Foundations

Regarding foreign policy, there are—unfortunately—patriotic framings that prevent meaningful discourse from happening.

I want to use this piece to talk about the remarkably low level of discourse that we see when it comes to foreign policy—discourse is dishearteningly low-quality on various topics, but it’s particularly bad regarding foreign policy.

Table Stakes for a Meaningful Discourse

Foreign-policy discourse should begin with five simple foundations: (1) we should seek to educate ourselves about the facts regarding the unpleasant side of our own countries’ atrocities; (2) we should—regarding the recent and ongoing atrocities that our own countries are responsible for—make the effort to read the literature about the major ones; (3) one should recognize that there’s only moral value in criticizing state atrocities that one can actually affect and that one is almost always most able to affect one’s own country’s atrocities; (4) we should humanize our victims, spotlight their perspectives, and make sure not to treat them as statistics; and (5) we should have the self-awareness to see that we exhibit extreme hypocrisy when we fail—while expressing selective outrage about official enemies’ atrocities—to criticize our own country’s atrocities.

The five basic foundations are: (1) it’s good to educate ourselves about our own atrocities; (2) we should be literate when it comes to our own recent and ongoing atrocities; (3) we should—because it’s the moral approach—spotlight our own atrocities; (4) we should humanize our victims; and (5) we should be self-aware and not engage in extremely hypocritical condemnation of official enemies’ atrocities. I will—for clarity—repeat the foundations in a bullet-point list:

• (1) it’s good to educate ourselves about our own atrocities

• (2) we should be literate when it comes to our own recent and ongoing atrocities

• (3) we should—because it’s the moral approach—spotlight our own atrocities

• (4) we should humanize our victims

• (5) we should be self-aware and not engage in extremely hypocritical condemnation of official enemies’ atrocities

I wonder what foreign-policy discourse would look like if these five foundations were prerequisites—what if these five basic foundations were actually table stakes regarding foreign-policy discourse? I think that it would be refreshing. And I think that it would lead to a far more intelligent—and moral—foreign-policy discourse. But all five of the foundations are—due to patriotic framings—unacceptable.

Suppose that one accepts the core patriotic notion that America doesn’t commit atrocities—accepting that idea means that the five foundations are unacceptable. And unfortunately, I don’t think that meaningful foreign-policy discourse can occur without the five foundations in place.

An Institutionally Unfree Media

How do patriotic framings get instilled in our minds? Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky write in the 2002 version of their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: this “book centers in what we call a ‘propaganda model,’ an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate”; it’s “our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them”; structural “factors are those such as ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means”; the “propaganda model also incorporates other closely related factors such as the ability to complain about the media's treatment of news (that is, produce ‘flak’), to provide ‘experts’ to confirm the official slant on the news, and to fix the basic principles and ideologies that are taken for granted by media personnel and the elite, but are often resisted by the general population”; in “our view, the same underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper-thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies”; “what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted as premises of their work are frequently well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis”; these “structural factors that dominate media operations are not all-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results”; it’s “well recognized, and may even be said to constitute a part of an institutional critique such as we present in this volume, that the various parts of media organizations have some limited autonomy, that individual and professional values influence media work, that policy is imperfectly enforced, and that media policy itself may allow some measure of dissent and reporting that calls into question the accepted viewpoint”; these “considerations all work to assure some dissent and coverage of inconvenient facts”; the “beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda”; a “propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices”; it “traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public”; the “essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under” five headings; the first is “the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms”; the second is “advertising as the primary income source of the mass media”; the third is “the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power”; the fourth is “‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media”; the fifth is “‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism”; these “elements interact with and reinforce one another”; the “raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print”; and regarding these filters, they “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns”.

A “propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy”; the “evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation”; “the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model”; while “this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone”; and this “is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system”.

