The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.
Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains. It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”
Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.
Since the invasion, a number of civil society efforts have been undertaken against the dubious triumvirate of evangelist warmongers. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, convened over four days in November 2011, invoked universal jurisdiction in finding Bush, Blair and their accomplices guilty of the act of aggression.
Despite its unmistakable political flavour – the original body had been unilaterally established by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad – its reasoning was sound enough. The invasion of Iraq could not “be justified under any reasonable interpretation of international law” and threatened “to return us to a world in which the law of the jungle prevails over the rule of law, with potentially disastrous consequences for the human rights not only of the Iraqis but of the people throughout the region and the world”.
The Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation also resolved to submit a complaint to the ICC in 2012, hoping that the body would conduct an investigation and issue a warrant for Howard’s arrest. In September 2013, a complaint was filed by Peter Murphy, Secretary of the Foundation, alleging, among a range of offences, the commission of acts of aggression, breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights, and crimes against peace. The effort failed, leaving Howard irritatingly free.
In two decades, the United States still finds itself embroiled in Iraq, with 2,500 troops stationed in a capacity that is unlikely to stop anytime too soon. That said, the parallels with Afghanistan are already being drawn. In 2022, the outgoing head of US Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, trotted out his dream about what would happen. “You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us.”
Ironically enough, such violent extremist threats had more than a little help in their creation from Washington’s own disastrous intervention. Eventually, the Iraqis would simply have to accept “to take a larger share of all the enabling that we’re doing now.”
The calamity of Iraq is also a salutary warning to countries willing to join any US-led effort, or rely on the good grace of Washington’s power. To be an enemy of the United States might be dangerous, but as Henry Kissinger reminds us, to be a friend might prove fatal.
Twenty years after a United States-led coalition invaded and occupied Iraq, the country is facing cascading environmental crises and was recently declared the fifth-most vulnerable country to climate disruption. Plagued by instability and corruption fueled by religious divisions and various militias competing for influence and revenue, the Iraqi government is weak and unable to tackle these…
It had been 15 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq when, on March 19, 2018, the celebrated Iraqi novelist and poet Sinan Antoon published a blistering op-ed in The New York Times. He took readers through his observations of the steady deterioration of Iraqi society since the war began, but the most scathing words came toward the end. “No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of…
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.
Stop calling the Iraq War a “mistake”. When you make a mistake, you make changes to ensure that mistake is not repeated. Nobody responsible for that invasion suffered any consequences of any kind, zero policy changes were made, and the unipolarist ideology which led to it has become more entrenched than ever.
If the invasion of Iraq was a “mistake”, western government officials would be residing in prison cells at The Hague, countless pundits and journalists would now be working behind cash registers in retail shops, and US foreign policy would have undergone a massive, dramatic overhaul. Instead the exact opposite has happened — the western officials who launched the Iraq War are esteemed members of elite society, the pundits and journalists who manufactured consent for it are at the top of their field, and securing US unipolar hegemony by any means necessary is the accepted status quo norm in mainstream politics.
This is because the Iraq War was not a “mistake”. It was a cold, calculated decision which had precisely the effects it was intended to have: the advancement of western energy interests, greater geostrategic control, and the expansion of the US war machine in key geostrategic regions. Someone who makes a “mistake” doesn’t get everything they always wanted as a result and suffer zero consequences for the damage it caused. That’s what happens to someone who took a deliberate, calculated action in their own interests.
You can only pretend the Iraq War was a “mistake” if you accept the official reasons for starting it: getting those WMDs, spreading freedom and democracy to those poor Iraqis who we love, and making the Middle East a safer and more peaceful place for everyone. It’s not okay for grown adults in the year 2023 to believe those were the real intentions behind the invasion of Iraq.
If the invasion of Iraq was a mistake there would have been changes put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Those changes were never made because they thoroughly intend to do similar things in the future.
It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging George W Bush, it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.
It’s hilarious that Putin has been hit with an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court not only on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, but also a few days after the Pentagon intervened to stop the Biden administration from helping the ICC compile evidence of Russian war crimes because it might lead to ICC prosecution of American war crimes.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Breaking News: The Pentagon is blocking the U.S. from sharing evidence on Russian atrocities in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court, officials said. Military leaders fear setting a precedent that might pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. https://t.co/xnHCjkkZnK
One of the funniest empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its #1 rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively.
❖
I hear people say, “I oppose the Chinese GOVERNMENT, not the Chinese PEOPLE!”
Oh cool, so sort of like the exact same thing literally every warmongering neocon has said about literally every country they wanted to destroy since the turn of the century?
You’re not making an important or interesting distinction when you say you oppose a foreign government and not it’s people, you’re just painting the same pretty picture over the same ugly agenda as every war slut since 9/11. Shut the hell up.
❖
China should start arming Mexican cartels so they can defend themselves against the coming US invasion. Per the US playbook Washington should have no problem with this.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Invade Mexico to stop Americans from doing drugs. We know this is a good and sensible idea because we've done bad things in the past. https://t.co/d6N396OiD6
I’ve seen people use Marxist-sounding rhetoric to justify NATO expansion and US proxy warfare. I’ve seen people use anti-imperialist jargon to justify encirclement of China. It’s like how people used the Bible to justify racism and other ugly things. Your beliefs don’t matter if your heart’s in the wrong place.
Reading all the right books and having all the correct concepts won’t protect you from error; only clarity of vision can keep you on the straight and narrow. And that takes hard, dedicated, rigorously honest inner work. No amount of accumulated knowledge will substitute for this.
We’ve all known people who share what we think of as noble ideological beliefs but are actually garbage human beings once you get to know them. Having the right beliefs won’t make you a better person, and it won’t protect you from applying those beliefs in a very unwholesome way.
Having all the right political opinions is no substitute for being a good human being. Ticking all the right conceptual boxes is no substitute for psychological health. Reading all the right books is no substitute for real inner work. Concepts are worthless without inner clarity. You’ve got to do the work.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Friday marked the upcoming 20th anniversary of the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq—where thousands of U.S. troops remain today—by asking if Americans have learned anything from the “failed war of aggression” and warning that waging another such war will have even more dire consequences.
In a Twitter thread, Omar (D-Minn.) asserted that “20 years later, the Iraq War remains the biggest foreign policy disaster of our generation, one that took thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.”
None
— (@)
As Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates as many as 580,000 people were killed in Iraq and Syria since 2003 and nearly 15 million people were made refugees or internally displaced by the war—which is forecast to cost a staggering $2.9 trillion by 2050.
What then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer called Operation Iraqi Liberation—OIL—devastated much of Iraq but enriched multinational corporations while creating a power vacuum that was eventually filled by Islamic State, whose rise to power in much of Iraq and neighboring Syria led to a second phase of the war launched during the administration of former President Barack Obama that continues today.
“Have we fully learned the lessons from this failed war of aggression, or are we doomed to repeat it?” Omar asked.
None
— (@)
“Our foreign policy discourse remains fundamentally pro-war,” Omar noted. “Think tanks (often the same ones who cheerled the Iraq War) outflank each other to justify armed conflict and derail diplomacy with adversaries like Iran.”
Omar—whom Republicans recently ousted from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs—continued:
Instead of seeing China as a geopolitical challenge to be managed, politicians gin up jingoistic sentiment and nationalism to see who can be the most “anti-China.”
Our spending on Pentagon waste and new weapons continues to rise uncontrollably—with weapons contractors wielding more lobbying power than ever in Washington.
Our national media too often treat war as a game—a way to juice ratings as fewer Americans turn into TV news—rather than the most horrific state of conditions to be avoided at all costs.
Claims from senior national security officials are reported as fact, even when no evidence for those claims is presented.
Much like the lost Iraqi lives lost were often ignored 20 years ago, we continue to ignore the pain and suffering of Black and Brown people in places like Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Haiti, and more.
“To truly be able to avoid another Iraq, we need a national reckoning with how we got into it the first place,” argued Omar, who fled civil war in Somalia with her family when she was a child.
None
— (@)
“We need accountability for those who got us into this war,” Omar said. “But most of all we need to see all of our lives connected as part of the human fabric—to understand that the parent who loses a child in war could be us, that the child who is displaced could be our child.”
“Because the next Iraq,” she added, “will be even worse.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
U.S. soldiers breaking into a home in Baquba, Iraq, in 2008 Photo: Reuters
March 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”
Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.
It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”
Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: “Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”
So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”
But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.
As the U.S. Senate on Thursday teed up a vote to end the congressional authorizations for the Gulf and Iraq wars, President Joe Biden formally backed the bipartisan bill.
The progress on finally repealing the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force (AUMFs) comes just ahead of the 20th
anniversary of the George W. Bush administration’s costly and devastating invasion of Iraq.
The bill (
S. 316/H.R. 932) was reintroduced in February by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and has GOP co-sponsors in both chambers. On Thursday, 19 Republican senators joined with all Democrats present to advance the measure.
The legislation has not yet been approved by the House of Representatives, which is narrowly controlled by the GOP. However, if it reaches the president’s desk, he supports it,
according to the statement of administration policy released Thursday.
None
— (@)
While former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump used the 2002 authorization to justify strikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, respectively, the new Biden administration document notes that “the United States conducts no ongoing military activities that rely primarily on the 2002 AUMF, and no ongoing military activities that rely on the 1991 AUMF, as a domestic legal basis.”
“Repeal of these authorizations would have no impact on current U.S. military operations and would support this administration’s commitment to a strong and comprehensive relationship with our Iraqi partners,” that policy statement adds. “President Biden remains committed to working with the Congress to ensure that outdated authorizations for the use of military force are replaced with a narrow and specific framework more appropriate to protecting Americans from modern terrorist threats.”
None
— (@)
Demand Progress Education Fund policy adviser Cavan Kharrazian
said in a statement that “we are glad President Biden is supportive of getting these outdated AUMFs off the books, and that he is committed to work with Congress on presumably replacing the 2001 AUMF with a narrower framework.”
“However, any serious attempt by President Biden to work with Congress on war powers reforms requires the administration to halt unauthorized participation of U.S. armed forces in hostilities that contravene the War Powers Act,” Kharrazian stressed. “This includes ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition’s war on Yemen, ceasing the use of U.S. forces to protect Syrian oil fields and battling Iranian-backed militias, and putting an end to legally dubious military operations in the Horn of Africa.”
The campaigner continued:
Moreover, the administration must commit to full legal transparency regarding the use of military force. Both this administration and previous administrations have failed to provide Congress with timely reporting on the 2001 AUMF, as required by 50 U.S. Code § 1550. Additionally, President Biden has failed to respond to lawmakers’ inquiries about the administration’s legal justifications for the expansive use of the 2001 AUMF and Article 2 authorities. Without such transparency, Congress is unable to fully exercise its oversight and legislative duties over war and peace.
It’s encouraging to see an administration committed to addressing outdated AUMFs. However, a genuine commitment will involve respecting congressional authority over war by proactively ending unauthorized military activities and implementing comprehensive transparency measures.
In a series of tweets, the Quaker advocacy group Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) welcomed the administration’s position and highlighted fresh comments from Kaine and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a co-sponsor, who gathered outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday with members of the American Legion.
None
— (@)
“There’s no reason—none—to have a war authorization against a strategic partner, and so that’s the first reason why we need to do this,” Kaine said of Iraq, adding that the repeal must also occur to honor U.S. service members.
Kaine called out previous failures by Congress to end the AUMFs, and noted that leaving them in place enables abuse. While confirming he has not spoken with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about the bill, the senator expressed optimism that it will pass—saying of the lower chamber, “there’s a wonderful bipartisan coalition there as well.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”
This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.
