Foreign Policy Lies Lead to War
July 25, 2003
By Harry Targ
On
August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval
vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson
defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression.
Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in
international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on
North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had
already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of
Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do
what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia.
Only two Senators voted "no." Over the next three years the U.S. sent
500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the
South and North of the country.
Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to
appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval
vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage
in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable
conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.
President Johnson's lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin
contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that
cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.
Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq- imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead
to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home,
and military casualties abroad.
The American people must insist that their leaders tell the truth about the
U.S. role in the world.
Joe Biden
Was Instrumental in Launching the Iraq War
Lies
and war!
Harry Targ: Posted on September 4, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer
U.S. administrations
ever since Truman have justified aggressive foreign policies by lying and
distorting the realities behind complex international relationships.
Harry Truman delivers his Truman Doctrine speech before a joint session of Congress, March 12, 1947. Image from American Rhetoric.
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 was engaged in an
effort 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 about a global struggle between the forces of good threatened by the forces of evil.
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 10 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.
Now the United States and its allies are presenting scenarios justifying war based upon a new round of lies and distortions.
And in
the leadup to the Iraq war in 2003, the United States and its allies in
NATO presented scenarios to justify war based
upon a new round of lies and distortions. In the Persian Gulf whole nations
were constructed by European colonial powers after World War One. As the next
World War ended, the United States agreed to provide arms and protection to the
Saudi monarchs in exchange for oil.
The
U.S. identified client regimes to support its interests in the region, from the
former Shah of Iran, to the state of Israel, to various so-called Islamic
fundamentalist groups including what became Al Qaeda, to leaders the U.S. once
supported such as Saddam Hussein and Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. In the 21st
century, the stability of whole countries, Iraq and Libya for example, was
destroyed by United States interventions costing many million deaths and
injuries and many more people fleeing violence.
Now the
latest enemy, ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, is portrayed as a
monster movement that beheads its prisoners and murders masses of people who do
not share its religious ideology. While there is enough data to suggest that ISIS
is engaging in cruel violence against its enemies, that violence is being used
to justify bombing campaigns against alleged enemy targets. War-hungry hawks
inside the beltway particularly those with ready access to mainstream media
demand that President Obama expand bombing, transfer more arms to so-called
friends, and recruit militant opponents of ISIS to even the score.
Since this new enemy, even more scary than the Communists of the 20th century, includes a handful of Americans, they claim, the territory of the United States is threatened by global terror. The rhetoric calling for a global war against this presumably global threat is escalating. Those who raise questions about why ISIS is as popular as it is, what its grievances are, why there is hatred for the West, particularly the United States, in the region, and whether the application of military force would make matters better or worse, are drowned out by those who built careers based on arguments about the inevitability of war and violence and the need to kill for the greater good.
The other apocryphal narrative of the day comes from Eastern Europe.
The United
States participated covertly in the overthrow of a dictatorial but elected
regime in Ukraine. After the elected leader fled, those with ties to historic
fascist parties gained influence in a newly created government.
Ukrainians
from the eastern part of the country with ties of politics, culture, and
language to Russia rebelled against the new central government in Kiev which
wants to join Western military and economic organizations. Kiev has launched a
brutal assault on the separatists in the East. The dominant narrative in
Washington and the mainstream media is not about the coup in Kiev, the
descendants of fascists in the government, but the Russians who want to move
westward across Central Europe, reestablishing the old Soviet Bloc.
Indeed,
Russia is giving material aid to the separatists, although information about
what kind comes only from Washington and Kiev. Little attention is given to the
NATO vision of expanding its military alliance eastward, ultimately to besiege
a threatened Russia. Even less attention is given to the fact that Kiev
oligarchs wish to incorporate Ukraine into the European Union.
In
other words, a country with a divided population in terms of culture and
politics engaged in a violent civil war has been transformed by politicians,
pundits, and media sources into a narrative of a struggling Ukraine democracy
challenged by an aggressive Russia, the descendent of the twentieth century
demon, the former Soviet Union. (For a more detailed discussion of United
States/Russian/ Ukraine relations in 2013-2014 see Harry Targ, “Pushing for
Starvation at Home and War Abroad: A Time to Resist,” Diary of a Heartland Radical, March
28, 2014).