The “five filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become ‘big news,’ subject to sustained news campaigns”; by “definition, news from primary establishment sources meets one major filter requirement and is readily accommodated by the mass media”; messages “from and about dissidents and weak, unorganized individuals and groups, domestic and foreign, are at an initial disadvantage in sourcing costs and credibility, and they often do not comport with the ideology or interests of the gatekeepers and other powerful parties that influence the filtering process”; “the torture of political prisoners and the attack on trade unions in Turkey will be pressed on the media only by human-rights activists and groups that have little political leverage”; the “U.S. government supported the Turkish martial-law government from its inception in 1980, and the U.S. business community has been warm toward regimes that profess fervent anti-communism, encourage foreign investment, repress unions, and loyally support U.S. foreign policy (a set of virtues that are frequently closely linked)”; media “that chose to feature Turkish violence against their own citizenry would have had to go to extra expense to find and check out information sources”; “they would elicit flak from government, business, and organized right-wing flak machines, and they might be looked upon with disfavor by the corporate community (including advertisers) for indulging in such a quixotic interest and crusade”; they “would tend to stand alone in focusing on victims that from the standpoint of dominant American interests were unworthy”; in “marked contrast, protest over political prisoners and the violation of the rights of trade unions in Poland was seen by the Reagan administration and business elites in 1981 as a noble cause, and, not coincidentally, as an opportunity to score political points”; many “media leaders and syndicated columnists felt the same way”; “information and strong opinions on human-rights violations in Poland could be obtained from official sources in Washington, and reliance on Polish dissidents would not elicit flak from the U.S. government or the flak machines”; these “victims would be generally acknowledged by the managers of the filters to be worthy”; the “mass media never explain why Andrei Sakharov is worthy and José Luis Massera, in Uruguay, is unworthy”; “the attention and general dichotomization occur ‘naturally’ as a result of the working of the filters”; reports “of the abuses of worthy victims not only pass through the filters”; “they may also become the basis of sustained propaganda campaigns”; if “the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public”; conversely, “propaganda campaigns will not be mobilized where victimization, even though massive, sustained, and dramatic, fails to meet the test of utility to elite interests”; “while the focus on Cambodia in the Pol Pot era (and thereafter) was exceedingly serviceable, as Cambodia had fallen to the Communists and useful lessons could be drawn by attention to their victims, the numerous victims of the U.S. bombing before the Communist takeover were scrupulously ignored by the U.S. elite press”; after “Pol Pot’s ouster by the Vietnamese, the United States quietly shifted support to this ‘worse than Hitler’ villain, with little notice in the press, which adjusted once again to the national political agenda”; attention “to the Indonesian massacres of 1965–66, or the victims of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor from 1975 onward, would also be distinctly unhelpful as bases of media campaigns, because Indonesia is a U.S. ally and client that maintains an open door to Western investment, and because, in the case of East Timor, the United States bears major responsibility for the slaughter”; the “same is true of the victims of state terror in Chile and Guatemala, U.S. clients whose basic institutional structures, including the state terror system, were put in place and maintained by, or with crucial assistance from, U.S. power, and who remain U.S. client states”; propaganda “campaigns on behalf of these victims would conflict with government-business-military interests and, in our model, would not be able to pass through the filtering system”; “a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests”; this “should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage”; “we will see that such dichotomization in the mass media is massive and systematic”; and “not only are choices for publicity and suppression comprehensible in terms of system advantage, but the modes of handling favored and inconvenient materials (placement, tone, context, fullness of treatment) differ in ways that serve political ends”.

Herman and Chomsky write that they would—using a propaganda model—anticipate: “definitions of worth based on utility, and dichotomous attention based on the same criterion”; “the news stories about worthy and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality”; “official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily—and uncritically—in connection with one’s own abuses and those of friendly governments, while refugees and other dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies”; “the uncritical acceptance of certain premises in dealing with self and friends—such as that one’s own state and leaders seek peace and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth—premises which will not be applied in treating enemy states”; “different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends”; “great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one’s own and friendly states”; “worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically”; “they will be humanized”; “their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion”; and “unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage”.

I think that the media is—even if we often challenge what it presents—important in determining what we’re aware of. We simply lack basic awareness—let alone basic literacy, which is a separate thing—regarding certain atrocities that haven’t been covered properly in our media. I think that an institutionally free media would properly cover our atrocities. And that this proper coverage would result in (A) our being aware of our atrocities and (B) our being too self-aware to conduct ourselves in the hypocritical manner that elicits ridicule. I think that both (A) and (B) would be great for us, for our victims, and for the whole world—just imagine the difference that it would make if we were aware of our atrocities and we had a hypocrisy-precluding self-awareness.

