A Prologue, or rehashing yesterday’s news
Take the question of war crimes (isn’t that really a redundancy?) which are much in the news today as the war in Ukraine grinds on and on, in large part, I would argue, to the US refusal to work for a negotiated settlement. The US condemns the Russians for committing horrendous crimes against civilian populations and the press, even those outlets claiming to be liberal or progressive, carries story after story documenting these crimes. US leaders demand that the Russians from the lowliest private in the Army up to the Russian President, Putin, be put on trial, one would assume by some international agency, perhaps the International Criminal Court, ignoring the fact, which they are well aware of, that because Russia does not recognize the ICC, under international law, its nationals can’t be tried there for the war crimes they have committed, in Ukraine or anywhere else. So no one seriously believes that these trials will ever take place, but it plays well in the press.
There is no question about whether these crimes have been
committed and must be condemned.
But what’s left out of this discussion is that the US also doesn’t recognize the ICC and therefore its soldiers and political leaders can’t be tried for war crimes, either. As if to emphasize that point, the US Congress passed legislation during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (during which, of course, it should be clear, there were no war crimes committed by anyone except the Taliban), that gave the US government the authority to use military force to “rescue” any American citizens who were about to be tried by international courts for war crimes.
The US may not recognize the authority of the ICC, but Afghanistan does. Under Donald Trump, the US refused to cooperate with the ICC’s chief prosecutor when she announced that her investigation into war crimes during the Afghan War would include “alleged C.I.A. and American military abuse in detention centers in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and at sites in Poland, Lithuania, and Romania” (aka black ops sites). At this point the Trump administration revoked her visa, preventing her from interviewing any witnesses here. It then followed up with financial sanctions on her.
Well, that was Trump, you might say, but here is Joe Biden’s response to the investigation, which can only be described as genuine bipartisanship:
“the United States continues to object to the International Criminal Court’s assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of such non-States Parties as the United States and its allies absent their consent or referral by the United Nations Security Council and will vigorously protect current and former United States personnel from any attempts to exercise such jurisdiction.”
To put it bluntly, the “rules-based order” that the US is intent on enforcing around the world goes like this: We make the rules and we enforce the order, and nobody, or no international body (ICC, UN, etc.) can overrule us. In a slight modification of the golden rule (he who has the gold, rules - which clearly applies domestically), the US asserts that “he who has the guns, rules” and we surely have the MOST guns, from the military right down to the gen pop.
Since the ICC was established, no Americans have been tried for war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam, Korea and the hundreds of other large or small US military actions outside its borders since the end of WW II. No courts have been convened to try US Presidents or Congressmen for supplying weapons of war to countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia (the list could go on and on, but these are good examples), who have used them against their own civilian populations as well as those of their neighbors. Apparently, the US leaders and their sycophants in the press haven’t brushed up on their bible verses lately. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone …” (John, 8:7)
The first rule of war, as laid out by the ICRC, requires combatant countries to distinguish between (permitted) military and (prohibited) civilian targets. The second states that “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population” — an all-too-on-target summary of Russia’s war-making these last 10 months — “are prohibited.” Violating that prohibition is a crime.” Rebecca Gordon in Nation of Change https://www.nationofchange.org/2023/01/10/american-exceptionalism-on-full-display/
To reiterate, the Russians are certainly guilty of war crimes. But
·
in a country whose military budget is more than
the military budgets of the next 10 largest countries spending on war,
COMBINED;
·
in a country that spends over ½ of its national
budget on war (aka “defense”, a rather interesting term to justify massive military
spending in a country that hasn’t been invaded in over 200 years);
·
in a country whose weapons have been used time
and again against civilian populations;
·
in a country that has the world’s largest
stockpile of nuclear weapons and has been steadily withdrawing from treaties
designed to reduce the stockpiles of all the major nuclear powers;
·
in a country that has 750 publicly acknowledged military
bases in over 80 countries (and that doesn’t count the black ops sites);
·
in a country that is by far the largest supplier
of military weapons to other countries around the world, many of whom do not in
any sense qualify as democracies;
·
in a country which has invaded countless other countries
throughout its history, particularly
since WW II, and engaged in mass carpet bombing of civilian populations and
infrastructure and more recently, targeted bombings (but I guess this was OK
because these populations weren’t white Christians);
· AND in a country that has used the most horrendous weapon of war on civilians, not once, but twice and still refuses to rule out first use of these weapons in the future;
in that country, one might ask if it isn’t guilty of
“prohibited” attacks on civilians on a scale that dwarfs even what Putin and the
Russians have done. (Note: if you are not familiar with these actions, it’s
because we generally don’t learn about them in our history books, which praise
The Empire of Liberty for spreading the “liberty” (by any means necessary), but
all too often leave out the “empire” part.)
