Like Cicero in the Roman Republic, there are always a handful of chroniclers who can see and articulate clearly the social, cultural, and political realities of empires in terminal decline. They call out the bankruptcy of an inept and corrupt ruling class, blinded by hubris, as well as a populace that has checked out of civic life and is entranced by bread and circus spectacles. In his trilogy Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chambers Johnson does a masterful job of showing how and why we are disintegrating. So does Andrew Bacevich, who, in his newest book of essays, On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, writes about the debacles that have beset the American empire since the Vietnam War, a conflict he fought in as a young army officer. Bacevich warns that Americans’ inability to be self-critical, to dissect and understand the litany of disasters that have followed on the heels of Vietnam, including decades of fruitless warfare in the Middle East, will have terrible consequences for us and much of the rest of the globe.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Adam Coley Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
Transcript
Chris Hedges: At the end of any empire, there are always a handful of chroniclers who, like Cicero in the ancient Roman Republic, see clearly the looming disintegration of empire. They call out the bankruptcy of an inept and corrupt ruling class blinded by hubris, as well as a populace that has checked out of civic life and is entranced by the bread and circus of spectacles. Chambers Johnson in his trilogy on American empire: Blowback; The Sorrows of Empire; and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic does a masterful job of showing how and why we are disintegrating.
So does Andrew Bacevich, who in his newest book of essays, On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, writes about the debacles that have beset the American empire since the Vietnam War, a conflict he fought in as a young Army officer. He warns that our inability to be self-critical, to dissect and understand the litany of disasters that have followed on the heels of Vietnam, including the 20 years of fruitless warfare in the Middle East, will have terrible consequences for us and much of the rest of the globe.
Joining me to discuss his new book is Andrew Bacevich, the president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A West Point graduate and retired Army colonel. He is also professor emeritus of History and International Relations at Boston University. His other books include The New American Militarism; The Limits of Power; America’s War for the Greater Middle East; and After The Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.
Andrew, I want to begin with what you call the Church of America the Redeemer. You say this is a virtual congregation, albeit one possessing many of the attributes of a more traditional religion. The church has its own holy scripture, authenticated on July 4, 1776 at a gathering of 56 prophets, and it has its own saints, prominent among them, the good Thomas Jefferson, chief author of the sacred text – Not the bad Thomas Jefferson, who owned and impregnated enslaved people – Talk about the Church of America the Redeemer, and what happens when you don’t pay fealty to that church?
Andrew Bacevich: Well, if you don’t pay fealty to it, I think you probably get ignored and end up being somewhat frustrated, which would be, I think, the way I would describe myself with regard to my writing efforts. But what’s the Church of the Redeemer? Well, I guess the essay itself is another way of approaching and commenting on the notion of American exceptionalism, which rests on a conviction that we are, indeed, the chosen people, the new chosen people, and as the new chosen people, that we have a divinely inspired mission. And the mission is to transform the world in our own image. This, I think, is something that, in many respects, we can trace back to the founding of the republic, even to the colonial era. I think it is something that really achieved maturity beginning in 1945 and has persisted down to the present moment despite the accumulation of evidence that says that we’re not exceptional, and that the prophets that we look to in many respects have feet of clay.
Chris Hedges: I mean, 1945, you could argue that after World War II, of course, in many ways, at least for some parts of the world, and particularly Europe, America was the redeemer. And yet, since Vietnam, this kind of rhetoric is at complete odds with the reality of how we project power and what we do in the world. And I want you just to address that disconnect between the language we use to describe ourselves to ourselves and what’s actually happening.
Andrew Bacevich: What a great question, and I can’t give you a satisfactory answer. The persistence of myth when facts and reality contradict the myth is a bit of a puzzle. You’ve put your finger, I think, on the key point, and that is that even if at the end of World War II, and arguably for the next couple of decades, it would be at least plausible to be patting ourselves on the back as the savior of the world, that notion has become implausible since Vietnam. There was an effort to revive it in the aftermath of 9/11 when George W. Bush embarked upon his great crusade, the one that we called global war on terrorism. Certainly the expectations that informed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 traced their origin back to the claims made at the end of World War II and early in the Cold War. But we saw in Iraq that the facts simply demolished those expectations.
So you put your finger on the main question, I think: why does the myth persist? Again, I don’t have a very good answer, although I think that, to some degree, it persists because those who wield power in the United States, whether we’re talking political power, economic power, those who wield power have an interest in sustaining the myth. Because as long as the myth persists, so does their elevated status.
Chris Hedges: Well, if their reference point is Vietnam or the 20-year debacle in the Middle East, the myth itself implodes. And so, in a way, it has to be anchored in the past, because it’s impossible to anchor it in the present.
Andrew Bacevich: But in a way it doesn’t implode. I mean, it ought to implode.
Chris Hedges: Right.
Andrew Bacevich: Let’s talk about the Afghanistan War. Longest war in our country’s history – Not the biggest, by any means, if we look at the number of Americans and other than Americans killed, wounded. The most expensive, I think, arguably, in terms of dollar cost. 20-year effort, ends in abject failure. And one might say, well, obviously, clearly then the nation is going to step back and reflect deeply on the cause and consequences of this failure. But as you know and I know, that didn’t happen. I mean, it is astonishing how quickly both our political elites in Washington and the country more broadly have turned aside from Afghanistan. And now today, as you and I speak, we’re all gung-ho to wage a proxy war, underline a proxy war in Ukraine, as if the debacle of Afghanistan, the parallel debacle of Iraq, never happened.
Chris Hedges: Well, there was a story, I can’t remember if it was Churchill or somebody went to Paris after World War II, and the French were talking about lessons of the war, and it was all about World War I, which of course they won. But it has something of that kind of utter denial of reality because reality is just so unpalatable. And I wonder if that’s a feature of all late empires, where no one’s held accountable, there’s no self reflection, and it’s a collective self-delusion. Does that characterize… I think you could argue it characterizes any late empire.
Andrew Bacevich: Yeah, I’m not a student of comparative empires, but if we take the little I know of a couple of cases, one would be France. France, in the wake of World War II, determined to cling to its empire in Indochina and in Algeria, an effort that came nowhere near to succeeding and simply exacted great costs, both of France and of these former colonial territories. That was an empire that didn’t learn, that was an empire that didn’t read the writings on the wall.
I think you can say the same thing about the Brits. Certainly, in the wake of World War II, British leaders recognized that the pre-war British Empire was unsustainable, but they exerted themselves to try to maintain a privileged status. And that didn’t work. And I think here the most illustrative case is the Suez crisis of 1956, when the Brits tried to reassert control of the Suez Canal, and more broadly were attempting to reassert indirect control of Egypt, and I suppose more broadly of the Middle East. And of course that flopped terribly. So yeah, it’s not just us. I think you probably can make a case that empires cling to the past even when the signs clearly indicate that there’s no way to resuscitate the past.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask you a question as a historian. You quote the great historian, Carl Becker, “For all practical purposes, history is for us, and for the time being, what we know it to be.” And then you go on and say, “The study of the past may reveal truths, Becker allowed, but those truths are contingent, incomplete, invalid only for the time being. Put another way, historical perspectives conceived in what Becker termed the ‘specious present’ have a sell-by date.” Can you explain that idea?
Andrew Bacevich: Well, and that’s not the past that Americans want to conjure up. We want to be able to pick the parts of the past that are relevant. I think, absolutely, the classic example of this is the run-up to World War II, the narrative that everybody knows: the failed effort to appease Hitler, American reluctance to intervene in the European war, once it began, on behalf of Great Britain. These are the shake-your-finger lessons that have persisted since then down to the present moment.
Another way, I think, of saying that is that our prevailing notions of history are exceedingly narrow and exceedingly selective. And basically the process of selection is one that aims to reassure ourselves. To reassure ourselves that the myths that we believe in can be sustained. That disappointments, whether it’s the disappointment of the Vietnam War, whether it’s the disappointment of the Afghanistan war, that those are mere merely passing moments, and that if we exert ourselves, if we try hard enough, if we send our soldiers off to enough wars, that we can somehow turn this thing around. I think that’s very much what’s going on with regard to the US proxy participation in the Ukraine War, that, by God, if we can defeat Russia, then we’ll be back on top. We’ll be number one. Let the Chinese see what we’ve done to the Russians, and then let’s see what they say at that time. But it all involves this… Recognize the truths, the realities that I want to and ignore the ones that I find inconvenient.
Chris Hedges: You write that the process of formulating new history to supplant the old is organic rather than contrived – And this is the point I found really interesting – It comes from the bottom up, not the top down. What do you mean by that?
Andrew Bacevich: Well, I think I was suggesting what it ought to be. It ought to be organic, that we ought to recognize voices that, perhaps, have been ignored or taken less than seriously. I think here an example is the 1619 Project, although it cuts both ways. I’m a critic of the 1619 Project. I think that the effort to – And people will accuse me of being unfair to the supporters of that project – But I think the notion of contriving a new narrative of American history that basically revolves around the African American experience goes too far. That doesn’t say that it’s wrong. I think it’s not wrong. And I think the positive aspect of the 1619 Project – And it’s achieving great success in that regard – Is that it does belatedly provide due acknowledgement of the place of Black Americans in our history, going all the way back to the founding of Anglo America in the early part of the 17th century.
So Black Americans are no longer a footnote. They’re no longer the people we say, well, we credit them for the creation of jazz. Or, wasn’t Jackie Robinson a wonderful guy? That they now become integral to the larger narrative. I guess my problem is that integral to the narrative should not mean taking over the narrative, that there is another story. And I think a proper appreciation of history would certainly acknowledge the role of African Americans since the founding of Anglo America. But also, we have to keep all the white guys in, and all the white women, and all the ethnic groups, and everybody else. It’s a complex story and we shouldn’t try to oversimplify it.
Chris Hedges: Well, I don’t want to get into a debate on the 1619 Project. However, it’s not just about Blacks or African Americans, it’s about the institution of slavery as a social and an economic force and the reverberations of that institution, which white historians have sought to erase.
Andrew Bacevich: Well, I’ll disagree with you a little bit. I don’t think they’ve sought to – Well, they tried to erase it until sometime in the 20th century, then I think it was acknowledged, but it tended to be treated as a peripheral issue. And the 1619 – Maybe I’m wrong – The 1619 Project says, no, it’s not peripheral, it’s central. And frankly, I’m willing to acknowledge central. I’m not willing to acknowledge dominant.
Chris Hedges: Well, but it took until the ’50s till you got historians like Kenneth Stamp, Leon Litwack –
Andrew Bacevich: John Whit Franklin.
Chris Hedges: And then you had W. E. B. Du Bois, of course, but Du Bois was kind of pushed out of that narrative.
I want to talk about this, of what you call the present American moment. And you raised this question about, when it’s clear that a war is a mistake – We know from the Afghan papers that the policy makers and the military leaders understood that they were never going to quote-unquote, “win,” in Afghanistan. The same thing that they understood, we know, from the Vietnam War through the Pentagon Papers. But you ask why those in power insist on its perpetuation regardless of the costs and consequences. And that’s a question I want you to try and answer.
Andrew Bacevich: It’s because they’re in power. They want to remain in power. And if George W. Bush had gone on national TV circa what, 2004, 2005, he went on TV and said, I got a great idea. It’s called the surge, and we’re going to persist. If he’d gone on TV and said, boy, we screwed up. This is a disaster, and I’m responsible for this disaster. Well, this would’ve been an act of great courage on his part, but it would’ve been quite surprising, because President George W. Bush, like every other president down to and including President Biden, sought power, achieved power, and will cling to power as long as possible. Not because they’re evil people, but because that’s the way politics works. And I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much dishonesty that permeates our politics, because the perceived penalties of honesty are unacceptable.
Chris Hedges: But why does Obama perpetuate it? He didn’t start it. It wasn’t his war.
Andrew Bacevich: Well [laughs], we’d have to ask him, I guess, but I think my answer is that we see frequent references to the president of the United States as the most powerful person on the planet. I think that’s wildly misleading. Whoever is US president actually wields pretty limited power. You and I could make a pretty long list of the things that presidents can’t do, might want to do but are unable to do because they are constrained. Constrained by circumstance globally, constrained by other nations, but they’re also constrained by circumstances at home.
And I think President Obama, who I hold in high regard, was an acutely intelligent politician who understood the constraints that he labored under and, to a large degree, accepted them. Now, we might regret that. We might say, God, I wish Obama had pushed harder to bring about the kind of change that he seemed to want. But I think that, at the end of the day, whether ’cause he was being advised or whether this was his own thinking, he conformed, he went along, he accepted the constraints. And I think that’s a reality of American politics. I suppose it’s a reality of politics wherever you are.
Chris Hedges: You draw parallels between the Vietnam War and Iraq. I’m just going to run through them quickly and then have you comment. You say both were avoidable, both turned out to be superfluous. Both were costly distractions. In each instance, political leaders in Washington and senior commanders in the field collaborated in committing grievous blunders. Thanks to that incompetence, both devolved into self-inflicted quagmires. Both conflicts left behind a poisonous legacy of unrest, rancor, and bitterness – Although perhaps more so Vietnam. And finally, with both political and military elites alike, preferring simply to move on, neither war has received a proper accounting. To what extent has that inability to learn the lessons of Vietnam contributed to the debacles that we have repeated since Vietnam?
Andrew Bacevich: I think to a very great extent. Now, I wouldn’t have said that, I think, 20 or 25 years ago. My own appreciation of Vietnam has substantially evolved, so that several of those items that you ticked off reflect the position I have more or less recently come to. When I was a serving soldier, very much accepting the framework of the Cold War as the proper lens to examine and think about international politics, it was possible to conclude that the Vietnam War was necessary. If you took seriously what turns out to be bogus, but if you took seriously the notion that there was this thing called monolithic communism that posed a threat to the well-being of the United States and of our allies, then you can make the case that it was necessary for the US to employ US forces to try to prevent the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam.
From where we are today, all of that is utterly bogus, and really makes you want to weep. I mean, that our leaders fell for such a load of crap, sold it to the American people, who bought it. We’re conscious of the anti-war movement. Okay, let’s be conscious of the number of American soldiers who were told to go fight in Southeast Asia and said, yes sir, yes sir, and followed orders. 58,000 people were killed, and we’re just talking the Americans. The number of Vietnamese killed, of course, was orders of magnitude greater, and for what? For nothing.
I’m meandering here, but I guess my point is that sometimes, at least for somebody like me, it takes a while to come to a proper understanding of the event and to put it in a historical context that is, if not entirely true, at least closer to the truth than what back in the day we were getting from Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and Dean Ruskin and William Westmoreland. But sometimes it takes a while to figure all that out.
Chris Hedges: Well, but those who do figure it out at the time – And I think this really represents your marginalization – Those who do figure it out in the moment and decry it are pushed to the margins.
Andrew Bacevich: I think that’s true. I think that’s true. The power of the establishment, the influence of the establishment, the power of those myths that we referred to a little while ago, makes it very difficult to advance an alternative point of view and have it be embraced and accepted. And I think we have seen that over and over and over again with the most pernicious results.
Chris Hedges: Well, you have a media that won’t disseminate it. We’re getting to the end, and I just want to read a passage you write towards the end of the book, “I am by temperament a conservative, and a traditionalist wary of revolutionary movements that more often than not end up being hijacked by nefarious plotters more interested in satisfying their own ambitions than pursuing high ideals. Yet, even I am prepared to admit that the status quo appears increasingly untenable. Incremental change will not suffice. The challenge of the moment is to embrace radicalism without succumbing to irresponsibility.” Can you explain what you mean by all that?
Andrew Bacevich: [Laughs] I mean, I guess the pertinent question is what does this radicalism look like?
Chris Hedges: Well, exactly.
Andrew Bacevich: What does this radical –
Chris Hedges: Yeah, there you go.
Andrew Bacevich: I’m not sure I know, Chris. It took me a while to reach the conclusion that incremental change just isn’t going to hack it. I think that probably it was the Trump period that brought me to that conclusion. I’ve never believed that Trump himself is as important as the many in the mainstream media seem to want to pretend. But I think that the Trump moment, this nationalist populist reaction from the right signals that the republic is in serious danger. And I don’t know that incrementalism – Joe Biden is an incrementalist – I don’t know that incrementalist offers a sufficient response to what we experienced when Trump was riding high. But I don’t have the six-point plan that is going to move the country back in a better direction. I wish I did, but I don’t.
Chris Hedges: Well, doesn’t it look something like FDR, the New Deal?