“So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved … seize the moment,” Milley told the Economic Club of New York.
Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response, we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace groups longing to prevent a looming war.
In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.
Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns.
Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?”
I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring, “Will we always be this way?”
Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind after “ending” a war of choice.
Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.
“I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”
“War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions, prolonging the agony.
He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense inert metal explosives lop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons trying to remove the sinister material.
“You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”
As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia, some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a nuclear war?
U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022, four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”
UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”
Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded.
Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war began.
In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.
Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, spoke confidently about getting F-16 fighter jets next. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he told Reuters.
Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January 24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”
Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the Doomsday Clock sounds an alarm for all humanity. “We are on the brink of a precipice,” she said. “But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and livable planet. From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done. The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset.”
As do we all. The Doomsday Clock indicates we’re living on borrowed time. We needn’t “always be this way.”
Over the past decade, I was fortunate to be hosted in dozens of trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, by young Afghans who fervently believed that words could be stronger than weapons. They espoused a simple, pragmatic proverb: “Blood does not wash away blood.”
We owe to future generations every possible effort to renounce all war and protect the planet.
The sooner the war in Ukraine is over, the sooner the U.S. and Russia can get down to the business of preserving arms control as a viable part of the relationship between the two nations.
By seeking to extend the Ukraine conflict, however, the U.S. is in effect engaging in an act of self-immolation that threatens to engulf the world in a nuclear holocaust.
— former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter
It is an imperative, and it must be a universal principle of all morally conscious people that war is anathema and militaries should be abolished everywhere, at least on the national level. (I leave open space for the establishment and maintenance of a genuinely international military force under a nonaligned international command to uphold the disarmament and abolishment of national and extranational militaries.)
In the article, “On the Left and Violence in Syria: The imperialist Violence in Syria, Part 7,” B.J. Sabri and I discussed violence in the context of mortal struggle between or inside nation states and the need to consider the factors that generated it. It is a given that every decent person in the world should decry the killing of kids, women, elderly, and civilians of all ages anywhere, and this includes men; there is no debate on this point. However, our rage, analysis, and criticism should be directed primarily and even exclusively on all those governments whose involvement in imperialism, warring, and killing that create death, destruction, and tragedies.
However, the root causes of warring must be addressed, and not all warring must be considered as equivalent. Morality and principles must guide us in how we address warring.
Earlier, I argued: “As a principle, resistance to oppression must be an inalienable right no matter what the type of resistance it may be. Blame for any violent resistance must never be laid on the oppressed but rather on the oppressor because oppression in itself is violent and when one suffers violence then violent resistance becomes justified as self-defense.”
Numerous anti-imperialist writers from around the world are antiwar. Yet, not all clearly distinguish between the initiator of the violence, resistance to the initial violence, and machinations that corner a rival country which then fights it way out from the corner.
Ted Glick, antiwar activist and author of Burglar for Peace, wrote on 24 February,
The Ukraine/Russia war continues to be, at root, a battle for national self-determination by Ukraine against an imperialist power, Russia. Disturbingly, there continue to be leftist groups and individuals in the US who deny this fact.
I demurred with his contention that it was “a battle for national self-determination by Ukraine against an imperialist power, Russia,” so I asked Ted Glick,
How do you define NATO’s massive eastward encroachment to Russia’s border? Yet, you define Russia as an imperialist for defending its security after its proposal of a mutual security agreement was rejected by US-NATO-Ukraine. It sure seems to me that Russia asked for a win-win from all parties, and that the blame lies on those who rejected security for all.
Glick replied,
An invasion by 125,000 troops into a neighboring country isn’t ‘defending its security,’ it is imperialist aggression.
Peace advocate Jan Oberg, co-founder of the The Transnational Foundation (a think tank dedicated to bringing about “peace by peaceful means”), wrote in an email missive on 8 April 2022:
It’s time to say it clear and loud: Russia is responsible for its illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine. The West is responsible for its military, economic and political reaction to it and for NATO’s expansion before it. And Ukraine’s leaders are responsible for how they operated 2014-2022.
And it is every social science intellectual’s duty to do comparative studies – to compare also this war with other wars over the last 30 years, the far majority of which conducted illegally and immorally by the US and NATO allies – and with many times worse consequences than the war on Ukraine has so far had.
I asked Jan Oberg,
My reading from the above is that Russia acted without provocation. So provocation (unless you reject that) based on a rejection of mutual security and knowing full well what US imperialism has wreaked over the years up to today only makes the West responsible for their reaction to Russia’s invasion? This strikes me as the onus being placed on Russia. Others argue that the SMO was legal (e.g., Scott Ritter). Immoral. Yes, killing in isolation is immoral, but killing in self-defense is not immoral. Allowing a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of the Russian people to continue to encroach closer with an agenda to carve up Russia and siphon off its resources would be a dereliction of a government’s duty, no?
Oberg replied,
No, the invasion was by no means unprovoked – I would never use that stupid NATO phrase/lie.
In terms of a bit of philosophy, each of us are responsible for how we choose to react to a provocation – and other acts. There is no automaticity that legitimates violent actions – I am too much of a Gandhian to believe in that. And that what I said here, today a year ago:
It’s one long argument that NATO has made the mother of all blunders – in trying to getting Ukraine into NATO and NATO into Ukraine. A series of scholars – including I myself – warned that war would be the outcome. Nobody listened to us – not even to (now CIA’s) William Burns (see my latest article) and also not to any Russian leader for 30 years.
Even so, I would argue, the invasion was not acceptable – although understandable/explainable.
David Swanson of War Is A Crime.org, has been an unrelenting opponent of war — a principled sentiment. What sane and morally guided person doesn’t share this sentiment? Although opposition to warmaking is a unifying factor of antiwar types, there is room for dissent as to what constitutes warmaking and the legitimacy of different forms of warring. For instance, Swanson lumps together warmaking and the warring of a resistance, such that he criticizes all violence, even that in self-defense, as reprehensible. Not only is such lumping flawed but it is arguably a barrier to attaining a world in which there is no more war. If one fails to unequivocally differentiate between offensive violence (what I would define as “warmaking,” although an equally apt term may be “aggression.”) and the violence of self-defense or joint defense of an ally under attack (which is not “warmaking” – except in an Orwellian sense – but is more aptly defined as “resistance.”) George Orwell was scathing in his rejection of pacifism: “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other.”1
In response to a 3 September 2019 article, “Nonviolence Denial Is As Dangerous As Climate Denial” by Swanson, I interviewed him to discern how he could seemingly equate all actors in a war notwithstanding why the warring started and why the warring actors where engaged. I find some of his statements factually inaccurate, logically and ethically flawed, and evasive.
For example, Swanson cited, by way of Stephen Zunes, “Mariupol became the largest city to be liberated from control by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine…” This is propaganda for NATO. Another writer would have noted that the US engineered a coup in Ukraine to overthrow the elected government using neo-Nazis, to which a resistance arose in the east of Ukraine.
In a similar vein to Oberg, Swanson presents as a successful passive resistance the Gandhian example in India. Of this, George Orwell wrote, “As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government.”1 Those people who were subservient to British empire in the Indian subcontinent could be considered accomplices in a genocide that has been calculated to number 100 million.
*****
As for the problem with pacifism, to get at the core of the matter, I present a scenario from which readers can draw their own conclusions.
Imagine that a person unfamiliar to you suddenly punches you in the face. You recoil from the blow and massage your sore jaw. Somehow you stifle any physical retaliation. Instead you try to understand why this stranger would assault you. He replies, “Just because I don’t like your face.”
He comes at you again with his fist, and it lands in your solar plexus. You are bent over and winded by the blow. Then he kicks you in the side. At this point you fully understand that the attacker is going to continue to inflict physical violence against you.
Two questions for readers to ponder:
1) Seeing no other options, if you defend yourself physically, are you blameworthy for any part of the violence?
2) Are you then a “violence-maker” along with the attacker who threw the first punches without any legitimate justification?
*****
While non-violent resistance sounds righteous. I submit that a violent attacker prefers nothing better than to target a passive “resistor”? What good is being self-righteous when you are hospitalized or dead, leaving behind your family and friends to fend for themselves and their potentially becoming the next targets for violence? I side with the logic proffered by the anti-racist revolutionary Malcolm X:
I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I’d say, okay, let’s get with it, we’ll all be nonviolent. But I don’t go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody’s going to be nonviolent…. But as long as you’ve got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don’t want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.2
Readers ought to reach their own conclusions and consider the above scenario while reading the following interview with Swanson.
*****
Kim Petersen: I am thoroughly antiwar, and I’d like to see every nation disarm. However, I grant the victims of attack the right to defend against and resist attacks. This does not come through to me in your latest piece. So I pose the following questions.
David Swanson: Because I disagree with it.
KP: You wrote: “I severely criticized my fellow peace activists when some of them cheered for Russian bombings in Syria. I even went after Russia for its warmaking in Syria repeatedly on Russian television.”
I agree that warmaking is a heinous crime. And as I understand it, you condemn all warring. Nonetheless, for warring to occur there has to be a starting point and, I submit that a war does not usually start simultaneously between/among combatants. Therefore, I ask if a party makes war against your country, how should you respond? Would you not defend your country?
DS: Usually this is asked as “Do the Iraqis get to fight back?” since it’s the U.S. doing most of the aggression. The short answer to that question is that if the aggressor would have refrained, no defense would have been needed. Turning resistance to U.S. wars around into justification for further U.S. military spending is common on this topic, yet too twisted even for a K Street lobbyist.
The slightly longer answer is that it’s generally not the proper role for someone born and living in the United States to advise people living under U.S. bombs that they should experiment with nonviolent resistance.
But the right answer is a bit more difficult than either of those. It’s an answer that becomes clearer if we look at both foreign invasions and revolutions/civil wars. There are more of the latter to look at, and there are more strong examples to point to. But the purpose of theory, including Anti-Just-War theory, should be to help generate more real-world examples of superior outcomes, such as in the use of nonviolence against foreign invasions.
Studies like Erica Chenoweth’s have established that nonviolent resistance to tyranny is far more likely to succeed, and the success far more likely to be lasting, than with violent resistance.3 So if we look at something like the nonviolent revolution in Tunisia in 2011, we might find that it meets as many criteria as any other situation for a Just War, except that it wasn’t a war at all. One wouldn’t go back in time and argue for a strategy less likely to succeed but likely to cause a lot more pain and death. Perhaps doing so might constitute a Just War argument. Perhaps a Just War argument could even be made, anachronistically, for a 2011 U.S. “intervention” to bring democracy to Tunisia (apart from the United States’ obvious inability to do such a thing, and the guaranteed catastrophe that would have resulted). But once you’ve done a revolution without all the killing and dying, it can no longer makes sense to propose all the killing and dying — not if a thousand new Geneva Conventions were created, and no matter the imperfections of the nonviolent success.
Despite the relative scarcity of examples thus far of nonviolent resistance to foreign occupation, there are those already beginning to claim a pattern of success. Here’s Stephen Zunes:
“Nonviolent resistance has also successfully challenged foreign military occupation. During the first Palestinian intifada in the 1980s, much of the subjugated population effectively became self-governing entities through massive noncooperation and the creation of alternative institutions, forcing Israel to allow for the creation of the Palestine Authority and self-governance for most of the urban areas of the West Bank. Nonviolent resistance in the occupied Western Sahara has forced Morocco to offer an autonomy proposal which — while still falling well short of Morocco’s obligation to grant the Sahrawis their right of self-determination — at least acknowledges that the territory is not simply another part of Morocco.
