In the winter following 9/11, Washington refused to halt its bombing runs and Northern Alliance proxy war long enough for food aid trucks to reach rural Afghanistan before winter snows made roads impassable, putting seven and a half million Afghans at unnecessary risk of starvation. Mass famine was avoided not by any American charity, but because the Taliban were kind (and strategically sensible) enough to unexpectedly withdraw to the mountains before the snow began. On Wednesday, Patrick Cockburn reported in the UK's The Independent that "... a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition, a survey of 20,000 households by the Iraqi government and UNICEF says." Sound familiar?

This is nothing new, of course. In 1996, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (now cashing in on a nationwide book tour) famously told a 60 Minutes interviewer, regarding the deaths of a UNICEF-estimated 500,000 Iraqi children due to the impact of US-led sanctions purportedly aimed at Saddam Hussein, that "the price is worth it." Then, the strictest economic sanctions in world history were affecting public health, safe drinking water, and medical supplies (along with many other things) as well as food supplies.

The fruits of war remain unchanged. Now, some three million Iraqi children are malnourished due to an economy that has completely disintegrated, a government that supplies absolutely no social services, and international aid groups rendered pointless by raging war. It makes pointless the debate over whether more people are dying due to the US/UK occupation and the insurgency against it, or through sectarian strife and Iraq's emerging civil war. People are dying, and most of them, on all sides, are non-combatants. Many, inevitably, are children.

Almost completely without notice in American media, children and the infirm are also quickly becoming the victims du jour in the latest, strikingly vicious effort by the United States and its European allies to help Israel keep the Palestinians under lock and key. That would be the economic blockade, including the suspension of humanitarian aid and the refusal by Israel to pay taxes legitimately owed to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The boycott is intended to collectively punish all Palestinians for having had the temerity to not back the enemy-approved choice in January's election, quite possibly the freest and fairest expression of electoral democracy in the Middle East since Iran's democratically elected government was overthrown by (sense a long-term trend here?) the United States, over a half-century ago, in 1953.

The first victims of this latest attempt to make Palestinians civilians suffer for the tangled politics of the region have been, not surprisingly, those least able to defend themselves. In Gaza, whose entire access to the outside world is controlled by currently closed Israeli border crossings, four patients on kidney dialysis have died due to lack of supplies. There are further reports of Type I diabetics having faltered due to lack of insulin, syringes, sugar, and even refrigeration. Supplies of other essential medicines are rapidly dwindling. Food, too, is running out in many quarters in what apparently boils down to an intentional policy of mass starvation, initiated and countenanced by the West. Gaza has been the worst hit, but residents of the more populous West Bank are also suffering. The Palestinian economy, needless to say, is nonexistent. As Palestinians are one of the only populations in the world suffering (now for 39 years!) under the control of an occupying military government, the fate of victimized civilians legally lies entirely on the heads of Israel. But the fingerprints of Bush neocons are also clearly all over this. (If this precedent or logic were to be applied elsewhere, think of what might happen to all of us who are guilty, like the Palestinians, of nothing more than living in a jurisdiction that supports politicians considered vile elsewhere in the world. At least Hamas actually won its election.)

Politically, the insistence of the West on collectively punishing Palestinians in the hopes that they will abandon their backing of the "terrorist" political party Hamas for the previously ruling, monumentally corrupt Fatah Party seems to have backfired. First, Palestinians began rallying behind Hamas in even greater numbers. Thus far, the hoped-for-by-the-West calls for a quick new election never materialized. Instead there was an uneasy stalemate, as Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is still P.A. President, and therefore controls Executive Branch functions while Hamas controls Legislative Branch matters. But this week, in response to the endemic corruption and favoritism in the Fatah-controlled P.A. security forces, Hamas announced that it was creating its own militias to provide security for Palestine, drawing on the armed wings of various allied groups. Rhetoric quickly heated up into confrontations, and the ugly prospect of a Palestinian civil war now looms. Just what the long-suffering Palestinian civilians need. Israeli leaders, always big fans of divide and conquer, are doubtless terribly amused at the delightful prospect of Palestinians killing each other. However, if any kind of civil war does break out within Palestine, the primary victims will, alas, assuredly be yet more civilians.