Andrew Bacevich: Well… I don’t know. I mean, yes in the sense that’s, in my estimation, I think in many people’s estimation, he was far and away the most effective reformer of the 20th century down to the present moment. And that he himself was not a radical. In many respects he was a reformer. He had to reform the system in order to save the system. And he did that with not perfect skill, but very considerable skill. On the other hand, Chris, it’s not 1933. We are not the nation that we were in 1933 – 1933 being the year that the New Deal began. And so, as much as I admire what Roosevelt accomplished, and I genuinely do, I’m not sure that the New Deal actually serves as a proper blueprint.
Chris Hedges: Well, because we’re post-industrial –
Andrew Bacevich: Primarily in the realm –
Chris Hedges: We’re a post-industrial society. That would be a big difference.
Andrew Bacevich: That’s one big difference, I think. And also, the New Deal was designed to benefit white people.
Chris Hedges: Well, yes.
Andrew Bacevich: It was a predominantly white society, and Roosevelt treated African Americans as an afterthought. They were not excluded from the benefits of the New Deal, but certainly African Americans – Or, we say African Americans, or Brown Americans, or Native Americans, or Asian Americans, their interest did not figure in a large way in Roosevelt’s agenda. And today, a reform program would have to be far more inclusive, I think, than was the New Deal.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Andrew Bacevich, On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, Darian Jones, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
(Readers sensitive to discussion of inappropriate adult behavior toward children may want to skip this one.)
There’s a really gross video going around of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy on the lips and telling him to suck his tongue while an adult audience looks on approvingly. A tweet from Tibet.net last month shows a video clip of the Tibetan spiritual leader with the child and says the encounter took place during his “meeting with students and members of M3M Foundation,” though Tibet.net’s clip cuts out the sexually inappropriate part of the encounter.
Here is a hyperlink to a video of the interaction. For those who understandably do not wish to see such a thing but are comfortable with a text description, here’s a new write-up from News.com.au:
The Dalai Lama has raised eyebrows after kissing a young Indian boy on the lips and asking him to “suck” his tongue at a recent event.
Footage of the bizarre interaction, which occurred last month during an event for India’s M3M Foundation, has gone viral on social media.
The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso, was hosting students and members of the foundation at his temple in Dharamshala, India, where he lives in exile.
In the video, the boy approaches the microphone and asks, “Can I hug you?”
The 87-year-old says “OK, come” and invites him on stage.
The Dalai Lama motions to his cheek and says “first here” and the boy gives him a hug and kiss.
He holds the boy’s arm and turns to him, saying “then I think fine here also” as he points to his lips.
The spiritual leader then grabs the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth as the audience laughs.
“And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama tells the boy, sticking out his tongue.
They press their foreheads together and the boy briefly pokes out his tongue before backing away, as the Dalai Lama gives him a playful slap on the chest and laughs.
What is it with power-adjacent clergymen and child molestation, anyway? As Michael Parenti noted in 2003, sexual abuse was commonplace in the tyrannical environment of feudal Tibet, over which the 14th Dalai Lama would still preside had it not been forcibly annexed by the PRC in the 1950s. While the slogan of “Free Tibet” has long been used as a propaganda bludgeon by the west against China particularly and against communism generally, the truth of the matter is that Tibet was quantifiably a far more tyrannical and oppressive place to live back when it was supposedly “free”.
I went to see the Dalai Lama a long time ago when he came to speak at Melbourne, and I remember what stood out the most for me was how completely lacking in depth or profundity it was. As someone with an intense interest in spirituality and enlightenment I always found it perplexing that someone so highly regarded in the circles I moved in had nothing to say on such matters besides superficial, Sesame Street-level remarks about being nice and trying to make the world a better place. Probably no one alive today is more commonly associated with Buddhism and spiritual awakening in western consciousness than the Dalai Lama, yet everything I’ve ever read or heard from him has struck me as unskillful, unhelpful and vapid when compared to the words of other spiritual teachers.
That confusing discrepancy cleared up after I got into political analysis and learned that the Dalai Lama is probably not someone who should be looked to for spiritual guidance, and is actually far too messed up inside to have accomplished much inner development as a person.
Take an interview he did back in September 2003, a solid six months after the invasion of Iraq. The Dalai Lama told AP that he believed the US invasion of Afghanistan was “perhaps some kind of liberation” that could “protect the rest of civilization,” as was the USA’s brutal intervention in Korea, and that the US invasion of Iraq was “complicated” and would take more time before its morality could be determined. In 2005, years after the invasion, after normal mainstream members of the public had realized the war was a disaster, the Dalai Lama stillsaid “The Iraq war — it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”
This is plainly someone with a broken moral compass. These are basic, bare-minimum assessments that any normal person with any degree of psychological and emotional health can quickly sort out for themselves, and he still winds up basically on the same side of these issues as some of the worst people on earth.
I used to think it odd that the Dalai Lama has nothing to offer but vapid kindergarten pop spirituality, then I learned he was a well-paid CIA agent for many years.https://t.co/wBfqsLm3rtpic.twitter.com/2DmGsgll5B
But I guess that’s about the best anyone could expect from a literal CIA asset. His administration received $1.7 million a year from the Central Intelligence Agency through the 1960s, and it’s reported that he himself personally received $180,000 a year from the CIA for decades.
Many friends of Tibet and admirers of the Dalai Lama, who has always advocated nonviolence, believe he knew nothing about the CIA program. But Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers, was closely involved in the operations, and [CIA veteran John Kenneth] Knaus, who took part in the operation, writes that “Gyalo Thondup kept his brother the Dalai Lama informed of the general terms of the CIA support.” According to Knaus, starting in the late 1950s, the Agency paid the Dalai Lama $15,000 a month. Those payments came to an end in 1974.
The CIA is easily the most depraved institution in the world today, so it would be reasonable to expect the moral development of someone so intimately involved with it to be a bit stunted. Ten or fifteen years ago it would’ve surprised me to learn that I would one day type these words, but it turns out the Dalai Lama is a real asshole.
It’s rare to find a spiritual teacher who has expanded their consciousness inwardly enough to have useful things to say about enlightenment, and of those who do it’s extremely rare to find one who has also expanded their consciousness outwardly enough to discuss world events from a place of wisdom and understanding as well. The Dalai Lama is as far from this as you could possibly get: he has lived his life in cooperation with the most unwise institutions on earth, and he is less inwardly developed than most people you might pass on the street.
People should stop looking up to this freak.
__________________
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All staff in Afghanistan ordered to stay home for 48 hours to give officials time to negotiate with Taliban
United Nations staff in Afghanistan have been ordered to stay at home for 48 hours to give UN officials time to persuade the Taliban not to go ahead with their plan to ban all female Afghan employees of the UN from working.
The UN said the ban would lead to even less humanitarian aid reaching Afghanistan.
As with all matters regarding United States policy, Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a non-committal position — “quiet diplomacy”. Binoy Kampmark reports.
Last year, the short-term facility in Kent ballooned into a vast, unsafe camp holding thousands of people, including children. How did our asylum system get so broken – and what does it reveal about Rishi Sunak’s promise to stop the small boats?
In late September last year, a Home Office employee walked into a newly opened section of the Manston short-term holding facility in Kent and realised that conditions there were spiralling out of control: “It had got way beyond what was ethical and humane.”
The site, a collection of marquees in the grounds of a former army barracks near a disused airport, was overcrowded, and staff were improvising increasingly unsuitable makeshift expansions. “There were people who’d been sleeping on a mat on the floor of a marquee for 20 days. We’d run out of space, so we were opening old bits of the site. They’d put some mats on the floor of the gym – a really old building. It looked like it was about to fall down. None of it had been set up with decent hygiene facilities, bedding or anything. You walked in and your heart just sank. I had a feeling of: ‘Oh my God, what have we got into here?’” says the official, who asked not to be identified.
March 18, 2023, marks the 20-year anniversary of the illegal US invasion of Iraq. Two decades later, over a million Iraqis have been killed, 37 million people have been displaced by the War on Terror, and none of the architects of the worst crime of the century have been held accountable.
In commemoration of the millions of lives lost and destroyed by the Iraq War and its consequences, The Real News Network is airing an exclusive showing of Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy, the acclaimed 2007 documentary produced by the Media Education Foundation at the height of the Iraq War. This film was co-directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, and is being shared with the permission of the filmmakers.
This critically acclaimed look at American war propaganda exhumes five decades of remarkable archival footage to show how presidents from both parties have relied on fear-driven political spin and craven media complicity to sell a succession of wars to the American people. The result is an invaluable introduction to how propaganda, public relations, and perception management function in democratic societies. Essential viewing for courses in media studies, political science, journalism, and US history.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR: Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.
1940s NEWSREEL VOICEOVER: The final United Nations victory has been won. The war is over. Peace is here.
A crowd of two million review the greatest parade of arms ever witnessed.
This is the news that electrified the world. Unconditional surrender. A new world of peace.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR: Today the guns are silent … The skies no longer rain death … The entire world lies quietly at peace.
VOICES OF NEWS REPORTERS: On the way American infantrymen once again hit the road toward Korea’s capital city of Seoul. On the way American infantry men …
And US Marines were ordered into the Dominican Republic as a rebel force collapses … Meanwhile US Marines have also taken center stage in South Vietnam … This is what the war in Vietnam is all about …
The first wave of Marines landed in Grenada … encounter some twelve hundred US Marines would land in Grenada for several days along with …
Most of the Libyans were terrified with last night’s heavy bombing raid … President Bush’s decision to neutralize Panama’s General Manuel Noriega … Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is over… This is the beginning of the war in Iraq …
SEAN PENN: Since World War II we have seen a dramatic escalation in United States military actions around the globe, ranging from missile strikes and rapid troop deployments, to all out wars and occupations.
The reasons for these military interventions have varied, each involving complex geopolitical interests in different parts of the world at different times in US history. But the public face of these wars has not reflected this complexity.
Over the past five decades deliberation and debate about US military actions have largely been left to a closed circle of elite Washington policy makers, politicians and bureaucrats whose rationales for war have come into public view only with the release of leaked or declassified documents, often years after the bombs have been dropped and the troops have come home.
In real time, officials have explained and justified these military operations to the American people by withholding crucial information about the actual reasons and potential costs of military action – again and again choosing to present an easier version of war’s reality … a steady and remarkably consistent storyline designed not to inform, but to generate and maintain support and enthusiasm for war.
Nationally syndicated columnist and author Norman Solomon began to notice the basic contours of this official storyline during the war in Vietnam.
NORMAN SOLOMON: As a teenager I read about the war in Vietnam as it escalated. I saw the footage on television.
VIETNAM ERA REPORTER (UNIDENTIFIED): In combat there are no niceties. A dead enemy soldier is simply an object to be examined for documents and then removed as quickly as possible, sometimes crudely.
NORMAN SOLOMON: People that I knew began to go to Vietnam in uniform of the US military. And as time went on I began to wonder, particularly as I became draft age, about the truthfulness of the statements coming from the White House and top officials in Washington.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: We fight for the principle of self-determination. That the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course, choose it in free elections, without violence, without terror and without fear.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And through that process I began to really wonder about whether we were getting more truth or lies.
SEAN PENN: In the years since, Solomon has focused his attention on a set of striking parallels between the selling of the Vietnam War and the way Presidents have rallied public support for subsequent military actions.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Looking back on the Vietnam War, as I did many times, I had a very eerie feeling that while the names of the countries changed, and of course each circumstance was different, there were some parallels that cried out for examination.
Rarely if ever does a war just kind of fall down from the sky. The foundation needs to be laid, and the case is built, often with deception.
COLD WAR PROPAGANDA FILM: In the background was the growing struggle between two great powers to shape the post-war world. Already an iron curtain had dropped around Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria …
It can’t happen here? Well, this is what it looks like if it should …
Chief of police is hustled off to jail. Public utilities are seized by Fifth Columnists. Editor who operates under a free press, he goes to jail too …
This will account for some of the enemy, but some will get through to your home …
SEAN PENN: The use of propaganda to arouse public support for war is not new. Leaders throughout history have turned to propaganda to transform populations understandably wary of the costs of war into war’s most ardent supporters – invoking images of nationalism, and channeling fear and anger towards perceived enemies and threats.
And in the United States since World War II, government attempts to win public support for military actions have followed a similar pattern.
FIFTIES PROPAGANDA FILM: We are living in an era marked by the growth of socialism. It’s basic godless philosophy —
Lying, dirty … It’s goal of world conquest — Shrewd, godless …
Its insidious tactics — Murderous, determined … And its cunning strategy — It’s an international criminal conspiracy.
NORMAN SOLOMON: It’s the same sort of message that’s utilized today and often identical techniques.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (MONTAGE): States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
These are barbaric people.
Servants of evil.
The cult of evil.
A monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Whether it’s the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda, it provides a way to legitimize US plans for war.
You have the comparison between the enemy leader and Hitler.
PETER JENNINGS, ABC: President Bush called Saddam Hussein a little Hitler again today.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: We are dealing with Hitler revisited.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them.
NORMAN SOLOMON: We don’t get information that would help us put the images in perspective
PRESIDENT REAGAN: This mad dog of the Middle East … I find that he’s not only a barbarian, but he’s flakey.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: The drug indicted, drug related, indicted dictator of Panama …
NEWS REPORTER (UNIDENTIFIED): And to support their claim that Noriega was out of control, ghoulish evidence of Satanic practices with dead animals that one official called “kinky.”
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And as Aldous Huxley said long ago – it’s more powerful to often leave things out than it is to tell lies. For instance, quite often the US government directly helped the dictators that we’re now being told must be overthrown. And it’s that selectivity of history that’s a very effective form of propaganda.
SEAN PENN: This selective view of reality, buttressed by these fear-based appeals, represents a larger pre-war pattern: the repeated claim that the United States uses military force only with great reluctance —
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: We still seek no wider war.
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: The United States does not start fights.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: America does not seek conflict.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: I don’t like to use military force.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: Out nation enters this conflict reluctantly
SEAN PENN: And only for the most virtuous of reasons: first and foremost, to spread freedom and democracy.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: We want nothing for ourselves, only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The rhetoric of democracy is part of the process of convincing people that even though unpleasant things must be done sometimes in its name, like bombing other countries, democracy is really what it’s about.
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: The United States has been engaged in an effort to stop the advance of communism in Central America by doing what we do best: by supporting democracy.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And it’s almost as though repeating it enough times makes it so.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: Our cause of liberty, our cause of freedom, our cause of compassion and understanding.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: People want democracy, peace, and the chance for a better life and dignity and freedom.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: We want to lift lives around the world, not take them.
NORMAN SOLOMON: These are forms of propaganda that are insidious, because they tug at our heartstrings.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: We must get the Kosovo refugees home safely. Mine fields will have to be cleared. Homes destroyed by Serb forces have to be rebuilt. Homeless people in need of food and medicine —
NORMAN SOLOMON: Of course, we want to help other people. These are propaganda messages that say don’t just think of yourself, America can’t just be selfish. It makes bombing other people ultimately seem like an act of kindness, of altruism.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Today, our armed forces joined our NATO allies in air strikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: It was another devastating hit against Yugoslavia’s capital.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: We are upholding our values, protecting our interests and advancing the cause of peace.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Belgrade’s largest heating plant up in flames.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: And even as planes of the multinational forces attack Iraq, I prefer to think of peace, not war.
NORMAN SOLOMON: If my motives are pure, then the fact that I’m killing people may not be too upsetting. As a matter of fact, it may indicate that I’m killing people for very good reasons.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And so, you have kind of the high-ground president with the lofty motives being proclaimed. We’re told that peace is being sought, alternatives to war are being explored. And that’s kind of, you know, the official story.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: And I am continuing and I am increasing the search for every possible path to peace.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Whether we’re talking about President Johnson or President Nixon or the president today, you have one chief executive after another in the White House saying how much they love peace and hate war.
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression, to preserve freedom and peace.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: No one, friend or foe, should doubt our desire for peace.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: The United States wants peace. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We seek peace. We strive for peace.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Every president of the last half-century has gone out of his way to say that he wanted peace and wanted to avoid war.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Even while ordering military action. NIXON WHITE HOUSE TAPES:
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?
HENRY KISSINGER: That would drown about 200,000 people. PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: Well, no, no, no. I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. HENRY KISSINGER: That, I think, would just be too much. PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: The nuclear bomb? Does that bother you? HENRY KISSINGER: [inaudible] PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sake.