“In the final years of German occupation of Denmark and Norway during WWII, the Nazis effectively no longer controlled the population. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia freed themselves from Soviet occupation through nonviolent resistance prior to the USSR’s collapse. In Lebanon, a nation ravaged by war for decades, thirty years of Syrian domination was ended through a large-scale, nonviolent uprising in 2005. And last year, Mariupol became the largest city to be liberated from control by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine, not by bombings and artillery strikes by the Ukrainian military, but when thousands of unarmed steelworkers marched peacefully into occupied sections of its downtown area and drove out the armed separatists.”4
One might look for potential in numerous examples of resistance to the Nazis, and in German resistance to the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, or perhaps in the one-time success of the Philippines and the ongoing success of Ecuador in evicting U.S. military bases, plus of course the Gandhian example from India. But the far more numerous examples of nonviolent success over domestic tyranny also provide a guide toward future action.
To be morally right, nonviolent resistance to an actual attack need not appear more likely to succeed than violent. It only need appear somewhat close to as likely. Because if it succeeds it will do so with less harm, and its success will be more likely to last.
KP: And if you and your allies engage in defense, does that mean that you are a “warmaker”?
DS: That would depend on whether your defense uses war.
KP: Sorry, I should have elaborated. If you use the physical violence characteristic of warring to defend against a war launched against you, does that make you a “warmaker”?
DS: Yes, if you wage war you wage war.
which does not mean Hitler = Roosevelt = Castro
it just means if you wage war you wage war
KP: In the case of Syria, the legitimate government (meaning that it governs the country and is recognized as the government by other countries) found itself under physical attack, (and for the sake of argument whether we agree or not on this point) is that government not allowed to defend itself from physical threat?
DS: The simple answer of yes or no in a particular circumstance as well as the answer to “How much mass slaughter is acceptably characterized as defense”? is not empirically answerable by a scientist or a lawyer and, as you know, is answered by the U.S. and allied nations as they see fit. What I would consider a moral answer is of course a completely different one.
KP: You wrote: “If the United States and Russia escalate a joint bombing campaign in Syria, things will go from very bad to even worse for those not killed in the process.”
With all due respect, this comes across as an assertion; one could equally assert the opposite: if fanatical “insurgents,” “rebels,” “mercenaries,” etc. (whatever monikers one wishes to attach to the forces seeking to depose the government) are allowed to attack without resistance and depose the government then the situation will surely become a hell, and the evidence for this is the smoldering carcass of the formerly leading African nation of Libya.
DS: It’s not an assertion. It’s a guarantee. But it’s not exclusive of your worry, as the U.S. is not setting aside overthrowing the government and throwing the region into chaos and likely putting ISIS in power. Clinton says Obama was wrong not to bomb and overthrow the government three years ago, and she intends to do so.
KP: You wrote: “Of course the U.S. went ahead with arming and training and bombing on a much smaller scale. Of course Russia joined in, killing even more Syrians with its bombs than the United States was doing, and it was indeed deeply disturbing to see U.S. peace activists cheer for that. Of course the Syrian government went on with its bombings and other crimes, and of course it’s disturbing that some refuse to criticize those horrors, just as it’s disturbing that others refuse to criticize the U.S. or Russian horrors or both, or refuse to criticize Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Iran or Israel.”
By trying to come across as evenhanded in your criticism, I submit a bias arises. Do you agree or disagree that if Saudi-, Qatari-, western-backed “rebels” had not launched/supported an attempted coup that there would have been no need for the Syrian government to defend the country (and, of course, the government) and there would have been no need to ask Russia to intervene or Iran or Hezbollah?
DS: The Syrian government cracked down on a mostly Syrian opposition before it became such a proxy war — which excuses the ongoing mass murder by absolutely nobody. [This narrative by Swanson has been compellingly refuted by independent journalist Eva Bartlett who has often been on the ground in Syria during the fighting.5 ]
KP: If my contention is factual, then why focus equal blame on the resistance to the “rebels”? The rebels made war, and this gave rise to resist the “rebels.”
DS: Blaming everyone engaged in making a situation worse does not mean blaming them all equally, and I have certainly never tried to imply such a thing which would of course be ridiculous.
Yet, it is known that from the beginning, in Dara’a and throughout Syria, armed protesters were firing upon, and butchering, security forces and civilians. Tim Anderson’s “Syria: how the violence began, in Daraa” pointed out that police were killed by snipers in the March 17/18 protests; the Syrian army was only brought to Dara’a following the murder of the policemen. Additionally, a storage of protesters’ weapons was found in Dara’a’s al-Omari mosque.
Prem Shankar Jha’s, “Who Fired The First Shot?” described the slaughter of 20 Syrian soldiers outside Dara’a a month later, “by cutting their throats, and cutting off the head of one of the soldiers.” A very “moderate”-rebel practice.
In “Syria: The Hidden Massacre” Sharmine Narwani investigated the early massacres of Syrian soldiers, noting that many of the murders occurred even after the Syrian government had abolished the state security courts, lifted the state of emergency, granted general amnesties, and recognized the right to peaceful protest.
The April 10, 2011 murder of Banyas farmer Nidal Janoud was one of the first horrific murders of Syrian civilians by so-called “unarmed protesters.” Face gashed open, mutilated and bleeding, Janoud was paraded by an armed mob, who then hacked him to death.
Father Frans Van der Ludt—the Dutch priest living in Syria for nearly 5 decades prior to his April 7, 2014 assassination by militants occupying the old city of Homs—wrote (repeatedly) of the “armed demonstrators” he saw in early protests, “who began to shoot at the police first.”
• Local officials become influencers
• Schools strengthen digital education
• Expanding GM soybean and corn areas
• Iraq will use yuan in oil trade with China
“Persons taking no active part in hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” (Common Article 3 to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions of 1949)
High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of Iraq’s Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27, 1991.
Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq’s acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, retreating Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990.
Nonetheless, President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement “an outrage” and “a cruel hoax.”
The Home of the Brave, it seems, wasn’t quite ready to stop the massacre.
“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours,” says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist.
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” one U.S. pilot said.
Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: “Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice because it took too long to load.”
“When you see the battlefield littered with dead bodies as far as you can see and there’s smoke swirling around, and the smell of the dead bodies, the ammunition, the fuel, the explosions; it’s very overpowering,” said Paul Sullivan, a combat veteran from Operation Desert Storm who went on to create the National Gulf War Resource Center.
Sullivan later described the so-called “Highway of Death” as “miles and miles and miles of charred trucks, tanks, blown up buildings, pieces of arms, pieces of legs every which way.”
“Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all,” adds U.S. Attorney General-turned-peace activist, Ramsey Clark, “but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers.”
“Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments,” Chediac reported after visiting the “Highway of Death” scene in 1991. “No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.”
“At one spot,” Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, “snarling wild dogs had reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds picked at another — only a boot-clad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable.”
“Even in Vietnam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” said Army intelligence officer and eyewitness, Major Bob Nugent.
When you’re talking about America, it’s not pathetic… it’s policy.
I wrote the following column ten years ago. Note the absence of any accountability or regret by Bush, Cheney and their co-war criminals.
Ten years ago [now 20 years ago, on March 19, 2003] George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies, propaganda and cover-ups that duped or co-opted leading news institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Wars of aggression – this one blowing apart a country of 25 million people ruled by a weakened despot surrounded by far more powerful adversaries – Israel, Turkey, and Iran – are major crimes under international law and the UN Charter. The Bush-Cheney war was also unconstitutional, never declared by Congress, as Senator Robert Byrd eloquently pointed out at the time. Moreover, many of the acts of torture and brutality perpetrated against the Iraqi people are illegal under various federal statutes.
Over one million Iraqis died due to the invasion, the occupation and the denial of health and safety necessities for infants, children and adults. Far more Iraqis were injured and sickened. Birth defects and cancers continue to set lethal records. Five million Iraqis became refugees, many fleeing into Jordan, Syria and other countries.
Nearly five thousand U.S. soldiers died. Many other soldiers committed suicide. Well over 150,000 Americans were injured or sickened, far more than the official Pentagon under-estimate which restricts nonfatal casualty counts only to those incurred directly in the line of fire.
So far, the Iraq War has monetarily cost taxpayers about $2 trillion. Tens of billions more will be spent for veteran’s disabilities in addition to continuing expenses in Iraq. Taxpayers are paying over $600 million a year to guard the giant U.S. Embassy and its personnel in Baghdad, more than what our government spends for OSHA, whose task is to reduce the number of American workers who die annually from workplace disease and trauma – currently about 58,000.
All for what results? Before the invasion, there was no al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship. Now a growing al-Qaeda in Iraq is terrorizing the country with ever bolder car bombings, and suicide attacks taking dozens of lives at a time and spilling forcefully over into Syria.
Iraq is a police state with sectarian struggles between the dominant Shiites and the insurgent Sunnis who lived together peacefully and intermarried for centuries. There were no sectarian slaughters of this kind before the invasion, except for Saddam Hussein’s bloodbath against rebellious Shiites. The Shiites were egged on by President George H.W. Bush, who promptly abandoned them to the deadly strafing by Saddam’s helicopter gunships at the end of the preventable first Gulf War in 1991.
Iraq is a country in ruins with a political and wealthy upper class raking off profits from the oil industry. The U.S. is now widely hated in that part of Asia. Bush-Cheney ordered the use of cluster bombs, comprised of white phosphorous and depleted uranium, against the people of Fallujah where infant birth deformities have skyrocketed.
As Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American analyst observed, “Complete destruction of the Iraqi national identity.” Moreover, the sectarian system introduced by the U.S. invaders in 2003, resulting in Iraqis being favored or excluded based on their sectarian and ethnic affiliations, laid the basis for the current cruel chaos and violence – a nasty, brutish form of divide and rule.
The results back home in our country are soldiers and their extended families suffering in many ways from broken lives. Phil Donahue’s gripping documentary Body of War follows the pain-wracked life of one soldier returning in 2004 from Iraq as a paraplegic. That soldier, Tomas Young, nearing the end of his devastated life, has just written a penetrating letter to George W. Bush, which every American should read.
The lessons from this unnecessary quagmire should be: first, how to stop any more wars of aggression by the Washington warmongers – the same neocon draft dodgers are at it again regarding Iran and Syria. And second, the necessity to hold accountable the leading perpetrators of this brutal carnage and financial wreckage who are presently at large – fugitives from justice earning fat lecture and consulting fees.
In the nine months running up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, at least three hundred prominent, retired military officers, diplomats and national security officials publicly spoke out against the Bush-Cheney drumbeats to war. Their warnings were prophetically accurate. They included retired Generals Anthony Zinni and William Odom, and Admiral Shanahan. Even Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, two of President George H.W. Bush’s closest advisors, strongly opposed the invasion.
These outspoken truthsayers, notwithstanding their prestige and experience, were overwhelmed by a runaway White House, a disgraceful patsy mainstream media and an abdicatory Congress. Multi-billionaire George Soros was also courageously outspoken. Unfortunately, prior to the invasion, he did not provide a budget and secretariat for these men and women to provide continuity and to multiply their numbers around the country, through the mass media and on Capitol Hill. By the time he came around to organizing and publicizing such an organized effort, it was after the invasion, in July 2003.
Nine months earlier, I believe George Soros could have provided the necessary resources to stop Bush-Cheney and their lies from stampeding our government and our country into war.
Mr. Soros can still build the grassroots pressure for the exercise of the rule of law under our Constitution and move Congress toward public hearings in the Senate designed to establish an investigative arm of the Justice Department to pursue the proper enforcement against Bush/Cheney and their accomplices.