Awareness of Our Atrocities

I would say that few Americans have any awareness when it comes to the Iraq War’s events and human toll—how many Americans know what happened over there, what the aggression’s ultimate impact was, and what the aggression’s victims have to say? A 17 March 2023 Guardian piece says: two “decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government”; “Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret”; today “another large, world-shaking invasion is under way”; “Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression”; after “delivering his remarks, Biden declared” that the “‘idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country—since world war II, nothing like that has happened’”; the “president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad”; the “White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement”; reporters “do not appear to have asked about it”; the “country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line”; neither “of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy”; while “Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers”; the “flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations”—“this happened”; the “attempt to legitimize ‘pre-emption’ (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone)”—“this mattered”; and worst “of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region”.

Nalib Salih gives—in a 21 March 2023 piece—some press quotes that portray Iraq’s current situation in a positive light. Salih then comments: “This is how our generational agony is trivialized. Who tells the story of Iraq? The victims and the survivors, or the tourist reporters and the rulers enthroned by unpunished war criminals from Downing Street and the Beltway?” I think that we should all ponder on Salih’s provocative question regarding who tells the story—doesn’t it make sense to spotlight the perspectives of the “victims and the survivors”? And I think that Iraqi victims and survivors should be treated in the way that Herman and Chomsky say—in what I quote above—that certain victims will be treated in the US media: “worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically”; “they will be humanized”; and “their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion”. Salih writes: “America’s war against Iraq was not a single explosion in time that happened in a distant then”; it “is here, with us—we can still hear the sirens”; rather “than aftermath(s), the war has afterlives embroidered with ours in a canvas dripping blood as we speak”; “Iraq has become an unlivable wasteland, but those who sound the alarm in the hope of rescuing the future from an expected doom are punished”; and the “normalization of today’s situation comfortably ignores the terror to which Iraqis are subjected”.

Salih writes in a 5 January 2023 piece: in “cafés at night, Iraqis were glued to their television screens”; in “living rooms, mothers’ hands were raised in prayer”; in “Mosul, Basra and the faraway corners of exile, Iraqis’ hearts raced to Moroccans’ chants as Walid Regragui’s Atlas Lions forayed into hitherto uncharted World Cup territories and conquered them in style”; “Spain, Portugal and Belgium were undone by Morocco, and France by Tunisia”; the “‘scrappy’ Saudis, as The New York Times’ lexicon defines them, scored one of the tournament’s finest goals against a bewildered Argentina, now crowned world champion over France”; this “is how we will remember the World Cup”; “Palestine flags in the stands and Arab and North African triumphs on the pitch”; alas, “a few hundred, a few thousand of those who would have cheered were missing”; their “eyes would have glittered as Sofyan Amrabat chased Kylian Mbappe down the left flank, winning the ball with an immaculate tackle that left the wonder kid writhing behind, before orchestrating the play for another raid in Les Bleus’ territory”; those “missing are the children of Fallujah”; they “are asleep now”; the “football field where they would have emulated Achraf Hakimi and Yassine Bounou on chilly winter afternoons is their resting place”; their “mothers are not going to worry about their mud-stained tracksuits tomorrow”; they “are not wearing them”; today, “the field is known as the Martyrs’ Cemetery”; it “is where residents of the once besieged city buried the women and children massacred in repeated United States assaults to repress a raging rebellion in the early years of occupation”; in “Iraq, even playgrounds are now sites for mourning”; the “war entailed showering Fallujah in depleted uranium and white phosphorus”; “US savagery didn’t end there”; twenty “years and incalculable birth defects later, the US navy is naming one of its warships the USS Fallujah”; this “is how the US Empire continues its war against Iraqis”; “Fallujah’s name, bleached in white phosphorus implanted in mothers’ wombs for generations, is a spoil of war, too”; under “‘extraordinary odds,’ reads a US Empire statement explaining the decision to name a warship after Fallujah, ‘the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending in an urban area’”; through “this historical revisionism, the US has launched another assault on our dead”; and what “is left is the haunting absence of family members, homes bombed into nonexistence and photographs incinerated along with the smiling faces”.