NORMAN SOLOMON: So you have this paradox, in a way, of the President, who has just ordered massive military violence and lethal action by the Pentagon, turning around and saying, I want to oppose violence and promote peace.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I respect your idealism. I share your concern for peace. I want peace as much as you do.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Actually, war becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
NORMAN SOLOMON: As Americans, we like to think that we’re not subjected to propaganda from our own government, certainly that we’re not subjected to propaganda that’s trying to drag the country into war, as in the case of setting the stage for the invasion of Iraq.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Weapons of mass destruction. ARI FLEISCHER: Botulin, VX, Sarin, nerve agent. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Iraq and al-Qaeda. RICHARD ARMITAGE: Al-Qaeda.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Iraq and al-Qaeda. UNIDENTIFIED: Terrorism. DONALD RUMSFELD: Cyber-attacks. ARI FLEISCHER: Nuclear program.
COLIN POWELL: Biological weapons. DONALD RUMSFELD: Cruise missiles, ballistic missiles. ARI FLEISCHER: Chemical and biological weapons. DONALD RUMSFELD: Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
ARI FLEISCHER: President Bush has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Tony Blair has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Donald Rumsfeld has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Richard Butler has said they do. The United Nations has said they do. The experts have said they do. Iraq says they don’t. You can choose who you want to believe.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The war propaganda function in the United States is finely tuned, it’s sophisticated, and most of all, it blends into the media terrain.
SHEPARD SMITH: The White House says it can prove that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction, claiming it has solid evidence.
DAN RATHER: The White House insisted again today it does have solid evidence that Saddam Hussein is hiding an arsenal of prohibited weapons.
NORMAN SOLOMON: It’s necessary to provide a drumbeat media echo effect.
JOHN GIBSON: They might fight dirty, using weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological or radioactive.
WILLIAM SCHNEIDER: There are ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda — BILL O’REILLY: Anthrax, smallpox. TOM BROKAW: Dirty bomb. BRIAN WILLIAMS: Dirty bomb.
BRIT HUME: Iraq-al-Qaeda connection.
WILLIAM SCHNEIDER: Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda share the same goal: they want to see — both of them — both of them want to see Americans dead.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And I was very struck by the acceptance, the tone of most of the media coverage, as the sabers was rattled, as the invasion of Iraq gradually went from possible to probable to almost certain.
DAVID LEE MILLER: The President essentially giving Saddam forty-eight hours to get out of Dodge. War now seems all but inevitable.
GREGG JARRETT: Short of a bullet to the back of his head or he leaves the country, war is inexorable.
UNIDENTIFIED: Well, I think that’s exactly right. War is inevitable, and it is approaching inexorably.
WOLF BLITZER: Is war with Iraq inevitable right now? LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER: I think it’s 95% inevitable. CHRIS BURY: You, at this point, right now tonight, don’t see any other option but war.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Do you? CHRIS BURY: I’m asking you, Ambassador.
WESLEY CLARK: I agree. I don’t think there’s a viable option for the administration at this point. We’re way too far out front in this.
MAJOR BOB BEVELACQUA: You sent us over there, guys. Let’s get on with it. Let’s get it over with.
MSNBC AD: Showdown Iraq. If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC and “The Experts.”
NORMAN SOLOMON: And in many ways, the US news media were equal partners with the officials in Washington and on Capitol Hill in setting the agenda for war.
MSNBC AD: We’ll take you there.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And although it’s called the liberal media, one has a great deal of difficulty finding an example of major media outlets, in their reporting, challenging the way in which the agenda setting for war is well underway. And when that reporting is so much a hostage of official sources, that’s when you have a problem.
CNN: US officials tell CNN —
CNN REPORTER: Bush official says —
CNN REPORTER: Analysts say —
AARON BROWN: Pentagon officials tell us —
DAVID MARTIN: According to US intelligence —
NORMAN SOLOMON: Often, we’re encouraged to believe that officials are the ones who make news.
JOHN KING: US officials say — US officials say that — US officials here say — Officials here at the White House tell us —
NORMAN SOLOMON: They are the ones who should be consulted to understand the situation.
COLIN POWELL: I just pull these two things out — I’ve laundered them, so you can’t really tell what I’m talking about, because I don’t want the Iraqis to know what I’m talking about, but trust me. Trust me.
NORMAN SOLOMON: If history is any guide, the opposite is the case: the officials blow smoke and cloud reality, rather than clarify.
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ: The notion that it will take several hundred thousand US troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq are wildly off the mark.
DONALD RUMSFELD: So the money’s going to come from Iraqi oil revenue, as everyone has said. They think it’s going to be something like $2 billion this year. They think it might be something like $15, $12 [billion] next year.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ: A country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.
TOM BROKAW: National Security Advisors Ken Adelman and Richard Perle, early advocates of the war, said the war would be a cakewalk.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The sources that have deceived us so constantly don’t deserve our trust, and to the extent that we give them our trust, we set ourselves up to be scammed again and again.
REPORTER: There are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
DONALD RUMSFELD: There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
REPORTER: Excuse me, but is this an “unknown unknown”? DONALD RUMSFELD: I’m not — REPORTER: Just several unknowns, and I’m wondering if this is an unknown unknown. DONALD RUMSFELD: I’m not going to say which it is. REPORTER: But, Mr. Secretary, do you believe —
DONALD RUMSFELD: I’m right here. I’m right here. REPORTER: If you believe something —
SEAN PENN: In the run-up to the war in Iraq, the failure of mainstream news organizations to raise legitimate questions about the government’s rush to war was compounded by the networks’ deliberate decision to stress military perspectives before any fighting had even begun.
AARON BROWN: We’ve got generals and, if you ask them about the prospects for war with Iraq, they think it is almost certain.
SEAN PENN: CNN’s use of retired generals as supposedly independent experts reinforced a decidedly military mindset, even as serious questions remained about the wisdom and necessity of going to war.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting. But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it. You had a top CNN official named Eason Jordan going on the air of his network and boasting that he had visited the Pentagon with a list of possible military commentators, and he asked officials at the Defense Department whether that was a good list of people to hire.
EASON JORDAN: Oh, I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important.
NORMAN SOLOMON: It wasn’t even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people on its own network, “See, we’re team players. We may be the news media, but we’re on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.” And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press, and that suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance when the US is involved in a war based on lies.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: My fellow Americans —
SEAN PENN: In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson falsely claimed that an attack on US gun ships by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin gave him no choice but to escalate the war in Vietnam.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: …that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action and reply.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Routinely, the official story is a lie or a deception or a partial bit of information that leaves out key facts.
US NAVY FILM, 1964: In international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, destroyers of the United States Navy are assigned routine patrols from time to time. Sunday, August the 2nd, 1964, the destroyer Maddox was on such a patrol. Shortly after noon, the calm of the day is broken as general quarters sound. In a deliberate and unprovoked action, three North Vietnam PT boats unleash a torpedo attack against the Maddox.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The official story about the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie.
DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT MCNAMARA: The destroyer was carrying out a mission of patrol in those waters, in international waters, when it was attacked.
NORMAN SOLOMON: But it quickly became accepted as the absolute truth by the news media, and because of the press’s refusal to challenge that story, it was much easier for Congress to quickly pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was pivotal, because it opened the floodgates to the Vietnam War.
SEN. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT: I think it’s a very clear demonstration of the unity of the country behind the policies that are being followed by the President in South Vietnam and, more specifically, of the action that was taken in response to the attack upon our destroyers.
NORMAN SOLOMON: At that point, the facts were secondary. In the case of the Washington Post reporting, I asked more than three decades later whether there had ever been a Post retraction of its reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin events, and I called the newspaper and eventually reached the man who had been the chief diplomatic correspondent for the paper at the time, Murrey Marder, and I said, “Mr. Marder, has there ever been a retraction by the Washington Post of its fallacious reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin?” And he said, “I can assure you it never happened. There was never any retraction.” And I asked why. And he said, “Well, if the news media were going to retract its reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin, it would have to retract its reporting on virtually the entire Vietnam War.”
Fast forward a few decades, you have President George W. Bush saying that to an absolute certainty there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that intelligence sources told him that clearly, which was not at all the case.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors and its links to terrorist groups.
SEAN PENN: The failure of American news media to check government distortion reached new heights when, on the eve of war, the highly respected Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations to make the case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
COLIN POWELL: Saddam Hussein’s intentions have never changed. He is not developing the missiles for self-defense. These are missiles that Iraq wants in order to project power, to threaten and to deliver chemical, biological and, if we let him, nuclear warheads.
AARON BROWN: Today, Secretary of State Powell brought the United Nations Security Council, the administration’s best evidence so far.
NORMAN SOLOMON: After Colin Powell’s speech to the UN, immediately the US press applauded with great enthusiasm.
AARON BROWN: Did Colin Powell close the deal today, in your mind, for anyone who has yet objectively to make up their mind?
HENRY KISSINGER: I think for anybody who analyzes the situation, he has closed the deal.
SEAN HANNITY (MONTAGE): This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today …
Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today … Colin Powell was outstanding today …
I mean, it was lockstep — it was so compelling, I don’t see how anybody, at this point, cannot support this effort.
ALAN COLMES: He made a wonderful presentation. I thought he made a great case for the purpose of disarmament.
MORT KONDRACKE (MONTAGE): It was devastating, I mean, and overwhelming …
Overwhelming abundance of the evidence. Point after point after point with — he just flooded the terrain with data.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It’s the end of the argument phase. America has made its case.
BRIT HUME: The Powell speech has moved the ball.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think the case is closed.
NORMAN SOLOMON: But at the time, it was quite possible to analyze and debunk what he was saying.
SEAN PENN: Whereas the British press and other international news sources immediately raised legitimate questions about the accuracy of Powell’s presentation. the major US news media were virtually silent about the factual basis of his claims and near unanimous in their praise.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Even the purportedly antiwar New York Times editorialized the next day that Colin Powell had made a sober case, a factual case. One of the great myths and part of the war propaganda cycle is, way after the fact, to claim that it couldn’t have been known at the time that US officials were lying us into war. And in point of fact, it was known at the time and said by many people who were not allowed on the networks, by and large.
SEAN PENN: One such critical voice belonged to MSNBC’s Phil Donahue, one of the few mainstream media commentators who consistently challenged the official storyline coming out of Washington.
PHIL DONAHUE: And, you know, we’re all now — everybody’s righteous, what a terrible Hitler this is. We were mute when he was doing that. He was our SOB, and now we’re sending our sons and daughters to war to fix that mistake. It doesn’t seem fair to me.
SEAN PENN: Despite being the highest-rated program on MSNBC, Donahue’s show was abruptly cancelled by the network just three weeks before the start of the war.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Phil Donahue was an antiwar voice on MSNBC, one of the cable news channels, and a memo that was leaked as the Donahue show was cancelled is very explicit. It said, we don’t want this to be a face of NBC as the United States goes into war. This guy puts antiwar voices on our network.
JIM JENNINGS: The American people need to know there is no just cause for this war.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: But there’s no evidence that there is even a weapon that exists in that country yet.
JEFF COHEN: Journalists, too many of them — some quite explicitly — have said that they see their mission as helping the war effort. And if you define your mission that way, you’ll end up suppressing news that might be important, accurate, but maybe isn’t helpful to the war effort.
NORMAN SOLOMON: We don’t want to have that kind of public persona, when then we’d be vulnerable to charges that we’re unpatriotic. It will make it more difficult to keep
pace with the flag wavers at FOX or CNN, or whatever. And more broadly, news media are very worried, not only government pressure, but advertiser pressure, criticism from readers, listeners and viewers. “Gee, our soldiers are in the field. You got to support them. Don’t raise these tough questions.”
PAT BUCHANAN: It seems to me that the right thing to do for patriots when American lives are at risk and Americans are dying is to unite behind the troops until victory is won. Now, on this show, Buchanan and Press, we’ve had a good debate for eight months on this conflict, but now it seems when the war comes, the debate ends. I think unity, Bill, is essential at this time, or at least when the guns begin to fire.
NORMAN SOLOMON: It’s a very effective tactic, at least in the short run, to a large extent, to say, look, you’ve got to support the troops.
PRO-WAR COUNTER-PROTESTER: You’re killing the troops! You’re killing the troops!
NORMAN SOLOMON: And that’s an effort to conflate supporting the troops with supporting the President’s policies.
BILL O’REILLY: Once the war against Saddam begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if they can’t do that, to shut up.
SEAN PENN: In addition to Phil Donahue, many other journalists have been silenced for crossing the mythical line known as objectivity.
BRIT HUME: Today, NBC fired journalist Peter Arnett this morning for participating in an interview on Iraqi state-controlled television.
PETER JENNINGS: Arnett criticized American war planning and said his reports about civilian casualties in the Iraqi resistance were encouraging to antiwar protesters in America.
NORMAN SOLOMON: If you’re pro-war, you’re objective. But if you’re antiwar, you’re biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn’t dream of making a statement that’s against a war.
TED KOPPEL: I must say, I was trying to think of — I was trying to think of something that would be appropriate to say on an occasion like this, and as is often the case, the best you can come up with is something that Shakespeare wrote for Henry V, “Wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war.”
NORMAN SOLOMON: And that is a tip-off to just how skewed the media terrain is. We should keep in mind that CNN, which many believe to be a liberal network, had a memo from their top news executive, Walter Isaacson, in the fall of 2001, as the missiles were falling in Afghanistan, telling the anchors and the reporters, “You need to remind people,
any time you show images on the screen of the people who are dying in Afghanistan, you’ve got to remind the American viewers that it’s in the context of what happened on 9/11,” as though people could forget 9/11.
NIC ROBERTSON: We talked to several people who told us that various friends and relatives had died in the bombing there in that collateral damage. Nic Robertson, CNN, Kandahar, Afghanistan.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN: And we would just remind you, as we always do now with these reports from inside the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, that you’re seeing only one side of the story, that these US military actions that Nic Robertson was talking about are in response to a terrorist attack that killed 5,000 and more innocent people inside the United States.
BILL HEMMER, CNN: And we juxtapose what we’re hearing from the Taliban with a live picture of the clean-up that continues in Lower Manhattan, Ground Zero, again, a twenty-four-hour operation that has not ebbed. 5,000 killed that day back on Tuesday, September 11, their biggest crime, as civilians, going to work that day.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And yet, we know statistically — the best estimates tell us — that more civilians were killed by that bombing in Afghanistan than those who died in the Twin Towers in New York. And the moral objections that could be raised to slaughtering civilians in the name of retaliation against 9/11, those objections were muted by the phrase “war on terror,” by the way in which it was used by the White House and Congress and also by the news media.
SEAN PENN: Free flows of information have been further blocked by a more general atmosphere of contempt for antiwar voices.
MICHELLE MALKIN: Among them are a group called CODEPINK, which is headed by Medea Benjamin, who’s a terrorist sympathizer, dictator-worshiping propagandist.
BILL O’REILLY: The far-left element in America is a destructive force that must be confronted.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: Some Americans, sadly, not interested in victory, and yet they want us to believe that their behavior is patriotic. Well, it’s not.
STEVE MALZBERG: To call the president stupid, he doesn’t know much about anything, that’s just great. Go with Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon. You fit in perfect.
NEWT GINGRICH: To in any way be defending a torturer, a killer, a dictator — he used chemical weapons against his own people — is pretty remarkable, but it’s a very long tradition in the Democratic Party.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Pay no heed to the peaceniks and the left-wing rock stars. They’ve had their fifteen minutes of fame.
JONAH GOLDBERG: These people are essentially useless. They are reflexively opposed to war. It’s a principled position, but it’s the wrong position, and you can’t take them seriously as a strategic voice.
WOLF BLITZER: Millions and millions of useful people out there?
NORMAN SOLOMON: If you want to have democracy, you’ve got to have the free flow of information through the body politic. You can’t have these blockages. You can’t have the manipulation.
SEAN PENN: While mainstream journalists have rarely called attention in real time to failure of news media to provide necessary information and real debate, they have repeatedly pointed to their own failures well after wars have been launched.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: During the course of this war, there was a lot of snap-to in press coverage: we’re at war, the world’s changed, we have to root for the country to some extent. And yet, it seems something missing from this debate was a critical analysis of where it was taking us.
JIM LEHRER: Those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation. CHRIS MATTHEWS: Because?
JIM LEHRER: Because it just didn’t occur to us. We weren’t smart enough. You’d have had to gone against the grain.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right. You’d also come off as kind of a pointy head trying to figure out some obscure issue here —
JIM LEHRER: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: — when it’s good guys and bad guys.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah, negative. Negativism.
NORMAN SOLOMON: News media, down the road, will point out that there were lies about the Gulf of Tonkin or about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I’m sorry to say, but certainly television, and perhaps to an extent my station, was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at FOX News.
