by Edward S. Herman / April 1st, 2013
The call to “support our troops,” or “our boys,” is really an
appeal to support the war in which the troops are engaged. Critics of
the war would say that if the war is unjustified, possibly even a
criminal enterprise in violation of international law at several levels,
as was so clearly true of the Iraq war, supporting the troops and war
is to support international criminality. The proper support of our
troops and boys therefore is to oppose the war and fight to get our boys
(and girls) out before they can kill or be killed while participating
in such a criminal enterprise.
Naturally, this critical view of supporting our troops gets little
play in the propaganda system, and the propaganda design of the formula
“support our troops” is probably effective in the environment of
patriotic fervor that wars engender. But the hypocrisy here runs deep.
Many of the threads of hypocrisy woven into this propaganda fabric stem
from the fact that the political and military establishments care very
little about the welfare of our boys. The really bad thing about their
deaths, injuries and suffering is the resultant negative publicity and
possible increased financial costs of greater attention to their needs
that might limit military budget size and flexibility. There has been a
notorious struggle over the damage our boys have suffered in Iraq and
Afghanistan from economies in the protective equipment provided to them;
from the damaging psychological effects of multiple tours of duty; from
the reluctance to recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) and the seriousness of traumatic brain injury (TBI); and
the scandals reflecting lagged and poor care of personnel back home and
in need of medical care.
In earlier years, also, it was a long struggle to get recognition of
the damage suffered by U.S. troops in Vietnam from the massive chemical
warfare used there, where, of course, the damage to U.S. personnel was
only a small fraction of that suffered by the Vietnamese people, still
unacknowledged and unrectified by the responsible criminal state. The
ironical usage of “MIA” to mean “missing in America,” referring to war
veterans in a sad state of indigence and homelessness at home, also goes
back at least to the Vietnam and post-Vietnam war days. There are many
MIAs in the United States today, and a dramatic figure that did get some
publicity was that more military personnel committed suicide than were
killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2012 (349 versus 295).
It is enlightening also that there is an inverse correlation between
aggressively supporting U.S. wars and supporting our troops with
generous funding of their medical care and post-service education and
general welfare. This is plausible. The bulk of service personnel are
drawn from that 47 percent of the population that Mitt Romney derided as
government-dependent and not “job creators.” (The heads of Lockheed
Martin, General Dynamics. Ratheon and Textron are job creators.)
Romney, Paul Ryan, George Bush, John Boehner (etc.) and their monied
base are fighting a major battle to diminish or terminate the welfare
state, and many Democrats as well as Republicans are with them, so that
containing what amounts to welfare state benefits to our boys with PTSD
and otherwise in distress is entirely logical.
Of course, along with “support our troops” there is an implicit
“support our torturers and higher level war criminals.” This flows from
the overwhelming and increasingly centralized power in the hands of the
dominant elite, including the military-industrial complex (MIC) and
leading politicians, and an associated remarkable level of
self-righteousness. Anything we do is tolerable because we are not only
strong and the global policeman, but also good and always
well-intentioned, and are therefore not to be questioned when we do
abroad precisely what we condemn in target states. We can support Saddam
Hussein and even provide him with “weapons of mass destruction”, when
he is doing us a service in attacking Iran, even when he is using
chemical weapons there; and with no seeming sense of shame or guilt we
can quickly turn him into “another Hitler” when he disobeys orders. We
can help the Shah of Iran build a nuclear capability, but threaten war
when his successor regime tries to do what was encouraged with the Shah;
and again, with utter self-righteousness. It testifies to the
greatness of the Western propaganda system that these shifts and
mind-boggling double standards can occur without the slightest pause or
recognition or any need for explanation or apology.
