Word: Sorry about that bombed hospital

George Monbiot, Guardian - “The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” This is how an anonymous Nato spokesperson described Saturday’s disaster in Afghanistan. Let’s translate it into English. “We bombed a hospital, killing 22 people.” But people, hospital and bomb, let alone we: all such words are banned from Nato’s lexicon. Its press officers are trained to speak no recognizable human language.

The effort is to create distance: distance from responsibility; distance from consequences; distance above all from the humanity of those who were killed. They do not merit even a concrete noun. Whatever you do, do not create pictures in the mind.

.... An analysis published last year by the human rights group Reprieve revealed that attempts by United States forces to blow up 41 men with drone strikes killed 1,147 people. Many were children. Some of the targets remain unharmed, while repeated attempts to kill them have left a trail of shattered bodies and shattered lives.

.... As the analyst Paul Rogers points out, the US Air Force dropped 1800 bombs while helping Kurdish fighters to wrest the town of Kobane in northern Syria from Isis. It used 200 kg bombs to take out single motorbikes.

Every misdirected bomb, every brutal night raid, every non-combatant killed, every lie and denial and minimisation is a recruitment poster for those with whom the US is at war. For this reason and many others its wars appears to be failing on most fronts. The Taliban is resurgent. Isis, far from being beaten or contained, is growing and spreading: into North Africa, across the Middle East, and in the Caucasus (a development that Putin’s intervention in Syria will only encourage). The more money and munitions the West pours into Syria and Iraq, the stronger the insurgents appear to become. And if, somehow, the US and its allies did succeed, victory over Isis would strengthen the Assad regime, which has killed and displaced even greater numbers.