WOLF BLITZER: We should have been more skeptical.
NORMAN SOLOMON: But that doesn’t bring back any of the people who have died, who were killed in their own country or sent over by the President of the United States to kill in that country. So, after the fact, it’s all well and good to say, “Well, the system worked” or “The truth comes out.” But when it comes to life and death, the truth comes out too late.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
[news montage]
SEAN PENN: Once public support is in place and war is finally under way, the news media necessarily turns from covering the rationales for war to covering war itself.
NORMAN SOLOMON: When the President decides he wants the US to go to war, then the war becomes the product.
Particularly in the early stages, news coverage of war is much more like PR about war.
SEAN PENN: Influencing the nature of this war coverage has been a priority of one administration after another since Vietnam, when conventional wisdom held that it was negative media coverage that turned the American people against the war and forced US withdrawal. Since that time, and beginning with new urgency during the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon has worked with increasing sophistication to shape media coverage of war.
As then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney noted about the importance of public perceptions during the first Iraq War, “Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed. The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave it to the press.”
NORMAN SOLOMON: So for the invasion of Grenada and invasion of Panama in ’83 and ’89, then the Gulf War in early 1991, it was like a produced TV show, and the main producers were at the Pentagon. They decided, in the case of the Gulf War, exactly what footage would be made available to the TV stations. They did nonstop briefings, utilizing the increasing importance of cable television. They named it Operation Desert Storm.
DAN RATHER: Breaking news of what’s now officially called Operation Desert Storm. TOM BROKAW: Good evening. Operation Desert Storm rages on.
NORMAN SOLOMON: All that sort of stuff was very calculated, so you could look at that as an era of media war manipulation from the standpoint of the US government. Then you had a different era. You had the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
DAN RATHER: Scores of American reporters have now joined US military units in Kuwait as part of the Pentagon’s effort to make any war with Iraq what the Pentagon calls a media-friendly campaign. Another part that effort is on display at the US Military Command Center in Qatar. A Hollywood set designer was brought in to create a $200,000 backdrop for official war briefings.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And tied in with that is the worship of Pentagon technology.
HANSON HOSEIN: I’ve fallen almost in love with the F/A-18 Super Hornet, because it’s quite a versatile plane.
BRIAN WILSON: I’ve got to tell you, my favorite aircraft, the A-10 Wart Hog, I love the Wart Hogs.
JOHN ELLIOTT: This morning, around 4:00 a.m. local time, the first three took off. And when you’re 300 feet away from them, when they do it, you hear it in your shoes and feel it in your gut.
SEAN PENN: The Pentagon’s influence on war coverage has also been evident in the news media’s tendency to focus on the technical sophistication of the latest weaponry.
GREGG JARRETT: Should they have used more? Should they, you know, use a MOAB, the mother of all bombs, and a few daisy cutters? And, you know, let’s not just stop at a couple of cruise missiles.
JAMIE McINTYRE: The newest, biggest, baddest US bomb —
GENERAL BARRY MCCAFFREY: We’ll pound them with 2,000-pound bombs and then go in —
PAT BUCHANAN: 2000-pound bombs in urban areas? GENERAL BARRY MCCAFFREY: Oh, sure.
LESTER HOLT: I’m holding in my hand here the F-117 Stealth Fighter, was used in these attacks significantly —
GRETA VAN SUSTERN: How do you steer this thing? I mean, there’s no — you have a stick, is that right?
PILOT: Sure. Both of us have a matching center stick with left throttles. You can do every —
NORMAN SOLOMON: Every war, we have US news media that have praised the latest in the state-of-the-art killing technology, from the present moment to the war in Vietnam.
WALTER CRONKITE: B-57s — the British call them Canberra jets — we’re using them very effectively here in this war in Vietnam to dive-bomb the Vietcong in these jungles beyond Da Nang here. Colonel, what’s our mission we’re about to embark on?
AIR FORCE COLONEL: Well, our mission today, sir, is to report down to the site of the ambush seventy miles south of here and attempt to kill the VC.
WALTER CRONKITE: The colonel has just advised me that that is our target area right over there. One, two, three, four, we dropped our bomb, but now a tremendous G-load as we pull out of that dive. Oh, I know something of what those astronauts must go through.
Well, colonel.
AIR FORCE COLONEL: Yes, sir.
WALTER CRONKITE: It’s a great way to go to war.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And there’s a kind of idolatry there. Some might see it as worship of the gods of metal.
UNIDENTIFIED: That’s the JDAM. It is a 2,000-pound bomb that is deadly accurate, and that is the thing that is allowing us — allowed us in Afghanistan and will allow us in this next conflict to be terribly accurate, terribly precise and terribly destructive.
SEAN PENN: In fact, even as US military technology has become increasingly sophisticated with the development of so-called smart bombs and other forms of precision-guided weaponry, civilian casualties now greatly outnumber military deaths, a grim toll that has steadily increased since World War I.
TEXT BOX (MOTION GRAPHIC): During World War I, 10% of all casualties were civilians.
During World War II, the number of civilian deaths rose to 50%.
During the Vietnam War 70% of all casualties were civilians.
In the war in Iraq, civilians account for 90% of all deaths.
UNIDENTIFIED: This is the beginning of the shock-and-awe campaign, according to one official, this is going to be the entire nine yards.
TOM BROKAW: It was a breathtaking display of firepower.
NORMAN SOLOMON: There’s kind of an acculturated callousness towards what happens at the other end of US weapons.
LESTER HOLT: Behind the flight deck, the weapons officer who goes by the call sign Oasis, will never see the ground or the target, for that matter. The airfield is simply a fuzzy image on his radar.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And this is another very insidious aspect of war propaganda. There’s a bias involved, where, because the United States has access to high-tech military weaponry, that somehow to slaughter people from 30,000 feet in the air or a thousand feet in the air from high-tech machinery is somehow moral, whereas strapping on a suicide belt and blowing people up is seen as the exact opposite.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see. The care that goes into it, the humanity that goes into it, to see that military targets are destroyed to be sure, but that it’s done in a way and in a manner and in a direction and with a weapon that is appropriate to that very particularized target. The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.
SEAN PENN: Within this war friendly news frame the Defense Department has also been successful in shaping actual war reporting. Its influence reached new levels with the embedding of journalists during the war in Iraq.
NEWS REPORT: The Pentagon tightly controlled the media during the 1991 Persian Gulf War – limiting where reporters could go and often restricting access to small groups of pool reporters. This time the Pentagon is doing an about face after running more than 230 journalists through media boot camps, the Pentagon is inviting more than 500 media representatives to accompany US combat units to war.
SEAN PENN: Despite being widely praised as a new form of realism in war coverage, the strategy of embedding reporters has raised new questions about the ability of war reporters to convey balanced information to the American people.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Rather than being kept far away, they were embraced and smothered and participated in the process of being smothered. They were brought along, hundreds and hundreds of them, with the Marines, with the Navy, with the Army. They became, in a sense, part of the invading apparatus. You didn’t have embedded reporters with people who were being bombed; you only had embedded reporters with the bombers.
NEWS REPORTER: Last night a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And it was through the eyes of the invaders that so much of the reporting was done.
WALTER ROGERS, CNN: It was a gradual process of getting to know and trust each other. And for them trusting me was knowing I would not blow their objective and get us all shelled with artillery.
NORMAN SOLOMON: People who were correspondents for the major US TV networks would express in no uncertain terms that they had been bonding very closely with the US soldiers
SHEPARD SMITH: We have a number of correspondents in bed [SIC] with our troops across the region.
PETER JENNINGS: Very deeply embedded in a personal way with the marines he is traveling with …
NORMAN SOLOMON: And you had correspondents saying that you know, “I would do virtually anything for them, they would do anything for me.” There was all this camaraderie.
RICK LEVENTHAL, FOX NEWS: We had guys around us with guns and they were intent on keeping us alive, because, they said, “You guys are making us stars back home and we need to protect you.”
NORMAN SOLOMON: That’s very nice, but it has nothing to do with independent journalism, which we never need more than in times of war. It was a very shrewd effort by the Pentagon to say, “You want access, here’s plenty of access.”
DONALD RUMSFELD: I doubt that in a conflict of this type there’s ever been the degree of free press coverage as you are witnessing in this instance.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And the embedding process was actually a new wrinkle in an old game – which was, and is, propaganda for war.
SEAN PENN: Praise for the embedding process as a step forward in balanced war reporting has often invoked comparisons to media coverage of the Vietnam War.
NORMAN SOLOMON: A myth has kind of grown up after the Vietnam that the reporting was very tough, that Americans saw on their television sets the brutality of the war as it unfolded. And people often hark back to that as a standard that should now be rediscovered or emulated.
MORLEY SAFER: This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Yes, there was exceptional reporting, but it was the exception. And so you had the Zippo lighters being used by the GI’s burning down the huts of a village that Morley Safer on CBS reported. Well, people mention that actually because it wasunusual. Andinpointoffactverylittleaboutthetremendousviolenceinthatwar
was conveyed through the television set, especially when the US government was responsible for the human suffering. That is in a way the most taboo – to show in detail, graphic human detail, what’s involved when bombs, missiles, mortars paid for by US taxpayers do what their designed to do … which is to kill and to maim.
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: I know that this is a great concern, I think it’s part of the Vietnam syndrome.
WALTER CRONKITE: The Vietnam Syndrome that President Reagan mentioned was a reference to America’s attempt to forget its most unpopular war.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: This will not be another Vietnam. Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.
SEAN PENN: Like President Reagan before him, President George H.W. Bush explicitly set out during the first Gulf War to rid the national psyche of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, the common belief after the bloody and protracted conflict in Vietnam that the American public no longer had the stomach for war unless guaranteed swift, easy and decisive victory.
DOCUMENTARY NARRATOR FROM TV SPECIAL “INSIDE THE PENTAGON”: Precision weapons and the strategic use of air power helped make the Gulf War an enormous operational victory for the Pentagon, helping it move past the legacy of Vietnam.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: It’s a proud day for America, and by God we’ve kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all. Thank you very, very much.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The idea is that supposedly the public is not willing to back strong military action because people have become too skittish about US casualties. In fact, if you look at the actual course of public opinion there’s been a real willingness to support wars without exception at the beginning.
Public support for the Second World War never fell below 77%, according to opinion polls. But during the Vietnam War, public support fell to about 30%, and within a couple of years of the US occupation of Iraq public support was down to almost 30% among the US population.
So what’s the difference? In one case, WWII, the US public never felt that the war was fundamentally based on deception. But if it emerges that the war can’t be won quickly, and that the war was based on deceptions, then people have turned against the war.
So, first, the public has to be sold on the need to attack. Then, after the war’s under way, withdrawal needs to be put forward as an unacceptable option.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: Withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We’re not leaving, so long as I’m the President. That would be a huge mistake.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: Our allies would lose confidence in America.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: To yield to force in Vietnam would weaken that confidence.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Any sign that says we’re going to leave before the job is done simply emboldens terrorists.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: A retreat of the United States from Vietnam would be a communist victory, a victory of massive proportions and would lead to World War III.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: If this little nation goes down the drain and can’t maintain their independence, ask yourself what’s going to happen to all the other little nations.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: It would not bring peace. It would bring more war.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And many propaganda lines become stock and trade of those who started the war in the first place.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of “cut and run.”
REP. J.D. HAYWORTH: The American people will not stand for surrender. REP. JEAN SCHMIDT: Cowards cut and run. REP. PATRICK MCHENRY: They’re advocating a policy called “cut and run.” KARL ROVE: That party’s old pattern of cutting and running.
REP. CHARLIE NORWOOD: If we high-tailed it and cut and run — PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (MONTAGE): We won’t cut and run. Cut and run.
Cut and run. We will not cut and run. Cut and run. ANDERSON COOPER: Cut and run. Cut and run. How do you respond? PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (MONTAGE): We will stay the course. We must stay the course. We stay the course. We will stay the course. And we’re not going to cut and run, if I’m in the Oval Office.
NORMAN SOLOMON: All a president has to do is start a war, and these arguments kick in that you can’t stop it. So it’s a real incentive for a president to lie, to deceive, to manipulate sufficiently to get the war started. And then they’ve got a long way to go without any sort of substantive challenge that says, hey, this war has to end.
NEWS ANCHOR: Then appealing for public support for his peace policy, Mr. Nixon said, “The enemy cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans,” he said, “can do that.”
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: The peacemakers are out there in the field. The soldier and the statesman need and welcome the sincere and the responsible assistance of concerned Americans. But they need reason much more than they need emotion. They must have a practical solution and not a concoction of wishful thinking and false hopes, however well-intentioned and well-meaning they may be. It must be a solution that does not call for surrender or for cutting and running now. Those fantasies hold the nightmare of World War III and a much larger war tomorrow.
NORMAN SOLOMON: During the Vietnam War public opinion polls were showing after a few years into the early 1970’s that a majority of Americans felt the war was wrong, even immoral and yet the war continued because the momentum was there.
NEWS ANCHOR: Vice President Agnew’s target tonight, as he put it, was the professional pessimist. Most of those, the Vice President explained at a rally for California Republicans, are Democrats and it was all the kind of rhetoric Republican crowds have been enjoying on this tour.
VICE PRESIDENT AGNEW: In the United States today we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The same has been the case in terms of the occupation of Iraq.
VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians for losing their memory or their backbone but we’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And that’s an insidious process because often those who oppose a war are simply discounted.
SHEPARD SMITH: Congressman John Murtha, the first Vietnam Vet to serve in Congress, a man awarded a bronze star and two purple hearts, choking back tears as he talked about his change of heart.
CONGRESSMAN JOHN MURTHA: It’s time to bring them home. They’ve done everything they can do, the military has done everything they can do. This war has been so mishandled, from the very start, not only was the intelligence bad, the way they disbanded the troops, there’s all kinds of mistakes that have been made. They don’t deserve to continue to suffer. They’re the targets.
NORMAN SOLOMON: As an original supporter of the war and somebody known as a hawk – pro-military – inside the Congress, John Murtha, despite his credentials, he was not taken terribly seriously.
BRITT HUME, FOX NEWS: This guy has long passed the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world, and that sound byte is naiveté writ-large. And the man is an absolute fountain of such talk.
NORMAN SOLOMON: His recommendations to pull out US troops, discounted by pundits.
RICH LOWRY, FOX NEWS: Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha once again sounding like the grim reaper when it comes to the war on terror.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Murtha’s running a psyop against his own people …
CRAIG MINNICK: As a veteran, I consider it my duty to defend those who defend America against repeated public attacks by a politician who cares nothing more than political and personal gain than the welfare of our fellow Americans on the battlefield.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And yet you looked at the polls and you found that a large amount of Americans totally were in his corner on this.
CONGRESSMAN JOHN MURTHA: I go by Arlington cemetery every day. And the Vice President – he criticizes Democrats? Let me tell you, those gravestones don’t say Democrat or Republican. They say American! [CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
NORMAN SOLOMON: And almost any analysis of public opinion data, laid side-by- side with what news media are or are not advocating in terms of editorials, will show that the media establishment is way behind the grassroots. In February of 1968, the Boston Globe did a survey of 39 different major US daily newspapers. The Globe could not find a single paper that had editorialized for withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.
PROTESTORS AT NIXON STADIUM SPEECH: 1-2-3-4 we don’t want your stinkin’ war.
SEAN PENN: And even when calls for withdrawal have eventually become too loud to ignore, officials have put forward strategies for ending war that have had the effect of prolonging it – in some cases, as with the Nixon administration’s strategy of Vietnamization, actually escalating war in the name of ending it.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace.
NORMAN SOLOMON: It’s the idea that, OK, the war has become unpopular in the United States, so let’s pull out some US troops and have the military burden fall on the allies inside that country.
NEWS REPORTER: White House officials say it is obvious that the South Vietnamese are going to have to hack it on their own.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The model is to use air power while pulling out US troops and training Vietnamese to kill other Vietnamese people. And several decades later, in effect, that is a goal of George W. Bush’s administration.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqi’s stand up, we will stand down.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The rhetoric about shifting the burden of fighting the insurgency onto the shoulders of Iraqi people themselves is very enticing for a president because it’s a way of saying to people in the United States, “Hey, we’re going to be out of there, it’s just a matter of time.”
DONALD RUMSFELD: There isn’t a person at this table who agrees with you that we’re in a quagmire and that there’s no end in sight.
NORMAN SOLOMON: The media and political focus on the word quagmire is a good example of how an issue can be framed very narrowly.
