"War is the American way of life," says U.S. historian Paul Atwood.
BEIJING, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- In the bloody drone strike on what the U.S. military claimed "suspected suicide bombers" in Afghanistan late August, 10 members of one family, including a two-year-old girl, were killed. All of them were innocent civilians.
However, when U.S. media raised doubts with evidences suggesting the targeted vehicle contained no explosives and the family had no connection to terrorist groups, a spokesperson for the U.S. Ministry of Defense understated the attack, saying "not aware of any plans to put investigators on the ground."
The remarks are a typical reflection of Washington's disregard for life. For centuries, the United States has been obsessed with aggressive wars. Its endless military actions have seriously violated human rights and caused tremendous humanitarian disasters across the world, and made the country the biggest saboteur of global peace and stability.
File photo shows American soldiers patrolling at attack scene in Maidan Shahr, capital city of Wardak province, Afghanistan on Sept 8, 2013. (Xinhua)
As U.S. historian Paul Atwood put it, "War is the American way of life." Since its independence on July 4, 1776, in more than 240 years, the United States was not at war for merely 16 years. Its path towards global dominance was built on wars, slavery and slaughters.
After the end of World War II, the United States has launched a series of wars in foreign lands and brought about conflicts and chaos in many places of the world, leaving horrific civilian casualties and property damage.
Take the Iraq War as an example. Amid global oppositions, Washington invaded the oil-rich country in 2003 with allegations that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction, although there was no concrete evidence.
According to Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, between 184,382 and 207,156 Iraqi civilians were directly killed in war-related violence in the country.
The invaders also deployed such weapons as depleted uranium bombs and white-phosphorus bombs during the war, which has posed a grave threat to local environment and the public health. According to the Iraqi authorities, prior to the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people, while by 2005, the figure had soared to at least 1,600 out of 100,000.
A study by the Smithsonian Magazine in 2019 showed that the U.S.-launched wars and military operations under the pretext of "anti-terrorism" after the 9/11 attacks have "spread to more than 40 percent of the world's countries."
A woman commemorates victims in the 9/11 attacks at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, the United States, Sept. 10, 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)
Over 929,000 people were killed in the violence of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, with 38 million people displaced in the past two decades, showed September data by the Costs of War project of Brown University.
"Endless campaigns abroad unleash a host of political forces -- militarism, secrecy, enhanced executive authority, xenophobia, faux patriotism, demagoguery, etc," wrote Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, in an earlier piece on Foreign Policy magazine.
The United States is not only a notorious war criminal, but also the "dirty hands" that messed other countries up. In his book "America's Deadliest Export: Democracy," U.S. writer William Blum pointed out that the United States has tried to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments since the end of World War II, interfered in elections in at least 30 nations, and attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders. Cuba's Granma daily has reported that in the last 20 years, U.S. institutions including the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy have allocated about 250 million U.S. dollars to finance destabilizing and subversive activities in the island country.
A countless number of facts have proved that the United States is the real disruptor of international rules and the world order, the source of growing uncertainties across the world, as well as the major stumbling block in the pursuit of peace and development.
If the United States continues to be addicted to hegemony and the law of the jungle, it will be drifting toward antithesis of peace-loving people and countries, and be left behind by the times. ■
