America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (William Blum)

America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else
Author	William Blum
Publisher	Zed Books
First published	2012
Type	Book
Source	https://annas-archive.org/md5/bc26bc4bb845cc6190ef63e860b8bbf6
PDF	https://annas-archive.org/md5/e1a1eeec84ea9cc3f0c280560e1d8d82

Introduction

The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world, for which end it is prepared to use any means necessary. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War II the United States has

• endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;1
• grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries;²
• attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders;³
• dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;⁴
• attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.⁵

The impact on world consciousness in recent decades of tragedies such as in Rwanda and Darfur has been more conspicuous than the American-caused tragedies because the first two each took place in one area and within a relatively short period of time. Despite the extensive documentation of the crimes of US foreign policy, because of the very breadth of American interventions and the time period of sixty-eight years it’s much more difficult for the world to fully grasp what the United States has done.

In total: since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world),6 in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair, and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands. US foreign policy has likely earned the hatred of most of the people in the world who are able to more or less follow current news events and are familiar with a bit of modern history.

Oderint dum metuant – ‘Let them hate so long as they fear’ – was attributed to one or another prominent leader of Ancient Rome.

Shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, career diplomat John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the US embassy in Athens, resigned over the Iraq policy. ‘Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?’ he asked in his letter of resignation, referring to the fact that more than one member of the Bush administration had used the expression.⁷

Following the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, former CIA director James Woolsey commented about worries that storming Baghdad would incite Islamic radicals and broaden support for them: ‘The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America’s victories in Afghanistan,’ he said, proves that ‘only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S. … We need to read a little bit of Machiavelli.’ (In the same talk, Woolsey further established himself as a foreign policy pundit by stating: ‘There is so much evidence with respect to [Saddam Hussein’s] development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles … that I consider this point beyond dispute.’⁸)

Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, in June 2002, President George W. Bush told America’s future warriors that they were ‘in a conflict between good and evil’ and that ‘We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries.’9 The United States institutional war machine was, and remains, on automatic pilot.

When the plans for a new office building for the military, which came to be known as The Pentagon, were brought before the Senate on August 14, 1941, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. ‘Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size?’ he asked. ‘Or is the war to be permanent?’¹⁰

‘Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors,’ observed The Black Commentator in the fourth year of the war in Iraq. ‘American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.’¹¹

It can be said that American history is the history of an empire in the making, since the first British settler killed the first native American.

All countries, it is often argued, certainly all powerful countries, have always acted belligerent and militaristic, so why condemn the United States so much? But that is like arguing that since one can find anti-Semitism in every country, why condemn Nazi Germany? Obviously, it’s a question of magnitude. And the magnitude of US aggression puts it historically into a league all by itself, just as the magnitude of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism did. Is the world supposed to uncritically accept terribly aggressive behavior because it’s traditional and expected? Somehow normal? Is that any way to build a better world?

Full spectrum dominance

A number of expressions and slogans associated with the Nazi regime in Germany have become commonly known in English.

Sieg Heil! – Hail Victory!

Arbeit macht frei – Work makes you free.

Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt – Today Germany, tomorrow the world.

Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht! – I was only following orders!

But none perhaps is better known than Deutschland über alles – Germany above all.

Thus I was taken aback, in June 2008, when I happened to come across the website of the United States Air Force (www.airforce.com) and saw on its first page a heading ‘Above all’. Lest you think that this referred simply and innocently to planes high up in the air, this page linked to another site (www.airforce.com/achangingworld) where ‘Above all’ was repeated even more prominently, with links to sites for ‘Air Dominance,’ ‘Space Dominance,’ and ‘Cyber Dominance,’ each of which in turn repeated ‘Above all’. These guys don’t kid around. They’re not your father’s imperialist warmongers. If they’re planning for a new ‘thousand-year Reich’, let’s hope that their fate is no better than the original, which lasted twelve years.

Here’s how the gentlemen of the Pentagon have sounded in the recent past on the subject of space.

We will engage terrestrial targets someday – ships, airplanes, land targets – from space. … We’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space. (General Joseph Ashy, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Space Command¹²)

With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it. (Keith R. Hall, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office13)

During the early portion of the 21st century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare. … The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance. … Development of ballistic missile defenses using space systems and planning for precision strikes from space offers a counter to the worldwide proliferation of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. … Space is a region with increasing commercial, civil, international, and military interests and investments. The threat to these vital systems is also increasing. … Control of Space is the ability to assure access to space, freedom of operations within the space medium, and an ability to deny others the use of space, if required. (‘United States Space Command: Vision for 2020’¹⁴)

Space represents a fundamentally new and better way to apply military force. (US Strategic Command¹⁵)

Washington’s ambition for world domination is driven not by the cause of a deeper democracy or freedom, a more just world, ending poverty or violence, or a more liveable planet, but rather by economics and ideology.

Michael Parenti has observed:

The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere – including the people of North America – the blessings of an untrammeled ‘free market’ corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many.¹⁶

It can thus be appreciated that to the American power elite one of the longest lasting and most essential foreign policy goals has been preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model. This was the essence of the Cold War. Cuba and Chile were two examples of several such societies in the socialist camp which the United States did its best to crush.

Like most powerful leaders – past, present, and future – American officials would have the rest of us believe that the policies they pursue in their quest for domination are beneficial to their own people and to most of the world, even if the blessings are not always immediately recognizable. They would like nothing better than to remake the world in America’s image, with free enterprise, ‘individualism’, something called ‘Judeo-Christian values,’ and some other thing they call ‘democracy’ as core elements. Imagine, then, what a shock September 11, 2001 was to such men; not simply the kind of shock that you and I experienced on that fateful day, but the realization that someone had dared to ‘diss’ the empire, a traumatic shock to the political nervous system. American leaders assume that US moral authority is as absolute and unchallengeable as US military power. ‘The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing,’ a Russian parliamentary leader noted in 2006. ‘When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: “The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc.”’17

And here is Michael Ledeen, former official of the Reagan administration, later a fellow at one of the leading conservative think tanks, American Enterprise Institute, speaking shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.¹⁸

It was difficult to resist. A year after the dreadful invasion and catastrophic occupation of Iraq I sent Mr Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: ‘I’d like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days.’ I did not expect a reply, and I was not disappointed.

Future president Theodore Roosevelt, who fought in Cuba at the turn of the last century with the greatest of gung-ho-ism, wrote: ‘It is for the good of the world that the English-speaking race in all its branches should hold as much of the world’s surface as possible.’19 One can find similar sentiments without end expressed by American leaders since the 1890s.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 many Americans acquired copies of the Quran in an attempt to understand why Muslims could do what they did. One can wonder, following the invasion of Iraq, whether Iraqis bought Christian bibles in search of an explanation of why the most powerful nation on the planet had laid such terrible waste to their ancient land, which had done no harm to the United States.

Wars of aggression

Has there ever been an empire that didn’t tell itself and the rest of the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The National Security Strategy, a paper issued by the White House in September 2002, states:

In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.

However, later in the same report we read:

It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States. … To forestall or prevent … hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

‘Preemptive war’ is what the post-World War II International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, called a war of aggression. ‘To initiate a war of aggression,’ the Tribunal declared, ‘therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’

Six months after issuing the National Security Strategy, the United States carried out an attack on Iraq which was less – that is, worse – than ‘preemptive’: there was no provocation or threat of any kind from Iraq. The 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by imperial Japan was certainly more preemptive. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the US explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan’s wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases – ‘to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps,’ as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that ‘simply delighted’ President Roosevelt. Evidently, that is a far more powerful justification for bombing military bases in US colonies than anything conjured up by Bush–Blair and their associates in their execution of ‘preemptive war.’20

The Germans insisted that their invasion of Poland in 1939 was justified on the grounds of preemption. Poland, declared the Nazis, was planning to invade Germany. (Nineteenth-century German Chancellor Otto Bismarck once asserted that ‘Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.’) In 2003, and for some years subsequent, it was the United States saying that Iraq was an ‘imminent threat’ to invade the US or Israel or whoever, even when no weapons of mass destruction had been located in Iraq and no plausible motive for Iraq invading the US or Israel could be given. The claim of an imminent Iraqi threat eventually fell of its own weight, as did many other prominent Bush administration assertions about the US invasion.

Intelligence of the political kind

American leaders have convinced a majority of the American people of the benevolence of their government’s foreign policy. To have persuaded Americans of this, as well as a multitude of other people throughout the world – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the lists of US international atrocities shown above – must surely rank as one of the most outstanding feats of propaganda and indoctrination in all of history.

I think there are all kinds of intelligence in this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, academic, literary, mechanical, and so on. Then there’s political intelligence, which I would define as the ability to see through the nonsense which the politicians – echoed by the media – of every society feed their citizens from birth on to win elections and assure continuance of the prevailing ideology. A lack in the American citizenry of any of the other types of intelligence, though perhaps personally detrimental, does not kill. A widespread deficiency of political intelligence, however, can and does allow the taking of the lives of large numbers of innocent people in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam. The American people alone have the power to influence the extremists who, in one election after another, in the form of Democrats or Republicans, come to power in the United States and proceed to create havoc and disaster in one new killing field after another. But the citizenry fall for US government propaganda justifying its military actions as regularly and as naively as Charlie Brown falling for Lucy’s football.

The American people are very much like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and don’t want to know, but then wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window.

Now why is that? Why are these people so easily indoctrinated? Are they just stupid? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, and if you don’t deal with these basic beliefs you’ll be talking to a stone wall. This book deals with many of these basic beliefs, or what can also be called ‘myths.’

It is not at all uncommon to grow to adulthood in the United States, even graduate from university, and not be seriously exposed to opinions significantly contrary to these prevailing myths, and know remarkably little about the exceptionally harmful foreign policy of the government. It’s one thing for historical myths to rise in the absence of a written history of a particular period, such as our beliefs concerning the Neanderthals; but much odder is the rise of such myths in the face of a plethora of historical documents, testimony, films, and books.