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN: The criticism would be that you’re in a situation from which there’s no good way to extricate yourself.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Then the word clearly would not be a good one.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Talking about a quagmire seems to be a positive way of fomenting debate because then we can argue about whether the war is actually working out well.
SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY: We are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire. SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL: That terrible word quagmire.
ROBERT DALLEK, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: This could be or seems to be a kind of quagmire.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Quagmire is really a false sort of a critique because it says really the problem here is what the war is doing to the United States. Are we able to win.
ANDERSON COOPER: Are we winning in Iraq? BILL O’REILLY: Do you want the United States to win in Iraq? DAVID GERGEN, CNN: I can’t tell who’s winning and who’s losing. SENATOR CARL LEVIN: Do you believe that we are currently winning in Iraq? DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: We are not winning but we are not losing. SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: We are losing. GENERAL GEORGE CASEY: We’re winning it. NEWS REPORTER TO SOLDIER: You’re winning this war? SOLDIER: I couldn’t tell you.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And a big problem with the media focus is that it sees the war through the eyes of the Americans, through the eyes of the occupiers, rather than those who are bearing the brunt of the war in human terms.
WALTER CRONKITE: We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.
NORMAN SOLOMON: In early1968, Walter Cronkite told CBS viewers that the war couldn’t be won.
WALTER CRONKITE: It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And that was instantly, and through time even more so, heralded as the tide has turned. As Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said when he saw Cronkite give that report, “I’ve lost middle America.” And it was presented as not only a turning point, quite often, but also as sort of a moral statement by the journalistic establishment.
Well, I would say yes and no. It was an acknowledgement that the United States, contrary to official Washington claims, was not winning the war in Vietnam, and could not win. But it was not a statement that the war was wrong. A problem there is that if the critique says this war is bad because it’s not winnable, then the response is, “Oh yeah, we’ll show you it can be winnable, or the next war will be winnable.”
AMERICAN TROOPS AT IRAQI HOME: Open the door, open the door.
NORMAN SOLOMON: So that critique doesn’t challenge the prerogatives of military expansion or aggression, if you will, or empire. And a deeper critique says, “Whether you can win or not, either way, empire enforced at the point – not of a bayonet but of the cruise missile — that’s not acceptable.”
SEAN PENN: Over the last five decades we have witnessed a wave of US military interventions – a series of bombings, invasions, and long-term occupations. Undertaken, we have been told, with the most noble of intentions … and paid for with the lives of young Americans and countless others around the world.
NORMAN SOLOMON: What has occurred with one war after another is still with us. These dynamics are in play in terms of the US occupation of Iraq, looking at other countries such as Iran, and the future will be replicated to the extent that we fail to understand what has been done with these wars in the past.
The news media have generally bought into and promoted the notion that it’s up to the President to make foreign policy decisions. This smart guy in the oval office has access to all the information, he knows more than we do, he’s the commander in chief. And the American people have no major role to play, and nor should they, because after all they don’t have the knowledge or capability to be responsive to the real situation. That was certainly true during the Vietnam War as it was to be later, time after time.
There were people in Congress that raised these issues and they simply were marginalized by the news media – even though in retrospect, maybe especially because in retrospect, they had it right and the conventional wisdom and the President were wrong.
REP: BARBARA LEE: However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint.
Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.
As we act let us not become the evil that we deplore. Thank you and I yield the balance of my time. UNIDENTIFIED CONGRESSMAN: The gentlewoman’s time has expired.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And this is a very common motif of history in the last several decades, where people who at the time were portrayed as loners, as mavericks, as outside of the mainstream of wisdom turned out to understand the historical moment.
SENATOR WAYNE MORSE: We’ve got to back our President? Since when do we have to back our President, or should we, when the President is proposing an unconstitutional act?
NORMAN SOLOMON: The best example is Wayne Morse, the senior Senator from Oregon who, beginning in 1964, was a voice in the Congressional wilderness. Senator Morse was unusual in that he challenged the very prerogative of the US government to go to war against Vietnam. He said it’s up to the American people to formulate foreign policy.
PETER LISAGOR, FACE THE NATION: Senator, the Constitution gives to the President of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.
SENATOR WAYNE MORSE: Couldn’t be more wrong, you couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the President of the United States. That’s nonsense.
PETER LISAGOR: To whom does it belong, then, Senator?
SENATOR WAYNE MORSE: It belongs to the American people, and the Constitutional fathers made it very, very clear —
PETER LISAGOR: Where does the President fit into this in the responsibility scale?
SENATOR WAYNE MORSE: What I’m saying is—under our constitution all the President is, is the administrator of the people’s foreign policy, those are his prerogatives, and I’m pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy —
PETER LISAGOR: You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy —
SENATOR WAYNE MORSE: Why you’re a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of comment. I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you give them, and my charge against my government is that we’re not giving the American people the facts.
NORMAN SOLOMON: And that’s the kind of faith in democracy that’s not in fashion among the Washington press corps or the power elite in the nation’s capital. But it’s a good reading of the Constitution, and it’s a good definition of democracy.
The independent journalist I.F. Stone says that all governments lie and nothing they say should be believed. Now Stone wasn’t conflating all governments, and he wasn’t saying that governments lie all the time, but he was saying that we should never trust that something said by a government is automatically true, especially our own, because we have a responsibility to go beneath the surface. Because the human costs of war, the consequences of militaristic policies, what Dr. King called “the madness of militarism,” they can’t stand the light of day if most people understand the deceptions that lead to the slaughter, and the human consequences of the carnage. If we get that into clear focus, we can change the course of events in this country. But it’s not going to be easy and it will require dedication to searching for truth.
MARTIN LUTHER KING: A time comes when silence is betrayal, and that time has come for us. …
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. …
And I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government …
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? …
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness …
We are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their mistrust of American intentions now …
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. … This way of settling differences is not just. …
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. …
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. …
I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
How did we get here? 20 years after the U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, we still refuse to reckon with the last decades of war as yet another decade of violence unfolds. Since the invasion, tens of thousands if not over a million lives have been lost. Millions of Iraqis are still displaced, while tens of millions have endured relentless violence ever since the destabilization of their country beginning in the 1990s through bombing, sanctions, multiple military invasions, and the occupation that began in 2003.
We share these reflections as two antimilitarist organizers in the U.S. who met years after the invasion through our shared work with About Face Veterans Against War (formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War). Twenty years ago this weekend, one of us was deployed as a communications technician and heard nothing about the massive protests the other participated in. One of us was organizing with Direct Action to Stop the War, coordinating twenty thousand people to shut down San Francisco’s financial district, in an attempt to raise the financial and social cost of invasion that was being steamrolled through despite the largest global street protests in the history of the world.
We know the war on Iraq—like the war on Afghanistan—was a calculated grift for money and power. We can’t allow the truth to be manipulated or forgotten. George W. Bush is being reanimated as a folksy painter instead of brought to account for his administration’s war crimes. His creation of the so-called “Endless Wars” after 9/11 has so far cost incalculable damage to peoples’ lives and over $14 trillion in Pentagon spending. Up to half of that massive amount has piped directly into the pockets of private military contractors.
Those who seek profit from wars rely on our consent, our confusion about what’s really happening, and our willingness to submit to historical amnesia. The only voices allowed to speak on large platforms about this 20-year milestone are the ones attempting to rewrite history in favor of the architects and beneficiaries of war. A former speechwriter for Bush wants you to buy that the U.S. “went to war to build a democracy in Iraq,” but listen instead to Iraqis like Riverbend (the pen name of a young Baghdadi woman writing during the early years of the occupation) who told us the truth at the time:
“You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.”
Even now in Iraq, everyday people still struggle daily for the bare minimum. As the nonpartisan Iraqi diaspora group Collective Action for Iraq recently described, “People have continued taking to the streets across Iraq to protest corruption, for basic services and to live their lives in dignity—from Kurdistan, to Najaf, and Dhi Qar. State and local security forces continue to respond with violence and the suppression of dissident voices.” These are only a few effects of the cascade of violence triggered by the U.S. occupation.
The silence here about the devastation caused by U.S. wars abroad is by design. Obama came to office on a platform of “change” nodding strongly towards the populist antiwar sentiment of the late 2000s, and yet here we are, still prioritizing war. Under this ongoing “Global War on Terror” framework—under Bush and Obama and Trump and now Biden—the lead-up to each consecutive war utilizes tailored rhetoric but the patterns remain the same, even while weapons evolve. Now the contractors are the same corporations providing the software we use every day. Google and Microsoft work alongside Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to produce and operate weapons of mass destruction. The war machine is becoming more secretive, more connected, and more ubiquitous. None of us can afford to remain silent or apathetic about the devastation we continue to cause to innocent civilians. The money being spent on war must be redirected to those most impacted by U.S. aggression.
Instead of reparations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has stolen billions from the Afghan Central Bank; drained Iraq of people, its resources, and undermined civil society creating regional instability. If we allow ourselves to be lied to yet again about these wars, we are more easily manipulated to go along with the next iteration of the U.S. war. Obama’s so-called “Pacific Pivot” initiated a shift back to China, yet again, as the leading rationale for continued military buildup. The fear-mongering is the same, yet the tactics of war-making are being implemented with evermore secrecy by intelligence officials and contractors preventing public discourse and effective oversight.
Our misleadingly named “defense” spending, the money earmarked for expanding U.S. control overseas, has doubled since the invasion of Iraq. Nothing stops the growth of war profiteering: not exposures of war crimes, not the inarguable destabilization of multiple countries with increased violence and displacement, not the epidemics of veteran suicide and war trauma coming home, not the avoidance of auditing or accountability for the use of such funds. Last Monday, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters that a $1 trillion defense budget is coming soon.
What will the world look like 20 years from today? If this country cannot relinquish its death grip on empire-building, we will have only continued to impoverish and incarcerate our own population while spreading unimaginable destruction abroad. The U.S. military is also the biggest polluter on the planet; in order to address the dangers of climate change, we must shrink this footprint immediately.
If we want a brighter future, we can and must divest from wars abroad and the increased domestic militarization that both pose serious threats to democracy. We can move that money from the Pentagon, police, and prisons to invest instead in community needs and real safety. We can pursue diplomacy, nonviolent interventions, and repair. This country is rich in leadership—especially in Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led grassroots community organizing. There are those working toward taking better care of each other amid conditions created by an overextended empire that deprioritizes human needs. Let’s move towards collective healing instead of continually funneling money into the bloody pockets of CEOs of weapons makers and major corporations that profit off death and destruction. Let’s return resources, including money and sovereignty, to the people most impacted by these wars.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of arbitrarily detaining at least 2,400 Afghan refugees in “miserable” accommodation for more than a year, pending resettlement elsewhere.
The human rights group said that between 2,400 and 2,700 Afghans are “arbitrarily detained” in makeshift refugee housing. There, they have limited freedom of movement and scarce access to legal counsel. The refugees were first evacuated to the UAE following the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021.
HRW’s UAE researcher, Joey Shea, called for their immediate release, stating:
Emirati authorities have kept thousands of Afghan asylum seekers locked up for over 15 months in cramped, miserable conditions with no hope of progress on their cases
HRW reported that authorities have stationed guards throughout the complexes. Furthermore, the refugees are only permitted to leave the camp for essential hospital visits, during which time security will accompany them. Authorities also tightly control visits to the camp from outside.
‘Prison-like conditions’ for Afghan refugees
The UAE, for its part, said it was working with US counterparts to complete the resettlement process. However, it denied reports of dire living conditions. An Emirati official told AFP:
The UAE continues to work with the US embassy to process travellers and liaise with US counterparts in efforts to resettle the remaining evacuees in a timely manner
We understand that there are frustrations and this has taken longer than intended to complete.
The official also said that the country had agreed to temporarily host Afghan refugees at the request of the US.
However, according to HRW, detained Afghans suffer “prison-like conditions”. It said they have no freedom of movement, and suffer around-the-clock surveillance. The organisation also described a “mental health crisis” in the camp, adding it has learnt of at least one suicide attempt.
Shea said:
Governments should not ignore the shocking plight of these Afghans stranded in limbo in the UAE
The US government in particular, which coordinated the 2021 evacuations and with whom many evacuees worked before the Taliban takeover, should immediately step up and intervene.
Prominent Afghans and Iranians say current laws do not capture the systematic suppression of women
A prominent group of Afghan and Iranian women are backing a campaign calling for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime under international law.
The campaign, launched on International Women’s Day, reflects a belief that the current laws covering discrimination against women do not capture the systematic nature of the policies imposed in Afghanistan and Iran to downgrade the status of women in society.
Elite Afghan commandoes trained by the West may already be fighting alongside Russian Wagner Group mercenaries against Ukraine, reports claim. Both the mercenary organization and the Afghan commandos have been linked with war crimes and atrocities in the past.
This is an example of the unintended consequences of Western imperial tinkering. British and American military expertise are being repurposed and brought to bear against the West – and not for the first time.
There should be a full, frank and public accounting of Western-trained troops, who in Afghanistan acted as brutal death squads, now working on behalf of official ‘enemies’.
Indeed, in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal in 2021, Tory MPs even suggested Afghan special forces be formed into a new British Army regiment like the Gurkhas. One even told parliament that their loyalty was proven, but now they appear to be fighting for Russia.
Zero Units
In 2020 I returned to Afghanistan after nearly 14 years to make a documentary. I had previously served there as a British soldier in 2006.
Within two years of my trip, the American-led occupation collapsed and the Taliban were back in power. Since then then we have learned that US allies in government may have accepted bribes to not resist the Taliban. But back in 2020 my focus was the Zero Units: shadowy, CIA-controlled death squads said to have killed numerous innocent civilians. The Zero Units were one key component of Afghan special forces, led by US operators and largely unaccountable.
When the occupation collapsed in 2021, the Zero Units’ locations became even harder to keep tabs on. What is clear is that some ended up being evacuated to the West. One of the few outlets to cover the story was the Intercept, which reported that Zero Unit veterans would be given a fresh start in the US – despite war crimes allegations. Their new lives in America were even detailed in interviews.
Others, we are told, were quietly airlifted out to the UK to work with British special forces, by whom they had been trained.
New regiments?
After the occupation collapsed, three Tory MPs backed a call to integrate Afghan special forces who had reached the UK into the British military. They were all ex-army officers, and at least two of them served in Afghanistan.
Given that we’ve helped train these forces, it’s certainly something that needs to be a consideration.
One avenue is they are kept as a unit, as the Gurkhas have operated.
The other avenue is they are blended into our own system.
And Johnny Mercer, an Afghanistan veteran and serving veterans minister, told reporters at the time it would be an “absolute waste not to make use of them”.
Interestingly, Tugendhat and Ellwood are perhaps best known for their hawkishness on Russia and China. Meanwhile, proposals to place Afghan veterans into British regiments have gone quiet.
Wagner Group
The Wagner Group is a private military company closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s regime. It is been rightly criticised for its operations in Africa, including in Libya and Mali. However, as the Canary has pointed out before, such criticisms are not especially convincing from UK ministers. Indeed, the UK has a thriving mercenary trade itself.
It is not entirely clear how former Afghan commandos came to be working with the Wagner Group. However, Middle East Monitorreported on Friday 24th February:
When the US left Afghanistan in 2021, some 20,000-30,000 commandos were out of work and being hunted by the Taliban. According to several reports, these Afghan commandos fled to Iran, where they were recruited by a Russian mercenary outfit called the Wagner Group, who promised them good salaries and help to relocate their families.
This claim was based on reportage by Radio Free Europe from December 2022 which went into greater depth:
Lost status and a desperate existence in Iran are driving thousands of former Afghan troops – many of them elite commandos trained by the United States – to consider fighting as mercenaries in Ukraine and other battlefields.
During the fall of Afghanistan, many Afghans, including military personnel, fled to neighbouring Iran. This aligns with the Radio Free Europe claim that:
Afghan soldiers in Iran who have said they plan to take Wagner up on its recruitment offers say they were betrayed by the United States and the U.S.-backed Afghan government that they fought for. Many blame them for their current predicament.
Betrayal and blowback
Not everyone who wanted to get out of Afghanistan in 2021 could. The scenes of chaos at Kabul airport in late summer 2021 will stick in the mind of anyone who spent time in the country. So they should, despite attempts by the British establishment press at rewriting the legacy of both the 20-year war and the subsequent defeat.
It may be understandable, then, that those whom the West trained to fight for it and then left destitute and homeless in neighbouring countries might look to Russia as a route out of their predicament.
