A Proposal for Assessing Legitimacy of our So-called “Wars of Liberation”

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Sun Dec-07-08 09:07 PM
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A Proposal for Assessing Legitimacy of our So-called “Wars of Liberation”

Edited on Sun Dec-07-08 10:00 PM by Time for change

Like many other liberal/progressive Americans, I am very disturbed over our nation’s imperialistic ideals and actions, which have significantly accelerated under the Bush/Cheney administration.

Though it is a near certainty that an Obama Presidency will be an improvement over the past eight years, I am nevertheless not willing to allow myself to feel too optimistic about the likelihood of our country making a clean break with its imperialistic tendencies. This did not start with the Bush administration, and ending it will be a monumental task for any president. If President Obama manages to take large strides in that direction, he should be regarded as one of the greatest presidents in our history, on that basis alone.

Andrew Bacevich, in the last chapter of his book “The Limits of Power – The End of American Exceptionalism”, offers a very gloomy assessment, not directed at any particular individual. After briefly summarizing candidate Obama’s campaign promises, he says:

The agenda is an admirable one. Yet to imagine that installing a particular individual in the Oval Office will produce decisive action on any of these fronts is to succumb to the grandest delusion of all…

Whoever moves into the White House on January 20, 2009, the fundamental problem facing the country – a yawning disparity between what Americans expect and what they are willing or able to pay – will remain stubbornly in place. Any presidential initiatives aimed at alleviating the crisis of profligacy, reforming our political system, or devising a more realistic military policy are likely, at best, to have a marginal effect… Counting on the next president to fix whatever is broken promotes expectations of easy, no-cost cures, permitting ordinary citizens to absolve themselves of responsibility for the nation’s predicament. The same Americans who profess to despise all that Washington represents look to – depending on partisan affiliation – a new John F. Kennedy or a new Ronald Reagan to set things right again. Rather than seeing the imperial presidency as part of the problem, they persist in the fantasy that a chief executive, given a clear mandate, will “change” the way Washington works and restore the nation to good health… A citizenry that looks to the White House for deliverance is assured of disappointment.

I do not fully agree with Bacevich, though I share his concerns. I am more optimistic than he is. And I also believe that a U.S. President has more potential to make substantive changes in our nation’s direction than he does.

But still, I agree with Bacevich that the pressures on any U.S. President to continue on our imperialist road are going to be tremendously difficult to resist. So, for the record, I would like to state some of my rather simple-minded ideas on the subject.

“War of Liberation” as a euphemism for imperialist conquest

Imperialist countries almost always – if not always – spin their imperialist actions to make them sound much more benevolent than they are. In the case of the United States, the nature of the spin is to make their imperialist conquests sound like some sort of “war of liberation”, since our country was founded upon its own war of liberation. Let’s consider this spin with respect to the three most egregious examples of wars of imperialist conquest in our nation’s history: The Philippine-American War, the Vietnam War, and the current Iraq War and occupation:

Philippine-American War
After “liberating” the Philippines from Spain in 1898 in the course of the Spanish American War, the question arose as to what to do with them. President McKinley was besieged with advice from businessmen with commercial interests in the Philippines and by military men who believed we should gain control over the Philippines for strategic military purposes. This is how McKinley justified his decision to pursue conquest of the Philippines:

The truth is I didn’t want the Philippines, and when they came to us, as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them…

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance… And one night late it came to me this way: (1) That we could not give them back to Spain – that would be cowardly and dishonorable… (3) that we could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for self-government – and they would soon have anarchy and misrule; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!

The Filipinos didn’t appreciate that decision. They declared independence on January 23, 1899, and twelve days later they declared war against the United States.