To describe this on a personal level: I remember the good warm feeling I used to have in my teens and twenties, and even into my thirties, whenever I heard good ol’ Bob Hope dishing out his good ol’ American humor to the good ol’ American GIs scattered all over the world. I never gave any thought to what the good ol’ American GIs were actually doing all over the world in the first place. But would good ol’ Bob Hope be entertaining good ol’ American GIs embarked on anything less than honorable missions? Could the nice, young, clean-cut American boys who laughed so heartily at the same jokes I laughed at be up to no good? Had our soldiers ever been up to no good? Nothing I had been exposed to in any school or mainstream media had left me with that impression in any firm or lasting way. The question had never even crossed my mind.

On the infrequent occasion that I encountered someone of dissident views they invariably did not have the facts at their fingertips, did not argue their case very well, did not understand – as I myself did not – my basic beliefs/myths. Their effect upon my thinking was thus negligible. It took the horror of Vietnam inescapably thrown into my face by protesters and their media coverage to initiate a whole new personal intellectual process. The process would likely have begun much sooner had I been able to read something like the present book.

Democracy is a beautiful thing, except that part about letting just any old jerk vote

The people can have anything they want.

The trouble is, they do not want anything.

At least they vote that way on election day.

(Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, early twentieth century)

Why was the 2008 presidential primary vote for Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich so small when anti-Iraq War sentiment in the United States was apparently so high – millions had marched against it on repeated occasions, with perhaps not a single demonstration of any size in support – and Kucinich was easily the leading anti-war candidate in the Democratic race, indeed the only genuine one after former senator Mike Gravel withdrew? Even allowing for his being cut out of several televized national debates, Kucinich’s showing was remarkably poor. In Michigan, on January 15, it was only Kucinich and Hillary Clinton running. Clinton got 56 percent of the vote, the ‘uncommitted’ vote (for candidates who had withdrawn but whose names were still on the ballot) was 39 percent, and Kucinich received but 4 percent. And Clinton had been the leading pro-war hawk of all the Democratic candidates.

I think much of the answer may lie in the fact that the majority of the American people – like the majority of people elsewhere in the world – aren’t very sophisticated politically or intellectually, and many of them weren’t against the war for very cerebral reasons. Their opposition often stemmed from things like the large number of American soldiers who’d been killed or wounded; the fact that the United States was not ‘winning’; that America’s reputation in the world was being soiled; that numerous other Americans had expressed their opposition to the war; that President Bush suffered from multiple verbal and character shortcomings with television comedians regularly making fun of him – or because of a number of other reasons we couldn’t even guess at. There is not much that is particularly perceptive or learned in this collection of reasons, no special insight into history, foreign relations, international law, warfare, economics, propaganda, or ideology – the basis of the ‘political intelligence’ referred to above; which makes it so much easier for a politician who actually supports a war to sell herself as an anti-war candidate when the occasion calls for it.

Activists like myself are often scoffed at for saying the same old things to the same old people; just spinning our wheels, we’re told, ‘preaching to the choir’ or ‘preaching to the converted.’ But long experience as speaker, writer and activist in the area of foreign policy tells me it just ain’t so. From the questions and comments I regularly get from my audiences, via email and in person, I can plainly see that there are numerous significant information gaps and misconceptions in the choir’s thinking, often leaving them unable to see through the newest government lie or propaganda trick; they’re unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that illuminates the present; or knowing the facts but unable to apply them at the appropriate moment; vulnerable to being led astray by the next person who offers a specious argument that opposes what they currently believe, or think they believe. The choir needs to be frequently reminded and enlightened.

As cynical as many Americans may think the members of the choir are, the choir is frequently not cynical enough about the power elite’s motivations. No matter how many times they’re lied to, they still often underestimate the government’s capacity for deceit, clinging to the belief that their leaders somehow mean well. As long as people believe that their elected leaders are well intentioned, the leaders can, and do, get away with murder. Literally. This belief is the most significant of the myths the present book deals with.

One reason for confusion among the electorate is that the two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans, while forever throwing charges and counter-charges at each other, actually hold indistinguishable views concerning foreign policy, a similarity that is one of the subjects of this book. What is the poor voter to make of all this?

Apropos of this we have the view of the American electoral system from a foreigner, Cuban leader Raúl Castro. He has noted that the United States pits two identical parties against one another, and joked that a choice between a Republican and Democrat is like choosing between himself and his brother Fidel. ‘We could say in Cuba we have two parties: one led by Fidel and one led by Raúl, what would be the difference?’ he asked. ‘That’s the same thing that happens in the United States … both are the same. Fidel is a little taller than me, he has a beard and I don’t.’21

In sum, even when the hearts of the choir may be in the right place, their heads still need working on, on a recurring basis. And, in any event, very few people are actually born into the choir; they achieve membership only after being preached to, multiple times.

The essays that make up the book are a combination of new and old; combined, updated, expanded, refined; many first appeared in one form or another in my monthly online Anti-Empire Report, or on my website, at various times during the past eight years or so; where a date is specified at the beginning of the piece it’s the date it was first written and should be read from that vantage point (although in some cases it may differ markedly from the original). This book is for current and, hopefully, future members of the choir.

US Foreign Policy vs the World

Mit der dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

(‘With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.’)

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

I’m often told by readers of their encounters with Americans who support the outrages of US foreign policy no matter what facts are presented to them, no matter what arguments are made, no matter how much the government’s statements are shown to be false. My advice is to forget such people. They would support the outrages even if the government came to their home, seized their firstborn, and hauled them away screaming, so long as the government assured them it was essential to fighting terrorism (or communism), and threw in a little paean to democracy, freedom, and God. My rough guess is that these people constitute no more than 15 percent of the American population. I suggest that we concentrate on the rest, who are reachable.

Inasmuch as I cannot see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than: educate yourself and as many others as you can, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass, at which point… I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger.

As to the education, I like to emphasize certain points that try to deal with the underlying intellectual misconceptions and emotional ‘hang-ups’ I think Americans have which stand in the way of their seeing through the propaganda. Briefly, here are some of the main points (explained in more detail in later chapters):

1. Far and away the most important lesson to impart to the American mind and soul: regardless of our lifetime of education to the contrary, US foreign policy does not ‘mean well.’ The facts presented in this book should leave no doubt of that thesis, but the progressive political activist must be conscious of it at all times. I like to ask the American True Believers: what would the United States have to do in its foreign policy to cause you to stop supporting it?
2. The United States is not concerned with this thing called ‘democracy’, no matter how many times every American president uses the word each time he opens his mouth. As noted in the Introduction, since 1945 the US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries. The question is: what do American leaders mean by ‘democracy’? The last thing they have in mind is any kind of economic democracy – the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too much is not enough. The first thing they have in mind is making sure the target country has the political, financial, and legal mechanisms in place to make it hospitable to corporate globalization.
3. Anti-American terrorists are not motivated by hatred or envy of freedom or democracy, or by American wealth, secular government, or culture, as we’ve been told many times. They are motivated by decades of awful things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. It works the same way all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of harmful American policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. The US bombing, invasion, occupation, and torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in recent years have created thousands of new anti-American terrorists. We’ll be hearing from them for a very long time.
4. The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There is a lengthy and infamous history of Washington’s support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government, though he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people. He’s but one of hundreds of anti-Castro terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years. The United States has also provided close support to terrorists, or fought on the same side as Islamic jihadists, in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al-Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.
5. Iraq was not any kind of a threat to the United States. Of the never-ending lies concerning Iraq, this is the most insidious, the necessary foundation for all the other lies.
6. There was never any such animal as the International Communist Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in misery, rising up in protest against their condition, against an oppressive government, a government usually supported by the United States.

That oh-so-precious world where words have no meaning

In December 1989, two days after bombing and invading the defenseless population of Panama, killing as many as a few thousand totally innocent people, guilty of no harm to any American, President George H.W. Bush declared that his ‘heart goes out to the families of those who have died in Panama.’1 When a reporter asked him, ‘Was it really worth it to send people to their death for this? To get [Panamanian leader Manuel] Noriega?’ Bush replied: ‘Every human life is precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it.’²

A year later, preparing for his next worthwhile mass murder, the first US invasion of Iraq, Bush Sr. said: ‘People say to me: “How many lives? How many lives can you expend?” Each one is precious.’³

At the end of 2006, with Bush’s son now president, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel, commenting about American deaths reaching 3,000 in the second Iraq War, said that Bush ‘believes that every life is precious and grieves for each one that is lost.’⁴ In February 2008, with American deaths about to reach 4,000, and Iraqi deaths as many as a million or more, George W. Bush asserted:

When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious. … In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion. … When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man.⁵

Inspired by such noble – dare I say precious? – talk from its leaders, the American military machine likes to hire like-minded warriors. Here is Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater, whose employees in Iraq killed people like others flick away a mosquito, in testimony before Congress: ‘Every life, whether American or Iraqi, is precious.’⁶

While his killing of thousands of Iraqis was proceeding merrily along in 2003, the second President George Bush was moved to say: ‘We believe in the value and dignity of every human life.’7

Both father and son are on record expressing their deep concern for God and prayer both before and during their mass slaughters. ‘I trust God speaks through me,’ said Bush the younger in 2004. ‘Without that, I couldn’t do my job.’⁸

After his devastation of Iraq and its people, Bush the elder said: ‘I think that, like a lot of others who had positions of responsibility in sending someone else’s kids to war, we realize that in prayer what mattered is how it might have seemed to God.’⁹

God, one can surmise, might have asked George Bush, father and son, about the kids of Iraq. And the adults. And, in a testy, rather ungodlike manner, might have snapped: ‘So stop wasting all the precious lives already!’

In the now-famous exchange on television in 1996 between Madeleine Albright and reporter Lesley Stahl, the latter was speaking of US sanctions against Iraq, and asked the then-US ambassador to the UN, and Secretary of State-to-be: ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And… and you know, is the price worth it?’

Albright replied: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price… we think the price is worth it.’¹⁰

Ten years later, Condoleezza Rice, continuing the fine tradition of female Secretaries of State and the equally noble heritage of the Bush family, declared that the current horror in Iraq was ‘worth the investment’ in American lives and dollars.¹¹

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011, in the midst of NATO/US bombing of his country, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Barack Obama in which he said:

We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened … Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair.12

Gaddafi’s hope that writing to Obama could move the American president to put an end to the bombing of Libya turned out, as we know, to be unrealistic.

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab–Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.¹³ Washington’s reply was its ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing.

