No apologies, please

While our rightwing "patriots" rant about the moral and physical superiority of the USA! USA! USA!, and spend so much of their time ostentatiously, very ostentatiously, thanking the troops for their "service" in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're not supposed to notice that these very patriots don't give a damn about the fact that not one of the thousands of soldiers who are gone forever died in the protection of this nation. It is uncool to emphasize the fact that they died for a foreign policy that was designed to protect somebody else's nation.

Nor do these loyalists care about the rest of those young soldiers who are not only left without arms that they can never wrap around a woman, but also without sexual organs that were blown away. The essence of their life wiped out for nothing. (Or is that too delicate a matter to bring up?) Is it also too delicate to mention the fact that only cold-blooded villains would have used government to rob these naive, young men of so much in an era when the U.S. need never have waged war against any country?

Is it likely that we will ever hear an apology to these men, or to the millions of innocents who happened to be in the way of U.S. imperial arrogance, as its missiles and drones and other life-exterminating devices exterminated life?

In his review of former Governor Mitt Romney's new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Connor Boyack outlines several U.S. interventions abroad that have led to unfortunate and often unintentional catastrophes for civilians. He quotes the shallow (and might we say hollow) George H.W. Bush who, as Vice President in 1988, proclaimed, after a U.S. Navy missile destroyed an Iranian civilian airplane, killing all 290 passengers including 66 children, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are. I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy."

Are such people part of the human race?

After detailing a multitude of instances of U.S. troops, driven by American hubris, stamping around the world, destroying ordinary people's institutions and livelihoods, Boyack asks:

Should America offer no apology for any of the aforementioned atrocities? Should our government be able to wash its hands so easily of these actions by merely declaring them necessary for "protecting America’s interests," "spreading democracy," or some similarly pathetic response? And should the ignorance and/or arrogance of current politicians be tolerated when they declare that "we should not apologize for America"?

Read complete article here.