Foreign-Policy Immorality Has No Excuse (Michael Parenti)

Foreign-Policy Immorality Has No Excuse
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	Los Angeles Times
First published	1984-06-20
Type	Newspaper article
Source	https://www.newspapers.com/image/400685547/

Foreign-Policy Immorality Has No Excuse, also published as The morality of intervention, Just Where Has Morality Gone?, Foreign policy fails to ponder 'what is moral?', Presumptive amoralism buoys U.S. foreign policy, and Morality's our first line of defense, is an article by Michael Parenti, published in the Los Angeles Times on 21 June 1984.

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"Is it true that two of our helicopters were shot down?" This question, the first one put to President Reagan during the press conference at which he announced the U.S. invasion of Grenada, offers us a glimpse of the presumptive amoralism that supports so much of U.S. foreign policy. Under false pretenses, the United States had just launched an unprovoked invasion of a tiny sovereign nation, killing scores of people, in violation of every canon of international law—and the first concern voiced was: Are we taking any losses? The question did not challenge, and implicitly accepted, the legitimacy of the operation. The question left largely unexamined was: What right did the United States have to invade Grenada? Mainstream political debate about the use of military force is generally limited to amoral, instrumental considerations: Will it succeed? Are we overcommitted? During the Vietnam era, a few personages such as then-Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) noted the wrongful, destructive efforts of our Indochina policy on the Indochinese, but most political leaders and news media focused on how we were doing, not what we were doing. The complaint that was most commonly expressed was that Vietnam was a no-win situation, and that therefore we should get out. From this we might suppose that if we could have won, the intervention and all its dreadful devastation would have been justified. Similarly, the opponents of Reagan's intervention in Lebanon complained that Lebanon was a sectarian quagmire, a no-win situation that was best left to itself. Few of the critics raised any questions about the morality of pulverising the Lebanese countryside with hundreds of 2,000-pound shells from the battleship New Jersey. Reagan's policy was denounced as a failure rather than an abomination.

Given the amoralism paraded as Realpolitik by our leaders and media pundits, the only restraint against U.S. military intervention is the potential losses sustained by American forces. The concern for "the lives of our boys" is accompanied by no commensurate regard for the lives, homes, and lands of the people who are caught in our boys' fire—at least not in the mainstream political debates and major news media. If a war can be fought without great loss of American lives, with U.S. actions limited to aerial and sea attacks and logistics that put few Americans in the line of fire, critics have much of their argument taken from them—witness Grenada. If the threat of failure is our main polemic, it becomes difficult to argue against a quick success.

"Good news! We won one for the Gipper!"

This amoral mentality carries over with grotesque consequences into the debate concerning nuclear armaments. The major argument that one hears against nuclear war is that "no one can win," and that "both sides would be destroyed." The mutual-destruction argument contains the intentional but stunning implication that the only thing, or most important thing, keeping us from incinerating millions of human beings who inhabit the Soviet Union is that we, too, would be destroyed. It implies that if the destruction were not mutual, a nuclear attack might well be an acceptable option at some future time. To be sure, there are influential strategists in Washington who have drawn that very conclusion. Let us assume that they are right. Let us assume that the United States could win a nuclear war without sustaining millions of American casualties and without destroying most of Earth's life-support systems. What exactly would such a victory bring? We are told that the Soviet people are the innocent captives of the Soviet system. But to vanquish that system by nuclear arms we would have to slaughter millions upon millions of unoffending men, women, and children, obliterate their cities and farmlands, and contaminate more than one-sixth of the Earth's surface. There is no justification for an act of that genocidal ferocity and magnitude—not even a guarantee that it could succeed. A policy that entertains the possibility of nuclear victory is not only insane, it is also profoundly evil. Similarly, a policy that entertains the possibility of killing tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and Salvadorans in some future U.S. invasion (a policy that has already taken a large toll in both countries) is also evil—even if it proves successful. We often hear the advocates of Realpolitik warn us that in a world such as this we cannot afford to give much weight to moral questions. Quite the contrary. In a world such as this, morality is our first—and perhaps our last—line of defence, the best hope for our personal survival and national salvation, the force that must once more move us in strong opposition against the stratagems of insane and heartless "realists."