Casualties of War: Making It Plain About New Orleans

America has no mercy for peoples of color. It bombs them without pity in Iraq--wiping out access to water, to health care. The deaths of over half a million Iraqi children--due strictly to US backed sanctions - was considered "worth it" by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

President Bush thought seizing Iraq's oil fields was worth the sacrifice of the city of New Orleans.

In order to help finance the war, Bush cut spending in 2004 for repair and upgrading of the levee and pump system that protected the city from massive flooding--even though just such a disaster was rated among the top three devastating potentials facing the US in the short term. The city, which has been called a "repository of the deep scars of the American colonization" and slavery, is 67 percent black. Those stranded in the city were, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly Black.

Let's make it plain, as Malcolm X used to say.

Bush consciously decided that sacrificing the lives of African people in New Orleans was worth the price--that the descendants of America's former slaves were expendable in the face of the empire's gluttony for oil and global supremacy. The city and its poor inhabitants are casualties of war.

Having made such a decision, it must have been hard for Bush to turn back, to put up a front, to pretend suddenly that the lives of Black children matter any more than the lives of Iraqi children. In fact, he couldn't do it, any more than Albright could say Iraqi children mattered to her and keep a straight face.

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