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted President Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place very shortly thereafter.¹⁴

In 1994, it was reported that the spokesperson of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos, said that ‘he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians.’ ‘Finally,’ Marcos said, ‘they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes.’¹⁵ Yet for many years, before and after these remarks, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the tools and training needed to crush the Zapatistas.

Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, the Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.16 The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America’s help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that ‘the four powers’ (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹⁷ Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some kind of communist.

The myth of the good war

The reason so many Americans support US war crimes is that they’re convinced that no matter how bad things may look, the government means well. And one of the foundation stones for this edifice of patriotic faith is the Second World War, a historical saga that all Americans are taught about from childhood on. We all know what its real name is: ‘The Good War.’

Which leads me to recommend a book, The Myth of the Good War, by Jacques Pauwels, published in 2002. It’s very well done, well argued and documented, an easy read. I particularly like the sections dealing with the closing months of the European campaign, during which the United States and Great Britain contemplated stabbing their Soviet ally in the back with maneuvers like a separate peace with Germany, using German troops to fight the Russians, and sabotaging legal attempts by various Communist parties and other elements of the European left to share in (highly earned) political power after the war; the most dramatic example of this being the US taking the side of the Greek neo-fascists against the Greek left, who had fought the Nazis courageously. Stalin learned enough about these schemes to at least partially explain his postwar suspicious manner toward his ‘allies.’ In the West we called it ‘paranoia.’18

The enduring mystique of the Marshall Plan

Amidst all the political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 the name ‘Marshall Plan’ kept being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the supposed political advances. But caveat emptor; let the buyer beware.

During my years of writing and speaking about the harm and injustice inflicted upon the world by unending United States interventions, I’ve often been met with resentment from those who accuse me of chronicling only the negative side of US foreign policy and ignoring the many positive sides. When I ask the person to give me some examples of what s/he thinks show the virtuous face of America’s dealings with the world in modern times, one of the things mentioned – almost without exception – is the Marshall Plan. This is usually described along the lines of: ‘After World War II, the United States unselfishly built up Europe economically, including its wartime enemies, and allowed them to compete with the US.’ Even those today who are very cynical about US foreign policy, who are quick to question the White House’s motives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, have little problem in accepting this picture of an altruistic America of the period 1948–1952. But let us have a closer look at the Marshall Plan.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19

After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires:

1. Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism.
2. Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests.
3. Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat.
4. Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

The CIA also skimmed large amounts of Marshall Plan funds to covertly maintain cultural institutions, journalists, and publishers, at home and abroad, for the omnipresent and heated propaganda of the Cold War; the selling of the Marshall Plan to the American public and elsewhere was entwined with fighting ‘the red menace’. Moreover, in their covert operations, CIA personnel at times used the Marshall Plan as cover, and one of the Plan’s chief architects, Richard Bissell, then moved to the CIA, stopping off briefly at the Ford Foundation, a long-time conduit for CIA covert funds. ’Twas one big happy, scheming family.

The Marshall Plan imposed all kinds of restrictions on the recipient countries, all manner of economic and fiscal criteria which had to be met, designed for a wide-open return to free enterprise. The US had the right not only to control how Marshall Plan dollars were spent, but also to approve the expenditure of an equivalent amount of the local currency, giving Washington substantial power over the internal plans and programs of the European states; welfare programs for the needy survivors of the war were looked upon with disfavor by the United States; even rationing smelled too much like socialism and had to go or be scaled down; nationalization of industry was even more vehemently opposed by Washington.

The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: ‘The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.’20

The program could be seen as more a joint business operation between governments than an American ‘handout’; often it was a business arrangement between American and European ruling classes, many of the latter fresh from their service to the Third Reich, some of the former as well; or it was an arrangement between congressmen and their favorite corporations to export certain commodities, including a lot of military goods. Thus did the Marshall Plan help lay the foundation for the military–industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life.

It is very difficult to find, or put together, a clear, credible description of how the Marshall Plan played a pivotal or indispensable role in the recovery in each of the sixteen recipient nations. The opposing view, at least as clear, is that the Europeans – highly educated, skilled and experienced – could have recovered from the war on their own without an extensive master plan and aid program from abroad, and indeed had already made significant strides in this direction before the Plan’s funds began flowing. Marshall Plan funds were not directed primarily toward the urgently needed feeding of individuals or rebuilding their homes, schools, or factories, but at strengthening the economic superstructure, particularly the iron, steel and power industries. The period was in fact marked by deflationary policies, unemployment, and recession. The one unambiguous outcome was the full restoration of the propertied classes.²¹

Why do they hate us? Part 1

Here is President Dwight Eisenhower in a March 1953 National Security Council Meeting: Why can’t we ‘get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us?’²²

The United States is still wondering, and is no closer to an understanding than Good Ol’ Ike was sixty years ago. The American people and their leaders appear to still believe what Frances Fitzgerald observed in her study of American history textbooks:

According to these books, the United States had been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history, it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased countries. … the United States always acted in a disinterested fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took.23

I almost feel sorry for the American troops scattered round the world on military bases situated on other people’s land. They’re ‘can-do’ Americans, accustomed to getting their way, accustomed to thinking of themselves as the best, and they’re frustrated as hell, unable to figure out ‘why they hate us’, why we can’t win them over, why we can’t at least wipe them out. Don’t they want freedom and democracy? At one time or another the can-do boys tried writing a comprehensive set of laws and regulations, even a constitution, for Iraq; setting up mini-bases in neighborhoods; building walls to block off areas; training and arming ‘former’ Sunni insurgents to fight Shias and al-Qaeda; enlisting Shias to help fight, against whomever; leaving weapons or bomb-making material in public view to see who picks it up, then pouncing on them; futuristic vehicles and machines and electronic devices to destroy roadside bombs; setting up their own Arabic-language media, censoring other media; classes for detainees on anger control, an oath of peace, and the sacredness of life and property; regularly revising the official reason the United States was in the country in the first place… one new tactic after another, and when all else fails call it a ‘success’ and give it a nice inspiring action name, like ‘surge’… and nothing helps. They’re can-do Americans, using good ol’ American know-how and Madison Avenue savvy, sales campaigns, public relations, advertising, selling the US brand, just like they do it back home; employing psychologists and anthropologists… and nothing helps. And how can it if the product you’re selling is toxic, inherently, from birth, if you’re totally ruining your customers’ lives, with no regard for any kind of law or morality. They’re can-do Americans, accustomed to playing by the rules – theirs; and they’re frustrated as hell.

Here now the Google Cavalry rides up on its silver horse. Through its think tank (or ‘think/do tank’), Google Ideas, the company paid for eighty former Muslim extremists, neo-Nazis, US gang members and other former radicals to gather in Dublin in June, 2011 (‘Summit Against Violent Extremism’, or SAVE) to explore how technology can play a role in ‘de-radicalization’ efforts around the globe. Now is that not Can-do ambitious?

The ‘formers,’ as they have been dubbed by Google, were surrounded by 120 thinkers, activists, philanthropists, and business leaders. The goal was to dissect the question of what draws some people, particularly young people, to extremist movements and why some of them leave. The person in charge of this project was Jared Cohen, who spent four years on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, and was soon to be an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), focusing on counter-radicalization, innovation, technology, and statecraft.24

So… it’s ‘violent extremism’ that’s the big mystery, the target for all these intellectuals to figure out. Why does violent extremism attract so many young people all over the world? Or, of more importance probably to the State Department and CFR types, why do violent extremists single out the United States as their target of choice?

Readers of my rants do not need to be enlightened as to the latter question. There is simply an abundance of terrible things US foreign policy has done in every corner of the world. As to what attracts young people to violent extremism, consider this: what makes a million young Americans willing to travel to places like Afghanistan and Iraq to risk life and limb to kill other young people, who have never done them any harm, and to commit unspeakable atrocities and tortures?

Is this not extreme behavior? Can these young Americans not be called ‘extremists’ or ‘radicals’? Are they not violent? Do the Google experts understand their behavior? If not, how will they ever understand the foreign Muslim extremists? Are the experts prepared to examine the underlying phenomenon – the deep-seated belief in ‘American exceptionalism’ drilled into every cell and nerve ganglion of American consciousness from prekindergarten on? Do the esteemed experts, then, have to wonder about those who believe in ‘Muslim exceptionalism’?

In 2009, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, declared: ‘He [Obama] is trying to say: “Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you”.’25

Why do they hate us? Part 2

For some time in 2005 the Pentagon was engaged in fighting against the American Civil Liberties Union, members of Congress, and others who were pushing for the release of new photos and videos of prisoner ‘abuse’ (otherwise known as ‘torture’) in the American gulag. The Pentagon was blocking release of these materials because, they claimed, it would inflame anti-American feelings and inspire terrorist acts abroad. This clearly implied that so-called anti-Americans come to their views as a result of American actions or behavior. Yet, the official position of the Bush administration, repeated numerous times and never rescinded by the Obama administration, is that the motivation behind anti-American terrorism has nothing to do with anything the United States does abroad, or has ever done, but has to do with personal defects of the terrorists.²⁶

In a similar vein, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes toured the Middle East in 2005 for the stated purpose of correcting the ‘mistaken’ impressions people have of the United States, which, she would have the world believe, are the root cause of anti-American hatred and terrorism; it was all a matter of misunderstanding, image, and public relations. At her confirmation hearing in July, Hughes said: ‘The mission of public diplomacy is to engage, inform, and help others understand our policies, actions and values.’27 But what if the problem is that the Muslim world, like the rest of the world, understands America only too well?

Predictably, this confidante of President Bush (this being her only qualification for the position) uttered one inanity after another on her tour. Here she is in Turkey: ‘to preserve the peace, sometimes my country believes war is necessary,’ and declaring that women are faring much better in Iraq than they did under Saddam Hussein.²⁸ When her remarks were angrily challenged by Turkish women in the audience, Hughes replied: ‘Obviously we have a public relations challenge here … as we do in different places throughout the world.’²⁹ Right, Karen, it’s all just PR, nothing of any substance to worry your banality-filled little head about.

The Arab News, a leading English-language Middle East daily, summed up Hughes’s performance thus: ‘Painfully clueless.’³⁰

The Washington Post reported that Hughes’s ‘audiences, especially in Egypt, often consisted of elites with long ties to the United States, but many people she spoke with said the core reason for the poor U.S. image remained U.S. policies, not how those policies were marketed or presented.’³¹ Might she and her boss learn anything from this? Nah.