After all, the Justice Department had such a special prosecutors’ office during the Watergate scandal and was moving to indict a resigned Richard Nixon before President Ford pardoned him.
Compare the Watergate break-in and obstruction of justice by Nixon, with the horrendous crimes coming out of the Bush and Cheney war against Iraq – a nation that never threatened the U.S. but whose destruction takes a continuing toll on our country.
[Additional note: As Senators, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voted for the Iraq war in 2003. Will President Biden, Congress and other Americans recognize the massive war crimes committed against the Iraqi people with appropriate declarations and actions on March 19, 2023?].
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.
When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, while the IAEA’s denial was hidden by the ‘news’-media — censored-out by them all (except for only one tiny and unclear news-story that only one small news-medium published three weeks later and few people even noticed — and which news-report didn’t even so much as just mention that it had related to the U.S. President’s allegation, much less that it disproved that allegation: that America’s President had lied his country into — deceived his own public into supporting — that invasion).
This is an example of censorship to require lies, and to prohibit truths. And that is what censorship is generally intended to do. An author can write or say truths, but if no one will publish it, what good is it? What good is such ‘freedom of the press’? What good was it? (The IAEA knew.) None, at all (except for the international corporations that profited from America’s takeover of Iraq, and that served them by publishing those clients’ propaganda as ‘news’, such as in “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).
I specialize in documenting such censorship to enforce lies and prohibit truths, but I find that the public isn’t much concerned about this problem; most people simply assume it doesn’t even exist, and that if any censorship does exist, it is to prohibit lies instead of truths (the exact opposite of what it really is). They are thus doubly deceived. On December 27th, Russia’s RT headlined “Every social media firm censors for US government”, documenting that claim with links to the sources, and noting that it pertains to at least Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, and Pinterest, and that it’s controlled by collusion between those corporations and the Government in order to hide truths — including partisan political truths — so as to pump up the public’s support for current Governmental policies, to continue those policies by continuing those leaders in office. It’s essential to retaining the regime.
group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday).
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
It wasn’t “nonpartisan,” and it was, instead, censorship to enforce lies — not to prohibit them — and that ‘news’paper was praising it by spreading its lies about itself (i.e., that the WP wasn’t itself one of the top spreaders of “fake ‘news’” — which, like all mainstream (and many non-mainstream) ‘news’-peddlers, it was and is). In fact: many of the “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” were publishing more truths and less lies than such mainstream ‘news’-media as the WP itself was and does. But that’s an unpublishable truth, because it’s a truth that exposes themselves to be precisely what they condemn.
If you want to be censored-out from America’s mainstream — and from most of America’s non-mainstream — ‘news’ media, just prove that they are fraudulent; that’ll do it, every time.
There was no accountability for either Bush’s, or his ‘news’-media’s, lying America into invading and occupying Iraq — providing knowingly false ‘justifications’ for that (in order to do it ‘democratically’ — with support by the majority of voters). However, to expose, such lying, gets a journalist censored-out 100% (in this anything-but-democratic country).
On 5 February 2003, U.S. SecState Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council urging its authorization to invade (which didn’t come). He said that Saddam’s Government was hiding crucial information, and “Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq’s nuclear program. Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?” The next day, all major U.S. newspapers editorialized that, as the Washington Post headlined “Irrefutable”, saying that, “Whether Iraq is disarmed through the authority of the United Nations or whether the United States effectively assumes responsibility depends on how the Security Council responds.” In other words: this issue was to stand as a test not of the U.S., but of the U.N. And definitely not of the ‘news’-media, at all. On 22 March 2019, the WP’s “Fact Checker” columnist issued a 2,000+word retrospective, “The Iraq War and WMDs: An intelligence failure or White House spin?” which concluded “It’s too fuzzy for the Pinocchio Test [“True” vs. “False”], as it also falls in the realm of opinion [supposedly meaning statements that are neither true nor false but ONLY about what the person wants others to believe — and that statement about “opinion” is itself FALSE]”; and, so, he was alleging, both the “Bush administration” and its intelligence agencies had failed (even though both actually succeeded because they — with the assistance of the Washington Post and others — had deceived the public). His lengthy column 100% avoided any reference to the IAEA — whose Bush-alleged but non-existent “new report” had gotten the regime’s PR campaign to invade Iraq started. Nobody (certainly no U.S. ‘news’-medium) even noticed that the IAEA as the alleged source of the nuclear allegation had somehow mysteriously disappeared (much less wondered why it disappeared in the press, and from the Government). Colin Powell’s speech made no mention of the IAEA. There was constant hiding of the fact that America’s President had lied in order to start the allegation as having originated from the IAEA (the U.N.-authorized investigation-agency on nuclear matters — and Powell was addressing the U.N.). The media hid his lies, and their own lies, to back up the U.S. president’s lies. And (unlike on issues that are politically partisan in the U.S.) this was unanimous lying, by the U.S.-and-allied press.
I shall here cite my own personal experience to explain why I think that the public (which is so deceived as to be largely supportive of censorship) should be very much concerned about this (censorship), if they care at all about democracy. The incident in which the invasion of Iraq resulted from censorship is what had caused me, in 2002, to focus upon this problem, because it made clear to me that I was living under a dictatorship. I hadn’t previously been certain of this subsequently proven fact about America. So: that incident was a turning-point for me. A second such turning-point for me was the start in 2014 of the war in Ukraine:
Back in or around 2014, 43 international-news media were publishing my articles, and some of them were mainstream liberal media, some were mainstream conservative, and others were libertarian, but the vast majority were non-mainstream. When Barack Obama in February 2014 perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there on Russia’s border and that was instead ‘reported’ as-if it had been a ‘democratic revolution’, which coup-imposed regime perpetrated a massacre against its pro-Russian protestors inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May 2014 (see especially the charred bodies of its victims at 1:50:00- in that video), I started writing about Ukraine; and, then, those 43 international-news sites gradually whittled themselves down to only 7; and, yet, none of them ever alleged that anything in any of my articles was false and asked me to prove it true, but they were instead getting pressure from Google, and from the FBI, and from other Establishment U.S. entities, and were afraid of being forced out of business (which many of them ultimately were) by them. The personal narrative that will now be provided here is about the latest of these cases, which threatens the site Modern Diplomacy, which had been an excellent international-affairs news site and included writers from all across the international-affairs news spectrum, for and against every Government’s policies, and from practically every angle. I had long been expecting MD (because of its impartiality) to receive a warning from the U.S. regime, and this finally happened late in December 2022, when the site’s founder, D., sent me this notice:
I ask you please to explain to me, and to the webmaster at moderndiplomacy.eu, why your organization — well, here is what he sent me about what your organization did:
[I pasted in D.’s message to me.]
As you can see there, he is afraid (that’s a weak version of terrorized) that your organization will downgrade his site because of his site’s posting some of my articles.
It seems to me that there are two reasonable types of responses that you can give him and me:
Either you will cite falsehoods in one or more of my articles at his site
(but, of course, you could also do that regarding any edition of the New York Times or Washington Post; so, why would that be a reason?), or else:
You could search to find such falsehoods, find none, ask your employee why he or she is terrorizing that webmaster and (essentially) indirectly threatening me; and, if that employee fails to provide a reasonable and entirely true answer, which justifies what he or she has done, fire that person and inform the rest of your staff that you have done so and explain to all of them WHY you fired the employee, so that they all can then know to STOP DOING THIS!!!
Sincerely,
Eric Zuesse
Brill didn’t respond. So, I sent to D.:
I take my not having received a reply from either Steven Brill or you to be an ominous sign, because, suddenly, none of my recent articles has been posted by your site. Would you please explain? (If you are cancelling me as an author, I shall remove your site from my submissions-list.) After all, you said “They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.” Did they state what those “false claims” were? Did you ask them? I very much doubt that they were able to find anything in any of my articles that is false. No one has ever before, to my knowledge, alleged any assertion in any of my articles to be false. I don’t ever make a claim that is false. I am EXCEEDINGLY careful. And any assertion in any of my articles that I think some readers MIGHT find questionable I provide a link to its documentation. So, I would distrust that allegation from Brill’s organization and consider it to be likely a lie from them in order to censor out from the news-media information that the U.S. regime wishes the public not to know. Would you not want to know whether that allegation from them was merely an excuse to censor out from your site information that they don’t want the public to know?
D. responded:
Dear Eric,
Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your efforts in contacting newsguard, although I was surprised to see that you used my message I sent you in your contact email without my consent. Now they know I took it seriously. Anyway, I decided to stop publishing your articles — at least for a while and see how it goes. Part of my decision was of course the threats (not only from them) but also the fact that you are spreading them to a lot of websites and that google considers it as “scraped content”. I will try to stay in exclusive content although I appreciate your work and your courage.
I worked really hard these 10 years for MD and still can’t monetize it to support the expenses and me of course. Also I am tired and I am thinking about the possibility to find a buyer and stand back. Just keep it in mind, in case you find someone interested in it.
Of course we can stay in touch and keep sending me your articles — at least to have the opportunity to read them.
Below, you will find newsguard allegations concerning your articles. Please don’t use it to reply to them — we both know that there is no use. Instead, maybe you can write a new piece debunking them.
Kind Regards
D.
Here is what he had received from News Guard, and which I shall here debunk [between brackets]:
We found that Modern Diplomacy articles often link to sites rated as unreliable by NewsGuard for promoting false information, such as OrientalReview.org, pro-Kremlin site TheDuran.com, and en.interaffairs.ru <http://en.interaffairs.ru> , owned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The site has also republished articles from sites such as The Gray Zone, rated unfavorably by NewsGuard for repeatedly publishing false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war and Syrian chemical attacks. Could you comment on why Modern Diplomacy republishes or links to sites which consistently promote false claims?
[Rating allegations as “true” or as “false” ON THE BASIS OF the identity of the SITE instead of on the basis of the specific allegation in the specific article (or video) is a standard method of deception of the public, which censors employ to distract and manipulate individuals (readers, etc.) by appealing to their existing prejudices such as (for an American conservative or Republican) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Times” or (for an American liberal or Democrat) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Post” (or, for both, “Russia is bad and wrong, and America is good and right”). It is appealing to prejudices and emotions, instead of to facts and evidence — it is NOT appealing to actual truth and falsity. It is a method of deception.]
We also found that ModernDiplomacy.eu has repeatedly published false and misleading claims about the Russia-Ukraine war.
For example, a June 2022 article titled “Have Europeans been profoundly deceived?,” claims to provide evidence that “A coup occurred in Ukraine during February 2014 under the cover of pro-EU demonstrations that the U.S. Government had been organizing ever since at least June 2011.”
[The word “coup” in that article was linked to this video, every detail of which I have carefully checked and verified to include ONLY evidence that is authentic — and no one has contested any of the evidence in it. The first item of evidence that is referred-to in this video is at 0:35, which item is the audio of a private phone-conversation between two top EU officials in which one, who was in Kiev while the coup was occurring, reported to his boss, who wanted to know whether it was a revolution or instead a coup, and he reported to her that it was a coup, and described to her the evidence, which convinced her. My article later says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of what he was telling her, and of what her response to it indicated — that though it was a disappointment to her, she wouldn’t let the fact that it had been a coup affect EU policies).” This news-reporting is of real evidence, not distractions, not any appeal to the reader’s (and listener’s) prejudices, either. But Mr. Brill’s employee apparently didn’t check my article’s sources (gave no indication of having clicked onto any of my links), because he or she was judging on the basis purely of that person’s own prejudices — NOT upon the basis of any evidence. Then, at 3:35 in that video, is audio of another private phone-conversation, which was of Obama’s planner of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling his Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get appointed to run the stooge-regime after the coup will be over, “Yats” Yatsenyuk, which then was done. My article also says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of whom she was referring to in it, and why).” The reference to “June 2011” had appeared in this passage from a prior article of mine, where that two-word phrase linked to Julian Assange’s personal account of the matter — the Obama Administration’s early planning-stage for the coup in Ukraine — that explains how those “pro-EU demonstrations” had been engineered by Obama’s agents. So: everything in that paragraph by Brill’s employee was fully documented in my links — which that person didn’t care to check.]
