War and Propaganda
Continuous US Imperialist War, Law, and the American Public
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: 12 September, 2009; Monday, 27 September 2010
Permanent War
Mary L Dudziak of the University of Southern California Law School writes in California Law Review, 2010, arguing that, though Americans think the US’s involvement in warfare is episodic—limited in time, ie temporary, and only occasional—it is belied by the plain fact of America’s continual, indeed latterly continuous, involvement in overseas military action! Though its purely social, economic and democratic consequences are bad, Dudziak naturally emphasises the serious legal consequences it can have.
She notes that anxiety about the temporal extent of war has emerged in cases relating to Guantánamo detainees considered by the Supreme Court. America’s top judges had to weigh up the “justice” of the detention of terrorist “suspects” (sic). The legal principle that people are innocent until proven guilty has to be by-passed, in the government’s view, in a permanent war situation so terrorist “suspects” have to be punished as if they were multiple murderers. The US federal state, having decided such breeches of legality as torture and indefinite detention of “suspects” were needed to fight terrorism left the judges having to exercise their proper function of deciding whether the administrative and executive arms were acting lawfully—they plainly were not—while risking seeming unpatriotic to say so.
Yet, when war is to be continuous, and therefore endless, to uphold the administration’s illegal decisions might mean endless detention for some people without public evidence or due process. In short, people who might be innocent of any crime will be incarcerated indefinitely. Even by America’s poor standards of justice, whereby bad convictions can lead to death or concurrent full life sentences, it begins to look manifestly unjust that untried people can be given life sentences and even be tortured.
Global Militaristic Culture
There were plenty of lies, torture and invasions even before George Bush—a semi dictator who ignored the constitution and pretended that he was a war leader so as to rule by diktat (the description of Geoff Simons, author of many books on geopolitics)—usurped the Presidency. This legacy left a new President opposed to war, Barack Obama, trapped in a culture that regards military aggression and subversive operations as normal tactics—the deep seated, enduring and global militaristic culture with which Obama has to contend.
Before Barack Obama became president, US military strategists briefed him on the war in Afghanistan. He asked them what was their exit strategy from Kabul. Silence! Whatever Obama thought about this, the US are still deeply involved in killing Afghans, and his top general looks to be mutinously defying the Supreme Commander. Obama is surrounded by people in the US intelligence and military who don’t want themselves or their policies subjected to too much scrutiny.
The Afghan war is what the Vietnam war was, and dozens of other US wars have been in the last 100 years since the Spanish American war, aggression against a foreign state started with whatever excuse and for whatever real reason the US deemed appropriate in its role of world bully. The initial excuse here was the handing over of Osama bin Laden and the supposed al Qaida perpetrators of 9/11. Then it became the noble neocon desire to bring democracy to a backward country—whether they wanted it or not—a banner eagerly waved by Blair, then Brown, as philanthropic imperialism.
All US wars in the twentieth century were outside US borders, and the strategy of the American political caste has varied between increasing the awareness of the American people in a war, and insulating them from it. Awareness was meant to build up a patriotic anger about a perceived offence to Uncle Sam, that then lets more tax dollars be appropriated for war, and lets unpopular domestic policies be smothered by war propaganda. Isolation from war is necessary when US citizens have to be insulated from seeing the shocking consequences it involves, not least to US military personnel, but also to the sheer inhumanity of sophisticated weapons used against ragged trousered peasants living in defenceless mud huts. For again, these, the “enemy”, are mostly innocent people who would rather get on with their lives free of risking death at the hands of gun happy US soldiers patrolling dusty streets thousands of miles from home.
The US can therefore indulge in purely wasteful warfare without the people having to know anything unpleasant about it. As a US general confessed, the whole experience for him was a real life shoot ’em up game. In any case, the situation presented is always pitifully simple, or rather simplistic—we, the good guys, are saving the world from the bad guys—who, in fact, just want the Yanks to go home and leave them in peace.