Why do they hate us? Part 3

The Pentagon awarded three contracts in June 2005, worth up to $300 million, to companies it hoped would inject more creativity into US psychological operations to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly their opinion of the American military. ‘We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media,’ said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element.

Dan Kuehl, a specialist in information warfare at the National Defense University, added: ‘There are a billion-plus Muslims that are undecided. How do we move them over to being more supportive of us? If we can do that, we can make progress and improve security.’32 And so it goes. And so it has gone since September 11, 2001. The world’s only superpower has felt misunderstood, unloved. ‘How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America?’ asked George W. a month after 9/11. ‘I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am – like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.’³³

Psychological operations, information warfare, cutting-edge media … surely there’s a high-tech solution. But again – what if it’s not a misunderstanding? What if the people of the world simply don’t believe that we’re so good? What if they – in their foreign ignorance and Al Jazeera brainwashing – have come to the bizarre conclusion that saturation bombing, invasion, occupation, destruction of homes, torture, depleted uranium, killing a hundred thousand, and daily humiliation of men, women and children do not indicate good intentions?

Why can’t the US government talk about why they hate us?

Following an act of terrorism, we rarely receive from our officials and media even a slightly serious discussion of the terrorists’ motivation. Was there any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed?

Any perceived wrong they wished to make right? Anything they sought to obtain revenge for? And why is the United States the most common target of terrorists?

But such questions are virtually forbidden in the mainstream world. At a White House press briefing in January 2010, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, John Brennan, was asked a question by veteran reporter Helen Thomas concerning an attempt by ‘the underwear bomber,’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day 2009:

THOMAS: What is really lacking always for us is you don’t give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. … What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out or why.

BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents … [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they’re] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.

THOMAS: And you’re saying it’s because of religion?

BRENNAN: I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.

THOMAS: Why?

BRENNAN: I think … this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.

THOMAS: But you haven’t explained why.34

You’ve got to be carefully taught

It needs to be repeated: the leading myth of US foreign policy, the one which entraps more Americans than any other, is the belief that the United States, in its foreign policy, means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. And as long as a person clings to that belief, it’s rather unlikely that s/he will become seriously doubtful and critical of the official stories.

It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous … schoolbooks, comicbooks, church sermons, Hollywood films, all forms of media, all the time; hardened into historical concrete. Here is Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States, writing in the Washington Post in 2009:

We in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don’t, to make it right again … And it’s why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn’t matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn’t even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it … Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war … I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion.35

How many young service members have heard such a talk from Mullen or other officers? How many of them have not been impressed, even choked up? How many Americans reading or hearing such stirring words have not had a lifetime of reinforcement reinforced once again? How many could even imagine that Admiral Mullen is spouting a bunch of crap? The great majority of Americans will swallow it. When Mullen declares ‘What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it,’ he’s implying that there was no way to avoid it. But of course it could have been easily avoided by simply not dropping any bombs on the Afghan people.

You tell the true believers that the truth is virtually the exact opposite of what Mullen has said and they look at you as if you just got off the Number 36 bus from Mars. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it ‘humanitarian intervention.’ It’s still regarded by almost all Americans, including many, if not most, ‘progressives,’ as just that. Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

God bless America. And its bombs

When they bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador and Nicaragua I said nothing because I wasn’t a communist.

When they bombed China, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, and the Congo I said nothing because I didn’t know about it.

When they bombed Lebanon and Grenada I said nothing because I didn’t understand it.

When they bombed Panama I said nothing because I wasn’t a drug dealer.

When they bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen I said nothing because I wasn’t a terrorist.

When they bombed Yugoslavia and Libya for ‘humanitarian’ reasons I said nothing because it sounded so honorable.

Then they bombed my house and there was no one left to speak out for me. But it didn’t really matter. I was dead.36

It has become a commonplace to accuse the United States of choosing as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns of modern times – seventy-eight consecutive days – was carried out against the people of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. The United States is an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become a target are: (a) it poses an obstacle – could be anything – to a particular desire of the American Empire; (b) it is virtually defenseless against aerial attack; (c) it does not possess nuclear weapons.

A Mecca of hypocrisy, a Vatican of double standards

On February 21, 2008, following a demonstration against the United States’ role in Kosovo’s declaration of independence, rioters in the Serbian capital of Belgrade broke into the US embassy and set fire to an office. The attack was called ‘intolerable’ by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,37 and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said he would ask the UN Security Council to issue a unanimous statement ‘expressing the council’s outrage, condemning the attack, and also reminding the Serbian government of its responsibility to protect diplomatic facilities.’³⁸

This is of course standard language for such situations. But what the media and American officials didn’t remind us is that in May 1999, during the US/NATO bombing of Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by a US missile, causing considerable damage and killing three embassy employees. The official Washington story on this – then, and still now – is that it was a mistake. But this is almost certainly a lie. According to a joint investigation by the Observer of London and Politiken newspaper in Denmark, the embassy was bombed because it was being used to transmit electronic communications for the Yugoslav army after the army’s regular system was made inoperable by the bombing. The Observer was told by ‘senior military and intelligence sources in Europe and the US’ that the embassy bombing was deliberate, which was ‘confirmed in detail by three other Nato officers – a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior [NATO] headquarters officer in Brussels.’39

Moreover, the New York Times reported at the time that the bombing had destroyed the embassy’s intelligence-gathering nerve center, and two of the three Chinese killed were intelligence officers. ‘The highly sensitive nature of the parts of the embassy that were bombed suggests why the Chinese … insist the bombing was no accident. … “That’s exactly why they don’t buy our explanation”,’ said a Pentagon official.⁴⁰ There were several other good reasons not to buy the story as well.⁴¹

In April 1986, after the French government refused the use of its airspace to US warplanes headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes were forced to take another, longer route. When they reached Libya they bombed so close to the French embassy that the building was damaged and all communication links knocked out.⁴²

And in April 2003, the US ambassador to Russia was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry due to the fact that the residential quarter of Baghdad where the Russian embassy was located was bombed several times by the United States during its invasion of Iraq.⁴³ There had been reports that Saddam Hussein was hiding in the embassy.⁴⁴

So, we can perhaps chalk up the State Department’s affirmations about the inviolability of embassies as yet another example of US foreign policy hypocrisy. But I think that there is some satisfaction in that American foreign policy officials, as morally damaged as they must be, are not all so unconscious that they don’t know they’re swimming in a sea of hypocrisy. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2004 that

The State Department plans to delay the release of a human rights report that was due out today, partly because of sensitivities over the prison abuse scandal in Iraq, U.S. officials said. One official … said the release of the report, which describes actions taken by the U.S. government to encourage respect for human rights by other nations, could ‘make us look hypocritical.’45

And in 2007 the Washington Post informed us that Chester Crocker, former Assistant Secretary of State and current member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, noted that ‘we have to be able to cope with the argument that the U.S. is inconsistent and hypocritical in its promotion of democracy around the world. That may be true.’⁴⁶

The empire’s deep dark secret

‘In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined,’ declared Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on February 25, 2011.

Remarkable. Every one of the many wars the United States has engaged in since the end of World War II has been presented to the American people, explicitly or implicitly, as a war of necessity, not a war of choice; a war urgently needed to protect American citizens, American allies, vital American ‘interests,’ freedom and/or democracy, or kill dangerous anti-American terrorists and various other bad guys. Here is President Obama speaking of Afghanistan: ‘But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.’⁴⁷

This being the case, how can a future administration say it will not go to war if any of these noble causes is seriously threatened? The answer, of course, is that these noble causes are irrelevant. The United States goes to war where and when it wants, and if a noble cause is not self-evident, the government, with indispensable help from the American media, will manufacture one. Secretary Gates is now admitting that there is a choice involved. Well, Bob, thanks for telling us. You were Bush’s Secretary of Defense as well, and before that spent twenty-six years in the CIA and the National Security Council. You sure know how to keep a secret.

Reforming the Indonesian military, for forty years

(June 13, 2005)

On May 25, 2005 President Bush stated that it makes sense for the United States to maintain close military ties with Indonesia, despite the objections of human rights activists who say such coordination should be withheld until Indonesia does more to address human rights abuses by its military. ‘We want young officers from Indonesia coming to the United States,’ said Bush. ‘We want there to be exchanges between our military corps – that will help lead to better understandings.’ Bush made his remarks after meeting with the Indonesian president, who, Bush added, ‘told me he’s in the process of reforming the military, and I believe him.’48 (In May 2002, Indonesian Defense Minister Matori met with US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Matori said his government had begun to ‘reform the military.’ Rumsfeld believed him enough to call for ‘military-to-military relations’ to be ‘re-established.’)⁴⁹

Indonesian officials saying they’re going to reform the military is like officials in Nevada saying they’re going to crack down on gambling. For forty years the Indonesian military has engaged in mass murder and other atrocities, in Jakarta, East Timor, Aceh, Papua, and elsewhere, taking the lives of well over a million people, including several Americans in recent years. For forty years relations between the US and Indonesian militaries have been one of the very closest of such contacts in the Third World for the United States, despite the occasional objections and prohibitions from Congress. For forty years, American officials have been saying that they have to continue training and arming Indonesia’s military because the contact with the American military will have some kind of ennobling effect. For forty years it has had no such effect at all. As Senator Tom Harkin (D.–Iowa) observed in 1999: ‘I have seen no evidence in my 24 years in Congress of one instance where because of American military involvement with another military that the Americans have stopped that foreign army from carrying out atrocities against their own people. No evidence, none.’50

Yet the pretense continues, for what else can an American official say? Something like the following? ‘We don’t care how brutal the Indonesian military is because they got rid of Sukarno and his irritating nationalism and neutralism for us, and for forty years they’ve been killing people we call communists, killing people we call terrorists, and protecting our oil, natural gas, mining, and other corporate interests against Indonesian protestors. Now if that’s not freedom and democracy, I don’t know what is.’

[As we’ll see from State Department cables in the WikiLeaks chapter, the Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats that the Indonesian military’s human rights abuses in the province of West Papua were stoking unrest in the region.