However, there is no evidence that the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych was a coup orchestrated by the United States. …Angry protesters demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and hundreds of police officers guarding government buildings abandoned their posts. Yanukovych fled the same day the agreement was signed, and protesters took control of several government buildings the next day. The Ukrainian parliament then voted 328-0 to remove Yanukovych from office and scheduled early presidential elections the following May, the BBC reported. These events, often collectively referred to as the “Maidan revolution,” were extensively covered by international media organizations with correspondents in Ukraine, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?
A March 2022 article titled “Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?” states that “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.”
In fact, Nazis are not running Ukraine. … Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote. Svoboda currently holds one parliamentary seat.
In February 2022, U.S. news site the Jewish Journal published a statement signed by 300 scholars of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II, which said that “the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime” is “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.” Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, addressed the Russian public in a Feb. 24, 2022, speech, saying that these claims do not reflect the “real” Ukraine. “You are told we are Nazis. But could people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim [that “the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there”], despite evidence to the contrary?
[Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee simply ignores my evidence — fails even to click onto my links whenever he disagrees with an allegation that has a link. Here was my published assertion, as it was published: “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.” The evidence is right there, just a click away, but Mr. Brill’s employee again wasn’t interested in seeing the evidence. (Nor is Brill himself.)]
An April 2022 article titled “Authentic War-Reporting From Ukraine,” promotes a video report by pro-Kremlin journalist, Patrick Lancaster, filmed in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The article asserts that Ukraine was “constantly shelling into that region in order to kill and/or compell to flee anybody who lived in that region […] It was an ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of enough of those residents so that, if ever that area would again become integrated into Ukraine and its remaining residents would therefore be voting again in Ukrainian national elections, the U.S.-installed nazi Ukrainian regime will ‘democratically’ be able to continue to rule in Ukraine.” (The article also repeats the claim that the 2014 revolution was a US-backed coup, and makes the unverified claim that “The CIA has instructed all of Ukraine’s nazis (or racist-fascists) to suppress their anti-Semitism and White Supremacy until after Ukraine has become admitted into NATO.”)
The claim that Ukraine conducted an “ethnic cleansing” in the Donbas echoes a falsehood propagated by the Russian government for years. There is no evidence supporting the claim that genocide occurred in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas. The International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in Donbas. The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb. 16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account. It said that the mission “has complete access to the government-controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims.”
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?
[Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee relies upon people’s opinions — but ONLY ones who agree with his — instead of any evidence at all. Here, on behalf of myself, and of Modern Diplomacy, and of Patrick Lancaster (INSTEAD OF on behalf of Lockheed Martin and the other U.S.-and-allied international-corporate entities that are profiting from this war), are nine news-reports linking to actual evidence which disproves those opinions:
These self-styled truth-policemen of the Web represent the regime, and came into being after the Web itself did. The Web enabled — for the first time in history — articles to be published and read that link to their sources, and this opened up a new possibility and reality, in which the online readers could actually evaluate ON THEIR OWN (by clicking onto such links) the evidence. That upset the billionaires’ applecarts of ‘authoritative opinion’ (which they have hired) so that authoritarianism (which they control) could become replaced by facts (which they can’t).
The least reliable means of forming or even of changing one’s opinions are means such as ink-on-paper allegations (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that cannot even POSSIBLY provide immediate direct online links to the items of evidence; and the MOST reliable means are online articles and books (such as my new one, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, whose ebook versions do document allegations by means of such online links — it’s the first-ever book to do so) which constantly bring directly to one’s computer or other Web-online device the items of evidence whenever the reader has any doubt about a given allegation’s veracity or not. That way the individual can form one’s opinion on the basis only of the evidence.
Anyone whose opinions are based upon the opinions of other people who believe as that person does, instead of on the basis of purely the facts of the matter and of ONE’S OWN investigations seeking out evidence both for and evidence against any alleged fact, will simply believe the myths that one already believes, and will only become more and more convinced of those falsehoods, as one grows older.
The function of censorship is to prohibit spreading truths. It poisons democracy, to death. Censors kill democracies. That’s what they are being paid to do. And they do it.
On December 6, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels and former U.S. President George W. Bush will appear together on a Purdue stage at an event billed by the university as a conversation on “leadership and citizenship.” Daniels is completing a nearly 10-year term as Purdue president. Previously, Daniels served from 2001-2003 as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush White House. The event is meant to celebrate both of their legacies.
Plans are underway for Daniels and Bush to be greeted that night by Purdue students, faculty and community members there for a different reason: to protest Bush and Daniels’s roles in the murderous U.S. war against the people of Iraq in the name of the “war on terror.”
As president, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, supposedly in retaliation for 9/11. As his budget director, Daniels priced the war for him at $50-60 billion. The subsequent U.S. onslaught produced devastation for the Iraqi people. More than 200,000 civilians died and more than 9.2 million Iraqis were displaced by the U.S. war. Kali Rubaii, a Purdue professor of anthropology, has documented high rates of birth defects in Iraq that may be the result of uranium and heavy metal exposure from U.S. weapons and burn pits meant to destroy the detritus of war. At least 800,000 Iraqi children were made orphans by the war. And despite Daniels’s original low projections, the U.S. has now spent approximately $2 trillion to date on the Iraq war, while more than 4,500 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives fighting it. All of this carnage against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Even U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious allegations of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” were later admitted by Powell himself to have been the result of deceitful intelligence.
The Bush-Daniels summit meeting at a public university seeking to glorify and whitewash Iraq’s apocalypse might be seen as a parable for the rise of what Henry A. Giroux has called the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (MIAC). In his 2007 book, The University in Chains, Giroux documented how since the Cold War the U.S. academy had been a recurring site for research, investment and collaboration with the U.S. military-state in proliferating war and war profiteering across the planet. This trend was massively jumpstarted by 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security, created by the Bush administration, distributed billions of dollars to universities to support national security research and programming.
In January 2006, at the University Presidents Summit, then-President Bush announced the “National Security Language Initiative,” funneling millions of dollars from the Departments of State, Education and Defense to promote the study of Arabic as a part of the state’s Islamophobic security apparatus. In 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates launched the “Minerva Research Initiative,” providing university grants for social science research that focuses “on areas of strategic importance to the U.S. national security policy.” To date, the initiative has funded hundreds of university faculty projects intended to improve “our basic understanding of security.” Funded faculty projects include “Combatting Chinese Influence in Contested and Non-Contested Territories” and “Foreign Military Training: Building Effective Armed Forces in Weak States.”
For Giroux, the MIAC’s function has been not only to support the advent and advance of U.S. wars, but to link the privatization of public education to the eradication of critical thinking about the contours of U.S. political and economic empire. Indeed, Daniels’s reign at Purdue is a continuation of the university’s own long promotion of academic militarization. In 2002, it opened the Purdue Homeland Security Institute, one of the first in the United States. The institute partners with U.S. military branches, the Department of Homeland Security, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security and Indiana State Police to conduct research into topics like “active shooter” situations. It also offers no-cost graduate education to active-duty military officers.
Since Daniels’s arrival as president in 2013, the university has further muscled up its military bona fides. In 2019, the Swedish manufacturer Saab announced it would build the airframe for the T-7A Redhawk fighter jet at Purdue’s Discovery Research Park to help train the “next generation of fighter and bomber pilots.” Daniels extolled the collaboration as a chance for Purdue to lead in “protecting the security of Americans.” In February 2021, Purdue received Department of Defense funding to participate in a consortial research project into advancing the adoption of lead-free electronics in defense systems. More recently, in August 2022, Department of Defense Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks was given a tour of the campus’s research and development facilities, including its nanotechnology. “We are investing heavily in the infrastructure, human and physical, to design, test and develop the systems necessary to protect the freedoms Americans enjoy,” said Daniels of the visit.
Daniels’s enthusiasm for war-making in the name of empire is a grisly but logical evolution of his role preparing the budget for a national war his then-boss President Bush described as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” But as Giroux has argued, the militarization of the American state and the militarization of the American university are symptomatic of other forms of racial, political and economic violence at work in the U.S.
Daniels, for example, earned himself the nickname “The Blade” while working as White House budget director for his alleged budget-balancing feats and commitment to austerity. Yet many students at Purdue, especially students of color, will tell you that Daniels’s weaponized nickname cuts in more than one way.
For example, in November 2019, Daniels drew national fire for telling a group of Black students that the university was recruiting “one of the rarest creatures in America,” a leading Black scholar. Daniels later apologized for the comment, but it reminded many students that the university leader had been conspicuously unsupportive when openly white supremacist posters were found tacked up on the university campus in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. Daniels first said of the posters it was “not at all clear what they mean” despite their use of classic Nazi imagery. Demanding a stronger condemnation of the posters, students occupied the university administration building. When the president refused to meet with them, they remained in the building throughout the spring term.
Student vulnerabilities reflected the general rise of racist militarization on college campuses in the U.S., such as the white nationalists who began their murderous feats at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 with a torch-lit march across the University of Virginia campus. Trump as a presidential candidate frequently invoked 9/11, then enacted a Muslim ban once elected. International student applications to the U.S. dropped accordingly.
Trump’s Department of Education sustained the Islamophobic project of 9/11 by demanding that the Duke-University of North Carolina Consortium for Middle East Studies (CMES) revise its curriculum or risk losing federal funding. A letter sent from the Education Department read, “It seems clear foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities at the Duke-UNC CMES.” The letter also said that the CMES was inappropriately promoting the “positive aspects of Islam.”
Organizers at Purdue are using this poster (and its QR code) to spread awareness of the protest planned for December 6.Courtesy of Bill V. Mullen
Episodes like these are reminders that the MIAC is both a structural and lived experience, especially for non-white and non-Christian denizens of U.S. universities, and that a true legacy of the war on terror within the United States has been an increasing atmosphere of racial policing, surveillance and academic militarization. Indeed, rhetoric of academic diversity and liberal multiculturalism on university campuses now easily coexists with rising militarism. When Purdue and Saab announced their partnership to build fighter planes, both highlighted that the “Red Tail” design on the aircraft was an ode to the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black aviators in the U.S. Air Force Army Corps in World War II. The use of racial diversity to promote U.S. warfare is a mask for the human costs of war — for both its victims and those who fight it.
More senior students on campus worry too that Bush’s role in the war on terror and the war on Iraq itself have been erased from historical memory for the current generation. Paige Frazier, a Ph.D. student in Purdue’s American Studies Program who plans to protest, said:
Many in Purdue’s undergraduate class are too young to remember Bush as a war criminal. George Bush lied to the American people, spent trillions of tax dollars on an unjust war, and caused immeasurable pain and suffering in Iraq and here at home. It is appalling that Mitch Daniels and other Purdue leaders believe that George W. Bush’s presence on campus will be somehow beneficial for our student body.
