An armed man alleged to be with Russian forces stands guard in front of surface-to-air missiles in Sevastopol, Ukraine, on March 5. (photo: Drache/AFP/Getty)
05 March 14
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World War II - and extending well into the Twenty-first Century - the
United States has invaded or otherwise intervened in so many countries
that it would be challenging to compile a complete list. Just last
decade, there were full-scale U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,
plus American bombing operations from Pakistan to Yemen to Libya.
So, what is one to make of Secretary of State John
Kerry's pronouncement that Russia's military intervention in the Crimea
section of Ukraine - at the behest of the country's deposed president -
is a violation of international law that the United States would never
countenance?
Kerry decried the Russian intervention as "a
Nineteenth Century act in the Twenty-first Century." However, if memory
serves, Sen. Kerry in 2002 voted along with most other members of the
U.S. Congress to authorize President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq
in 2003, which was also part of the Twenty-first Century. And, Kerry is a
member of the Obama administration, which like its Bush predecessor,
has been sending drones into the national territory of other nations to
blow up various "enemy combatants."
Are Kerry and pretty much everyone else in Official
Washington so lacking in self-awareness that they don't realize that
they are condemning actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that are
far less egregious than what they themselves have done?
If Putin is violating international law by sending
Russian troops into the Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by
neo-Nazi militias ousted Ukraine's democratically elected president -
and after he requested protection for the ethnic Russians living in the
country's south and east - then why hasn't the U.S. government turned
over George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and indeed John Kerry to the
International Criminal Court for their far more criminal invasion of
Iraq?
In 2003, when the Bush-Cheney administration
dispatched troops halfway around the world to invade Iraq under the
false pretense of seizing its non-existent weapons of mass destruction,
the U.S. touched off a devastating war that killed hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis and left their country a bitterly divided mess. But there has
been virtually no accountability.
And, why haven't many of the leading Washington
journalists who pimped for those false WMD claims at least been fired
from their prestigious jobs, if not also trundled off to The Hague for
prosecution as propagandists for aggressive war?
Remarkably, many of these same "journalists" are
propagandizing for more U.S. wars today, such as attacks on Syria and
Iran, even as they demand harsh penalties for Russia over its
intervention in the Crimea, which incidentally was an historic part of
Russia dating back centuries.
The WPost's Double Standards
A stunning example of the U.S. media's double
standards is the Washington Post's editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, who
pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 by treating the existence
of Iraq's non-existent WMD as "flat fact," not an allegation in dispute.
After the U.S. invasion and months of fruitless searching for the
promised WMD caches, Hiatt finally acknowledged that the Post should
have been more circumspect in its claims about the WMD.
"If you look at the editorials we write running up [to
the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of
mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia
Journalism Review. "If that's not true, it would have been better not to
say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]
Yes, that is a principle of journalism, if something
isn't true, we're not supposed to say that it is. Yet, despite the
enormous cost in blood and treasure from the Iraq War - and despite the
undeniable fact that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a clear violation of
international law - nothing happened to Hiatt. He remains in the same
job today, more than a decade later.
His editorials also continue to state dubious points as "flat fact." For instance, the Post's belligerent editorial
on Monday, entitled online as "President Obama's foreign policy is
based on fantasy," resurfaces the discredited claim that the Syrian
government was responsible for a chemical weapons attack outside
Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.
The Post wrote, "Since the Syrian dictator crossed Mr.
Obama's red line with a chemical weapons attack that killed 1,400
civilians, the dictator's military and diplomatic position has steadily
strengthened."
Note how there is no attribution or doubt expressed
regarding either the guilt of the Syrian government or the number of
casualties. Just "flat fact." The reality, however, is that the U.S.
government assertions blaming the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad for
the poison gas attack and the death tally of 1,400 have both crumbled
under examination.
The U.S. casualty figure of "1,429" always was
regarded as a wild exaggeration, since doctors on the scene cited a much
lower death toll of a few hundred, and the Wall Street Journal later
reported that the strangely precise number was ascertained by the CIA
applying facial recognition software to images of dead bodies posted on
YouTube and then subtracting duplicates and those in bloody shrouds.
The problems with this "methodology" were obvious,
since there was no way to know the dates when the YouTube videos were
taken and the absence of bloody shrouds did not prove that the cause of
death was poison gas.