The United States also overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces – despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder – after the Indonesian president threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.]

Terrorism

A safer world for Americans…if they don’t leave home

Supporters of US foreign policy have been repeating the point ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001: US counterterrorism policy has worked. How do they know? Because there haven’t been any successful terrorist attacks in the United States in all the years since that infamous day.

True, but there weren’t any terrorist attacks in the United States in the six years before September 11, 2001 either, the last one being the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995. The absence of terrorist attacks in the US appears to be the norm, with or without a War on Terror.

More significantly, in the years since 9/11 the United States has been the target of terrorist attacks on scores of occasions, not even counting those in Iraq or Afghanistan – attacks on military, diplomatic, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States; in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific; more than a dozen times in Pakistan alone. The attacks include the October 2002 bombings of two nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia, which killed more than 200 people, almost all of them Americans and citizens of their Australian and British war allies; the following year brought the heavy bombing of the US-managed Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, the site of diplomatic receptions and 4th of July celebrations held by the American embassy; and other horrendous attacks in later years on US allies in Madrid and London because of the war.

Land of the free, home of the War on Terror

David Hicks is a 31–year-old Australian who in a plea-bargain with a US military court served nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That was after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a terrible slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap – mon Dieu! – in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court). ‘If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn’t hide behind a gag order,’ said Hicks’s attorney Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union.1

Like so many other ‘terrorists’ held by the United States in recent years, Hicks had been ‘sold’ to the American military for a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that, once they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies, almost anyone was fair game.

Other ‘terrorists’ have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds. Many others – abroad and in the United States – have been incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a ‘terrorist organization,’ as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list conspicuously political.

It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.2

Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Most of these guys weren’t fighting. They were running,’ General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.³

Thousands of people have been thrown into hell on earth for no earthly reason. The world media have been overflowing with their individual tales of horror and sadness for years. Guantánamo’s former commander, General Jay Hood, said: ‘Sometimes we just didn’t get the right folks.’⁴ Not that the torture they were put through would be justified if they were in fact ‘the right folks.’

Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam and like others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such camps ‘terrorist training camps,’ or ‘anti-American terrorist training camps,’ or ‘al-Qaeda terrorist training camps.’ Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy that Washington wants to stigmatize is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al-Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against the atrocities of American imperialism while being a member of al-Qaeda and retaliating against the atrocities of American imperialism while not being a member of al-Qaeda; as if al-Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, and there are chapters of al-Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups – which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight – is on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former CIA director Stansfield Turner testified: ‘I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras’ actions have to be characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism.’5 The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves with Washington’s agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support for a Pakistani group called Jundullah and led by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the kidnappings and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks.⁶ Do not hold your breath waiting for the name Jundullah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.⁷

The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or Israeli policies.

Amid growing pressure from their home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years. Now a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at this twenty-first-century Devil’s Island says this policy undermines Washington’s own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison camp’s residents. The report, based on US government case files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press found that 84 percent of released detainees – 205 out of 245 individuals whose cases could be tracked – were set free after being released to the custody of their native countries. ‘There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases where it’s hard to understand why the people are still there,’ said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp three times. ‘We were struggling to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn’t just random. But we didn’t find it.’

The report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as circumstantial and ‘highly questionable,’ such as the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle Eastern country to another. American officials have associated certain travel routes with al-Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes ‘involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports.’ With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states: ‘This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities in the transliterations of a detainee’s name and a name found on one of the hard drives.’

Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half the individuals in his report the United States ‘had no first-hand knowledge of their activities’ in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.8

When Michael Scheuer, the former CIA officer who headed the Agency’s Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he declared: ‘We absolutely got the wrong people.’⁹ Never mind. They were all treated equally: all thrown into solitary confinement; shackled blindfolded, forced to undergo excruciating physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine; sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation were used, alomg with two dozen other methods of torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you tortured these officials, they might admit that it’s ‘torture lite.’)

‘The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment,’ a senior American defense official said in 2003, ‘so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited.’¹⁰

When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend?

Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell’s 1984 ‘three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today’s slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism.’

Saved again, thank the Lord, saved again

(August 18, 2006)

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. (General Douglas MacArthur, 195711)

So now we’ve (choke) just been (gasp) saved from the simultaneous blowing up of as many as ten airplanes headed toward the United States from the UK. Wow, thank you Brits, thank you Homeland Security. And thanks for preventing the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago, saving lower Manhattan from a terrorist-unleashed flood, smashing the frightful Canadian ‘terror plot’ with seventeen arrested, ditto the three Toledo terrorists, and squashing the Los Angeles al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airliner into a skyscraper.

The Los Angeles plot of 2002 was proudly announced by George W. in 2006. It has since been totally discredited. Declared one senior counterterrorism official: ‘There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage.’¹²

And the scare about ricin in the UK, which our own Mr Cheney used as part of the build-up for the invasion of Iraq, telling an audience on January 10, 2003: ‘The gravity of the threat we face was underscored in recent days when British police arrested … suspected terrorists in London and discovered a small quantity of ricin, one of the world’s deadliest poisons.’ It turned out there was not only no plot, there was no ricin. The Brits discovered almost immediately that the substance wasn’t ricin but kept that secret for more than two years.¹³

From what is typical in terrorist scares, it is likely that the individuals arrested in the UK on August 10, 2006 were guilty of what George Orwell, in 1984, called ‘thoughtcrimes.’ That is to say, they haven’t actually done anything. At most, they’ve thought about doing something the government would label ‘terrorism.’ Perhaps not even very serious thoughts, perhaps just venting their anger at the exceptionally violent role played by the UK and the US in the Middle East and thinking out loud how nice it would be to throw some of that violence back in the face of Blair and Bush. And then, the fatal moment for them that ruins their lives forever: their angry words are heard by the wrong person, who reports them to the authorities. (In the Manhattan flood case the formidable, dangerous ‘terrorists’ made mention on an Internet chat room about blowing something up.14)

Soon a government agent provocateur appears, infiltrates the group, and then actually encourages the individuals to think and talk further about terrorist acts, to develop real plans instead of youthful fantasizing, and even provides the individuals with some of the means for carrying out these terrorist acts, like explosive material and technical know-how, money and transportation, whatever is needed to advance the plot. It’s known as ‘entrapment,’ and it’s supposed to be illegal, it’s supposed to be a powerful defense for the accused, but the authorities get away with it all the time; and the accused get put away for a very long time. And because of the role played by the agent provocateur, we may never know whether any of the accused, on their own, would have gone much further, if at all, like actually making a bomb, or, in the present case, even making transatlantic flight reservations, since many of the accused reportedly did not even have passports. Government infiltrating and monitoring is one thing; encouragement, pushing the plot forward, and scaring the public to make political capital from it are quite something else.

Prosecutors have said that the seven men in Miami charged with conspiring to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and FBI buildings in other cities had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda. This came after meeting with a confidential government informant who was posing as a representative of the terrorist group. Did they swear or hold such allegiance, one must wonder, before meeting with the informant? ‘In essence,’ reported the Independent, ‘the entire case rests upon conversations between Narseal Batiste, the apparent ringleader of the group, with the informant, who was posing as a member of al-Qaeda but in fact belonged to the [FBI] South Florida Terrorist Task Force.’ Batiste told the informant that ‘he was organizing a mission to build an “Islamic army” in order to wage jihad.’ He provided a list of things he needed: boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios, vehicles, binoculars, bullet-proof vests, firearms, and $50,000 in cash. Oddly enough, one thing that was not asked for was any kind of explosive material. After sweeps of various locations in Miami, government agents found no explosives or weapons. ‘This group was more aspirational than operational,’ said the FBI’s deputy director, while one FBI agent described them as ‘social misfits.’ And, added the New York Times, investigators openly acknowledged that the suspects ‘had only the most preliminary discussions about an attack.’ Yet Cheney later hailed the arrests at a political fundraiser, calling the group a ‘very real threat.’15

It was perhaps as great a threat as the suspects in the plot to unleash a catastrophic flood in lower Manhattan by destroying a huge underground wall that holds back the Hudson River. That was the story first released by the authorities; after a while it was replaced by the claim that the suspects were actually plotting something aimed at the subway tunnels that run under the river.¹⁶ Which is more reliable, one must wonder, information on Internet chat rooms or WMD tips provided by CIA Iraqi informers? Or information obtained, as in the current case in the UK, from Pakistani interrogators of the suspects, none of the interrogators being known to be ardent supporters of Amnesty International.

And the three men arrested in Toledo, Ohio, in February 2006 were accused of – are you ready? – plotting to recruit and train terrorists to attack US and allied troops overseas. For saving us from this horror we have a paid FBI witness to thank. He had been an informer with the FBI for four years, and most likely was paid for each new lead he brought in. In the Sears case, the FBI paid almost $56,000 to two confidential informants, and government officials also granted one of them immigration parole so he could remain in the country.17

There must be millions of people in the United States and elsewhere who have thoughts about ‘terrorist acts.’ I might well be one of them when I read about a gathering of Bush, Cheney, and assorted neocons that’s going to take place. Given the daily horror of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine in recent times, little of which would occur if not for the government of the United States of America and its allies, the numbers of people having such thoughts must be multiplying rapidly. If I had been at an American or British airport as the latest scare story unfolded, waiting in an interminable line, having my flight canceled, or being told I can’t have any carry-on luggage, I may have found it irresistible at some point to declare loudly to my fellow suffering passengers: ‘Y’know, folks, this security crap is only gonna get worse and worse as long as the United States and Britain continue to invade, bomb, overthrow, occupy, and torture the world!’ How long would it be before I was pulled out of line and thrown into some kind of custody?

If General MacArthur were alive today, would he dare to publicly express the thoughts cited above?

Policymakers and security experts, reports the Associated Press, say that ‘Law enforcers are now willing to act swiftly against al-Qaeda sympathizers, even if it means grabbing wannabe terrorists whose plots may be only pipe dreams.’¹⁸

The capture of dangerous would-be terrorists has been a growth industry in the United States ever since the events of September 11, 2001. Do you remember the ‘shoe bomber’? Richard Reid was his name and he was aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001; he tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes, didn’t succeed, and was overpowered by attendants and passengers. It’s because of him that we have to take our shoes off at the airport.