The really high level war criminals like Bush, Blair, and Obama can
get away with anything, not only because they are at the pinnacle of
power and can set their own rules, but also because they dominate the
external institutions that supposedly make the rule of law
international, but fail to do so. One of the prettiest cases is, of
course, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, an act matching Hitler’s
1939 invasion of Poland, and resulting in a million or more Iraqi
deaths. Although this was a blatant violation of the most fundamental
principle of the UN Charter, while UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan did
point out that the invasion was “illegal” he didn’t express great anger
or suggest that the invaders be expelled or even reprimanded. He got on
board the aggression ship, as did the Western great powers (with the
Russians and Chinese essentially just sitting there watching).
But the sick comedy of “international law” rode on, with the UN,
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and International Criminal
Court (ICC) playing their assigned role by applying it whenever the Big
Aggressor or one of his leading allies felt the application of legal
principles to be useful. The Big A and his Little Aggressor client
Israel wanted a legal input for Darfur, but not for the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, invaded by Rwanda and Uganda, whose leaders were
Big Aggressor clients, and so it was—Sudan’s al-Bashir was indicted by
the ICC, Rwandan and Ugandan leaders were exempt. Big A and allies
wanted legal authority for attacking Libya, but not Bahrain, so the ICC
and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) obliged with indictments for
Gaddafi and sons, silence on Bahrain. The Big Aggressor wants
international law applied to Syria, so Navi Pillay, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, who along with her predecessor Louise
Arbour didn’t lift a finger in the case of the Iraq invasion-occupation,
which produced a million dead and 4 million refugees, now repeatedly
urges the UNSC to call on the ICC to investigate Bashir al-Assad’s war
crimes in Syria. Pillay played the same role in the case of Libya, in
collaboration with the ICC, greasing the skids for a NATO military
attack on Libya and the ouster and murder of Gaddafi.
The role of the “international community” (in the sense of the
leadership of the Western great powers and their clients, not the
underlying populations) was dramatically exhibited in giving the newly
elected U.S. President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace prize in 2009. He
hadn’t done anything whatsoever for peace at that time, but gave the
appearance of a leader more moderate than Bush and Cheney. A silly
award, but once again a giveaway on the supportive-groveling qualities
of Western political/cultural institutions. (Can you imagine the Nobel
Committee giving the award to Amira Hass, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, or
Richard Falk, people actually making genuine personal sacrifices in the
interest of peace?) Honest analysis and morality would have recognized
that Obama was going to be a major war criminal by structural necessity,
embedded as he was in a permanent war political economy where political
survival, let alone success, required the commission of war crimes.
Obama soon found that political success demanded killing foreigners;
that budget enlargement for killing was easy, but spending for
progressive civilian needs was difficult and would anger powerful
people. He quickly adapted to being a warrior president, his seemingly
most proud accomplishment being the killing of bin-Laden.
Obama has played all the war cards. He has lauded the Vietnam War as a
noble enterprise and is pleased to participate in and laud a memorial
that celebrates it. Like Bush he loves to speak to military cadres where
he can draw resounding applause with patriotic and war rhetoric,
although increasing numbers of liberal Democrats have gotten on board
his war-oriented ship of state and also find his warrior image and
actions agreeable. He has gone somewhat beyond Bush in
institutionalizing government rights to invade privacy, closing down
information access, and criminalizing whistle-blowing. His drone war
policy and claimed right to assassinate even U.S. citizens based on
executive decision alone breaks new ground in criminality and in
enlarging the scope of acceptable war crimes.
He has also refused to
prosecute U.S. torturers and high level war criminals, violating earlier
promises but, more importantly, violating international law and
effectively ending the rule of law. We need change we can believe in,
but Obama is giving us compromise and literal regression that we must
vigorously oppose.
• Article first appeared in Z Magazine April 2013
Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst
with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as
political economy and the media.
Read other articles by Edward.
This article was posted on Monday, April 1st, 2013 at 8:01am and is filed under
Crimes against Humanity,
Drones,
GWB,
Iraq,
Libya,
Military/Militarism,
Obama,
Sudan,
United Nations,
Viet Nam,
War Crimes.
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