Unlike the genocidal attacks in Darfur, the suffering of ordinary people in Palestine and Iraq is not the work of warring ethnic tribes or a brutally exploitative fundamentalist Muslim government. In Palestine, in Iraq, and--until it was averted through no fault of the would-be perpetrators--Afghanistan, it has instead been the handiwork of the West, particularly the United States. At what point did the misery, suffering, and blood almost entirely of innocents become a morally acceptable price to pay for political policy gain? At what point, in fact, did it become so commonplace and blasˇ, especially when the victims are brown people, that it is scarcely even reported by our allegedly free and unfettered corporate media? (But did you hear? Tom Hanks has a new movie!)

And if people with a straight face ludicrously question whether something like an Israel lobby even exists in the US, let alone has a bipartisan stranglehold on US Middle East policy, is it any wonder there's far less debate in US media on the generous, obsequious American bankrolling of Israel than there is among even Israeli media counterparts? For that matter, on immigration, one of the hottest political media topics of the season, how is it that we get endless discussions of immigrants (legal or not) coming to the US for economic opportunity, but no discussion whatsoever of the inextricably linked US free trade policies that have caused such economic privation in places like Mexico and Central America in the first place? People and whole families are willing to walk away from their homes, give up everything they own, and stake their lives on a high-risk migration to a land where they usually don't speak the language and where their labor is likely to be relentlessly exploited. But somehow that's not part of the equation. No major US media covers the privation in their lives, either, let alone the reasons.

Somehow, in a country where we like to flatter ourselves with stirring historical narratives about freedom, democracy, and opportunity, we have lost sight of humanity's inalienable right to the most basic freedom of all: the freedom to stay alive. That failure in empathy is not just a moral catastrophe; it has left the United States widely considered the most despised country on the planet, a country whose insensitivity and brutality is made all the worse by the breathtaking hypocrisy of its official pronouncements. The resulting resentment, hatred, and desire for vengeance is a major, and unnecessary, national security problem in a so-called "Global War on Terror" that should be all about persuading hearts and minds.

The specifics will come and go with the ebb and flow of geopolitics, but somehow, large numbers of people are likely to continue to suffer at the hands of the US until our leaders are either inspired or forced to take seriously their own inevitable rhetoric about the sanctity of life. Such a return to morally defensible policies, like all great political shifts in the history of our government's social perspectives, can only come from below. It can only happen when we start living our own lives as though the lives of others matter; when those others expand to include not just our families, friends, and neighbors, but complete strangers on the other side of the planet whose fate is being determined by actions taken in our names and with our tax money.

No blood for oil. No blood for beer. No blood for obliviousness. No blood for big cars with luxuriously upholstered interiors. No blood for thugs disguised as generals and politicians and businessmen and blameless bureaucrats. No blood for civic boosters who scramble to issue bonds to finance the new factories for lampshades and soap. No blood for men who rape their planet and extract its juices like it was just another woman. No blood for big ugly buildings with polished glass, computerized elevators, and your life wedged between their thumbs and forefingers. No blood for people who would carve you up and feed you to dogs if you weren't so willing to give them your money, suspend your imagination, mutilate your children, and dream of upward mobility. No blood for the hell of it.

The United States government will quit using hunger, illness, and economic catastrophe as policy weapons, at home or abroad, only when we realize that any government capable of exercising such ruthlessness abroad can do the same thing at home to any of us. Ask New Orleans. Resolve to live your life as though lives, all lives, matter. It's the essential first step to creating an ethic that must be honored by our elected so-called representatives. Patriotism is a high calling. Fidelity to our species, and unswerving loyalty to the survival of life on our planet, is higher still.