There was also ‘the underwear bomber,’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, referred to above, who tried to set off plastic explosives sewn into his underwear while aboard a Northwest Airlines flight as the plane approached Detroit airport in 2009. But he failed to detonate them properly, producing only some popping noises and a flame; another passenger jumped him and restrained him as others put out the fire. It’s because of Mr Abdulmutallab that we now virtually have to take our underwear off at airports.

And the reason we have strict rules about carrying liquids and gels aboard an airplane? We can thank some other young clowns in Europe in 2006 with pipe dreams about blowing up ten airliners with liquid explosives; they scarcely made it to step one. Since the ‘bomb made from liquids and gels’ story was foisted upon the public, several chemists and other experts have pointed out the technical near-impossibility of manufacturing such a bomb in a moving airplane, if for no other reason than the necessity of spending at least an hour or two in the airplane bathroom.

Then there was Faisal Shahzad, the ‘Times Square bomber,’ who on May 1, 2010 parked his car in the heart of New York City, tried to detonate various explosive devices in the car, but succeeded in producing only smoke. He then walked away from the car, after which he was arrested. It’s because of him that cars are no longer permitted in Times Square. (No, that’s a joke, but maybe not for long.)

The incompetence of these would-be bombers in being unable to detonate their explosives is remarkable. You’d think they could have easily gotten that critical and relatively simple part of the operation down pat beforehand. What I find even more remarkable is that neither of the two men aboard the airplanes thought of going into the bathroom, closing the door, and then trying to detonate the explosives. An 8-year-old child would have thought of that. Are we supposed to take the ‘threat’ posed by such men seriously?

‘The Department of Homeland Security would like to remind passengers that you may not take any liquids onto the plane. This includes ice cream, as the ice cream will melt and turn into a liquid.’ This was actually heard by one of my readers at Atlanta airport in 2012. He laughed out loud. He informs me that he didn’t know what was more bizarre, that such an announcement was made or that he was the only person that he could see who reacted to its absurdity.

Another example of the frightful terrorist threat was in October 2010 when we were told that two packages addressed to Chicago had been found aboard American cargo planes, one in Dubai, the other in England, containing what might, or might not, be an explosive device; which might, or might not, have exploded. Authorities said it was not known if the intent was to detonate the packages in flight or in Chicago.

Now get this. Terrorists, we are told, are shipping bombs in packages to the United States. They of course would want to make the packages as innocuous looking as can be, right? Nothing that would provoke any suspicion in the mind of an already very suspicious American security establishment, right? So what do we have? The packages were mailed from Yemen… and addressed to Jewish synagogues in Chicago… Well folks, nothing to see here, just keep moving.19

A tale of two terrorists

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person ever charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks, testifying at his 2006 trial in Alexandria, Virginia: the sobbing September 11 survivors and family members who testified against him were ‘disgusting’… He and other Muslims want to ‘exterminate’ American Jews… executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was ‘the greatest American.’20 Moussaoui expressed his willingness to kill Americans ‘any time, anywhere’… ‘I wish it had happened not only on the 11th, but the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th.’²¹

Orlando Bosch, one of the masterminds behind the October 6, 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger plane, blown out of the sky with seventy-three people on board, including the entire young Cuban fencing team, interviewed on April 8, 2006 by Juan Manuel Cao of Channel 41 in Miami:

CAO: Did you down that plane in 1976?

BOSCH: If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself … and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.

CAO: In that action 73 persons were killed…

BOSCH: No chico, in a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.

CAO: But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?

BOSCH: Who was on board that plane? Four members of the Communist Party, five north Koreans, five Guyanese … Who was there? Our enemies.

CAO: And the fencers? The young people on board?

BOSCH: I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant. We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.

CAO: If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult … ?

BOSCH: No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba.

The difference between Zacarias Moussaoui and Orlando Bosch is that one of them was put on trial and sentenced to life in prison while the other walks around Miami a free man, free enough to be interviewed on television. In 1983 the City Comission of Miami declared a ‘Dr Orlando Bosch Day.’22

Bosch had a partner in plotting the bombing of the Cuban airliner: Luis Posada, a Cuban-born citizen of Venezuela. He lives as a free man in the United States. His extradition has been requested by Venezuela for several crimes, including the downing of the airliner, part of the plotting having taken place in Venezuela. But the Bush and Obama administrations have refused to send him to Venezuela, for, despite his horrible crime, he’s an ally of the empire; Venezuela and Cuba are not. Nor will Washington try him in the US for the crime. However, the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation (1973), of which the United States is a signatory, gives Washington no discretion. Article 7 says that the state in which ‘the alleged offender is found shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged, without exception whatsoever and whether or not the offence was committed in its territory, to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.’²³ Extradite or prosecute. The United States does neither.

Iraq

Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.

‘Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,’ said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December 2011. ‘We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.’

‘It is pretty exciting,’ said another young American soldier in Iraq. ‘We are going down in the history books, you might say.’1

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume, leather-bound, richly-embossed set of ‘The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.’ The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi-failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for twelve years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly; how the people of that unhappy land lost everything…

The loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84 percent of the higher education establishments had been ‘destroyed, damaged and robbed.’ The intellectual stock was further depleted as many thousands of academics and other professionals fled abroad or were kidnapped or assassinated; hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving death threats. ‘Now I am isolated,’ said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave. ‘I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash.’2

Loss of a functioning health-care system. And loss of the public’s health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis rampaged through the country. Iraq’s network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, was severely damaged by the war and looting.

The UN’s World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering from ‘dangerous deficiencies of protein.’ Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly among children, already a problem because of the twelve years of US-imposed sanctions, increased as poverty and disorder made access to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.

Thousands of Iraqis lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, especially children who pick them up.

Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, and the genes, producing malformed babies. And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous. The most awful birth defects result. The BBC told of doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. The level of heart defects among newborn babies was said to be thirteen times higher than in Europe. The BBC correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage, and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads. He added that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children. One doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 – when she saw about one case every two months – with the situation in 2010, when she saw cases every day. ‘I’ve seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead,’ she said.3

(‘Years from now when America looks out on a democratic Middle East, growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima’ [in World War II] – George W. Bush⁴)

The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and reliable electricity all generally fell well below pre-invasion levels, producing constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. To add to the misery, people waited all day in the heat to purchase gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country’s chief source of revenue, being less than half its previous level.

The water and sewerage system and other elements of the infrastructure had been purposely destroyed by US bombing in the first Gulf War of 1991. By 2003, the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing the most essential parts of it. Then came Washington’s renewed bombing.

The American military assaulted at least one hospital to prevent it from giving out casualty figures from US attacks that contradicted official US figures, which the hospital had been in the habit of doing.

Numerous homes were broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the family said that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of the family’s money.

There was destruction and looting of the country’s ancient heritage, perhaps the world’s greatest archive of the human past. Sites were left unprotected by the US military, which was busy protecting oil facilities.

Iraq’s legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; now, religious law increasingly prevails.

Women’s rights, previously enjoyed, fell under great danger of being subject to harsh Islamic law. There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend. Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing outside in shorts.

I see that Frontline on PBS this week has a documentary called ‘Bush’s War’. That’s what I’ve been calling it for a long time. It’s not the ‘Iraq War.’ Iraq did nothing. Iraq didn’t plan 9/11. It didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. It did have movie theaters and bars and women wearing what they wanted and a significant Christian population and one of the few Arab capitals with an open synagogue. But that’s all gone now. Show a movie and you’ll be shot in the head. Over a hundred women have been randomly executed for not wearing a scarf. (Filmmaker Michael Moore, March 24, 2008)

Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.

Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam’s secular society; many have emigrated. The Kurds of Northern Iraq evicted Arabs from their homes. Arabs evicted Kurds in other parts of the country.

A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government featured a wide variety of torture and abuse; a human-rights disaster area. Only a very small portion of the many tens of thousands imprisoned by US forces were convicted of any crime.

Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the first US occupation administration of Iraq in 2003, made free enterprise a guiding rule, shutting down 192 state-owned businesses where the World Bank estimated 500,000 people were working.5

Many people were evicted from their homes because they were Baathist, Saddam Hussein’s party. US troops took part in some of the evictions. They also demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one of their buddies.

When US troops didn’t find who they were looking for, they took who was there; wives were held until the husband turned himself in, a practice which Hollywood films stamped in the American mind as being a particular evil of the Nazis; it’s also an example of collective punishment of civilians, forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

Continual American bombing assaults on neighborhoods left an uncountable number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and everything else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.

Haditha, Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi… names that will live in infamy for the wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human beings and human rights carried out in those places by US forces.

American soldiers and private security companies regularly killed people and left the bodies lying in the street; civil war, death squads, kidnapping, car bombs, rape, each and every day… Iraq became the most dangerous place on earth. US-trained Iraqi military and police forces killed even more, as did the insurgency. An entire new generation growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this will poison the Iraqi psyche for many years to come.

US intelligence and military police officers often freed dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents.

Iraqis protesting about particular issues were shot by US forces on several occasions.

At various times, Iraqi newspapers were closed down by the American occupation for what they printed; reporters were shot by American troops; the US killed, wounded, or jailed reporters from Al Jazeera television, closed the station’s office, and banned it from certain areas because occupation officials didn’t like the news the station was reporting; the Pentagon planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to serve propaganda purposes.

This war [in Iraq] is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan … it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad. (Thomas Friedman, much-acclaimed New York Times foreign affairs analyst, November 20036)

President Bush has placed human rights at the center of his foreign policy agenda in unprecedented ways. (Michael Gerson, columnist for the Washington Post, and former speech-writer for George W. Bush, 2007⁷)

[The war in Iraq] is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken. (David Brooks, NPR commentator and New York Times columnist, 2007⁸)

If this is what leading American public intellectuals believed and imparted to their audiences, is it any wonder that the media can short-circuit people’s critical faculties altogether? It should also be noted that these three journalists were all with ‘liberal’ media.