In the meantime, the MIAC has become big business. U.S. News and World Report now lists and ranks “Homeland Security Programs” across U.S. universities while the Office of Homeland Security boasts an Office of University Programs which “harnesses the intellectual power of America’s universities to provide innovative research, development, and education to the Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE).” College Factual meanwhile estimates that at least 7,000 degrees in Homeland Security were granted in the academic year 2021-2022, with an average starting salary of $52,000. Purdue Global University meanwhile offers an “Online Master’s Degree in Homeland Security and Emergency Management.” Purdue Global is itself a new Frankensteinian entry into the MIAC, a public online university built from Purdue’s 2018 purchase — for one dollar — of the for-profit online Kaplan University. Purdue Global is operated by the Purdue Board of Trustees and described as a “public benefit corporation.” It expands the MIAC footprint into a global market of thousands of virtual degree consumers both inside and outside of the U.S.
It is these sprawling conditions spawned by and through the war on terror — and its bedfellow Military-Industrial-Academic Complex — that activists, organizers and people of conscience will be protesting as George W. Bush and Mitch Daniels take the stage at Purdue. One faculty member joining the protest who requested anonymity for fear of retribution said of the event:
It is inappropriate for a man who deceived the American public to launch an illegal invasion, ignored the mass protests of his own citizens and sent thousands of Iraqis and Americans to their deaths, to be speaking at a public university that prides itself on integrity. We take this as an opportunity to do a teach-in to educate ourselves about the history and costs of militarism in our lives.
And said one local Democratic Socialists of America organizer who plans to protest:
George W. Bush and his administration represent corruption, lawlessness and militarism. This legacy is the complete opposite of the things a university should dedicate itself to. We hope that all members of the community will turn out to demonstrate their opposition to this ill-conceived invitation.
The organizers and activists will hold a teach-in and speak-out on December 6 as part of their protest. Their organizing efforts include this petition to protest Bush’s appearance and circulating the scannable QR code on the poster accompanying this story. The protesters’ rally will be in solidarity with other national movements to demilitarize university campuses, like the national Cops Off Campus Coalition and Dissenters, a group committed to reclaiming resources from the war industry. These movements align with ongoing battles to demilitarize K-12 education as documented in Scott Harding and Seth Kershner’s 2015 book, Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools. The protest efforts also fall under the broad banner of the contemporary abolitionist movement, which seeks restorative justice and a redistribution of public goods from death-making institutions like war and prisons to life-making activities like schools. Those protesting the Bush-Daniels summit will thus be fighting both in memory of those martyred by the U.S. war against Iraq and for a world that includes the right to live and build alternatives to state violence, racism and empire.
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.
War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.
Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.
The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.
“Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”
The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
NEW: President George W. Bush, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen will participate in the Bush Institute’s Nov. 16 event on advancing freedom.
— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) November 10, 2022
To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.
Bush, you may remember, drew headlines and laughter earlier this year with his Freudian confession in which he accused Vladimir Putin of launching “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine.” The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the US empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.
Also appearing with Bush will be the leader who’s slated to become the face of the US empire’s next proxy war, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. CNN writes:
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will also take part in the event next week. She will deliver a recorded message, in which she is expected to underscore that the struggle for freedom is a global challenge.
And sure, why not. If you’re going to manufacture consent for proxy warfare against multiple powers as your empire flails around frantically scrambling to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, you may as well save time and promote them all on the same ticket.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX
Many people who support the US proxy war in Ukraine now recognize that the Iraq war was a horrific disaster, but Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war. Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the war that’s currently being pushed by the propaganda of today. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.
It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Australian Robert Pether, jailed in Baghdad last year over a business dispute, has penned an emotional letter warning his prognosis is “bleak”, his human rights are being violated, and he is facing a potential “death sentence”.
In the letter to his family, released to Guardian Australia, Pether also reveals his daily torment about how he should break it to his children that he might not be coming home.
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.
In Part 1, we described how state-corporate media non-reporting of evidence relating to the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines on September 26 was an example of how the truth on key issues is increasingly being quarantined from public awareness by ‘mainstream’ media.
At first sight, our second example might appear to contradict this claim.
To its credit, in several news reports, and in an hour-long film, ‘Under Poisoned Skies’, the BBC provided news from Iraq that will have shocked many readers and viewers (in truth, it is a shock to read any UK media news on life in Iraq):
‘Communities living close to oil fields, where gas is openly burned, are at elevated risk of leukaemia, a BBC News Arabic investigation has revealed.’
By BBC standards, the report was absolutely damning:
‘The UN told the BBC it considers these areas, in Iraq, to be “modern sacrifice zones” – where profit has been prioritised over human rights.
Some of the worst ‘modern sacrifice zones’ are found on the outskirts of Basra, in the south-east of Iraq, ‘some of the country’s biggest oil exploration areas’. Flared gases from these sites are dangerous because they emit a mix of carbon dioxide, methane and black soot which is carcinogenic.
If this sounds bad, it gets worse when we consider just who has been subordinating Iraqi human welfare to profit in this way:
‘BP and Eni are major oil companies we identified as working on these sites.’
Eni is an Italian multinational energy company. BP, of course, is one of the world’s oil and gas ‘supermajors’, and is British.
In other words, these BBC reports highlighted the rarely discussed fact that a British oil giant is deeply involved in a country that was illegally invaded in 2003, at the cost of one million Iraqi lives, on a pack of bogus claims relating to ‘national security’ and ‘human rights’. The 2003 war was, of course, waged by a coalition led by the United States and Britain. Italy was part of the coalition.
Not only did this US-UK war crime secure substantial quantities of Iraq’s oil for US and UK corporations, but BP has now been accused of creating environmental mayhem in Iraq. The BBC reported:
‘A leaked Iraq Health Ministry report, seen by BBC Arabic, blames air pollution for a 20% rise in cancer in Basra between 2015 and 2018.
‘As part of this investigation, the BBC undertook the first pollution monitoring testing amongst the exposed communities. The results indicated high levels of exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.
‘Using satellite data we found that the largest of Basra’s oil fields, Rumaila, flares more gas than any other site in the world. The Iraqi government owns this field, and BP is the lead contractor.
‘On the field is a town called North Rumaila – which locals call “the cemetery”. Teenagers coined the phrase after they observed high levels of leukaemia amongst their friends, which they suspect is from the flaring.
‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’
This was a truly shocking comment; no wonder the BBC initially used it as the headline for its report:
‘BP in oil field where “cancer is like the flu”’
The News Sniffer website, which tracks edits made to media articles, found that this headline only lasted a few hours before being toned down to:
‘BP in oil field where “cancer is rife”’
Remarkably, the less dramatic headline and citation was actually fake. The relevant part of the text reads:
‘Prof Shukri Al Hassan, a local environmental scientist, told us that cancer here is so rife it is “like the flu”.’
Professor Al Hassan was not quoted as using the word ‘rife’, nor was anyone else quoted in the article. The edited headline was simply made up.
The BBC quoted Dr Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, professor of childhood cancer at Columbia University:
‘The children have strikingly high levels [of cancer-causing chemicals]… this is concerning for [their] health and suggests they should be monitored closely.’
The BBC report also gave us an idea of the nature of the ‘democracy’ installed in Iraq by the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation. The leaked Iraqi health ministry report shows the government is aware of the region’s health issues:
‘But Iraq’s own prime minister issued a confidential order – which was also seen by BBC Arabic – banning its employees from speaking about health damage caused by pollution.’
David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, told the BBC that people living near oil fields are ‘the victims of state-business collusion, and lack the political power in most cases to achieve change’.
Ali Hussein, a 19-year-old childhood leukaemia survivor, from North Rumaila, said:
‘Here in Rumaila nobody speaks out, they say they’re scared to speak in case they get removed.’
Indeed, the BBC reported:
‘Until now health researchers have been prevented from entering the oil fields to carry out air quality tests.’
As the BBC noted, their reports also revealed ‘millions of tonnes of undeclared emissions from gas flaring at oil fields where BP, Eni, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell work’. Major oil companies are not declaring this significant source of greenhouse gas emissions.
These were important exposés by the BBC, but what is simultaneously so shocking, and yet so normal for the media strategy of quarantine over inoculation, is that our search of the ProQuest media database for terms like ‘Iraq’ and ‘cancer’ found no articles mentioning or following-up the BBC reports in any UK national newspaper. This important story involving harm caused by powerful British interests was deemed unworthy even of mention.
In a free media environment, the report would have triggered serious reflection on whether the Iraq war really was, in fact, about oil, as honest commentators have long claimed, albeit at the margins of ‘respectable’ discourse. What does it say about Western ‘civilisation’ and its ‘rules-based order’ that UK and US oil companies like BP and Exxon have been able to profit from the vast crimes of their governments in Iraq? And what does it say that they’re able to do so without any state-corporate journalists noticing any controversy, or feeling any need to comment at all?
In a recent alert, we described how the Al Jazeera documentary series, The Labour Files, has been effectively quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. The ban on discussion is so extreme that a caller to journalist Matt Frei’s talk show on LBC was simply cut off when he mentioned the series. More than 1,200 people supported our polite request for an explanation from Frei on Twitter, but he simply ignored them and us.
In previous alerts, we have described how whistle-blowers from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) challenging claims of chemical weapons attacks allegedly committed by Assad’s forces in Syria have been quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. The silence has been overwhelming. News on the grim fate of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, imprisoned in Belmarsh maximum security prison, has been similarly quarantined. Other examples abound.
Agony is piled on agony for anyone who knows and cares about the torment inflicted by the West on Iraq over the last 30 years, when we recognise the strong echoes in the latest devastation of earlier horrors inflicted in the process of conquering Iraq.
In 2010, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a leading medical journal, published a study, ‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009’. Noam Chomsky described the study’s findings as ‘vastly more significant’ than the Wikileaks Afghan ‘War Diary’ leaks.
The survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah showed a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. It found a 10-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia. By contrast, Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia. According to the study, the types of cancer are ‘similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout’.
The extent of genetic damage suffered by residents in Fallujah suggested the use of uranium in some form. Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey, said:
‘My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside.’
The truth on Nord Stream and on cancer in Iraq has been effectively quarantined – journalists are deeply reluctant to point the finger of blame at the state-corporate Establishment of which they are a part and by which they are richly rewarded.
We are not supposed to notice that the same British media endlessly packing their pages with realpolitik-friendly ‘concern’ for the plight of Ukrainian people suffering invasion and bombardment by Russia have no interest whatever in massive environmental damage and mass human suffering caused by US and British corporations profiting from the crimes of their governments. Latest media reports predict that ‘2022 profits at Britain’s BP could break the $20bn mark’ in the next week. ExxonMobil is ‘expected to report year-to-date earnings approaching $70bn’.
By contrast, all ‘mainstream’ media gave high-profile coverage over several days to allegations that a policeman in oil-rich Iran had been caught on camera committing ‘sexual abuse’. The BBC analysed video footage of the incident: ‘officer approaches her from behind and puts his left hand on her bottom’.
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook asked: why does the West not ‘give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions?’
The answer: for the same reason the West doesn’t give a damn about its victims in Libya, Palestine, Iraq, or anywhere else. Western state-corporate ‘concern’ for human rights is a function of power, not of compassion.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. congressional vote to authorize the deadly war on Iraq, which according to some estimates, killed between 800,000 and 1.3 million people. In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, Noam Chomsky shares his thoughts on the causes and ramifications of this appalling crime against humanity.
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, 20 years ago, the U.S. Congress authorized the invasion of Iraq despite massive opposition to such an undertaking. Several leading Democratic senators ended up supporting the war authorization, including Joe Biden. For both historical and future purposes, what were the causes and ramifications of the Iraq war?