I wonder how many people know about the sanctions against Iraq—these sanctions are one of the darkest chapters in the entire history of US foreign policy. Ahmed Twaij writes in a 25 March 2022 piece: often “after the demise of political figures, their troubling histories are whitewashed in the name of respecting their memories and the feelings of their families”; the “passing of former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Wednesday has been no exception”; “Western media responded to the news of her death with a plethora of obituaries eulogising her achievements”; President Joe Biden “proclaimed she ‘was always a force for goodness, grace, and decency—and for freedom’”; for “me as an Iraqi” the “memory of Albright will forever be tainted by the stringent sanctions she helped place on my country at a time when it was already devastated by years of war”; millions “of innocent Iraqis suffered terribly and hundreds of thousands died because of the sanctions which, in the end, achieved almost none of Washington’s policy objectives”; as “we remember Albright’s life and achievements, we must also remember those innocent Iraqi lives lost because of her policy decisions”; the “most prominent memory of Albright that I have in my mind is from an interview she gave to CBS 60 Minutes in 1996”; and in “that now-iconic interview, veteran journalist Lesley Stahl questioned Albright—then the US ambassador to the United Nations—on the catastrophic effect the rigorous US sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had on the Iraqi population”. Twaij writes:

“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

With “this response, Albright showed that she sees innocent Iraqi children as nothing more than disposable fodder in a conflict between the US administration and the Iraqi leadership”; she “demonstrated, with no room left for any doubt, that she had no humanity—that she cannot and shall never be described as ‘a force for goodness, grace, and decency’”; “the US imposed sanctions on Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein’s regime, but it was innocent civilians, not the regime officials who suffered”; the “sanctions pushed the already struggling masses into deeper poverty, but only marginally affected the rich, widening the wealth gap in the country”; by “2003, it is estimated that nearly 1.5 million Iraqis, primarily children, had died as a direct consequence of sanctions”; “this devastating toll was hardly surprising, or unexpected”; the “sanctions, implemented in August 1990 by the UN Security Council Resolution 661, included a total financial and trade embargo”; not “only was Iraq barred from exporting oil (its main income source) on the world market for several years, but it was also prevented from importing products from abroad”; this “ban included healthcare equipment and medications, which translated into immeasurable suffering for common Iraqis, but placed no immediate pressure on Hussein’s regime”; according “to UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, the death rate of children below five crossed 4,000 a month due to the lack of food and basic medications caused by the sanctions—that is up to 200 babies and toddlers dying avoidable deaths a day”; several “UN officials resigned over the years in protest at this disastrous, ineffective and murderous sanctions policy”; “Albright, the ‘passionate force for freedom, democracy and human rights’, thought it was all ‘worth it’”; to “make matters worse, 13 years after the sanctions were first implemented to pressure the Iraqi regime, the US opted to invade the oil-rich country anyway under the pretence that Hussein managed to amass weapons of mass destruction despite the embargo”; the “years of suffering were for nothing—the sanctions had achieved nothing other than devastating millions of Iraqis who had no say over the actions of those ruling over them”; and “before you write or repost articles about Albright and how wonderful it is to see women pushing boundaries and breaking glass ceilings in politics, take a minute to learn what she chose to do with the power she had—how she supported the devastation and suffering of my people”.