The Vietnam War
It was John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, who initially decided to intervene in Vietnam. Though the Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam, that was not acceptable to Dulles. Fearing a Communist victory in those elections, Dulles intervened to prevent the elections from taking place and proclaimed an indefinite commitment by the United States to that effect – a commitment that President Kennedy inherited, and which was subsequently passed on to Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

From the time that we prevented the Vietnamese from holding elections in 1956 as previously agreed, until our withdrawal from Vietnam 17 years later, the justification for our imperial policies there was always to help the Vietnamese to throw of the yolk of Communism, and also to prevent the spread of Communism to other countries.

But the issue of what right we had to prevent a sovereign nation from holding elections to choose their own government was rarely discussed in our country.

The Iraq War
The initial justification for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that, given his alleged close ties to al Qaeda, those weapons posed a mortal danger to us. When the initial justification was exposed for the lie that it always was, Bush’s major new justification became the need to spread freedom and democracy to Iraq. Here are excerpts from a Bush speech, bragging about what his invasion of Iraq accomplished:

It's a remarkable transformation for a country that has virtually no experience with democracy, and which is struggling to overcome the legacy of one of the worst tyrannies the world has known…. There's still a lot of difficult work to be done in Iraq, but thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East, and the history of freedom… As the Iraqi people struggle to build their democracy, adversaries continue their war on a free Iraq. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists and Saddamists and terrorists.

In reality, “the enemy” that Bush referred to was, and is mostly Iraqis who are fighting against the U.S. occupation of their country.

The outcomes of our imperialist wars

The outcomes of these (and other) imperialist wars have been unmitigated and massive human tragedies:

The Philippine-American War
After the Filipinos declared independence, a long vicious guerilla war ensued. Only after press censorship was lifted in 1901 did ordinary Americans get to learn what was happening. According to a report in the Philadelphia Ledger:

Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog… Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk,” have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later… shot them down one by one…

Many more massacres and atrocities ensued. By the time that the new President, Teddy Roosevelt, declared the Philippines “pacified” on July 4, 1902, 4,373 American soldiers had died in the war, along with an estimated 16 thousand Filipino soldiers and 20 thousand Filipino civilians.

The Vietnam War
As in our war against the Philippines, most of the people of South Vietnam deeply resented our involvement there, which led to cycles of guerilla warfare against our troops, which we responded to with massacres and other atrocities. George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam War Democratic candidate for President in 1972, proclaimed numerous reasons for advocating complete withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam over a period of several months, including: The South Vietnamese people have a right to decide what kind of government they live under; the corrupt South Vietnamese government we supported had lost the confidence of the people of all parts of Vietnam; we were paying an awful price for the war in terms of lost lives and money; Nixon’s idea of “Peace with honor” was pure hypocrisy – There is no honor in having millions of people killed for no good reason; and, it had become obvious that we couldn’t win the war.

In the end, 58,000 American troops died in the Vietnam War, along with about two million Vietnamese. The cost to the U.S. was about $600 billion.

The Iraq War
An epidemiological study in 2006 showed that since the 2003 invasion of Iraq there had been 655,000 excess Iraqi deaths over a period of a little more than three years – that is, deaths that are due to the invasion and subsequent occupation. Over 600 thousand of those deaths were violent deaths, amounting to about 500 violent deaths per day. A later study placed the Iraqi death toll at over a million.

According to the United Nations, approximately two million Iraqis have fled their country since the start of the invasion, and the number of external refugees was then increasing by about 50 thousand per month. In addition, there have been almost two million internally displaced Iraqis since the start of the war.

Iraq’s infrastructure has been devastated. For example, despite U.S. promises to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure, by October 2006 Iraqis in Baghdad were receiving an average of only 2.4 hours of electricity per day. The Iraqi healthcare system is crumbling. And according to a UN/World Bank report, water and sewage treatment has deteriorated by 50%.