It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. (Washington Post, May 5, 2007)

It was indeed common. National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR’s Baghdad bureau in 2006, met with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as ‘a moderate’ and as a person trying to lead his followers into practicing peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into exile. Jenkins asked him: ‘What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?’ The cleric replied that he’d ‘rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way it is now.’9

That same year, in a BBC interview, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan agreed when it was suggested that some Iraqis believe life is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi’s life. If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, ‘Am I going to see my child again?’¹⁰

No matter… drum roll, please… Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And – deep breath here! – Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it.¹¹ How much will Iraq be paying the United States?

On December 14, 2011, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq War. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul – as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect – to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth? Barack H. Obama believes only in being the president of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

But freedom has indeed reigned – for the great multinationals to extract everything they can from Iraq’s resources and labor without the hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations, or worker protections.

Yet, despite all of the above, when the subject is Iraq and the person I’m having a discussion with has no other argument left to defend US policy, at least at the moment, I may be asked:

‘Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power?’

And I say: ‘No.’

And the person says: ‘No?’

And I say: ‘No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.’

And many Iraqis actually supported him.

US foreign policy, the mainstream media, and Alzheimer’s

There’s no letup, is there? The preparation of the American mind, the world mind, for the next gala performance of D&D – Death and Destruction. The bunker-buster bombs are now 30,000 pounds each one, six times as heavy as the previous delightful model. But the Masters of War still want to be loved; they need for you to believe them when they say they have no choice, that Iran is the latest threat to life as we know it, no time to waste.

The preparation of minds was just as fervent before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And when it turned out that Iraq did not have any kind of arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)… well, our power elite found other justifications for the invasion, and didn’t look back. Some berated Iraq: ‘Why didn’t they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?’

In actuality, before the US invasion high Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: ‘We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.’12 In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: ‘The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.’¹³ Hussein himself told Rather in February 2003: ‘These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.’¹⁴

Moreover, General Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.¹⁵

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.

And if there were still any uncertainty remaining, in July 2010 Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq, told a British inquiry into the 2003 invasion that those who were ‘100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq turned out to have ‘less than zero percent knowledge’ of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting – as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks – that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction.16

Those of you who don’t already have serious doubts about the American mainstream media’s knowledge and understanding of US foreign policy should consider this: despite the two revelations on Dan Rather’s CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?¹⁷

The United States and Israel are preparing to attack Iran because of their alleged development of nuclear weapons, which Iran has denied on many occasions. Of the Iraqis who warned the United States that it was mistaken about the WMD, Saddam Hussein was executed, Tariq Aziz is awaiting execution. Which Iranian officials is USrael going to hang after their country is laid to waste?

Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, or at a minimum should have seriously suspected it; the same applies to Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were. Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire with new bases, though in the end most of this didn’t work out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, demolished, and tortured.

But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: is there some international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed? Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written: ‘The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.’18

Examine a map: Iran sits directly between two of the United States’ great obsessions – Iraq and Afghanistan… directly between two of the world’s greatest oil regions – the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea… it’s part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination – Russia and China… Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington. How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!

The sign has been put out front: ‘Iraq is open for business’

In 2005, the British NGO Platform, issued a report, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, disclosing the American occupation’s massive giveaway of the sovereign nation’s most valuable commodity, oil. Among its findings:

The report revealed how an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields – accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves – for development by multinational oil companies.

The estimated cost to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194 billion, compared with leaving oil development in public hands. The contracts would guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates of return of 42 to 162 percent. The kinds of contracts that will provide these returns are known as production sharing agreements. PSAs have been heavily promoted by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior figures in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. However, PSAs last for 25–40 years, are usually secret, and prevent governments from later altering the terms of the contract.19 Crude Designs author and lead researcher Greg Muttitt says: ‘The form of contracts being promoted is the most expensive and undemocratic option available. Iraq’s oil should be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not foreign oil companies.’²⁰

Noam Chomsky remarked: ‘We’re supposed to believe that the US would’ve invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were pickles and lettuce. This is what we’re supposed to believe.’²¹

Another charming tale about the noble mission

On April 6, 2004 Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was in Iraq in video teleconference with President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One major American offensive was in operation, another about to be launched. According to Sanchez’s memoir, Powell was talking tough that day:

‘We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,’ Powell said. ‘There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.’ Then Bush spoke: ‘At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone. At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out. Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. … There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!’ (Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, pp. 349–50)

Who would have thought? Bush has been vindicated

(December 11, 2007)

We’re making progress in Iraq! The ‘surge’ is working, we’re told. Never mind that the war is totally and perfectly illegal. Not to mention totally and perfectly, even exquisitely, immoral. It’s making progress. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Meanwhile, the al-Qaeda types have greatly increased their number all over the Middle East and South Asia, so their surge is making progress too. Good for them. And speaking of progress in the War on Terror, is anyone progressing faster and better than the Taliban?

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided – a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who’s keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. (Real Americans don’t do Arab body counts.) An analysis by the Washington Post left the administration’s claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: ‘The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.’ The article then continued in the same critical vein.22

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead or in exile abroad, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons; there must also be a few million more wounded who are homebound or otherwise physically limited; so the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n’est-ce pas?) – Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down.²³ On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like… well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down. Remember that insurgent attacks on American forces is how the Iraqi violence (post-2003 invasion) all began in the first place.

Oh, did I mention that 2007 was the deadliest year for US troops since the war began?²⁴ It’s been the same worst year for American forces in Afghanistan.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that ‘Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq.’ The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.25

How long can it be before vacation trips to ‘Exotic Iraq’ are flashed across our television screens? ‘Baghdad’s Beautiful Beaches Beckon.’ Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a ‘business development/tourism’ expert to work in Baghdad, ‘with a particular focus on tourism and related services.’²⁶

We’ve been told often by American leaders and media that the US forces can’t leave because of the violence, because there would be a bloodbath. Now there’s an alleged significant decrease in the violence. Is that being used as an argument to get out – a golden opportunity for the United States to leave, with head held high? Of course not.

The past is unpredictable: leaving Iraq vs leaving Vietnam

(August 10, 2007)

As the call for withdrawal of American forces from Iraq grows louder, those who support the war are rewriting history to paint a scary picture of what happened in Vietnam after the United States military left in March 1973.

They speak of invasions by the North Vietnamese communists, but fail to point out that a two-decades-long civil war had simply continued after the Americans left, minus a good deal of the horror that US bombs and chemical weapons had been causing.

They speak of the ‘bloodbath’ that followed the American withdrawal, a term that implies killing of large numbers of civilians who didn’t support the communists. But this never happened. If it had taken place the anti-communists in the United States who supported the war in Vietnam would have been more than happy to publicize a ‘commie bloodbath.’ It would have made big headlines all over the world. The fact that you can’t find anything of the sort is indicative of the fact that nothing like a bloodbath took place. It would be difficult to otherwise disprove this negative.

‘Some 600,000 Vietnamese drowned in the South China Sea attempting to escape,’ proclaimed the conservative WorldNetDaily website recently.27 Has anyone not confined to a right-wing happy farm ever heard of this before?

They mix Vietnam and Cambodia together in the same thought, leaving the impression that the horrors of Pol Pot included Vietnam. This is the conservative National Review Online:

Six weeks later, the last Americans lifted off in helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, leaving hundreds of panicked South Vietnamese immediately behind and an entire region to the mercy of the communists. The scene was similar in Phnom Penh [Cambodia]. The torture and murder spree that followed left millions of corpses.²⁸

And here’s dear old Fox News, on July 26, 2007, reporters Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, with their guest, actor Jon Voight. Voight says ‘Right now, we’re having a lot of people who don’t know a whole lot of things crying for us pulling out of Iraq. This – there was a bloodbath when we pulled out of Vietnam,

2.5 million people in Cambodia and Vietnam – South Vietnam were slaughtered.’ Alan Colmes’s response, in its entirety: ‘Yes, sir.’ Hannity said nothing. The many devoted listeners of Fox News could only nod their heads knowingly.

In actuality, instead of a bloodbath of those who had collaborated with the enemy, the Vietnamese sent them to ‘re-education’ camps, a more civilized treatment than in post-World War II Europe where many of those who had collaborated with the Germans were publicly paraded, shaven bald, humiliated in other ways, and/or hanged from the nearest tree. But some conservatives today would have you believe that the Vietnamese camps were virtually little Auschwitzes.29

Another historical reminder: since it’s generally accepted that the United States lost the war in Vietnam, and since we were told back then that the war was a battle for our freedom, then the ‘fight for our freedom’ must have been unsuccessful, and we must be under the occupation of the North Vietnamese Army. Next time you’re out on the street and you see a passing NVA patrol, please wave and tell them that I say hello.

Can anyone find a message hidden here?

The following quotations all come from the same article in the Washington Post of August 4, 2006 by Ann Scott Tyson concerning the Iraqi town of Hit:

Residents are quick to argue that the American presence incites those attacks, and they blame the U.S. military rather than insurgents for turning their town into a combat zone. The Americans should pull out, they say, and let them solve their own problems.

‘We want the same thing. I want to go home to my wife,’ said an American soldier.

‘Another U.S. officer put it more bluntly: “Nobody wants us here, so why are we here? That’s the big question.”’

‘If we leave, all the attacks would stop, because we’d be gone.’

‘The problem is with the Americans. They only bring problems,’ said watermelon vendor Sefuab Ganiydum, 35. ‘Closing the bridge, the curfew, the hospital. It’s better for U.S. forces to leave the city.’

‘What did we do to have all this suffering?’ asked Ramsey Abdullah Hindi, 60, sitting outside a tea shop. Ignoring U.S. troops within earshot, he said Iraqis were justified to attack them. ‘They have a right to fight against the Americans because of their religion and the bad treatment. We will stand until the last,’ he said somberly.

City officials, too, are adamant that U.S. troops leave Hit.

‘I’m the guy doing the good stuff and I get shot at all the time! Nobody is pro-American in this city. They either tolerate us or all-out hate us,’ said a US Marine major.

‘If we do leave, the city will be a lot better and they’ll build it a lot better.’

This just in: Bush has just read this article and says the hidden message is that the United States is bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.

Chutzpah of an imperial size

Do you remember the classic example of chutzpah? It’s the young man who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan. The Bush administration’s updated version of that was starting a wholly illegal, immoral, and devastating war and then dismissing all kinds of criticism of its action on the grounds that ‘we’re at war.’