A 1 November 2001 FAIR piece says: “Madeleine Albright’s quote, calmly asserting that U.S. policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Arab children, has been much quoted in the Arabic press”; “a Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources since September 11 turns up only one reference to the quote—in an op-ed in the Orange Country Register (9/16/01)”; this “omission is striking, given the major role that Iraq sanctions play in the ideology of archenemy Osama bin Laden”; “his recruitment video features pictures of Iraqi babies wasting away from malnutrition and lack of medicine (New York Daily News, 9/28/01)”; the “inference that Albright and the terrorists may have shared a common rationale—a belief that the deaths of thousands of innocents are a price worth paying to achieve one’s political ends—does not seem to be one that can be made in U.S. mass media”; it’s “worth noting that on 60 Minutes, Albright made no attempt to deny the figure given by Stahl—a rough rendering of the preliminary estimate in a 1995 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions”; in “general, the response from government officials about the sanctions’ toll has been” a “barrage of equivocations, denigration of U.N. sources and implications that questioners have some ideological axe to grind (Extra!, 3-4/00)”; there “has also been an attempt to seize on the lowest possible numbers”; the “summer of 2001 saw a revival of long-discredited claims that sanctions are not to blame for Iraq’s suffering, but that Saddam Hussein bears sole responsibility—an argument put forward in a State Department report (8/99) issued shortly after the UNICEF report on the deaths of children”; with “renewed concern about biological warfare in the U.S., it’s worth noting an instance of the use of disease for military purposes that has gone almost uncovered”; “Thomas Nagy of Georgetown University unearthed a Defense Intelligence Agency document entitled ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,’ which was circulated to all major allied commands one day after the Gulf War started”; it “analyzed the weaknesses of the Iraqi water treatment system, the effects of sanctions on a damaged system and the health effects of untreated water on the Iraqi populace”; mentioning “that chlorine is embargoed under the sanctions, it speculates that ‘Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons,’ something that the United States disallowed for many years”; combined “with the fact that nearly every large water treatment plant in the country was attacked during the Gulf War, and seven out of eight dams destroyed, this suggests a deliberate targeting of the Iraqi water supply for ‘postwar leverage,’ a concept U.S. government officials admitted was part of military planning in the Gulf War (Washington Post, 6/23/91)”; subsequent “documents unearthed by Nagy (The Progressive, 8/10/01) suggest that the plan to destroy water treatment, then to restrict chlorine and other necessary water treatment supplies, was done with full knowledge of the explosion of water-borne disease that would result”; combine “this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called ‘1051 list’ of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq”; and deliberately “creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare—or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so”.

And Hans C. von Sponeck writes in his 2005 book A Different Kind of War: evidence “of the seriousness of the human misery in Iraq became clear in the course of the 1990s”; pressure “mounted on the Government of Iraq and the UN Security Council to come to an agreement upon Iraq’s humanitarian needs in order to avoid a total collapse of Iraqi society”; after “years of frustrating negotiations and the concurrent worsening of Iraqi conditions of life, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in early 1996 finally agreed to work out practical arrangements for the implementation of what became known as the ‘Oil-for-Food Programme’, the humanitarian exemption for Iraq under sanctions”; “I side with those who argue that the UN Security Council failed to carry out its policies within the limits prescribed by the UN Charter”; “comprehensive economic sanctions were implemented by the United Nations without careful predetermination of needs of the civilian population”; the “accompanying UN resolutions were imprecisely formulated, and therefore open to interpretation and political exploitation”; objective “and controllable sanction implementation for the protection of the Iraqi population was thus not possible”; a “date during the 1990–2003 sanctions period at which the UN Security Council had crossed the boundary between acceptable inconvenience for an innocent population or ‘collateral damage’ and unacceptable or illegal treatment of the Iraqi population cannot be defined precisely”; “I would argue that the first step in the direction of violation of international law was taken when the UN Security Council did not respond adequately in its humanitarian policy to the warnings of UN Under-Secretary-General Athisaari and the UN Executive Delegate, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan in 1991 that a human catastrophe of extraordinary proportions was in the making”; and a “second major step towards illegality involved the manner in which the UN Security Council carried out its oversight mandate”.

The “economic sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council were not free from international protest”; the “global outcry against these undiscriminating sanctions grew stronger and stronger in the course of the thirteen years, and did affect national attitudes towards international sanctions policy, regrettably not in those countries that took the uncompromising and hard-line approach in the UN Security Council”; the “Hague Convention of 1907 (referred to also in the Geneva Convention of 1949) includes the so-called ‘Martens Clause’”, which “establishes inter alia the legal value of the public conscience”; the “international protest against economic sanctions therefore strengthens the conclusion that Iraq sanctions violated international law”; years “of sanctions and humanitarian assistance, including the Oil-for-Food Programme, ended in” (A) “a political victory for the hard-liners in the UN Security Council”, (B) “a defeat for the Security Council as an international conflict resolution instrument”, (C) “a rejection of prevailing humanitarian law”, (D) “an affront to the international public”, and (E) “the destruction of a people who had nothing to do with the political and disarmament conflict”; there “was no shortage of warning from the international community, professional organisations, governments, the UN Secretary-General, UN civil servants, church leaders and people with healthy consciences that humanitarian law and human rights were ignored year after year”; the “profound seriousness of the Iraqi tragedy is that it was not accidental nor the result of ignorance”; and the “impact of sanctions and the inadequacy of the humanitarian exemption were known and documented”.