After years of fighting in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden remains free, despite the technology of the mightiest power on earth, and the liberal intervention to democratize the country is stuck in the mire of corruption. Karzai, the supposed leader of the country, is a US puppet who was for long a CIA agent. So it is hardly surprising that any aid sent to Afghanistan simply disappears long before it gets to its targets. The UN suggest that barely 10 percent of outside aid gets through. It still proves US benevolence, or so the average Yankee seems to think, scared as shit that if they do not keep the front line 6 to 12 thousand miles away, they will have to defend their own back yard. The trouble is their own back yard has continued to expand since the Monroe Doctrine, and for a long time now has covered the whole world.
A History of Permanent Aggression
On 2 December 1823, president James Monroe outlined the points that defined the Monroe Doctrine—the “American continents” were not subjects for European colonization and any such attempt would be seen as “dangerous to our peace and safety”. This doctrine yielded the idea of “manifest destiny”, supposedly giving divine sanction to any expansionist policy. The New York journalist, John L O’Sullivan, wrote in 1845 that it was “the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly expanding millions”. This meant that the racist genocide of indigenous people would rightly contribute to the enlargement of a Christian nation. In 1822-5, US forces repeatedly invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Since then, the US has been an imperial junkie, unable to break the habit of killing foreigners in their own lands as a route to expansion and resource exploitation. They had begun by breaking treaties with the native Americans and slaughtering them.
The Spanish-American war began in 1898, bringing further opportunities for US expansion across the world. The Cuban war of liberation was converted into a US war of conquest. Cuba had a liberation movement heroically fighting against Spanish colonialism and the US would have to intervene. On December 24 1897, US undersecretary of war, JC Breckenridge, commented that the inhabitants of Cuba…
…are generally indolent and apathetic. Its people are indifferent to religion and the majority are therefore immoral. They only possess a vague notion of what is right and wrong. As a logical consequence of this lack of morality, there is a great disregard for life.
It would of course be “sheer madness” to annex such a dissolute and depraved people into the virtuous US. Cuba was invaded and occupied in what US secretary of state John Hay dubbed “a splendid little war”, which crippled the Cuban economy and reduced the people to destitution. Havana stank, and sick and starving people roamed the city or lay in the gutters. Streets were lined with the corpses of horses, dogs and human beings. All efforts to bury the dead had been abandoned. Breckenridge observed:
We must clean up the country, even if this means using the methods Divine Providence used on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We must destroy everything within our cannons’ range of fire. We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and disease undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban army.
The academic, Brian Linn, graphically described the response of the US army to the Filipino liberation struggle. Suspects were hung by their thumbs to make them talk. Water was forced down the victim’s throat—“the water cure”—Americans seem fond of water torturing, and euphemisms for it! Villages were burned. US Colonel Benjamin F Cheatham urged his troops to “burn freely and kill every man who runs”. Villagers were forced into concentration camps with food shortages and appalling sanitation. A report said that “malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, disease and demoralisation”, had cost 11,000 Filipino lives.
The twentieth century gave many more opportunities for US imperial expansion. In the first decade of the century, troops were active in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Syria, Panama, Abyssinia, Korea, Cuba, Honduras and Nicaragua. Just before World War I, the US found reasons to send troops to Cuba, Haiti, China and Turkey. In 1915, president Woodrow Wilson ordered General John J Pershing to invade Mexico with 10,000 troops to crush the insurrection led by Francisco Villa—Pancho Villa. China was again invaded in 1916, while in the same year US troops began an eight year occupation of the Dominican Republic to combat a popular uprising.
The US invasions continued in China, Guatemala and Russia (all in 1920), China and Turkey (1922), China and Honduras (both invaded in 1924 and 1925), China again (1926 and 1927). In the prelude to World War II, US forces again invaded Cuba and China. In 1940, the US acquired from Britain the lend-lease bases of Newfoundland, Bermuda, St Lucia, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad and British Guiana, and in April 1941, Greenland and Iceland were taken under US protection. In October 1945, 50,000 US marines were sent to north China to aid the nationalist battle against the communists. World War II and the Korean war resulted in permanent US occupations of parts of Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain and of many island bases taken over from the Japanese.