They used this excuse to defend warrantless spying, to defend the imprisonment of people for years without charging them with a crime, to abuse and torture them, to ignore the Geneva Convention and other international treaties; they used it against Democrats, accusing them of partisanship during ‘a time of war’; they used it to justify the expansion of presidential powers and the weakening of checks and balances. In short, they claimed ‘We can do whatever we want about anything at all related to this war, because we’re at war.’

‘War is war,’ said Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, ‘and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. Give me a break.’30 Scalia, in his public talks, implies that prisoners held in the far-flung American gulag were all ‘captured on the battlefield.’³¹ But this is simply false. Very few of the poor souls were captured on any kind of battlefield, few had even a gun in their hand; most were just in the wrong place at the wrong time or were turned in by an informer for an American bounty or a personal grudge.

The American public, like all publics, requires only sufficient repetition from ‘respectable’ sources to learn how to play the game. In April 2006 many cities of Wisconsin held referendums on bringing the troops home from Iraq. Here’s Jim Martin, 48, a handyman in Evansville. He thinks that his city shouldn’t waste taxpayers’ money running a referendum that means nothing. ‘The fact of the matter remains, we’re at war,’ he said.32 And here now is Chris Simcox, a leader in the Minuteman movement that patrols the Mexican border: ‘If I catch you breaking into my country in the middle of the night and we’re at war … you’re a potential enemy. I don’t care if you’re a busboy coming to wash dishes.’³³

Dahlia Lithic of Slate.com summed up the legal arguments put forth by the Bush administration thus:

The existing laws do not apply because this is a different kind of war. It’s a different kind of war because the president says so. The president gets to say so because he is president. … We follow the laws of war except to the extent that they do not apply to us. These prisoners have all the rights to which they are entitled by law, except to the extent that we have changed the law to limit their rights.³⁴

Yet, George W. cut taxes heavily, something probably unprecedented while at war. Didn’t he realize that we’re at war?

Reconstruction, thy name is not the United States

(January 9, 2006)

In January 2006 the Bush administration announced that it did not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February. When the last of the reconstruction budget is spent, US officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq’s 26 million people.35

It should be noted that these services, including sanitation systems, were largely destroyed by US bombing – most of it rather deliberately – beginning in the first Gulf War: forty days and nights the bombing went on, demolishing everything that goes into the making of a modern society; followed by twelve years of merciless economic sanctions, accompanied by twelve years of often daily bombing supposedly to protect the so-called no-fly zones; finally the bombing, invasion and widespread devastation beginning in March 2003 and continuing even as you read this. ‘The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq,’ Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. McCoy said: ‘This was just supposed to be a jump-start.’³⁶ It’s a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn’t kill. And afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the damage.

On January 27, 1973, in Paris, the United States signed the ‘Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam.’ Among the principles to which the United States agreed was that stated in Article 21: ‘In pursuance of its traditional [sic] policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina.’

Five days later, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam in which he stipulated the following:

(1) The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2) Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years.

Nothing of the promised reconstruction aid was ever paid, or ever will be.

During the same period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as relentlessly as was Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were over, these nations, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of America’s ‘traditional policy’ of zero reconstruction.

Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There goes our neighborhood. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for ‘just compensation’ for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got just nothing, the same amount the people of Grenada received.

In 1998, Washington, in its grand wisdom, fired more than a dozen cruise missiles into a building in Sudan, which it claimed was producing chemical and biological weapons. The completely pulverized building was actually a major pharmaceuticals plant, vital to the Sudanese people. The United States effectively admitted its mistake by releasing the assets of the plant’s owner it had frozen. Surely now it was compensation time. It appears that nothing has ever been paid to the owner, who filed suit, or to those injured in the bombing.37

The following year we had the case of Yugoslavia; seventy-eight days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced state into virtually a pre-industrial one; the reconstruction needs were breathtaking. In all the years since Yugoslavian bridges fell into the Danube, the country’s factories and homes leveled, its roads made unusable, transportation torn apart … the country has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States.

The day after the above announcement about the US ending its reconstruction efforts in Iraq, it was reported that the United States is phasing out its commitment to reconstruction in Afghanistan as well.38 This after several years of the usual launching of bombs and missiles on towns and villages, resulting in the usual wreckage and ruin.

The fairy tale behind the war

(December 6, 2005)

As it became apparent that the US war in Iraq was an embarrassing tragedy, there were lots of accusations going around between the Democrats and the Republicans, followed by counter-accusations, congressional investigations, demands for more investigations… Who said what? When did they say it? How did it contribute to the buildup for war?… intelligence failures, the administration should have known, we were misled, they lied, but the Democrats believed it also, voted for it… round and round it goes, back and forth, what passes for serious parliamentary debate in the US of A in the twenty-first century…

It’s time once again to remind ourselves of the big lie, the biggest lie of all, the lie that makes this whole controversy rather irrelevant. For it didn’t matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it didn’t matter if the intelligence was right or wrong, or whether the Bush administration lied about the weapons, or who believed the lies and who didn’t. All that mattered was the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was a threat to use the weapons against the United States, an imminent threat to wreak great havoc upon America – ‘Increasingly we believe the United States will become the target of those [Iraqi nuclear] activities,’ declared Vice President Cheney six months before the invasion, as but one example.39

Think about that. What possible reason could Saddam Hussein have had for attacking the United States other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? ‘Oh,’ some people might argue, ‘he was so crazy, who knew what he might have done?’ But when it became obvious in late 2002 that the US was intent upon invading Iraq, Saddam opened up the country to the UN weapons inspectors much more than ever before, with virtually full cooperation. This was not the behavior of a crazy person; this was the behavior of a survivalist. He didn’t even use those weapons when he was invaded in 1991 when he certainly had some of them. Moreover, we now know that Iraq had put out peace feelers in early 2003 hoping to prevent the war.⁴⁰ They were not crazy at all.

No, the United States didn’t invade Iraq because of any threat of an attack using WMD. Nor can it be argued that mere possession of such weapons – or the belief of same – was reason enough to take action, for then the United States would have to invade Russia, France, Israel et al.

The elephant in Saddam Hussein’s courtroom

(November 10, 2005)

The trial of Saddam Hussein has begun. He is charged with the deaths of more than 140 people who were executed after gunmen fired on his motorcade in the predominantly Shiite Muslim town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in an attempt to assassinate him in 1982. This appears to be the only crime he’s being tried for. Yet for a few years now we’ve been hearing about how Saddam used chemical weapons against ‘his own people’ in the town of Halabja in March 1988. (Actually, the people were Kurds, who could be regarded as Saddam’s ‘own people’ only if the Seminoles were President Andrew Jackson’s own people.) The Bush administration never tires of repeating that line to us. As recently as October 21, Karen Hughes, White House envoy for public diplomacy, told an audience in Indonesia that Saddam had ‘used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.’ When challenged about the number, Hughes replied: ‘It’s something that our U.S. government has said a number of times in the past. It’s information that was used very widely after his attack on the Kurds. I believe it was close to 300,000. That’s something I said every day in the course of the campaign. That’s information that we talked about a great deal in America.’ The State Department later corrected Hughes, saying the number of victims in Halabja was about 5,000.41 (This figure, too, may well have been inflated for political reasons; for at least the next six months following the Halabja attack one could find the casualty count being reported in major media as ‘hundreds’, even by Iran with whom Iraq was at war from 1981 to 1988; then, somehow, it ballooned to ‘5,000.’⁴²)

It should be noted, incidentally, that Abraham Lincoln did in fact kill his own people in the American Civil war, hundreds of thousands of them! Given the repeated administration emphasis of the Halabja event, one would think that it would be the charge used in the court against Saddam. Well, I can think of two reasons why the US would be reluctant to bring that matter to court. One, the evidence for the crime has always been somewhat questionable; for example, at one time an arm of the Pentagon issued a report suggesting that it was actually Iran which had used the poison gas in Halabja.⁴³ And two, the United States, in addition to providing Saddam abundant financial and intelligence support, supplied him with lots of materials to help Iraq achieve its chemical and biological weapons capability; it would be kind of awkward if Saddam’s defense raised this issue in the court. But the United States has carefully orchestrated the trial to exclude any unwanted testimony, including the well-known fact that not long after the 1982 carnage Saddam is being charged with, in December 1983, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – perfectly well informed about the Iraqi regime’s methods and the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops – arrived in Baghdad, sent by Ronald Reagan with the objective of strengthening the relationship between the two countries.44 There are photos and film available depicting the warm greetings extended to each other by Saddam and Rumsfeld.

War is peace, occupation is sovereignty

(October 17, 2005)

The town of Rawa in Northern Iraq is occupied. The United States has built an army outpost there to cut off the supply of foreign fighters purportedly entering Iraq from Syria. The Americans engage in house searches, knocking in doors, summary detentions, road blocks, air strikes, and other tactics highly upsetting to the people of Rawa. Recently, the commander of the outpost, Lt. Col. Mark Davis, addressed a crowd of 300 angry people. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he told the murmuring citizens. ‘Some of you are concerned about the attack helicopters and mortar fire from the base,’ he said. ‘I will tell you this: those are the sounds of peace.’⁴⁵ He could have said, making as much sense, that they were the sounds of sovereignty. Iraq is a sovereign nation, Washington assures us, particularly in these days of the constitutional referendum, although the vote will do nothing to empower the Iraqis to relieve their daily misery, serving only a public relations function for the United States. The votes, it should be noted, were counted on an American military base; and on the day of the referendum American warplanes and helicopters were busy killing some seventy people around the city of Ramadi.46

The British also insist that Iraq is a sovereign nation. Recently, hundreds of residents filled the streets in the southern city of Basra, shouting and pumping their fists in the air to condemn British forces for raiding a jail and freeing two British soldiers. Iraqi police had arrested the Britons, who were dressed as civilians, for allegedly firing their guns (at whom or what is not clear), and either trying to plant explosives or having explosives in their vehicle. British troops then assembled several armored vehicles, rammed them through the jailhouse wall, and freed the men, as helicopter gunships hovered above.⁴⁷

An intriguing side question: we have here British soldiers dressed as civilians (at least one report said dressed as Arabs), driving around in a car with explosives, firing guns… Does this not feed into the frequent speculation that coalition forces have been to some extent part of the ‘insurgency’? The same insurgency that’s used as an excuse by the coalition to remain in Iraq?