An “Iraqi boy or girl aged six at the beginning of sanctions in 1990 was nineteen at their end in 2003”; in “contrast to their parents, these children will have had a ‘poor’ education at best”; badly “trained, sometimes even untrained teachers, limited teaching aids, outdated or no textbooks at primary and secondary-school levels, and certainly no state-of-the-art access to knowledge at tertiary level—these were the characteristics of education under sanctions”; during “my visits to different parts of Iraq I not only saw the collapsed education system, the run-down classrooms, the empty libraries, the broken-down sanitary facilities, the sewerage in schoolyards, I heard the complaints of headmasters and parents alike”; “I discussed with students and realised their fears about a tomorrow for which they knew they were not well prepared”; “Article 50 of the Hague Convention and Regulations of 1907” says “No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise shall be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly or severally responsible”; knowledge of “and adherence to the Iraqi policies that led to this immense suffering of a people invariably establishes a casual relationship and points to ‘intent’”; evidence “of intent in turn leads to evidence of conscious violation of human rights and humanitarian law on the part of governments represented in the Security Council, first and foremost those of the United States and the United Kingdom”; “the report Professor Marc Bossuyt presented to the UN Economic and Social Council in 2000 came to the grave conclusion that ‘the sanction regime against Iraq has as its clear purpose the deliberate infliction on the Iraqi people of conditions of life (lack of adequate food, medicines, etc.) calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’, i.e., that member governments of the UN Security Council violated article 2(c) of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948”; and regarding what the UN Security Council did “from the beginning of the Oil-for-Food Programme in 1996”, it’s sound to conclude that the sanctions violated—inter alia—(1) the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, (2) the Genocide Convention, and (3) the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Hypocrisy-Precluding Self-Awareness

I want to highlight the interesting point that a certain oblivious tone indicates—if you’re from a country with a foreign-policy record like Canada’s or America’s—that you’re a victim of major indoctrination. Herman and Chomsky write—I give these quotes above—that: “the U.S. mass media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model”; while “this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of the fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone”; and this “is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system”.

I think that the 6 April 2022 NYT piece “Document the War Crimes in Ukraine” is—given the US record of aggression, war crimes, and atrocities—one of the least self-aware things that I’ve ever seen in the media. The piece says: in “Ukraine, there is no question that Russia is the aggressor”; for “at least 75 years, the international community has undertaken a real but incomplete effort to define wars of unprovoked aggression as crimes in and of themselves”; in “the words of the Nuremberg tribunal, ‘To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime’”—“‘it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’”; the “entire invasion would appear to be a crime of aggression, which would presumably reach Mr. Putin”; “the world has also identified crimes that are unacceptable even in the fog of battle”; objectively “gathering and documenting evidence is a powerful way to cut through the muck and preserve the possibility that someone might someday be held accountable”; it “holds out the possibility, however slim, that someday a judge will declare the orders to fire on a village or hospital illegal and that that legal judgment might one day serve as a deterrent in the next war”; war “crime investigations are a powerful political tool that can be used to underscore the dignity of victims and the lawlessness of the invaders”; the “Russian Army’s actions give every appearance of violating these rules”; even “if the process is difficult and stretches into months and years, it is important that history be left a forensic, credible, verified and judicially processed record of the specific crimes in Ukraine”; those “responsible should be named, their actions specified, and if at all possible, the guilty should be locked away”; “it is also imperative to make sure that the horrific evidence of criminal atrocities on display in Bucha and so many other places is promptly collected while it is still there and that witnesses are questioned while their memories are still raw”; posterity “must know what really happened”; and justice “must be given a chance”. I think that the piece provides an interesting test—how many Americans can read those words and not be aware of the elephants in the room? Herman and Chomsky write—I quote this above—that the propaganda model anticipates (1) “great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states” and (2) “diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one’s own and friendly states”. The NYT piece demonstrates (1). And the NYT has demonstrated (2)—or worse than (2)—for decades and decades.