With the betrayal, comes the blowback. Western-backed and –trainedUkrainian soldiers may now face Western-trained Afghans on the frontlines of a war in Europe.
What must follow is a proper account of how this came to be. Without serious reflection and accountability, we will repeat ourselves again.
A coalition of Afghan-American community organizations on Wednesday welcomed a U.S. federal judge’s ruling rejecting a bid by relatives of 9/11 victims to seize billions of dollars in assets belonging to the people of Afghanistan.
In a 30-page opinion issued Tuesday, Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York denied an effort by family members of people killed during the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to gain access to $3.5 billion in frozen funds from Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the country’s central bank.
“The judgment creditors are entitled to collect on their default judgments and be made whole for the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, but they cannot do so with the funds of the central bank of Afghanistan,” Daniels wrote. “The Taliban—not the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or the Afghan people—must pay for the Taliban’s liability in the 9/11 attacks.”
“We support the 9/11 families’ quest for just compensation, but believe justice will not be achieved by ‘raiding the coffers’… of a people already suffering.”
The frozen assets are currently being held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the wake of the Taliban’s reconquest of the nation that, under the militant group’s previous rule, hosted al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other figures involved in planning and executing the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The 9/11 attacks resulted in a U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that lasted nearly two decades, the longest war in American history.
“We are pleased to see that Judge Daniels shares the same assessment we laid out in our amicus brief to the court: That this money belongs to the Afghan people, and no one else,” the coalition—Afghans for a Better Tomorrow (AFBT)—said in a statement.
\u201c\u2705 VICTORY FOR THE AFGHAN PEOPLE\n\nOur coalition of Afghan-American community organizations welcomes a judgment by a federal judge that rejects a bid to seize assets by the families of the victims of the September 11th attacks. \n\nOur full statement: https://t.co/mZct0WbZSU\u201d
— Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (@Afghans For A Better Tomorrow)
1677095507
In February 2022, the Biden administration said it would split $7 billion in frozen DAB funds between the people of Afghanistan and victims of the 9/11 attacks who sued the Taliban—a move that one critic warned would amount to a “death sentence for untold numbers of civilians” in a war-ravaged country reeling from multiple humanitarian crises including widespread starvation.
Last August, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn said that 9/11 families should not be allowed to use billions of frozen DAB funds to pay off legal judgments against the Taliban.
“Just like the families of the September 11th attack victims, the Afghan people are no stranger to the Taliban’s brutality and rule,” AFBT co-director Arash Azizzada said. “We support the 9/11 families’ quest for just compensation, but believe justice will not be achieved by ‘raiding the coffers,’ as Judge Daniels put [it], of a people already suffering.”
\u201cThis wouldn\u2019t have been possible without the selfless efforts of many 9/11 victims\u2019 families \u2014 from @PeacefulTomorro and beyond \u2014 that refused to let their own tragedy be used to justify another tragedy for the Afghan people \nhttps://t.co/ehphzAqIPI\u201d
Homaira Hosseini, a board member of coalition member Afghan-American Community Organization (AACO), asserted that “an appeal of this decision, which the 9/11 families have stated they will pursue, will only cause further harm to both Afghans and the families involved.”
“We continue to encourage these families to seek legal retribution elsewhere,” Hosseini added, “and to not further harm Afghans in the process.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight.
The
world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as victim of a U.S.-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.
The U.S. has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding NATO and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.
Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the U.S. proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the U.S. wasted more than $2-trillion of U.S. military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person!
Starting in 1979, the U.S. armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
later explained, the U.S. objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to U.S. leaders.
The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the U.S. hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The U.S. “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.
In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The U.S. war continued for another 20 years until the U.S. finally left in 2021. Sporadic U.S. military operations in Afghanistan continue.
Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the U.S. wasted more than $2-trillion of U.S. military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the U.S. government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralyzing the banking system.
The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the U.S. government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the U.S. desire to expand NATO to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for NATO countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the U.S. has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.
The American protagonists then and now are the same. The U.S. government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for Vice President Biden in 2014.
The U.S. overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
The second is that NATO enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the U.S. from incorporating Ukraine into NATO.
The U.S. repeatedly asserts that NATO is a defensive alliance. Yet NATO bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the U.S. established a giant military base in Kosovo. NATO forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept NATO in Ukraine.
At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the U.S.: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of NATO; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.
The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over NATO enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the U.S., Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as victim of a U.S.-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.
Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the U.S. “blocked” the peace process.
Since then, the war has escalated. According to U.S. investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh, U.S. agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the U.S. and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.
The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-NATO country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.
Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the U.N. Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.
Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the U.S. that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Leaked documents suggest that Qatar paid hundreds of millions of dollars to key Afghan government officials – including a former president – to not resist the Taliban.
The documents reportedly show that Qatar paid $110m to ex-president Ashraf Ghani to stop the Afghan military fighting the Taliban a month before the 2021 collapse of the US-backed government. The Khaama Press alleges that payments of $51m and $61m were made to Marshal Dostum and Atta Mohammad Noor respectively – both powerful figures in Afghan politics. Dostum was a senior military officer. and major player in successive Afghan governments. Noor was similarly highly ranked, as former governor of Balkh province.
The documents were first reported by Italian media outlet Tg1 following an investigation by journalist Filippo Rossi:
The story was subsequently reported in English by the Afghan-based Khaama Press News Agency.
Corruption
The investigation found three documents which appear to show corruption at the highest levels. One claims that Ajmal Ahmadi, former head of an Afghan bank and a close advisor to Ghani, received $110m from Qatar on Ghani’s behalf.
Ghani was previously accused of fleeing Afghanistan with millions of dollars during the 2021 collapse:
He denied reports that he escaped the Islamist militants with over $150 million in cash belonging to the Afghan people, calling the claims “completely and categorically false.”
One document reportedly shows Dostum received $51m from Qatar. Khaama reported :
The document praised Dostum’s sincere cooperation in retreating from the northern provinces’ battlefields, such as Fariyab and Jawzjan provinces.
On top of this, one Mohammad Farhad Azimi – a representative of Atta Mohammad Noor – received $61m from a Qatari representative in Kabul. Noor is former anti-Taliban commander. Both Noor and Dostum reportedly fled to Uzbekistan as Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021.
Meetings and conspiracies
This conspiracy, then, would have taken place at the very highest levels of leadership. Khaama reported that :
The documents also revealed that all three representatives of the former Afghan leaders received money from the Qatar representative after signing the documents on July 7, 2021.
The documents also detailed a meeting between a Qatari official and Ghani in July 2021, around a month before the occupation and the US-backed government collapsed.
The Khaama report claims the documents indicate a conspiracy among powerful Afghan figures to sell out for Qatari cash:
The letters also further highlight that the money was granted to all three prominent leaders to avoid resisting the Taliban fighters.
And that:
The documents allegedly show that Ashraf Ghani received money to avoid resistance. In contrast, Dostum and Noor received money from the Qatar government not to fight against the Taliban in Northern Afghanistan.
2021 Collapse
The speed of the 2021 collapse of the Afghan government – and with it the 20-year US occupation – shocked many. Since then, the people in Afghanistan have continued to suffer great hardships, much as they did under foreign occupation.
It remains to be seen how concrete these claims are. Clearly, more information is needed. However, the possibility that Afghanistan’s own leaders sold out the country to the Taliban adds another layer of bitterness to what is already one of the great human tragedies of our times.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the CIA-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing…
military officials knew that an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul likely killed Afghan civilians including children but lied about it, a report published Friday revealed. New York Times investigative reporter Azmat Khan analyzed a 66-page redacted U.S. Central Command report on the August 29, 2021 drone strike that killed 10 members of the Ahmadi family, including seven children…
A new report reveals United States military officials knew that an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul likely killed Afghan civilians including children, but lied about it, writes Brett Wilkins.
What to make of it? History is filled with the deeds of blood-thirsty princes bold in ambition and feeble of mind. Massacres make the man, though there is often little to merit the person behind it. The Duke of Sussex seemingly wishes to add his name to that list. In what can only be described as one of his “Nazi uniform” moments, Prince Harry has revealed in his memoir Spare that he killed a number of Taliban fighters. (In the same memoir, the weak-willed royal blames his brother for the uniform idea, though not for organising the Afghan shooting party.)
The prince, wishing to show that he was no toy soldier or ceremonial ornament of the British Army, puts the number of deaths at 25. “It wasn’t a statistic that filled me with pride but nor did it make me ashamed.” He recalls being “plunged into the heat and confusion of battle”, and how he “didn’t think about those 25 people. You can’t kill people if you see them as people.” Doing so from the security of a murderous Apache helicopter certainly helps.
The prince continues to show that he is nothing if not unworldly. “In truth, you can’t hurt people if you see them as people. They were chess pieces off the board, bad guys eliminated before they kill good guys.” Then comes a bit of cod social theory. “They trained me to ‘other’ them and they trained me well.” A dash of Meghan; a smidgen of postcolonial theory.
There it is: the killer aware about his Instagram moment, the social media miasma, the influence of cheap Hollywood tat via Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. He killed but was merely performing his duty as conditioned by the Establishment or, to put it another way, the army of his late grandmother.
The response from the Establishment was not one of praise. Adam Holloway MP, writing in The Spectator, did not find the statistic distasteful or troubling, but the fact that Prince Harry had mentioned it at all. Good soldiers did not publicise kills. “It’s not about macho codes. It’s about decency and respect for the lives you have taken.”
Retired British Army Colonel Tim Collins also seethed. “This is not how we behave in the Army,” he tut-tutted to Forces News, “it’s not how we think.” That’s Prince Harry’s point: more a doer than a thinker.
That doing involved, as Collins put it, “a tragic money-making scam to fund the lifestyle he can’t afford and someone else has chosen.” Harry had “badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did.”
Collins became something of a poster boy for revived wars of adventurism in the Middle East with his speech to the 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Regiment (1 R IRISH) battle group in March 2003. It was the eve of an international crime: the invasion of a sovereign country by colonial powers old and new. As with any such crimes, notably of vast scale, it was justified in the name of principle and duty, otherwise known as the civilisational imperative. “We go to liberate,” declared Collins with evangelical purpose, “not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own.”
In the Middle East, and elsewhere, such gifts of imposed freedom by armed missionaries tend to go off. In July last year, the BBC news program Panoramareported that, “SAS operatives in Afghanistan repeatedly killed detainees and unarmed men.” The report disturbed the amnesiac effect of two investigations by military police that saw no reason to pursue prosecutions. But the allegations were sufficiently publicised to prompt the launching of an independent statutory inquiry by the Ministry of Defence last December. “This will take into account the progress that has already been made across defence in holding our Armed Forces personnel to account for their actions, and the handling of allegations that were later found to have insufficient evidence for any prosecutions.”
Collins must also be aware that commencing a prosecution against British army personnel operating overseas for war crimes, let alone succeeding in one, is nigh impossible. It’s all marvellous to claim that the armed forces play by the book and operate to the sweet chords of justice, but it is rather easier to do so behind sheets of protective glass and exemptions.
Australia, as one of Britain’s partners in military adventurism, has also done its bit to bloat the war crimes files in its tours of Afghanistan. The four-year long investigation culminating in the Brereton Report identified at least 39 alleged murders of captured Afghan troops and civilians, and cruel mistreatment of two more locals by SAS personnel. To date, however, the Office of the Special Investigator has made no referrals to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, a tardiness that is likely to be repeated by British counterparts.
The war criminality theme was bound to be picked up by Afghanistan’s Taliban officials. Anas Haqqani, a senior Taliban figure, suggested to the prince via Twitter that those he had slain “were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return.” But astute enough to sense a public relations moment for his government, Haqqani heaped mock praise. “Among the killers of Afghans, not many have your decency to reveal their conscience and confess to their war crimes.”
In this whole affair, Prince Harry did perform one useful function. He removed the façade of decent soldiery, the mask of the supposedly noble liberator. On this occasion, it took a prince to tell the emperor he had no clothes. “The truth is what you’ve said,” continued Haqqani, “[o]ur innocent people were chess pieces to your soldiers, military and political leaders. Still, you were defeated in that ‘game’ of white & black ‘square’.”
We can certainly agree with Haqqani on one point: no tribunal will be chasing up the royal. “I don’t expect that the ICC [International Criminal Court] will summon you or the human rights activists will condemn you, because they are deaf and blind for you.” Some of that deafness and blindness might have been ameliorated.
U.S. military officials knew that an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul likely killed Afghan civilians including children but lied about it, a report published Friday revealed.
New York Times investigative reporter Azmat Khan analyzed a 66-page redacted U.S. Central Command report on the August 29, 2021 drone strike that killed 10 members of the Ahmadi family, including seven children, outside their home in the Afghan capital. The strike took place during the chaotic final days of the U.S. ground war in Afghanistan, just three days after a bombing that killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops, at Kabul’s international airport.
“When confirmation bias was so deadly in this case, you have to ask how many other people targeted by the military over the years were also unjustly killed.”
Zamarai Ahmadi, a 43-year-old aid worker for California-based nonprofit Nutrition and Education International, was carrying water containers that were mistaken for explosives when his Toyota Corolla was bombed by a Lockheed-Martin Hellfire missile fired from a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone.
As reports of civilian casualties began circulating hours after the strike, U.S. military officials claimed there were “no indications” that noncombatants were harmed in the attack, while stating that they would investigate whether a secondary explosion may have killed or wounded people nearby.
\u201cNEW: A U.S. Central Command investigation into the botched August 2021 drone strike in Kabul reveals how biases and assumptions led to the deadly blunder, and that military analysts saw possible civilian casualties within minutes of the strike:\nhttps://t.co/iGcmulbyw9 #FOIA\u201d
Portions of a U.S. Central Command investigation obtained by The New York Times show that military analysts reported within minutes of the strike that civilians may have been killed, and within three hours had assessed that at least three children were killed.
The documents also provide detailed examples of how assumptions and biases led to the deadly blunder.
Military analysts wrongly concluded, for example, that a package loaded into the car contained explosives because of its “careful handling and size,” and that the driver’s “erratic route” was evidence that he was trying to evade surveillance.
Furthermore:
The investigation refers to an additional surveillance drone not under military control that was also tracking the vehicle but does not specify what it observed. The Times confirmed that the drone was operated by the CIA and observed children, possibly in the car, moments before impact, as CNN had reported.
U.S. military officials initially claimed the “righteous strike” had prevented an imminent new attack on the airport. However they later admitted that the botched bombing was a “horrible mistake.”
The military’s investigation was completed less than two weeks after the strike. However, it was never released to the public. The Pentagon said it would not punish anyone for killing the Ahmadi family.
Hina Shamsi, an ACLU attorney representing families victims of the strike, told the Times that the investigation “makes clear that military personnel saw what they wanted to see and not reality, which was an Afghan aid worker going about his daily life.”
“When confirmation bias was so deadly in this case, you have to ask how many other people targeted by the military over the years were also unjustly killed,” Shamsi added.
Daphne Eviatar, who heads Amnesty International’s Security With Human Rights program, called the new report “more evidence that we need a huge change in how the U.S. uses lethal force and assesses and reveals its consequences.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
From Afghanistan and Iran to rampant misogynistic vitriol online, United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk has said he was appalled at “systematic” efforts to strip women of their rights, but believed they would ultimately fail.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP), the UN rights chief said he wanted to visit Kabul and Tehran for direct talks with the authorities:
Afghanistan is the worst of the worst.
To repress women in the way that it is happening is unparalleled.
Turk said it was deeply worrying that nearly 75 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, efforts to strip rights from women and girls were swelling:
I am very concerned about the backsliding and the pushbacks.
We see it in different ways, in insidious ways.
While misogyny and efforts to halt the march towards gender equality are not new, he warned there was now:
a more systematic, more organised way of countering women’s rights.
‘This cannot be the norm’
In Afghanistan, the Taliban last month banned women from working in non-governmental organisations. The group had already suspended university education for women and secondary schooling for girls.
The barrage of attacks on women’s rights by Afghanistan’s rulers, Turk said, should serve as a reminder:
of what perverted thinking can lead to.
This cannot be the norm in the future.
Turk said he wanted to visit Afghanistan. When his predecessor, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, did so last year, she issued stinging criticism of the Taliban’s record.
He said he would “find an opportune moment” to go, and would seek:
discussions with the de facto authorities about how to ensure that they understand that development of their country… has to include women.
‘Discriminatory practices’
Turk has also requested a visit to Iran, rocked by protests since Mahsa Amini died in custody in September after allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women. He said the Iranian authorities had yet to respond.