Noam Chomsky: There are many kinds of support, ranging from outright to tacit. The latter includes those who regard it as a mistake but no more than that — a “strategic blunder,” as in Obama’s retrospective judgment. There were Nazi generals who opposed Hitler’s major decisions as strategic blunders. We don’t regard them as opponents of Nazi aggression. The same with regard to Russian generals who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan as a mistake, as many did.
If we can ever rise to the level of applying to ourselves the standards we rightly apply to others, then we will recognize that there has been little principled opposition to the Iraq War in high places, including the government and the political class. Much as in the case of the Vietnam War and other major crimes.
There was, of course, strong popular opposition. Characteristic was my own experience at MIT. Students demanded that we suspend classes so that they could participate in the huge public protests before the war was officially launched — something new in the history of imperialism — later meeting in a downtown church to discuss the impending crime and what it portended.
Much the same was true worldwide, so much so that Donald Rumsfeld came out with his famous distinction between Old and New Europe. Old Europe are the traditional democracies, old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who we Americans can disregard because they are mired in boring concepts like international law, sovereign rights, and other outdated nonsense.
New Europe in contrast are the good guys: a few former Russian satellites who tow Washington’s line, and one western democracy, Spain, where Prime Minister Aznar went along with Washington, disregarding close to 100 percent of public opinion. He was rewarded by being invited to join Bush and Blair as they announced the invasion.
The distinction reflects our traditional deep concern for democracy.
It will be interesting to see if Bush and Blair are interviewed on this auspicious occasion. Bush was interviewed on the 20th anniversary of his invasion of Afghanistan, another act of criminal aggression that was overwhelmingly opposed by international opinion contrary to many claims, matters we have discussed before. He was interviewed by the Washington Post — in the Style section, where he was portrayed as a lovable goofy grandpa playing with his grandchildren and showing off his portraits of famous people he had met.
There was an official reason for the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, the “single question,” as it was called from on high: Will Iraq terminate its nuclear weapons programs?
International inspectors had questioned whether there were such programs and asked for more time to investigate, but were dismissed. The U.S. and its U.K. lackey were aiming for blood. A few months later the “single question” was answered, the wrong way. We may recall the amusing skit that Bush performed, looking under the table, “No not there,” maybe in the closet, etc. All to hilarious laughter, though not in the streets of Baghdad.
The wrong answer required a change of course. It was suddenly discovered that the reason for the invasion was not the “single question,” but rather our fervent wish to bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq. One leading Middle East scholar broke ranks and described what took place, Augustus Richard Norton, who wrote that “As fantasies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were unmasked, the Bush administration increasingly stressed the democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon.” As did the loyal media and commentariat, as usual.
They did have some support in Iraq. A Gallup poll found that some Iraqis also leaped on the bandwagon: One percent felt that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq, 5 percent thought the goal was “to assist the Iraqi people.” Most of the rest assumed that the goal was to take control of Iraq’s resources and to reorganize the Middle East in U.S. and Israeli interests — the “conspiracy theory” derided by rational Westerners, who understand that Washington and London would have been just as dedicated to the “liberation of Iraq” if its resources happened to be lettuce and pickles and the center of fossil fuel production was in the South Pacific.
By November 2007, when the U.S. sought a Status of Forces Agreement, the Bush administration came clean and stated the obvious: It demanded privileged access for Western energy companies to Iraqi fossil fuel resources and the right to establish U.S. military bases in Iraq. The demands were endorsed by Bush in a “signing statement” the following January. The Iraqi parliament refused.
The ramifications of the invasion were multiple. Iraq has been devastated. What had been in many ways the most advanced country in the Arab world is a miserable wreck. The invasion incited ethnic (Shia-Sunni) conflict that had not existed before, now tearing not only the country but the whole region apart. ISIS emerged from the wreckage, almost taking over the country when the army trained and armed by the U.S. fled at the sight of jihadis in pickup trucks waving rifles. They were stopped just short of Baghdad by Iranian-backed militias. And on, and on.
But none of this is a problem for the lovable goofy grandpa or the educated classes in the U.S. who now admire him as a serious statesman, called upon to orate about world affairs.
The reaction is much like that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, when asked about his boast to have drawn the Russians into Afghanistan and his support for the U.S. effort to prolong the war and to block UN efforts to negotiate Russian withdrawal. It was a wonderful success, Brzezinski explained to the naïve questioners. It achieved the goal of severely harming the U.S.S.R. he (dubiously) claimed, while conceding that it left a few “agitated Muslims,” not to speak of a million cadavers and a ruined country.
Or like Jimmy Carter, who assured us that we owe “no debt” to the Vietnamese because “the destruction was mutual.”
It is all too easy to continue. From a position of supreme power, with a loyal intellectual community, little is beyond reach.
The 2003 Iraq invasion was as criminal an act as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the reaction on the part of the Western community was very different than it has been in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No sanctions were imposed against the U.S., no freezing of the assets of U.S. oligarchs, no demands that the U.S. be suspended from the UN Security Council. Your comments on this matter?
Comment is hardly needed. The worst crime since World War II was the long U.S. war against Indochina. No censure of the U.S. could be contemplated. It was well understood at the UN that if the horrendous crimes were so much as discussed, the U.S. would simply dismantle the offending institution. The West righteously condemns Putin’s annexations and calls for punishment of this reincarnation of Hitler, but scarcely dares to utter a chirp of protest when the U.S. authorizes Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and Greater Jerusalem, and Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara. The list is long. The reasons are clear.
When the operative rules of world order are violated, reaction is swift. A clear illustration was when the World Court condemned the Holy State [the U.S.] for international terrorism (in legalese, “unlawful use of force”) in 1986, ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations to the victim (Nicaragua). Washington reacted by escalating the crimes. The press dismissed the judgment as worthless because the court is a “hostile forum” (according to the New York Times), as proven by its judgment against the U.S. The whole matter has been effectively wiped out of history, including the fact that the U.S. is now the only state to have rejected a World Court decision — of course with total impunity.
It’s an old story that “Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.” The maxim holds with particular force in the international domain, where the Godfather rules supreme.
By now the contempt for international law — except as a weapon against enemies — is barely concealed. It is reframed as the demand for a “rules-based international order” (where the Godfather sets the rules) to supersede the archaic UN-based international order, which bars U.S. foreign policy.
What would have happened if Congress had refused to go along with the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq?
One Republican voted against the war resolution (Chafee). Democrats were split (29-21). If Congress had refused to go along, the Bush administration would have had to find other means to achieve the goals that Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and other hawks had laid out fairly clearly.
Many such means are available: sabotage, subversion, provoking (or manufacturing) some incident that could be used as a pretext for “retaliation.” Or simply extending the brutal sanctions regime that was devastating the population. We may recall that both of the distinguished international diplomats who administered Clinton’s program (via the UN) resigned in protest, condemning it as “genocidal.” The second, Hans von Sponeck, wrote an extremely illuminating book spelling out the impact in detail, A Different Kind of War. There was no need for an official ban of what is arguably the most important book on the build-up to the criminal invasion, and on the U.S. sanctions weapon generally. Silent conformity sufficed. That might have crushed the population sufficiently as to call for “humanitarian intervention.”
It is well to remember that there are no limits to cynicism if conformity and obedience prevail.
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.
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced in early September that it had secured an export contract for its CH-4 (Cai Hong-4, or CH-4) medium altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (MALE UAV) worth over US$100 million from an undisclosed customer. It is understood that the order is from an existing customer for an […]
It was the event of the season. A “Distinguished Speakers Series”– and what speakers! A former secretary of state, a world-renowned hi-tech pioneer, a movie director quite famous for her films about the exploits of our glorious armed forces–and, last but not least, a former president of the United States!
The Beverly Hills series, despite the high-priced tickets, was sold out way in advance. After all, the wealthy citizens were eager to encounter, in-person, these exceptionally wealthy and successful luminaries–those who had unquestionably made it “to the top.” Maybe the ex-president wasn’t quite as wealthy as some of them, but he had certainly attained the ultimate prize–the pinnacle of power. The hushed audience suddenly broke into enthusiastic, interminable applause as the ex-president entered the stage and situated himself behind a lectern on the dais.
With a welcoming smile, a young man, exquisitely dressed in an expensive suit, rose in the front row and warmly addressed the speaker and the audience. “We of the Welcoming Committee”– an invention of his quick-witted mind–”can only express our gratitude that you kindly accepted our invitation to appear before us to share your insights on global affairs.” The two organizers of the event, elderly women who were quite socially prominent in town, were sitting on opposite sides of the auditorium. But they glanced over at each other in puzzlement. Welcoming Committee? Who decided on that?
“Before you begin, the Committee has asked me to humbly request that you include a couple of topics in your remarks.” The man, clearly articulate and gracious in his manner, continued to smile enthusiastically at both the speaker and audience. Clearly, he was as eager as everyone else to hear the esteemed speaker’s thoughts. “These are just a few points we hope you will touch upon. Why” — he paused for a couple of seconds–”did you lie about a non-existent threat of Iraqi WMDs?” He paused, just for a moment, sensing unrest in the audience, but looking up with earnest respect at the speaker. “Outrageous,” loudly grumbled a bejeweled dowager, but mumbling that “he certainly is a polite, well-spoken young man.”
The crowd, shocked but nonetheless silent; after all, it would be rude to chastise the Welcoming Committee and its spokesman. Speaking a bit more quickly, but in his friendly, almost nonchalant tone, the man continued: “Why did you order combat and bombing that killed about one million–yes, one million–innocent Iraqi people? And why, do you think, have over 30,000 Iraq war veterans committed suicide?”
At this, the initially taken-aback ex-president recovered his balance. “What kind of impertinence is this,” he snarled. “If this is a ‘welcome,’ then I don’t know…” Several now-aroused audience members also shouted: “This is offensive, disrespectful!” “Who do you think you are!?” “This Committee must just be a bunch of Marxists!”
“But this is a most sincere welcome,” the polite young man calmly responded in mock-surprise. “We are welcoming with open arms a distinguished friend, one who has carried out just the kind of murderous, amoral, profiteering schemes which have made us all rich…very rich.” Grumbling and muttering continued to spread throughout the audience. The two elderly organizers, first baffled but by now shocked, hurried to the back of the hall: “Who’s behind this Committee?! Better call Security.”
Meanwhile, the insouciant young man, who blithely ignored the pawing and nasty cracks of those around him, continued quietly, in a tone of wonder: “Did you know, Mr. President, that an esteemed social scientist has exhaustively documented 269 war crimes that you committed?1 And, fellow attendees, do you remember the great LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi? He wrote a book-length indictment, called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.”
“Is there not a single one of you, citizens as you are of a free country, who will back me up on these truths? You see, at this moment it is not our speaker who is on trial. It is you. Do you honor Truth? Do you honor Justice? Do you exercise your right as citizens to question the crimes of your elected officials?” Profound silence, punctuated by hostile mutterings, as most looked away or at the floor. “Where is Security?” one of the organizer-ladies angrily whispered to her counterpart.
Looking up at the ex-president, still standing behind the lectern, scowling furiously but speechless, the young man turned slowly to the audience, which collectively glared and shouted at him. “This,” he said softly, with sadness, “is your unequivocal answer. And it makes me more afraid, for humanity, than even the terrible crimes of this war criminal.”
The doors flung wide open, and three burly security guards, armed and rushing forward, seized the young man by the neck and dragged him quickly out of sight–and out of mind.
Note: This story is loosely based on Iraq veteran and antiwar activist Michael Prysner’s courageous confrontation with Bush, at just such a Beverly Hills lecture, on September 19, 2021.