I also want to highlight the enormous and persistent confusion where someone will point out the hypocrisy of the Ukraine-war outrage and then the interlocutor will say “Are you trying to apologize for Russian aggression?”. The point isn’t to apologize for anything that Russia has done—the point is simply to point out how shockingly and grotesquely selective our outrage is. The outrage should be expanded to include what we do—it shouldn’t be gated outrage that excludes what we do. An official enemy does something—enormous outrage follows. We do something just as bad or even worse—no outrage whatsoever follows. And people who aren’t inside the Western bubble can see how absurd our ultra-selective outrage really is—they notice how furious and disgusted we are when official enemies commit atrocities and how timid and reticent we become when our own governments do bad things. The problem is the stunning inconsistency—the problem is the stunning selectiveness.

Chomsky says in a 23 February 2023 Truthout interview: regarding the Iraq War, the US media did—at “the time of the massacre”—“report what was going on”; “I can do no better than to quote at length from the damning compilation of much of that reporting that Australian journalist John Menadue published in 2018”; that’s “NATO, for those willing to learn about the world”; “enough of this deplorable whataboutism”; orders “from on high are that it is outrageous to compare the new Hitler’s assault on Ukraine with the misguided but benign U.S.-U.K. mercy mission to help Iraqis by ousting an evil dictator—whom the U.S. enthusiastically supported right through his worst crimes, but that’s not proper fare for the intellectual class”; “however, we should be fair”; not “all agree that it’s improper to raise questions about the U.S. mission in Iraq”; recently “there was much ado about Harvard’s rejection of Human Rights Watch Director Kenneth Roth for a position at the Kennedy School, quickly rescinded under protest”; “Roth’s credentials were lauded”; Roth “even took the negative position in a debate, moderated by noted human rights advocate Samantha Power, on whether the Iraq invasion qualifies as humanitarian intervention”; “Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights, argued it did qualify”; how “lucky we are that at the peak of the intellectual world, our culture is so free and open that we even can have a debate on whether the enterprise was an exercise in humanitarianism”; and the “undisciplined might ask how we would react to an analogous event at Moscow University”.

I got the idea for this piece when I watched this Chomsky interview—that Times Radio conducted on 19 April 2023—in which the aforementioned foundations of meaningful foreign-policy discourse are strikingly absent:

In the interview, Chomsky says—this is my transcription—about the Ukraine war: “I am not seeking to excuse anything”; “I’m talking about the extreme hypocrisy of claims about how this is the worst thing that ever happened when it’s a fraction of what we do all the time”; this hypocrisy is why “the Global South is watching with ridicule as pompous Western commentators try to lecture them”; and this hypocrisy is why “they laugh in ridicule”.

We Should Take Our Atrocities Seriously

I think that it’s chilling to witness how state atrocities remain a laughing matter in America all these years after a social movement—against the Vietnam War—civilized the country enormously. A 20 May 2022 CNN piece says: speaking “from the lectern at the Southern Methodist University in Texas on Wednesday, Bush railed against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rule and the impunity that enabled ‘the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq’”; “he quickly corrected himself as the audience erupted in laughter”; Bush added “‘I’m 75’”, “blaming, in jest, his age for the slip of the tongue”; the “video made the rounds on social media, but it did not elicit laughs from everyone”; “many quipped darkly that the blunder was the closest Iraqis would get to Bush admitting to launching the bloody 2003 invasion of Iraq under a false pretext”; “the war in Iraq wreaked death and destruction across the country”; “unlike Ukraine, where Putin’s brutal invasion was met with Western outrage and skepticism of Russia’s narrative, the Western mainstream media had few scruples about reproducing the Bush administration’s WMD allegations about Iraq, paving the way for that country’s invasion”; the “Arab world continues to suffer the consequences of that botched war to this day, and the grievances are alive and well”; and “the US has not yet issued an apology to Iraqis, and almost two decades after the invasion, some—at least those in Bush’s audience on Wednesday—are still laughing about it”.