A report by a coalition of non-governmental groups called the Global Policy Forum shed a lot of light on some of the reasons for the tragedies that so many Iraqis have suffered under the U.S. occupation. The report explains that U.S. forces:

have held a large number of Iraqi citizens in 'security detention' without charge or trial, in direct violation of international law. No Iraqi is safe from arbitrary arrest and the number of prisoners has risen greatly since 2003 (when the US-led war began)…

U.S. military commanders have established permissive rules of engagement, allowing troops to use deadly force against virtually any perceived threat. As a consequence, the US and its allies regularly kill Iraqi civilians at checkpoints and during military operations, on the basis of the merest suspicion…abusing and torturing large numbers of Iraqi prisoners… torture increasingly takes place in Iraqi prisons, apparently with US awareness and complicity…In addition to combat deaths, coalition forces have killed many Iraqi civilians.

The United States has established broad legal immunity in Iraq for its forces, for private security personnel, for foreign military and civilian contractors, and even for the oil companies doing business in Iraq…

Under the control or influence of U.S. authorities, public funds in Iraq have been drained by massive corruption and stolen oil, leaving the country unable to provide basic services and incapable of rebuilding. Billion of dollars have disappeared.

A Proposal for assessing legitimacy of our so-called “wars of liberation”

As long as we allow our leaders to get away with their Orwellian doublespeak without challenging them on it, our country will continue to be pulled into imperialist wars, with the same tragic consequences as all of our other ones. When they claim that the purpose of a war against a sovereign nation is to spread freedom to its people, they ought to be able to point to criteria of legitimacy. If they can’t do that, that ought to be taken as prima facie evidence that we should pull out. I propose the following three criteria for starters, as a minimum.

Absence of substantial numbers of civilian deaths
The ultimate indication of lack of freedom is death. Dead people are not free, nor is a nation that is constantly confronted by death. Therefore, it represents an egregious abrogation of responsibility that in our war to “liberate” Iraq, our national news media has been so reluctant to report on Iraqi deaths.

Greg Mitchell edited a book titled “So Wrong for so Long – How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq”. A section titled “Will the Media Finally Count the Dead?” reads:

From the beginning, the U.S. military refused to count – and the American military rarely probed – civilian casualties as the result of our invasion of Iraq in 2003. For the longest time, these deaths were rarely mentioned at all…

Journalist Jane Arraf comments on the lack of delving into this crucial issue:

I’m more puzzled by comments that the violence isn’t any worse than any American city. Really? In which American city do 60 bullet-riddled bodies turn up on a given day? In which city do the headless bodies of ordinary citizens turn up every single day? …

Imagine the worst day you’ve ever had in your life, add a regular dose of terror, and you’ll begin to get an idea of what it’s like every day for a lot of people here.

What can one say about the abysmal failure of our news media to address this issue? If most Americans were aware that our efforts to “liberate” Iraq have resulted in a million innocent Iraqi deaths, what would that do our support for the war?

Absence of substantial numbers of refugees
Another major indication that a nation is not free is a substantial numbers of refugees. An April 2007 article in The Nation by Dahr Jamail notes about 4 million Iraqi refugees as of that date. Add one million dead to that, and we see that about one fifth of the original Iraqi population since the 2003 U.S. invasion has either died as a result of the war or occupation or become refugees. Jamail’s article explains the reason for so many refugees:

On all measurable levels, life in Baghdad, now well into the fifth year of U.S. occupation, has become hellish for Iraqis who have attempted to remain, which, of course, only adds to the burgeoning numbers who daily become part of the exodus to neighboring lands. It is generally agreed that the delivery of security, electricity, potable water, health care, and jobs -- that is, the essentials of modern urban life -- are all significantly worse than during the last years of the reign of Saddam Hussein… "The Americans are detaining so many people," Ali Hassan, a 41-year-old from the Hay Jihad area of Baghdad said as we spoke…

The opinions of the subjects of our occupation
If a so-called war of liberation is to claim any success in liberating the subjects of the presumed liberation, then one would expect those subjects to express feelings of gratitude, or at least when asked, indicate that they approve of the occupation. Attempts to ascertain their opinions should be the first order of business whenever we become involved in a “war of liberation” of another people. But as with the issues of Iraqi deaths and refugees, our national news media has been virtually mute on this subject.