On 7 August 1964, the US Congress, responding to president Lyndon B Johnson’s deliberate lie that US ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese vessels in international waters, approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution affirming “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States… to prevent further aggression”. The blatant lie had produced a presidential authorization that led to almost 60,000 US fatalities. Vietnamese dead, like the earlier Korean dead, numbered in the millions. The Vietnamese war included the Phoenix programme, which involved the systematic torture of tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants.
William Blum, in his book Rogue State, has profiled US interventions since the end of the Vietnam war. Washington launched military or subversive actions in the Dominican Republic, Zaire, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Grenada, Honduras, Chad, Bolivia, Iraq, Panama, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Liberia, Turkey, Kuwait, Somalia, Yugoslavia, the Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Afghanistan, East Timor, Serbia, Yemen, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Pakistan, South Ossetia, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Uruguay, Ghana, Chile, El Salvador, South Africa, Portugal, Angola, Jamaica, Seychelles, Diego Garcia, Marshall Islands, Albania, Costa Rica, Georgia and other countries.
In Afghanistan, back in the present, bombing by pilotless airplanes continues, and is extended into Pakistan. Neither Obama nor General David Petraeus seem able to stop rogue officers from doing just as they like, or maybe, as Petraeus himself has begun to sound like a rogue officer, it is the military in general who are defying the President. They are undisciplined and irresponsible, but determined to have fun soldiering, just as the captain of the USS Vincennes had fun in 1988 shooting down an Iranian aeroplane with 290 passengers and crew on board, in a similar utterly undisciplined act.
Many say the Lockerbie bombing, later the same year, was a reprisal for that US atrocity—an eye for an eye, so to speak—but the US did not want any such conclusion to be drawn, so the CIA set up Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, whom most of the British relatives of the dead passengers now consider to be innocent. Yet the US, with the same evidence before them refuse to accept that the conviction of al-Megrahi is, to say the least, unsafe, and the rage is fomented by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and one of the men responsible, CIA chief, Robert Mueller.
Why Permanent War?
In 2009, 17 per cent of US workers were unemployed or working short time. At the same time, 33 percent of capital equipment in the US was unused or underused. Why is it beyond the wit of US administrations to make use of all this underused capacity when cities like St Louis long after Katrina, Cleveland, Detroit, Stockton, and many many more are in a state of decrepitude and decay? People in these places, American people, are suffering as if they lived in the Third World, their needs unmet, except perhaps for the most basic ones, and then at the price of being regarded as social pariahs, and workshy for depending on welfare. The irrationality of capitalism is apparent to everyone, or ought to be. Here is the greatest country in the whole world ever, we are told repeatedly, but it is only great for the rich.
US rulers and the US military industrial complex have their own way of solving the problem of surplus capital. It is to arrange to use up some of it by warfare! That is why Yankees have had a continuous policy of invasion, knowing, utterly cynically, that it causes immense human suffering elsewhere while alleviating some locally by providing some pointless jobs and much immoral profit:
The effects are felt not only throughout the world of commodity production and exchange. Human lives are disrupted and even physically destroyed, whole careers and lifetime achievements are put in jeopardy, deeply held beliefs are challenged, psyches wounded and respect for human dignity is cast aside.Prof David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital
Capital can be used to make armaments, military equipment, and transport, solving some of the problem of US unemployed labor, and unused equipment, at the cost of murdering innocents, and antagonizing the whole world. That production is useless in respect of making anything to meet the needs of people in the USA or anywhere, but it generates profits for those with money in war production—the Daddy Warbuckses of the modern day!
So, the military industrial complex gets huge government appropriations, and these make for vast profits in the military linked armaments and supply industries. For Cheney and the like of his puppy, Bush, these overseas adventures are ways of siphoning tax dollars into personal profit. And who allegedly pays most tax dollars? Cheney’s own Republican voters! They do not seem to notice they are the ones being conned the most.
