Oh what fun, to inciderate an Afghan with the press of a button.

IT IS the horrific moment an Afghan man is blown apart by a US missile.

As a fireball incinerates at least one man, the American pilot firing the Hellfire missile can be heard singing the chorus from Don McLean's classic song, ‘Bye-bye Miss American Pie’.

Moments after the impact, another pilot can be heard saying ‘nice’.

Two Afghan men can then be seen running for their lives as the pilots shoot at them but miss.

The victims were reportedly "innocent farmers planting poppy seeds in the middle of the road" -- not that this is any concern to President Obama who says anyone the US kills is -- by definition, a "militant" or "terrorist" for being in the place where a missile was fired.

As far as Obama is concerned, the United States military is "the finest fighting force in the history of the world", valiantly crusading across the globe in the cause of "democracy", "freedom", "civilisation" and "our values".

Unfortunately for Obama -- and the sanctification of America's motives for waging endless war -- reality keeps muddying the propaganda waters.

And 2012 has been a bumper year for exposing US atrocities in Afghanistan.

In January, footage emerged which showed four American soldiers urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan. Over the clip, one of the men can be heard saying: "Have a great day, buddy" -- to laughter from his colleagues. Another of them jokes, "Golden like a shower", another says "Yeahhhh" as they groan with relief whilst urinating.

In February, the US admitted its "mistake" in an airstrike that killed eight teenagers -- having first, as always, insisted they were Taliban "militants".

In March we had the slaughter of 16 Afghans, nine of them children, alledgedly by a lone "rogue" US soldier on the rampage. Deploring the killing as a deranged act, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "This is not who we are," which is the mantra for the whole military and political establishment after whatever is the latest atrocity.

In April, the Los Angeles Times published pictures of US troops posing in 'trophy' photos with the body parts of Afghans they have killed.

Now in July, we have the exposure of the "Bye-bye Miss American Pie" killing. To which the US-led coalition responded, "Any impression of impropriety on the video is not representative of the professional service members who make up the Isaf coalition."

These are a handful of examples. No doubt the atrocities that are revealed are only a fraction of the total, and without independent whistleblowers like Wikileaks we would never hear about those either.

But in any case, each of these atrocities is just a microcosm of the greater crime of initiating a war of aggression, which was so succinctly defined at the 1945 Nuremberg trials for Nazi war criminals:

And so, for every nameless victim of a US hellfire missile fired by a pilot singing "Bye-bye, Miss American Pie", there are hundreds of thousands more, just as nameless, killed in the name of "humanitarian intervention", or whatever is the current excuse for imperialist war -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

In April, Obama set up a White House Atrocities Prevention Board, for formulating a response to war crimes, crimes against humanity and mass atrocities.

One essential way to prevent atrocities is to stop committing the supreme international crime of initiating wars of aggression. It is not a few "bad apples" or "rogue soldiers" or "regrettable mistakes" that causes the United States and its allies endlessly to perpetrate atrocities: it is the insatiable appetite of US governments for waging war in other peoples' countries.