More significantly, the U.S. claims about where the
missiles were launched - more than nine kilometers from the impact site -
turned out to be false, since expert analysis of the one missile that
was found to carry Sarin gas had a maximum range of around two
kilometers. That meant that the launch site was within territory
controlled by the Syrian opposition, not the government. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "The Mistaken Guns of Last August."]
Though it remains unclear which side was to blame for
the chemical attack, the Syrian government's guilt surely was not a
"slam dunk" anymore than the Iraqi government's possession of WMD in
2003. In such a case - especially on sensitive matters of war or peace -
responsible journalists reflect the uncertainty, not simply assert an
allegation as "flat fact."
However, since Hiatt was never punished for his
earlier journalistic violation - even though it contributed to the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including some 4,500 U.S.
soldiers - he is still around to commit the same offenses again, in an
even more dangerous context, i.e., a confrontation between the United
States and Russia, two nuclear-armed states.
Pushing for a New Cold War
And, what do Hiatt and other neocons at the Washington
Post say about confronting the Russians over the Ukraine crisis, which
was stoked by neocon holdovers in the U.S. State Department, such as
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and the U.S.-funded
National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 to replace
the CIA in the business of destabilizing targeted governments? [See
Consortiumnews.com's "What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis."]
The Post is demanding a new Cold War with Russia in
retaliation for its relatively non-violent interventions to protect
pro-Russian provinces of two countries that were carved out of the old
Soviet Union: Georgia where Russian troops have protected South Ossetia
and Abkhazia since 2008 and in Ukraine where Russian soldiers have taken
control of Crimea. In both cases, the pro-Russian areas felt threatened
from their central governments and sought Moscow's assistance.
In the case of Ukraine, a neo-Nazi-led putsch -
representing the interests of the western part of the country -
overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who
came from the eastern region. Then, under the watchful eye of the
neo-Nazi storm troopers in Kiev, a rump parliament voted unanimously or
near unanimously to enact a series of draconian laws offensive to the
ethnic Russian areas in the east and south.
Having fled Kiev for his life, Yanukovych asked Russia
for help, which led to Putin's request to the Russian parliament for
the authority to deploy troops inside Ukraine, essentially taking
control of Crimea in the south, an area that has been part of Russia for
centuries.
Though the Russian case for intervention in both
Georgia and Ukraine is much stronger than the excuses often used by the
United States to intervene in other countries, the Washington Post was
apoplectic about Russia's "violation" of suddenly sacred international
law.
The Post wrote, "as long as some leaders play by what
Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can't
pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military
strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners
of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might
wish they did not."
The Post also laments what it sees as a "receding"
tide of democracy around the world, but it is worth noting that the U.S.
government has a long and sorry record of overthrowing democratic
governments. Just a partial list since World War II would include:
Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile
in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002,
Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and now Yanukovych
in Ukraine in 2014. The next target of a U.S.-embraced "democratic" coup
looks to be Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.
Perhaps the closest U.S. parallel to the Russian
intervention in Ukraine was President Bill Clinton's decision to invade
Haiti in 1994 to reinstall Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to office, though Russia has not gone nearly that far regarding
Yanukovych in Ukraine. Russia has only intervened to prevent the
fascist-spearheaded coup regime in Kiev from imposing its will on the
country's ethnic Russian provinces.
Also, in the case of Aristide, the U.S. role wasn't as
pro-democratic as Clinton's invasion on his behalf might suggest.
Clinton ordered the action to reverse a 1991 military coup that ousted
President Aristide with the support of President George H.W. Bush.
Aristide was deposed a second time in 2004 in a coup partly engineered
by the administration of President George W. Bush.
In other words, Clinton's intervention on behalf of a
popularly elected leader in Haiti was the anomaly to the more typical
U.S. pattern of collaborating with right-wing military officers in the
overthrow of elected leaders who don't comply with Washington's wishes.
Thus, the overriding hypocrisy of the Washington Post,
Secretary Kerry and indeed nearly all of Official Washington is their
insistence that the United States actually promotes the principle of
democracy or, for that matter, the rule of international law. Those are
at best situational ethics when it comes to advancing U.S. interests
around the world.
1 comment:
Bravo
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