George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes, Michael Hass, Praeger, 2008.
The so-called “war on terror,” initiated by the U.S. and its global allies in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, did not so much change the rules of warfare as throw them out of the window.
The little light shed on these practices has largely been the result of hard and persistent work by international and civil society organizations, as well as lawyers who continue to sue states and other parties involved on behalf of victims and their families, some of whom are still detained.
How to deal with arbitrarily detained alleged ISIS (also known as Daesh) militia supporters and fighters in Syria and Iraq is an issue that goes back to the Obama era, but gained traction in 2018-2019, when ISIS lost its last major stronghold and significant territory, leading existing detention camps, like Al-Hawl, to swell in size. Al-Hawl was set up as an Iraqi refugee camp by the U.N. in 1991 with capacity for around 15,000 people. In 2018, it held around 10,000 Iraqi refugees. The majority of the 73,000-plus residents of this camp since 2019 are women and children, around 11,000 of whom are nationals of countries other than Syria or Iraq, living in poor shelter, hygiene and medical conditions.
All are detained by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and the Syrian Defense Force (SDF), which are not state entities. Their efforts to investigate and prosecute possible ISIS fighters are still at the early stages, lack formal and widespread recognition and do not look at potential war crimes. With some prisoners detained for over six years, without charge, trial or formal identification, the situation is pretty much as it was in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to Ní Aoláin, “No legal process of any kind has been established to justify the detention of these individuals. No public information exists on who precisely is being held in these camps, contrary to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions stipulating that detention records be kept that identify both the nationality of detainees and the legal basis of detention.”
She further states that, “These camps epitomize the normalization and expansion of secret detention practices in the two decades since the establishment of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The egregious nature of secret, incommunicado, harsh, degrading and unacceptable detention is now practised with impunity and the acquiescence of multiple States.”
In addition, around 10,000 men and 750 boys (of whom 2,000 and 150 are respectively not from Syria or Iraq) are held in some 14 detention centers in North-East Syria, accused of association with ISIS: “No judicial process has determined the legality or appropriateness of their detention. There are also reports of incommunicado detention.”
Efforts have been made, with varying success, to repatriate and release Iraqi refugees and Syrians internally displaced by the regional conflict: Around 2400 Iraqis have been repatriated over the past year or so.
European and other Western states were initially reluctant to repatriate their nationals — with former President Trump threatening to force them to — and some, such as the U.K., introducing measures to strip them of citizenship to prevent that. More recent efforts by European states have taken on a gendered approach, aimed at repatriating women and children in the camps. This approach, however, ignores the practice of the SDF to separate boys as young as 9 from their families and detain them, as a security risk, with men in prisons. Concern was only expressed during a prison break in early 2022 when it was feared these children would fall into ISIS’s hands, as though they were somehow safe with their original captors.
Missing the Point
The gendered approach to repatriation of detainees plays into long-standing orientalist and imperialist views, framing Western powers as saviors of these women and children, whereas the men and boys left behind remain “ISIS fighters” without investigation and substantiation of this status.
In spite of the recent U.S. conviction of two former British ISIS fighters for their role in the kidnapping and deaths of Western hostages, the value of such a detention policy must be questioned. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, arbitrary detention and cruel punishment of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes in conditions worse than those they are associated with, is unjustifiable.
Ní Aoláin’s report also found that no war on terror detainees have “received a complete and adequate legal remedy,” and the lack of due process has resulted in the continuing stigmatization and persecution of prisoners upon release from Guantánamo.
Two decades on, the absence of justice at Guantánamo remains a recurring theme. Prosecutors are now seeking a plea deal settlement with defense lawyers in the 9/11 case that would avoid trial — and thus torture revelations — and the death penalty, as the case continues to drag over a decade on.
The farce of “justice” is also amply demonstrated by the failure to release Majid Khan, who, following a plea bargain and several years of torture in secret CIA prisons, completed his sentence on March 1; the military jurors at his sentencing hearing decried the torture he faced and petitioned for clemency for him. However, he remains at Guantánamo as it is too unsafe for him to return to Pakistan and the U.S. has found no safe country for relocation. After being sued to take action, the U.S. Department of Justice has responded by opposing his habeas plea and claiming that he is still not subject to the Geneva Conventions.
What Justice?
The outcome of two decades of secret and arbitrary detention has been to deny justice to the victims of war crimes and terrorist acts, and create new victims — detainees and their families — who are also denied justice.
After two decades, the failure to close Guantánamo and end such secret and arbitrary detention and the secrecy that continues to surround them (such as the refusal to disclose the full 2014 Senate CIA torture report) are not errors or oversight but deliberate policy. It affords impunity for states and state-backed actors while tarring detainees with the “terrorist” label for the rest of their lives without due process, effectively leaving them in permanent legal limbo in many areas of everyday life.
A year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, justice still evades the Afghan people. With the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking to restart its investigation, but excluding the U.S. and its Afghan allies from its scope, effectively granting them impunity while focusing on the Taliban, “the ICC has so far come to represent selective and delayed justice to many victims of war in Afghanistan,” according to Shaharzad Akbar, former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. In addition, “a year after the withdrawal of international forces and many ‘lessons learned’ exercises, key troop contributing countries such as the United States, the U.K., and others in NATO are yet to reflect on the legacy of impunity they left behind.”
Not Going Anywhere
Addressing her report to the U.N. in April, Ní Aoláin stated, “It is precisely the lack of access, transparency, accountability and remedy that has enabled and sustained a permissive environment for contemporary large-scale detention and harm to individuals.”
Ní Aoláin expresses concerns in her report over the “lack of a globally agreed definition of terrorism and (violent) extremism, and […] the widespread failure to define acts of terrorism in concrete and precise ways in national legislation.” The vague definition has meant that any form of dissent and resistance against the state can effectively be labelled terrorist activity.
The focus on Guantánamo and mass detention of alleged terrorism suspects has drawn the attention away from the carceral practices of states. Torture, lengthy solitary confinement, rape, and other prisoner abuses in federal jails has not prompted the same criticism or action. The focus on ISIS prisoners also draws away attention from the mass detention and abuse of those incarcerated in Syrian prisons.
At the same time, mass arbitrary and secret detention of alleged terrorists has helped to justify the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, with the involvement of private contractors. Over the past two decades, the use of torture has grown worldwide. Perhaps most worrying has been the boom in the mass arbitrary detention and abuse of men, women and children worldwide without due process and few legal rights known as immigration detention, with the reframing of migration and asylum as a security issue over the past two decades.
That such reports and monitoring of the situation continue at the highest level and by civil society organizations means that the prisoners have not been obscured and forgotten or their situation normalized as much as the states involved would like them to be. The need for justice for all victims is on the path to any kind of peace, and thus it remains essential to keep pressing and supporting Ní Aoláin’s call for “access, transparency, accountability and remedy.”
Elite soldiers, cover-ups, night-time house raids, and evidence of execution-style killings. The story of Britain’s recent wars will be told for many years to come. And, the latest allegations of war crimes suggest that it will not be a tale of military glory.
Military personnel from the US, Australia, and the UK are held in high regard, often hero-worshipped by the public and politicians alike. However, their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has led to accusations of criminal activity – including the murder of civilians – as well as seemingly endless allegations of further wrong-doing which have proven difficult to pin down.
The SAS
The newest allegations concern operations in Afghanistan over a decade ago. The BBCpublished their findings on Tuesday 12 July. Through whistleblowers, experts, and witnesses, they found that multiple war crimes had been carried out by an SAS unit in 2011.
This includes the allegation that innocent civilians were executed during house raids in Helmand Province. Furthermore, senior military officers may have covered up evidence and worked against military police investigators. General Mark Carleton-Smith, a former head of special forces, and later head of the army, was also criticised in the report.
In one operational tour, it was alleged, up to 54 civilians may have been murdered. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) rejects the claims, calling them “subjective” and “unjustified”.
Disbanded?
The responses to the latest in a long line of allegations have been polarised. Some have said the regiment should be disbanded if the claims are true. Others have framed the allegations as improbable. In Parliament, Boris Johnson extended the tradition of never commenting on special forces matters when asked if there would be an investigation. Also in the Commons, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for special forces to be made democratically accountable:
In this morning's Urgent Question in Parliament on recent allegations about British Special Forces in Afghanistan, I put it to the Minister that our Special Forces should be subject to the same democratic accountability as the rest of the armed forces. pic.twitter.com/NPfnjJ3bdF
Some criticised the use of footage from an execution-style killing by Australian SAS soldiers in the BBC film. Like the British military, the Australian military have repeatedly been accused of war crimes in Afghanistan – the problem extends throughout Anglophone Western armies.
War crimes
In 2020, the Australian SAS was subject to war crimes allegations. These included the video, mentioned above, of a soldier executing a prisoner at point-blank range.
Investigators reported that a culture of violent impunity has developed in the elite unit. One described the soldiers conduct as:
deliberate, repeated and targeted war crimes.
Other allegations included a practice called ‘blooding’, in which new SAS soldiers were made to murder prisoners in order to acquire their first kill.
A report noted that the unit’s ‘distorted’ culture:
…was embraced and amplified by some experienced, charismatic and influential non-commissioned officers and their proteges, who sought to fuse military excellence with ego, elitism and entitlement.
Seal Team 6
For their part, elite US forces have been subject to similar allegations, including unlawful killings and the mutilation of bodies. In the latter case, this included the use of specially made hatchets modelled after indigenous American tomahawks.
Like the Australians, reports suggest that a toxic unit culture developed in the SEALS, a US Navy special forces unit. They reportedly treated killing like a sport, fetishising particular kinds of headshot:
“There is and was no military reason whatsoever to split someone’s skull open with a single round,” said a former SEAL Team 6 leader. “It’s sport.”
One of the highest-profile cases was of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of various crimes but eventually acquitted. Among those to rally to his cause was Donald Trump. In other cases, Trump pardoned elite soldiers accused of wartime atrocities.
Overseas Operation Bill
Responses from the state have varied across the US, UK, and Australia. In Australia, an investigation was launched. In the US, war crimes became a partisan issue, with Trump intervening in favour of soldiers. In the UK, the process culminated in the Overseas Operations Bill. This has since become law.
The bill, which was heavily criticised by veterans, military charities, lawyers, and human rights groups, has made it harder to investigate and prosecute war criminals. It includes what is in effect a five-year run-out date for allegations to be brought. Keir Starmer’s Labour was whipped to abstain from the bill, and the few who voted against it were disciplined.
Immunity from justice
The “war on terror” has seen armed forces personnel, and particularly elite military units, elevated to the status of heroes. Beneath that façade, there have been numerous accusations of brutality and murder. Special forces units from across the Western world often appear to have evolved toxic leadership cultures and enjoy little accountability.
In cases where they have been accused – or even found guilty of crimes – they have usually been framed as victims. The truth is, the victims have always been the often-nameless, forgotten, occupied people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And without a serious reckoning with these allegations, similar atrocities will happen again and again.
Exclusive: Investigation by group of prominent human rights lawyers also criticises Syria and Iraq
Turkey should face charges in front of the international court of justice for being complicit in acts of genocide against the Yazidi people, while Syria and Iraq failed in their duty to prevent the killings, an investigation endorsed by British human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy has said.
The groundbreaking report, compiled by a group of prominent human rights lawyers, is seeking to highlight the binding responsibility states have to prevent genocide on their territories, even if they are carried out by a third party such as Islamic State (IS).
, it seems, wasn’t quite ready to stop the massacre.