Belén Fernández writes in a 22 May 2022 piece: everyone “has by now heard about the latest gaffe by former United States president and unconvicted war criminal George W Bush, father of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and other fantastically bloody escapades”; to correct himself, Bush said “‘I mean, of Ukraine’”; after the correction, he added “‘Iraq, too, anyway’”; he added this comment—about Iraq—“slightly under his breath”; “the effective annihilation of a nation is hardly a laughing matter”; ditto “for the reduction to a split-second ‘Iraq, too, anyway’ of hundreds of thousands of deaths, countless massacres of Iraqi civilians, the forcible displacement of millions of people, and the saturation of the country with toxic and radioactive munitions that continue to cause congenital birth defects, cancer, and all manner of other maladies nearly two decades after the launch of the ‘wholly unjustified and brutal invasion’”; “this is not the first time Bush has unintentionally said something deeply revealing about his own belligerence”; nor “is it the first time that he has joked about the whole premise of the Iraq war”; in 2010 then-President Obama joked about predator drones; never “mind that US military drones were then, as now, notoriously associated with the indiscriminate killing of civilians in various foreign lands”; in “July 2006, during the G8 conference in none other than Russia, an unattended microphone captured the banter between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his faithful accomplice in the quest to obliterate Iraq”; it “was less than a week into the latest effort by Israel—another imperial accomplice—to obliterate Lebanon via a 34-day bombing campaign that ultimately killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians”; Bush said “‘Yo, Blair’”; “the pair had a good laugh over the important matter of a sweater Blair had gifted Bush”; the “duo then proceeded to discuss the bloodshed in Lebanon, which in Bush’s view could be resolved not by getting Israel to stop massacring people but rather by getting Lebanon’s Hezbollah organisation—which, logically, was fighting back—‘to stop doing this s***’”; and regarding “the 2022 Iraq-I-mean-Ukraine gaffe at the George W Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas”, the “‘wholly unjustified and brutal’ decimation of a country” was “condensed into a single imperial wisecrack”.

And Nathan J. Robinson writes in his 6 April 2022 Current Affairs piece: if “you are a person who is sensitive to the pain of others, and who does not discriminate morally between Americans and non-Americans, the U.S. can seem a downright perverse place”; part “of the problem is that the U.S. is geographically isolated from most countries that fall on the receiving end of its foreign policy decisions, a kind of cocoon, where most people have never had to see the aftermath of a city being bombed”; despite “the undercurrent of violence in American life domestically—the police killings, the prisons, the shootings—the country has not had its cities ravaged by war like so many others”; even “when foreign policy consequences are covered by the media, pictures on the news are carefully censored so as not to be too disturbing, and Central Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, etc. become a distant abstract Other whose pain doesn’t register”; in “the press, there is a straightforward hierarchy of lives, in which European and U.S. victims of crimes and natural disasters are given far more attention than African, Asian, and Latin American lives”; “U.S. policy and drug consumption has fueled monstrous violence just over the border in Mexico, but things that happen on the other side of the border might as well be happening on a distant planet for all the attention they get in the U.S. press”; “if you are not a member of the group on the receiving end of particular acts of subjugation and oppression, it can very difficult” to “see through the stories that are told to justify that subjugation and oppression, or to find the ugly facts that are kept out of the mainstream”; “Americans still do not really understand the truth about what our country did in Vietnam and Central America, let alone Afghanistan and Iraq, just as Brits generally still think their empire was something noble to be proud of”; most “of us in our everyday lives don’t run into people like, say, the maimed victims of the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos, so nobody thinks about it”; we “need to start noticing the ‘normalization’ of the atrocious”; “Chomsky has cited a Vietnam-war era instance in which a children’s museum offered an exhibit where patrons could simulate attacking a Vietnamese village”; this “insane simulation of psychopathic destruction was installed by people who probably had no qualms about it—normal Americans who loved their families and believed in Freedom”; when “I talked recently to” Chomsky, he recounted “a time he and his wife went to see a movie in Boston in the early 1950s”; the “film was about the Hiroshima bombing, and what made the experience so disturbing for Chomsky, to the point where he recounts it with a shudder even today at 93 years old, is that he realized when he got to the cinema that the film was being presented as an exploitation film, playing in a theater that usually showed porn”; there’s “a whole genre of lurid real-world footage of atrocities presented for entertainment”; and as “footage of Japanese civilians with their skin peeling off played on the screen, the audience of Americans was laughing hysterically as if they were watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers”.

I hope that we will—regarding foreign policy—overcome the disturbing opposition to the basic foundations of a healthy, serious, and meaningful discourse. Our security depends on that transformation—this isn’t just about integrity, morality, and our victims’ fate.