Key Takeaways
- The U.S. military hegemony is linked to millions of civilian deaths across Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
- U.S. forces are the world’s largest peacetime fossil‑fuel consumer, emitting over 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases since 2001.
- Unexploded ordnance remains a legacy, with 350,000 tons of bombs left in Vietnam, a cleanup expected to take centuries.
Beijing: The U.S. military hegemony has inflicted humanitarian disasters upon civilians worldwide, a Xinhua think tank report has revealed.
The report, titled Origins, Facts and Perils of U.S. Military Hegemony and released Tuesday by Xinhua Institute, the think tank of Xinhua News Agency, outlines the formation of the U.S. military hegemony, summarizes the means Washington adopted to maintain it, and delves into its perils with facts and data.
To maintain its military hegemony, the United States has killed civilians, trampled on other countries’ sovereignty and human dignity and damaged ecological environment, it said.
The United States has caused innumerable humanitarian catastrophes worldwide, the report said.
It points out that the Vietnam War led to 2 million civilian deaths, the war in Afghanistan caused over 100,000 civilian casualties, and the Iraq War killed between 200,000 to 250,000 civilians.
Moreover, the frequently reported scandals of systemic prisoner abuse by the U.S. military in recent years are evidence of blatant disregard for human rights and trampling on human dignity.
In a report presented to the 64th session of the UN General Assembly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism pointed out that the United States, along with its private contractors, resorted to interrogation techniques against male Muslims detained in Iraq and other countries, including but not limited to, forcing detainees to strip naked, piling detainees on top of each other naked, and threatening them with rape and sodomy.
“While the United States may verbally support environmental protection and carbon neutrality, the priorities of the U.S. military are its safety and lethality,” it said, revealing that the U.S. military is the world’s largest energy consumer of fossil fuel and its fuel consumption outside wartime along with the resulting carbon emissions exceeds that of most countries.
“Since the start of the so-called ‘war on terror’ in 2001, the U.S. military has generated over 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases,” the report said, citing data from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
“Over 350,000 tons of explosive bombs and landmines were left by the U.S. military in Vietnam, and it is estimated that it would take another 300 years to completely clear them,” the report added.