If able to go, Turk said he would again call for a repeal of “discriminatory practices against women and girls”. He also intends to raise the subject of the authorities’ brutal crackdown on the protests.
Oslo-based monitor Iran Human Rights says nearly 500 people have been killed in the crackdown, and thousands have been arrested.
In particular, Turk voiced alarm at the use of capital punishment in connection with the protests, with two such executions already carried out.
The death penalty, he said:
must absolutely not be used in this type of context under any circumstances.
Patriarchy’s last gasp
Beyond actions taken by states, Turk pointed to social media:
where misogynistic, sexist comments seem to be allowed, … and thriving.
He stressed the need for “guardrails” to ensure that social media platforms “don’t add fuel to the fire”.
He stated that the algorithms such platforms use can:
very quickly ensure that hate speech gets amplified in a way that is very dangerous.
Shortly after taking office, Turk sent an open letter urging Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk to make human rights central to the platform.
He told AFP he had initially planned to discreetly reach out to contacts in Twitter’s human rights department:
but we couldn’t reach any of them, because they had just been fired.
Since then, Musk has made numerous controversial moves, including reinstating people previously banned for misogynistic remarks and hate speech.
While alarming, Turk said he saw the current pushback against women’s rights:
as a last attempt by the patriarchy to show its force.
Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.
The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.
Dr. Liu’s sad observations seemed to echo in the words of Pope Francis lamenting war’s afflictions. “We live with this diabolic pattern of killing one another out of the desire for power, the desire for security, the desire for many things. But I think of the hidden wars, those no one sees, that are far away from us,” he said. “People speak about peace. The United Nations has done everything possible, but they have not succeeded.” The tireless struggles of numerous world leaders, like Pope Francis and Dr. Joanne Liu, to stop the patterns of war were embraced vigorously by Phil Berrigan, a prophet of our time.
“Oppose any and all wars,” he urged. “There has never been a just war.” “Don’t get tired!” he begged people, adding, “I love the Buddhist proverb, ‘I will not kill, but I will prevent others from killing.’ ”
People who’ve embraced his message continue meeting at the Pentagon, as happened December 28 when activists commemorated the “Feast of the Holy Innocents.” Christians traditionally dedicate this day to the remembrance of a time when King Herod ordered the massacre of children under two years of age because of a paranoid belief that one of the recently born children in the region would grow up to oust Herod from power and kill him. Activists gathered at the Pentagon held signs decrying the slaughter of innocents in our time. They’ll protest the obscenely bloated military budget which the U.S. Congress just passed as a part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023.
As Norman Stockwell of The Progressive recently noted, “The bill contains nearly $1.7 trillion of funding for FY2023, but of that money, $858 billion is earmarked for the military (‘defense spending’) and an additional $45 billion in ‘emergency assistance to Ukraine and our NATO allies.’ This means that more than half ($900 billion out of $1.7 trillion) is not being used for ‘non-defense discretionary programs’—and even that lesser portion includes $118.7 billion for funding of the Veterans Administration, another military-related expense.”
By depleting funds desperately needed to meet human needs, the U.S. “defense” budget doesn’t defend people from pandemics, ecological collapse, and infrastructure decay. Instead it continues a deranged investment in militarism. Phil Berrigan’s prophetic intransigency, resisting all wars and weapons manufacturing, is needed now more than ever.
Outraged by the reckless slaughter of innocent people in wars ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Phil Berrigan insisted that weapons manufacturers profiting from endless wars should be held accountable for criminal activity. The weapons corporations rob people, worldwide, of the capacity to meet basic human needs.
The appallingly greedy Pentagon budget represents a corporate takeover of the U.S. Congress. As the coffers of weapons manufacturers swell, these military contractors hire legions of highly paid lobbyists tasked with persuading elected officials to earmark even more funds for companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. According to militarists, stockpiles of weapons must be used up, in order to justify more weapons manufacturing. Media complicity is necessary, and can be purchased, in order to frighten U.S. taxpayers into the continued bankrolling of what could become worldwide annihilation.
Phil Berrigan, who in his lifetime evolved from soldier to scholar to prophetic anti-nuclear activist, astutely linked the racial oppression he opposed as a civil rights activist to the rising oppression caused by militarism. He likened racial injustice to a terrible hydra that contrives a new face for every area of the world. Throughout his life, Phil Berrigan identified with people menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war. Elaborating on this theme in a book called No More Strangers, published in 1965, he wrote that the dispassionate decision of people in the United States to practice racial discrimination made it “not only easy but logical to enlarge our oppressions in the form of international nuclear threats.”
How can we in the United States prevent the killing that goes on, in our name, in multiple wars, exacerbated by weapons made in the U.S.A? How can we resist the growing potential, acute scourge of a nuclear exchange as warring parties continue issuing nuclear threats in Ukraine and Russia?
One step we can take involves both political and humanitarian efforts to hold accountable the corporations profiting from the U.S. military budget. Drawing on Phil Berrigan’s steadfastness, activists worldwide are planning the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal scheduled to be held November 10 to 13, 2023. The Tribunal intends to collect evidence about crimes against humanity committed by those who develop, store, sell, and use weapons to commit crimes against humanity. Testimony is being sought from people who’ve borne the brunt of modern wars, the survivors of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia, to name but a few of the places where U.S. weapons have terrified people who’ve meant us no harm.
“We render you, corporations obsessed with war profiteering, accountable; answerable!,” declares the Reverend Dr. Cornel West on the Tribunal’s website.
On November 10, 2022, organizers of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal and their supporters served a “subpoena” to the directors and corporate offices of weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon United, and General Atomics. The subpoena, which will expire on February 10, 2023, compels them to provide to the Tribunal all documents revealing their complicity in aiding and abetting the United States government in committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, bribery, and theft.
People menaced by the hydra’s new faces of war often have nowhere to flee, nowhere to hide. Thousands upon thousands of the victims are children.
Mindful of the children who are maimed, traumatized, displaced, orphaned, and killed by all of the wars raging today, we must hold ourselves accountable as well. Phil Berrigan’s challenge must become ours: “Meet me at the Pentagon!” Or at its corporate outposts.
Humanity literally cannot live in complicity with the patterns that lead to bombing hospitals and slaughtering children.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
With murders, contract killings, ambushes, war zone deaths and fatal injuries, a staggering total of 1668 journalists have been killed worldwide in connection with their work in the last two decades (2003-2022), according to the tallies by the Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) based on its annual round-ups.
This gives an average of more than 80 journalists killed every year. The total killed since 2000 is 1787.
RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said:
“Behind the figures, there are the faces, personalities, talent and commitment of those who have paid with their lives for their information gathering, their search for the truth and their passion for journalism.
In each of its annual round-ups, RSF has continued to document the unjustifiable violence that has specifically targeted media workers.
This year’s end is an appropriate time to pay tribute to them and to appeal for full respect for the safety of journalists wherever they work and bear witness to the world’s realities.
Darkest years The annual death tolls peaked in 2012 and 2013 with 144 and 142 journalists killed, respectively. These peaks, due in large measure to the war in Syria, were followed by a gradual fall and then historically low figures from 2019 onwards.
Sadly, the number of journalists killed in connection with their work in 2022 — 58 according to RSF’s Press Freedom Barometer on December 28 — was the highest in the past four years and was 13.7 percent higher than in 2021, when 51 journalists were killed.
15 most dangerous countries During the past two decades, 80 percent of the media fatalities have occurred in 15 countries. The two countries with the highest death tolls are Iraq and Syria, with a combined total of 578 journalists killed in the past 20 years, or more than a third of the worldwide total.
They are followed by Afghanistan, Yemen and Palestine. Africa has not been spared, with Somalia coming next.
With 47.4 percent of the journalists killed in 2022, America is nowadays clearly the world’s most dangerous continent for the media, which justifies the implementation of specific protection policies.
Asia also has many countries on this tragic list, including the Philippines, with more than 100 journalists killed since the start of 2003, Pakistan with 93, and India with 58.
Women journalists also victims Finally, while many more male journalists (more than 95 percent) have been killed in war zones or in other circumstances than their female counterparts, the latter have not been spared.
A total of 81 women journalists have been killed in the past 20 years — 4.86 percent of the total media fatalities.
Since 2012, 52 have been killed, in many cases after investigating women’s rights. Some years have seen spikes in the number of women journalists killed, and some of the spikes have been particularly alarming.
In 2017, ten women journalists were killed (as against 64 male journalists) — a record 13.5 percent of that year’s total media fatalities.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
International aid groups are suspending their relief programs in Afghanistan after the Taliban government announced on Saturday that humanitarian organizations are barred from employing women. The edict is the latest blow to women’s rights in the country as the Taliban reimpose draconian rules they employed in the 1990s, when they were previously in power. Last week, the government also barred…
In Afghanistan, girls are being banned from primary school. Other Muslim nations hold the key to restoring their rights
Gordon Brown is the United Nations special envoy for global education and the former UK prime minister
This week, the Taliban made a bombshell announcement that it will ban women from attending university or teaching in Afghanistan. It is a decision that has done more in a single day to entrench discrimination against women and girls and set back their empowerment than any other single policy decision I can remember.
Since the Taliban returned to power, girls have been banned from attending secondary school. Now they are beingbanned from primary school. Thousands of female government workers have been told to stay at home. Other recent rulings prevent women from travelling without a male relative or attending mosques or religious seminaries. Last month, girls and women were banned from entering public places, including parks.
The UK government has finally announced an inquiry into allegations of war crimes committed by special forces troops in Afghanistan. The inquiry will be able to compel people to give evidence.
It also appears that the scope of the inquiry has been expanded from its initial remit. It was reported in July 2022 that any investigation would be limited to looking at how allegations were handled.
SAS reputation
It now seems that the inquiry will include a deeper look at the allegations of murderous acts by SAS (Special Air Service) troops. The move was announced by defence minister Andrew Murrison. Strangely, his Labour counterpart – John Healy – seemed to see the inquiry as an opportunity to protect the reputation of the SAS:
This special inquiry is welcome and must succeed. It is essential to protect the reputation of our British special forces, guarantee the integrity of military investigations and secure justice for any of those affected.
Unmentioned in the BBC coverage is the spectre of the Overseas Operations Act. This controversial law has the effect of making war crimes prosecution of British troops virtually impossible. This is especially true if more than five years have elapsed between the crimes and their being brought to court.
War crimes
The scope of the allegations cover a roughly three-year period between 2010 and 2013. At this time, SAS troops were engaged in capture operations in Afghanistan. A BBC Panorama documentary aired in July 2022 suggests that in one six-month period 54 people may have been killed by the elite unit.
The families of those allegedly murdered have campaigned for justice for many years. Members of the Noorzai and Saifullah families spoke to the BBC about the hardships they had faced trying to bring people to account.
My family has waited 10 years to find out why this happened. We are happy that finally, after so many years, someone is going to investigate this thoroughly.
British justice
With an inquiry announced, there may be a speck of hope for the bereaved families. But it is just a speck. Whatever the findings of the investigation, the path to accountability has been severely narrowed – if not shut entirely.
With the Overseas Operations Act now law, any allegations over five years old are unlikely to ever see the inside of a courtroom. As such, even if wrongdoing is uncovered, Britain’s alleged war criminals seem very likely to escape punishment in the long term.
This story was originally published by ProPublica. For more than two decades, the U.S. military has been barred from providing training and equipment to foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The law, named for its author, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, applies to military assistance for foreign units funded through the Defense or State…
The Albanese government is looking to compensate families of victims of alleged Afghanistan war crimes, more than two years after a landmark inquiry found payments should be offered quickly to restore “Australia’s standing”.
Guardian Australia can reveal the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, has received a number of briefings from officials about compensation, one of the key outstanding recommendations of the Brereton report he is examining.
A deadly Dutch air strike on a civilian compound in Afghanistan in 2007 was unlawful, a court in the Netherlands ruled on Wednesday 23 November, ordering the country to compensate the victims’ families.
Four Afghans, who were not named in the court papers, took the Dutch state to court over the incident, which occurred during fighting between international forces and the Taliban in Uruzgan province in central Afghanistan.In the early hours of June 17, 2007, Dutch F-16 fighter jets dropped 28 guided bombs in the area. Of these, 18 landed on walled compounds – called “qalas” – near the strategic town of Chora.Several bombs landed on one of the compounds, designated “qala 4131”. They killed at least 18 of the claimants’ relatives, court papers said.
Verdict
Dutch forces had not properly distinguished between military and civilian targets, the court ruled. It said:
The court concludes that the State has not sufficiently substantiated that at the time… there was sufficient information in which a reasonable commander could designate it as a military target.
The victims included the wife, two daughters, three sons and a daughter-in-law of one of the claimants.
Dutch government lawyers claimed the Taliban used the compound for military purposes and although civilians lived there, the attack was indeed justified. However, judges said there had been no firing around the stricken compound for at least 15 hours before the bombing.
The claimants’ lawyer, Liesbeth Zegveld, told Agence France-Presse (AFP):
The most recent information was already 15 hours old.
The intelligence is not of a nature in which one could say, ‘Well, yes please, go ahead with seven bombs.
Judges also ruled that the victims should be compensated, but that exact amounts would be determined at a later stage.
Further inquiries
The ruling comes as Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues its campaign for an inquiry into potential human rights violations “by all sides” in Afghanistan. HRW have said:
Human Rights Watch research found numerous violations of international humanitarian law by Afghan government forces, and has documented torture and ill-treatment of detainees by the United States military and CIA since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
While the latest ruling about the unlawful Dutch air strike in Afghanistan will be welcome, HRW warn that the road ahead for accountability will be difficult:
A fraught security environment, in which the Taliban frequently threaten and intimidate people who speak against them, and a difficult political landscape for justice in Afghanistan highlight both the need for an ICC investigation and the problems the court may face in gathering evidence.
Iran again launched deadly missile and drone strikes overnight to Monday against Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraq. One Kurdish peshmerga fighter was reported killed in mountainous northern Iraq, where two of the groups said their bases had been targeted in the latest such barrage of aerial attacks in recent months.
‘Indiscriminate attacks’
Iran has been shaken by over two months of protests sparked by the death of Kurdish-Iranian woman Jîna Mahsa Amini, 22, after her arrest for allegedly breaching the strict dress code for women.Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has repeatedly struck Kurdish dissident groups based in Iraq, whom it labels “separatist anti-Iranian terrorist groups”. One of the groups, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), said it was hit with missiles and suicide drones in Koya and Jejnikan, near Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Party official Ali Boudaghi said:
A member of the peshmerga was killed in an Iranian strike.
The PDKI, the oldest Kurdish party in Iran said:
These indiscriminate attacks are occurring at a time when the terrorist regime of Iran is unable to stop the ongoing demonstrations in (Iranian) Kurdistan.
The Iranian Kurdish nationalist group Komala said it was also targeted. On Twitter it said:
Our HQ was once again attacked by the Islamic regime tonight. We’ve been carefully prepared for these types of attacks & have no losses for the moment.
The autonomous Kurdistan region’s government condemned the strikes in a statement, saying:
The repeated violations that undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and the Kurdistan region are unjustifiable.
‘Vulnerable to attacks’
Since the 1980s, Iraqi Kurdistan has hosted several Iranian Kurdish opposition groups which have waged an armed insurrection against Tehran in the past.
In recent years their activities have declined, but the new wave of protests in Iran has again stoked tensions.
Rights groups on Monday accused Iranian security forces of using live fire and heavy weapons to suppress protests in Kurdish-populated regions in Iran’s west, intensifying a deadly crackdown.
Iran’s latest cross-border strikes come less than a week after similar attacks that killed at least one person, and following attacks in late September that killed more than a dozen people.
The Iranian attacks also come a day after Turkey carried out air raids against outlawed Kurdish militants in Iraqi Kurdistan and northern Syria.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has fought the Turkish government since the mid-1980s and has long operated rear bases in northern Iraq.
You can magnify a single bacteria a thousand times but it will not tell you that your entire herd is missing or that everything is dying on the farm.
The point is that when we’re too focused on the so-called details, we often miss what’s truly important to understand what’s going on.
