<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford">Mark Morford</a> has a new article, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/01/16/notes011602.DTL" title="Everyday Mundane Warmongering - Just another day in the life of a commonplace war no one fully understands">Everyday Mundane Warmongering...</a> talking about how easy it is to forget that there's a war going on. The bombing continues in Afghanistan (and Iraq). The Phillipines has edged out Somalia, Iraq and Yemen as the next likely target of American attack. Apparently, the increase in military funding there wasn't sufficient to hold back the rebels, so away we go. <span class="quote"><q>So now we simply forget about the war, accept its nagging everpresence, like getting used to a bad smell. Time to simply accept all the miserably unpredictable airport security procedures and the new era of warrantless police searches and email scanning and the idea that your civil liberties are to the Justice Department pretty much a running joke. ... Time to be very glad you aren't one of the thousands of inexplicably detained "aliens" or rights-annihilated prisoners or blacklisted academics on Lynne Cheney's big List O' Evil Intellectuals Who Aren't In Complete Sycophantic Agreement with Everything My Husband Decrees. (Full PDF of actual report <a href="http://www.goacta.org/Reports/defciv.pdf">here</a>).</q></span> This also means that the U.S. military presence world-wide, though pervasive already (we even have a base in Cuba), will only grow. <span class="quote"><q>"Overall, the American military global presence is more pervasive today than at any point in American history," said John Pike, a military analyst in Washington.</q></span> However, are we allying ourselves with countries that espouse the same principles the American people claim to believe in? Well, actually: <span class="quote"><q>In some cases, as it courts a country's military forces, the United States is willing to set aside human rights or other problems. ... U.S. officials want to help Indonesia fight possible member clusters of bin Laden's al-Qaida network, for example, but are under restrictions because of human rights abuses there, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently told The New York Times. Those restrictions "really need to be reviewed in the light of Sept. 11," he said.</q></span> So, since we really want to root out the people we're after, we'll overlook the fact that the government we need help from, and to whom we are shipping military aid and training, turns around and slaughters its people to maintain power. Why not? We've done the exact same thing throughout most of the nations in Southeast Asia, South America, the Middle East and Central America. Why change a policy that's served us so well in the past? Applying the same logic, the U.S. is pretty unwaveringly supporting Israel in its own war on terror. We supply them with unbelievable amounts of military hardware and funding, so why argue with how they use it? As <a href="http://www.johnpilger.com">John Pilger</a> points out in <a href="http://pilger.carlton.com/print/93067" title="Blair's meeting with Arafat served to disguise his support for Sharon and the Zionist project">Blair's meeting with Arafat...</a> (that's a nice conspiracy-baiting title if I ever heard one), both Britain and the U.S. pay only lip service to Palestinian issues. <span class="quote"><q>Following 11 September, Sharon worried that a Middle East "solution" would be a by-product of America's "war on terrorism", especially when George W Bush blurted out one of his non sequiturs: that he had always had the "dream" of a Palestinian state. On 23 November, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader Mahmud Abu Hunud. Twelve days later, the inevitable response came in co-ordinated suicide attacks against Israel. ... On cue, Sharon's military attacked the occupied territories with unprecedented force, all but destroying the Palestinian Authority and Arafat's political base. Arafat, said Sharon, was now "irrelevant". There was no more loose talk in Washington about the "dream" of a Palestinian state.</q></span> The actions of the U.S. military is also coming worryingly close to human rights violations. Many times, I've caught myself wondering "Isn't that against the Geneva Convention...or something? I thought we were the good guys?" In one case, most major U.S. news networks were broadcasting footage of the captured Taliban, with bags on their heads. Well <a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/">The Guardian</a> reports in <a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,628283,00.html">Spare our blushes and put a sack on it</a> notes that the U.S. can go ahead and do that because: <span class="quote"><q>Luckily the US is not bound by any soft-centred decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. In fact the US also needn't take any notice of the United Nations Convention against Torture either, because it was one of the few countries that had the sense not to sign the agreement in 1985. Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Senegal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Uruguay made the mistake of signing it, and subsequently Venezuela, Luxembourg, Panama, Austria and even the UK and Afghanistan joined in, but America didn't.</q></span> Which always begs the question of "Why?" Why does the U.S. act this way? Maybe it's because it can. It might just be as simple as that. It's the biggest and strongest and there is no economic reason to let principles or morals interfere with making a U.S. hegemony. Carl Estabrook writes <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrookkill.html">Why We Kill People</a> at <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/">CounterPunch</a>, mulling the possible reasons. Some say everything is governed by the U.S. thirst for oil. Well, that's probably part of it. Control of resources is important to U.S. interests. It's just that low gas prices always seem to override the desires of those that actually own the resources. Why? Because they can. He argues that it's mostly about showing might. The article contains a summary of U.S. "demonstrations of might" over the last 30 years or so. To help out in future demonstrations of might, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/">Fox News</a> is reporting in <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,42424,00.html" title="On Pentagon's Wish List: A Gun That Cuts Corners in Pursuit of Bad Guys">On Pentagon's Wish List...</a>that the U.S. military has now developed a gun that shoots around corners. I'm not kidding. <span class="quote"><q>Along with the standard 5.56-mm projectiles, the OICW will shoot 20-mm explosive rounds containing miniaturized electronics that can detonate the ammunition in midair. That means a soldier shooting the OICW doesn't have to hit his target to hit his target, so to speak. Instead, he can cause an explosion behind the target — and behind or above the barrier the target is hiding behind.</q></span> Look out, world.