One predominant characteristic of all three wars discussed in this post is the immense hostility of the populations that we “liberated” towards our “liberation” of them. In fact, in all three wars, so much of the population hated the American presence in their country that we could hardly differentiate the civilian population that we were claiming to “liberate” from the enemy that we were fighting. Consequently, our military becomes frustrated, and they end up massacring civilians because they are unable to differentiate the subjects of our “liberation” from “the enemy”. This is an all too common occurrence in guerilla wars in which the subjects of our “liberation” bitterly resent our presence. As an example, here is a brief summary of the battle of Fallujah in the spring of 2004:

In the end, perhaps as many as eight hundred Iraqis (including hundreds of women and children) died as a result of the first of what would be several sieges of Fallujah. Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes, and the city was razed… Far from asserting U.S. supremacy in Iraq, Fallujah demonstrated that guerrilla tactics were effective against the occupiers. The number of guerillas probably totaled no more than 400 out of a population of 300,000. But by assaulting a whole city, as if it was Verdun or Stalingrad, the US Marines managed to turn it into a nationalist symbol….

The point is that these kinds of scenarios ought to serve to remind us that our efforts at “liberation” are woefully unsuccessful and illigitimate, and we ought to just pack up and leave.

If our failure to differentiate the “enemy” from those we are trying to liberate isn’t enough to tell us that we’re on the wrong course, polling of the civilian population can be performed. An opinion poll of Iraqis in September 2006 should have told us all we needed to know about the success and legitimacy of our “liberation” effort:

 78% said that the U.S. military presence is provoking more conflict than it is preventing.
 61% said that U.S. military withdrawal would increase security for ordinary Iraqis.
 61% approved of violent attacks on U.S. led forces.
 91% said that U.S. forces should withdraw within two years or less.

Conclusion

If we have no method for measuring the success or legitimacy of our “wars of liberation”, then we will have no way of knowing when they are or are not successful. Of course, governments that engage in phony “wars of liberation” will never agree to such measurements because they will expose those wars for the frauds that they are. And that is why the American people must insist on such things.

But these kinds of methods for evaluating our wars are not what Americans are used to, and they go against the grain of a long history of American militarism. Consequently, President Obama will have a very difficult time of toning down our militaristic attitudes, no matter how much he may wish to do that. A recent editorial in The Nation expressed the conundrum. They did not express it specifically in terms of military matters, but the principle is the same regardless of the specific issue:

The pressure to govern from the center, to try not to alienate the establishment, will be massive. But as in 1933, when FDR took office, the people yearn for bold leadership – and the crisis we are in requires it.

FDR, we must remember… was compelled to take dramatic action because of the great traumas and powerful movements around him. The Great Depression, combined with pressure from the popular social movements working outside the administration, pushed him to carry out bolder reforms. There's a powerful lesson in this history for our time.
The small "d" democratic movement that helped elect Barack Obama – the millions of volunteers and organizers, and 2 million-plus small donors – will play a key role in forging a progressive agenda under his administration. We will need this broad and energized grassroots base to overcome the timid incrementalists, the forces of money and power, that are obstacles to change… Historically, we know the Democratic Party's finest moments have come when it was spurred into action by movements on the outside.

This is where The Nation, along with other independent and progressive forces, can come into play… We will continue to make bold proposals, ferret out the truth, expose corruption and abuse of power, and hold our politicians accountable… We will strive to inject new, timely ideas into the democratic arena…

While we may not agree with everything President Obama does, we recognize that he has the capacity to be a transformative president. The change he can bring will be most lasting and profound if the motto of his organizing campaign – "Respect. Empower. Include." – embodies the spirit of his administration. That was, in essence, the pledge he made election night when he said, "I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you."

In other words, President Obama cannot do it alone. It will be necessary for progressives to counter the pressure from the right and the center, to push him in the right direction.