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 and a renewed post-Soviet
threat from Russia, 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.”
*************************************************************************************
Expanding the ‘Iraq Syndrome’
Cooperation
over conflict: We need to expand the ‘Iraq Syndrome’
As
we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, the
madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military
involvement abroad.
By
Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | March 20, 2013
In a
November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article,
“The Iraq Syndrome,” I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism
about the notions that “the United States should take unilateral military
action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible
but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly
bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to
rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the
world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of
only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners
are naive and decadent wimps.”
Most
radically, I went on to suggest that the United States might “become more
inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of
humility.”
—
John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign
Affairs, March 28, 2011
David
Halberstam reported in his important book, The Best and the Brightest,
that President Roosevelt directed his State Department to develop a position on
what United States foreign policy toward Indochina should be after the World
War in Asia was ended. Two choices were possible in 1945: support the
Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore the brunt of struggle against
Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the French plan to reoccupy the
Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
As the
Cold War escalated the United States rejected Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support
for independence and began funding the French in their effort to reestablish
colonialism in Indochina. When the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces
in 1954, the United States stepped in and fought a murderous war until the
collapse of the U.S. South Vietnamese puppet regime in 1975.
Paralleling
the struggle for power in Indochina, competing political forces emerged on the
Korean Peninsula after the World War. With the Soviet Union and China
supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime created
by it in the South, a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued in 1950
and continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice, not
peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.
Political
scientist John Mueller analyzed polling data concerning the support for U.S.
military action in Korea and Vietnam, discovering that in both wars there was a
steady and parallel decline in support for them. Working class Americans were
the most opposed to both wars at every data point. Why? Because working class
men and women were most likely to be drafted to fight and their loved ones the
most likely to suffer the pain of soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or
disabled.
Polling
data from the period since the onset of the Iraq war followed the pattern
Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases levels of
support for U.S. war-making declined as the length of the wars increased and
casualties rose. The American people typically gave the presidents some
flexibility when the wars started and the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon
prevailed. But then resistance grew.
Throughout
the period from the end of the Vietnam War until the 1990s, each presidential
administration was faced with what foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam
Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term these elites used to scornfully describe
what they correctly believed would be the resistance to foreign military
interventions that they periodically wished to initiate.
President
Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save its dictatorship and to overthrow
the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would have preferred to send troops to
Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi of UNITA.
To
overcome the resistance to launching what could become another Vietnam
quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity conflict,” covert
operations that would minimize what the American people could learn about what
their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan did expand
globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s globalism,
militarism, and interventionism were somewhat constrained by the fear of public
outrage.
President
George Herbert Walker Bush launched a six-month campaign to convince the
American people that military action was needed to force Iraqi troops out of
Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such action by the Congress, the American
people supported Gulf War I because casualties were small and the war lasted
only a month. During a press conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in
February 1991, Bush proclaimed that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”
Clinton
knew better. He limited direct U.S. military action to supporting NATO bombing
in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets in Iraq in so-called “no-fly
zones in 1998,” bombed Serbia in a defense of Kosovo in 1999, and used economic
embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states” throughout his eight years in
office.
It was
President George Walker Bush who launched long and devastating wars in
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration used the sorrow
and anger of the American people after the 9/11 terrorist acts to lie, deceive,
aggress, and qualitatively increase the development of a warfare state.
As
Mueller has suggested, an “Iraq Syndrome” had surfaced by 2005 as the lies
about that war became public, the war costs were headed toward trillions of
dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and disabilities escalated. And of
course an historically repressive society, Iraq, was so destroyed that U.S.
troops left it in shambles with hundreds of thousands dead, disabled, and in
abject poverty.
As we
reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War in March
2003, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military
involvement in Syria, not “taking any options off the table” in Iran, and
threatening North Korea.
Meanwhile
the United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to
“challenge” rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to
“terrorism” on the African continent, and speaking with scorn about the
leadership in Latin America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.
The
American people must escalate commitment to its “syndromes,” demanding in no
uncertain terms an end to United States militarism. Mueller’s call for a U.S.
foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict motivated by humility
over arrogance is the least the country can do to begin the process of
repairing the damage it has done to global society.
Photograph by David Bacon