This is an old story, chicanery that has been used without pause from the onset of human communication. The misapplication of “focus” is used by tricksters, hucksters, hustlers, politicians, and other consummate liars, on a regular basis to keep us from stepping back and getting a full appreciation of a situation — the big picture, a fuller more truthful and useful understanding. It’s used by racists to generate hatred. By citing a few bad apples they convince us the whole orchard is rotten. It’s used by salesmen to direct our attention to some apparent necessity, often illusory, in order to pry open our wallets for the purchase of some superfluous, overvalued item. It’s used by propagandists and their allies in the media to misinform and twist our view of ourselves and the world we live in. Via calculated cherry-picking the truth, lying by omission, even making up “facts”, we are enlisted for an agenda which, if fully understood, we would never support, would probably oppose. As a subset of that, it’s used by warmongers to convince us of the nobility, justice, essential goodness of all sorts of horrors they inflict on the world. We save the lives of three school children in a remote village, failing to mention we killed 100,000 innocent civilians to get there.
If we take a long step back and look at how our country got to be so rich, so powerful, so respected and feared, if we are honest with ourselves, completely objective, attentive and balanced, there is only one possible conclusion we can draw . . .
The overall trajectory of U.S. foreign policy is that of a predator, a conqueror, a colonial oppressor.
There is nothing in the historical record of the last 100 years which contradicts this.
There is no example of voluntary retreat. There has never been an apology for the death and destruction wantonly inflicted on other countries. Except for a steady stream of self-flattering virtue signaling about justice and human rights, we’ve never made up for the grotesque theft of the labor and entire lives stolen from the millions of people we’ve enslaved over the entire course of our existence. This now includes the use of prison labor in our bloated system of corporate incarceration. There have been no reparations for the wars the U.S. has prosecuted, for the enormous social, economic, and political damage resulting from both military and non-military aggression by the U.S. against other nations. The U.S. has countless times covertly and overtly violated international law, broken treaties and its trusted word. It has turned truth on its head to justify its aggression and sometimes outright theft of money and resources, 1) falsely claiming its “national security” is under threat; 2) falsely portraying its military campaigns and economic terrorism as mitigation for human rights abuses, e.g. the public relations charade mockingly called Responsibility to Protect (R2P); 3) falsely accusing other countries of treaty violations to justify its own treaty violations; 4) hypocritically utilizing terrorist groups it claims to condemn for proxy wars against its perceived enemies; 5) bullying, instituting sanctions, blockades and embargoes, starving whole populations of essential food and medicines, self-righteously declaring itself judge and jury in determining how other sovereign nations and their people must act or be condemned and isolated for violating some model of proper behavior — a rules-based order — which the U.S., itself, ignores when inconvenient or unprofitable for the corporate interests the government loyally represents and serves.
The War on Terror, among the most egregious frauds perpetrated under the banner of Pax Americana, has been a War of Terror by the #1 terrorist country in the world — the U.S. itself. The unnecessary and illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, now Ukraine, to name the most prominent ones, have caused the greatest refugee crises in history. Taiwan is next on the assembly line of horrors generated by our belligerence, arrogance, and recklessness.
What do we take from this? What’s the lesson?
The message is clear: Any attempt at repairing U.S. foreign policy requires a complete reversal of priorities which are currently baked into our economy, politics, social and political system.
And such a reversal of priorities must necessarily require eliminating from positions of power any and all proponents of global hegemony, world conquest, indispensability, “American exceptionalism”, total spectrum dominion. Our current geopolitical agenda only produces one trajectory: imperial conquest. This trajectory only embraces one mechanism: War in all of its contemporary manifestations: war on other countries, war on economies, war on social structures, war on people (including its own), war on families, war on human rights, war on the environment, war on the truth.
Returning to our discussion of the “details”, meaning the focus on single, easily spun and manipulated events and public posturing. Questioning and challenging what the U.S. does in its relationship with the rest of the world by only targeting individual incidents, single moments in time, each supposedly a unique crisis — as it mysteriously just pops up out of nowhere and spoils our good time like some party crasher — is a pointless and futile task, a fool’s errand . . . A HUGE WASTE OF ENERGY AND TIME.
How many times do we need to be reminded of this? We question the wisdom and necessity of invading the tiny island nation of Grenada, we get Panama and the first Iraq war, then Kosovo. We object to the war on Afghanistan, we get a war both on Afghanistan and Iraq. We condemn the Iraq War and we get Libya and Syria and Sudan and Yemen. How many times do we need to be reminded that any calls for basic civility, diplomacy, restraint, peace, are scoffed at — if even noticed — are mocked and dismissed as childish fantasy and unhinged idealism, the stuff of hippies and dreamers? How often does the current power elite have to make it clear that for them confrontation, aggression, and war are the answers to every question?
The latest crisis to monopolize our attention — and admittedly it’s a whopper! — being used to obfuscate America’s real and ultimately self-destructive agenda, is the Ukraine war. Starting this war has been in the works for decades.* Further proof of the West’s real intent — a major drawn-out conflict which will weaken and ultimately destroy Russia — is the refusal by US and its NATO lapdogs to negotiate, have any conversation with Russia. Boris Johnson — a pathetic servile sheepdog if there ever was one — flew to Kiev and told Zelensky to pull out of peace talks and refuse any further discussion with Russia to resolve the situation. Zelensky is being generously rewarded by Washington DC to follow orders, toe the line, and sacrifice unnecessarily tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives in support of US/NATO thuggery. He’s got millions in the bank now, luxury homes far from the conflict zone, and presumably access to the best comedy writers in America, should he decide to return to his real calling, that of a buffoon TV comic.
Any cursory review of the actual events which made this mess inevitable leads to an indisputable conclusion: The “special operation”, as Russia calls it, is not naked Russian aggression, or as the media reminds us every ten seconds, an “unprovoked” attack. It is a reaction by Russia to calculated provocations, intimidations, a program engineered over at least a half a century — though hatred of Russia by the West goes back much further — ultimately intended to destroy Russia as a nation, then plunder it. It is the direct result of a highly-sophisticated, multi-layered strategy for imperial conquest, sometimes subtle and always covert, by the US and its puppet institution NATO . . . destroy, conquer, subjugate, pillage. It’s not Russia that’s circled the continental U.S. with military bases. It’s the U.S. and its puppet allies that have tried to construct a noose around Russia. The US by its own admission put $5 billion into creating turmoil and installing a US/NATO-friendly puppet regime in Kiev. The Ukraine coup of 2014 was nothing more than a tightening of the military noose around Russia and a ham-fisted attempt at stealing Russia’s major naval base in Sevastopol. That plot, of course, was foiled when Crimea decided by referendum to again become part of Russia.
Next in line — as if destroying and conquering Russia is just a day’s work — is China. This likewise is nothing new. The subjugation of China has been a work in progress for two centuries. The effort by the West+1 (the +1 being Japan) from 1839 to 1949 is referred to by the Chinese as the Century of Humiliation. China has never forgotten or forgiven. Why should it? Why shouldn’t it protect itself from future humiliation and plunder? The long history of racist, imperial aggression by the Western-led colonialists is what drives China’s distrust of the U.S. and its current partners in crime (Australia, Japan, Canada, the NATO lapdogs). As with Russia, China is not rattling its sabers across the planet. Understandably it is attempting to construct an impregnable defense framework against more anticipated Western colonial incursions. It’s not China performing FONOPS (Freedom of Navigation Operations) in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, off the coast of California and Virginia, not even around Hawaii and Alaska. It’s not China that has surrounded the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and other NATO countries with military bases. It is the U.S. in concert with its obsequious puppets that have encircled China with a huge array of forward-positioned bases, staffed and armed to the teeth with offensive weaponry. Japan alone has 56 U.S. bases. There are close to 30,000 active duty military persons in Okinawa alone.
It is imperative that the citizens of the U.S. who are still sane and capable of making their own rational judgments, understand that the obvious, truly frightening, unavoidable, but completely unnecessary result of our present course with Russia and China is WAR, WAR, AND MORE WAR — potentially nuclear war and the end of human life on this planet!
And putting aside death and destruction, as if tens of millions of deaths and ruined lives is just collateral inconvenience, for us now and future generations right here at home, our current trajectory guarantees more waste, an evisceration of our individual and national potential, a squandering of our vast human, national and economic resources, all in pursuit of the unattainable, undesirable, pathological insane goal of world domination!
During discussion of the most recent budget cycle, we might have detected the usual barely audible pleas for restraint and rationality, from the small chorus of voices attempting to alert the public exactly how skewed our funding priorities are. These are the same appeals we’ve been hearing year-after-year: Reduce the DOD budget, then repair the infrastructure, fix health care, take care of the planet, put the people back in the equation. The result of the “negotiations”? The defense budget increased to an all-time high, with Republicans and Democrats adding billions more than the White House requested, the grandstanding gas bags from both major parties competing for bragging rights over who is most responsible for this unconscionable bloat.
Did we vote for this? Do we really need more weapons of war, more military bases, more ships and submarines, more bombers and fighter jets, more missiles and nuclear bombs?
Or put another way . . .
Does the sturdy, proud individualism we claim defines us as a people have to equate to mass murder and destruction across the globe? World War III? Nuclear annihilation?
Is this what we as Americans stand for?
I think not.
This regime of perpetual war and global domination is the work of madmen, power-drunk sociopaths who’ve grabbed and now maintain absolute control of our foreign policy. They are empire-obsessed megalomaniacs who’ve seized the initiative and are the architects of the Great Imperial Project — the U.S. as absolute imperial master of the Earth. They have, without any consent by an informed citizenry, established the disastrous direction of the country, and are now taking us to a final denouement, an epic clash with two other major nuclear powers. To say ‘this will not end well’ ranks as the greatest understatement in history.
I repeat: There is nothing in the historical record of the last 100 years — some historians go back to the very early days of our republic — which offers any hope that our constant beating of the war drums will magically stop. That the trajectory of imperial conquest, and all the misadventures and war crimes which follow from that, will spontaneously reverse. Whether it’s the Monroe Doctrine or manifest destiny or the Wolfowitz Doctrine or R2P or Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard or charter for the Project for the New American Century, whatever form the justification and rationalizations take, the direction is clear and ghastly: The promise of aggression, chaos, and carnage, distinguishes itself as the only promise the U.S. will keep.
I’m baffled why anti-war activists can’t see this. Right now the U.S. is a beast. The nature of the beast is war. The beast is merciless, relentless, unforgiving, amoral, sociopathic, homicidal. If we don’t slay the beast, the beast will continue to do just what such a creature does. Negotiating with the beast is impossible. Taming the beast is impossible. Even slowing down the beast will only insignificantly temper the pace of its ravaging ways.
Many well-intentioned individuals over decades have been appealing to the better nature and better instincts of U.S. leadership. The reality is, it has neither. Nor does it show signs of common decency or common sense.
There is only one option: Removing from power those who now embrace threats, intimidation, confrontation, violence, and ultimately military conflict as the only mechanisms for dealing with the rest of the world.
Removing ALL OF THOSE now in power! They are all culpable. They are all complicit.
Yes, the world is a dangerous place. But those now in control of our governing institutions systematically and systemically make it a more dangerous place. They are not protecting us. They are not even protecting our nation. They are dooming America to a horrifying and catastrophic fate. Either they go away or the U.S. itself will go away. It won’t be a pretty sight. Manifest destiny will be manifest implosion and collapse. Or total annihilation in the war to end all wars, which will fulfill that hope by ending everything.
* You might consider looking at my The Peace Dividend book, written six years ago, which exposes the unhinged geopolitical agenda which made this conflict inevitable.
As protests in Iran drag on into their fourth week over the violent death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, there are two central questions.
The first is whether these protests involving women and girls across Iran are different from upheavals in the past, or will simply end the same way with the regime stifling a popular uprising.
The second question is what can, and should, the outside world do about extraordinarily brave demonstrations against an ageing and ruthless regime that has shown itself to be unwilling, and possibly unable, to allow greater freedoms?
The symbolic issue for Iran’s protest movement is a requirement, imposed by morality police, that women and girls wear the hijab, or headscarf. In reality, these protests are the result of a much wider revolt against discrimination and prejudice.
Put simply, women are fed up with a regime that has sought to impose rigid rules on what is, and is not, permissible for women in a theocratic society whose guidelines are little changed since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.
Women are serving multi-year jail sentences for simply refusing to wear the hijab.
Two other issues are also at play. One is the economic deprivation suffered by Iranians under the weight of persistent sanctions, rampant inflation and the continuing catastrophic decline in the value of the Iranian riyal.
The other issue is the fact Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death sparked the protests, was a Kurd.
The Kurds, who constitute about 10 percent of Iran’s 84 million population, feel themselves to be a persecuted minority. Tensions between the central government in Tehran and Kurds in their homeland on the boundaries of Iraq, Syria and Turkey are endemic.
A BBC report on the Mahsa Amini protests.
Another important question is where all this leaves negotiations on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA had been aimed at freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.
Former President Donald Trump recklessly abandoned the 2015 agreement in 2018.
The Biden administration, along with its United Nations Security Council partners plus Germany, had been making progress in those negotiations, but those efforts are now stalled, if not frozen.
The spectacle of Iranian security forces violently putting down demonstrations in cities, towns and villages across Iran will make it virtually impossible in the short term for the US and its negotiating partners to negotiate a revised JCPOA with Tehran.
How will the US and its allies respond? So will the US and its allies continue to tighten Iranian sanctions? And to what extent will the West seek to encourage and support protesters on the ground in Iran?
One initiative that is already underway is helping the protest movement to circumvent regime attempts to shut down electronic communications.
Elon Musk has announced he is activating his Starlink satellites to provide a vehicle for social media communications in Iran. Musk did the same thing in Ukraine to get around Russian attempts to shut down Ukrainian communications by taking out a European satellite system.
However, amid the spectacle of women and girls being shot and tear-gassed on Iranian streets, the moral dilemma for the outside world is this: how far the West is prepared to go in its backing for the protesters.
Since the Iranian protests began there have also been pro-government rallies in response. Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/AAP
It is one thing to express sympathy; it is another to take concrete steps to support the widespread agitation. This was also the conundrum during the Arab Spring of 2010 that brought down regimes in US-friendly countries like Egypt and Tunisia.
It should not be forgotten, in light of contemporary events, that Iran and Russia propped up Syria’s Assad regime during the Arab Spring, saving it from a near certain end.
In this latest period, the Middle East may not be on fire, as it was a decade or so ago, but it remains highly unstable. Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, is effectively without a government after months of violent agitation.
The war in Yemen is threatening to spark up again, adding to uncertainties in the Gulf.
In a geopolitical sense, Washington has to reckon with inroads Moscow has been making in relations with Gulf States, including, notably Saudi Arabia.
The recent OPEC Plus decision to limit oil production constituted a slap to the US ahead of the mid-term elections in which fuel prices will be a potent issue.
In other words, Washington’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is eroding, partly as a consequence of a disastrous attempt to remake the region by going to war in Iraq in 2003.
The US’s ability to influence the Middle East is much weaker than before it went to war in Iraq in 2003. Image: Susan Walsh/AP/AAP
A volatile region
Among the consequences of that misjudgement is the empowerment of Iran in conjunction with a Shia majority in Iraq. This should have been foreseen.
So quite apart from the waves of protest in Iran, the region is a tinderbox with multiple unresolved conflicts.
In Afghanistan, on the fringes of the Middle East, women protesters have taken the lead in recent days from their Iranian sisters and have been protesting against conservative dress codes and limitations on access to education under the Taliban.
This returns us to the moral issue of the extent to which the outside world should support the protests. In this, the experience of the “green” rebellion of 2009 on Iran’s streets is relevant.
Then, the Obama administration, after initially giving encouragement to the demonstrations, pulled back on the grounds it did not wish to jeopardise negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran or undermine the protests by attaching US support.
Officials involved in the administration, who are now back in the Biden White House, believe that approach was a mistake. However, that begs the question as to what practically the US and its allies can do to stop Iran’s assault on its own women and girls.
What if, as a consequence of Western encouragement to the demonstrators, many hundreds more die or are incarcerated?
What is the end result, beyond indulging in the usual rhetorical exercises such as expressing “concern” and threatening to ramp up sanctions that hurt individual Iranians more than the regime itself?
The bottom line is that irrespective of what might be the desired outcome, Iran’s regime is unlikely to crumble.
It might be shaken, it might entertain concerns that its own revolution that replaced the Shah is in danger of being replicated, but it would be naïve to believe that a rotting 43-year-old edifice would be anything but utterly ruthless in putting an end to the demonstrations.
This includes unrest in the oil industry, in which workers are expressing solidarity with the demonstrators. The oil worker protest will be concerning the regime, given the centrality of oil production to Iran’s economy.
However, a powerful women’s movement has been unleashed in Iran. Over time, this movement may well force a theocratic regime to loosen restrictions on women and their participation in the political life of the country. That is the hope, but as history has shown, a ruthless regime will stop at little to re-assert its control.
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