Harry Targ
Post-modernists
talk about “discourses,” “narratives,” “tropes,” and verbal “deconstructions.”
They should be commended for suggesting how words are used to mobilize,
inspire, deceive, promote self-interest, and, too often, justify killing
everywhere. Former Arkansas Senator, J. William Fulbright in describing how he
was tricked by his old friend President Lyndon Baines Johnson to support a
resolution authorizing escalating war in Vietnam said: “A lie is a lie. There
is no other way to put it.”
The story
can begin any time. As World War Two was ending, the Greek government
constructed by Great Britain after the Nazis were defeated sought to crush a
rebellion by activists who objected to their newly imposed rulers. The Greek
rebels included former anti-fascists freedom fighters, some of whom were
Communists or Socialists. The British, no longer able to support the repression
of the Greek Left in what was a civil war, called on the Americans for help.
In February,1947, Truman foreign policy advisers met to discuss what to do about the Greek civil war and the threat of “Communism” spreading along the Mediterranean. The Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, attending the meeting. said he would support U.S. military and economic aid for the unpopular Greek government. But, he said, tell the President he better “scare hell out of the American people.”
One month
later, President Truman gave his famous Truman Doctrine speech to the Congress
and the American people. He warned the American people, who until that time
still had positive feelings toward the Soviet people, that the United States
and the “free world” were going to be engaged in a long-term struggle against
the forces of “international communism.” The Truman Doctrine was not about
nations and movements with different interests and ideologies but rather a
global struggle between the forces of good threatened by the forces of evil.
United
States administrations ever since have justified aggressive foreign policies by
lying and distorting the realities behind complex international relationships.
In addition, when a politician, a journalist, a scholar, or a whole peace
movement criticizes targeting nations and movements as diabolical and security
threats, these critics are challenged as weak, indecisive, cowardly, and even
worse, stalking horses for the vile enemy or enemies.
Campaigns of
propaganda masquerading as truth have been a constant feature of international
relations, particularly since World War Two. The reality of U.S. struggles
against demonized enemies tells a sobering story. Deaths in wars and
interventions in which the United States participated from 1945 until 1995
totaled about ten million people. These figures, extracted from the valuable
research of Ruth Sivard, (World Military and Social Expenditures, 1996)
do not include injuries and forced migrations of millions of people fleeing
combat zones. Nor do these figures include the wasteful trillions of dollars of
military expenditures and environmental damage resulting from a war system.
Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Team Continued the Tradition of Lying to Make War
Neoconservatives, celebrants of war, have had a long and growing presence in the machinery of United States foreign policy. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense in the Truman Administration, was a leading advocate for developing a militaristic response to the Soviet Union in the years after World War II. As historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out, Forrestal was one of the Truman administrators who sought to create a “permanent war economy.” He was, in Bacevich’s terms, a founding member of the post-World War II “semi-warriors.”
Subsequent to the initiation of the imperial response to the “Soviet threat” — the Marshall Plan, NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the arms race — other semi-warriors continued the crusade. These included the Dulles brothers (John and Allen), Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and prominent Kennedy advisors including McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow, architect of the “noncommunist path to development,” in Vietnam.
Key semi-warriors of our own day, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, and others who formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s, gained their first experience in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The PNAC view of how the United States should participate in world affairs is to use military superiority to achieve foreign policy goals. The key failure of Clinton foreign policy, they claimed, was his refusal to use force to transform the world. For starters, he should have overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The neoconservative policy recommendations prevailed during the eight years of the George Walker Bush administration. International organizations were belittled, allies were ignored, arms control agreements with Russia were rescinded, and discourse on the future prioritized planning for the next war.
And concretely the United States launched long, bloody, immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the US war, thousands were displaced, and violence spread throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf. And despite the 2003 Office of Management and Budget office prediction of Mitch Daniels that the war would cost $60 billion, recent estimates suggest the true cost of the Iraq war approached $3 trillion. Cost estimates, claims that the US troops would be welcomed as liberators, and the war would be over quickly all turned out to be false. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s declaration before the world that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction proved false as well.
Subsequent to the Iraq War, the United States has been engaged in overt and covert war, economic embargoes to bring down governments it does not find to its liking (Libya, Syria, Iran, the Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba), and has spent billions more on the military (over 800 military bases in 39 countries) while its domestic infrastructure declines. Now, the Biden Administration is ramping up support for confrontations with China and Russia.
Lies and War Are a Testament to Citizen Skepticism
Getting back
to Senator Vandenberg’s advice to President Truman about how to gain support of
the American people for moral/military crusades, leaders and media are warning
about a new global terrorist threat, this time cyber attacks and space weapons, and a renewed post-Soviet threat
from Russia and China, a new Cold War. The intensity of the selling job is
testament to the good sense of the American people who continue to say “no more
wars.”