In this week’s news: The Spring Offensive?
Now comes another example, directly related to the war in Ukraine, of how the US “rules-based order” works to promote its “interests around the world”, and it comes from a journalist who has a long history of exposing the dark side of the Empire of Liberty, Seymour Hersh. A real investigative journalist, who doesn’t just parrot releases from the State Dept. and the Pentagon, Hersh gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. During the 1970s, he covered the secret bombing of Cambodia and in 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker.
Hersh’s latest investigation, however, has received little or no attention from the mainstream press, with a couple of exceptions, mainly in Europe. Why? Perhaps because it exposes one more piece of what’s behind the US actions with regard to Ukraine. In a substack post (https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream) Hersh provides a detail analysis of the “mysterious” explosion that shut down 3 of the 4 Nord Stream pipelines, which were designed to transport cheap natural gas from Russia to Germany.
At the time of the “mysterious” explosion, many in the US press speculated that the Russians blew up their own pipeline. This strains the bounds of my imagination, since I find it hard to believe that they would be stupid enough to destroy something so beneficial to them, both economically and in terms of political leverage on European nations, particularly Germany. No matter who you are, you’d have to be awfully stupid to bite the hand that feeds you, big time. The other “explanation” at the time claimed that it was an accident. You know that the Russians aren’t very competent when it comes to technology. Again I find this far-fetched, when we note that there were several separate explosions in different pipelines. A chain reaction?
Hersh’s post presents us with a lot of the pieces for solving the “mystery” by pointing out that the US had a very strong motive (even before the Russian invasion, and more so, once Russian troops invaded Ukraine). It had the opportunity and it had the means, as Hersh documents. Various officials of the US government had made it clear prior to the destruction of the pipelines, that the US would not tolerate the expansion (as in Nord Stream II, which was ready to come online) of the pipelines.
I’ve read a couple of attacks on Hersh’s facts, and don’t doubt that due to the aura of secrecy surrounding this event, he is only beginning to unravel the whole story, but I find this, far and above, the most credible theory of what happened. After all, as Hersh points out, how many times has it happened before? And, unlike the main stream media, I remember and understand the history of the Empire of Liberty.
US has a long and sordid history of secret actions in every corner of the world to promote its economic and political interests. As I am putting together my brief account of the history of the Empire and its relationship to white supremacy, I have included many such instances. Will we find out in 5 or 10 years that Hersh was on to something, that is if we are still around?
The Drums of War Beat Louder
In a recent WAPO piece, the link between the War in Ukraine and China policy was also spelled out clearly.
A Russian military victory in Ukraine will embolden Beijing and lead to war between the United States and China over Taiwan, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon and vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, warned in an interview ahead of remarks that he will deliver to global leaders at a major security and defense conference in Germany this weekend…
Khodorkovsky is due to speak this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, where he and two other opposition figures, the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, have been invited instead of official representatives of the Russian government. Khodorkovsky warns West of war with China if Russia wins in Ukraine – By Catherine Belton, February 15, 2023
And now we have the threats by both the US and its NATO partner in crime, Germany. They demand, according to the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that China refrain from sending weapons to Russia, or else. The or else isn’t spelled out.
