the RAF was already claiming that it could suppress Kurdish rebels in Iraq by bombing their villages. But over the last decade in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, air forces have made much more ambitious claims that they can hit targets with pinpoint accuracy, while such is the quality of the detailed information they can now receive from drones that they can distinguish armed enemies from the civilian population. In 2016, for instance, the Pentagon claimed to have killed 25,000 Isis fighters and only 21 civilians in 18 months.
Many suspected that this was not true, but the contrary was difficult to prove because those targeted lived in dangerous, difficult to access places. It was only when a hidden Pentagon archive of 1,300 documents about its air war in the Middle East since 2014 was handed over to researchers under the Freedom of Information Act and published in The New York Times that the true facts emerged.”
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