If the connections between the war in Ukraine and US actions (military, diplomatic, economic and political) with regard to China weren’t clear to the reader, they certainly should be now. If the eerie parallel to the events leading to WW I weren’t obvious before now, it certainly should be now. And if it’s not clear that WW III will be the war to end all wars, one would hope it is now
And again, the Empire gets ready to strike in conjunction with its “democratic” allies
It’s hard sometimes to keep up with the US’s (and its allies) use of its military threats around the world. While attention is focused on Ukraine and the South Pacific as hot spots, the situation in the Middle East continues to heat up. The Trump administration deep sixed the Iran Nuclear Deal and the Biden administration, after a half-hearted attempt to renegotiate, has abandoned any effort to revive it. In the meanwhile, other plans are afoot. From the Intercept:
The US military has allocated spending for secret contingency operations pertaining to an Iran war plan, according to a classified Pentagon budget manual listing emergency and special programs reviewed by The Intercept.
The contingency plan, code-named “Support Sentry,” was funded in 2018 and 2019, according to the manual, which was produced for the 2019 fiscal year. It classifies Support Sentry as an Iran “CONPLAN,” or concept plan, a broad contingency plan for war which the Pentagon develops in anticipation of a potential crisis…
When asked about the program and whether it is still in place, Maj. John Moore, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said, “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on numbered plans. Iran remains the leading source of instability in the region and is a threat to the United States and our partners. We are constantly monitoring threat streams in coordination with our regional partners and will not hesitate to defend U.S. national interests in the region.”
And who exactly are those regional partners? That great democracy, Saudi Arabia, whose government sanctions the murder of journalists and has been carrying out a genocidal war in Yemen for 8 years, with weapons generously supplied by the US.
And Israel, whose human rights record with regard to the Palestinians is once again making headlines and whose current government actions have resulted in massive protests at home and condemnation abroad.
So while we, in the US, are focused on “Putin’s War” in
Ukraine and the audacious Chinese “weather” balloon,
… the Biden administration is on the verge of sleepwalking (I beg to differ; it’s going down this path with eyes wide open) into a major armed conflict in the Middle East. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides appeared to endorse a plan for Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with U.S. support. “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran], and we’ve got their back,” he said at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Nides’s words come after recent high-level military drills between Israel and the United States intended to showcase the ability to strike Iranian targets, as well as recent acts of sabotage and assassination inside Iran …
… the Biden administration has not walked back the remarks. In a press conference, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the remarks reflected consistent U.S. support of Israeli security. (The Intercept, Hawkish Israel Is Pulling U.S. Into War With Iran, 3/1/23)
What now?
It is incumbent on the left in this country to work on developing a broad antiwar movement, one that can build off the lessons learned in opposing the war in Vietnam. To do so, we need to understand the basis for US actions, its defense of empire, as well as the implications for the working class, here in the US and internationally.
While many will be drawn to oppose the US policies as immoral because of the horrors of war (the religious and pacifist objections), and others will join because of the threat of escalation to nuclear war, what is critical is that left advance a clear anti-imperialist perspective and center the movement with a working class perspective. To do this it is absolutely necessary to highlight the relationship of this crisis to the others that threaten our very existence. These include the climate crisis; the rise of neo-fascism with its appeal to white supremacy; the continuing threat of COVID and other pandemics; and runaway inequality, which has resulted in the extreme concentration of wealth AND power in the hands of a tiny minority.
What we are facing is aptly described by Adam Tooze and others as a polycrisis. Stated simply, a polycrisis is the conjunction of several interrelated crises. The implication of the term is that these crises combine to form a polycrisis that is more than the sum of all of its parts. The nature of the “beast” is that you can’t deal with each individual crisis as independent from the others.
I hope to turn my attention to clarifying the nature of
the polycrisis and how we can deal with the whole in future postings.
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