Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo will be a guest on the Alan Colmes Show on Fox Radio Network today at 6:30pm Eastern Time (3:30pm Pacific). The topic is Syria.
You can listen live on their website, or you can listen on the radio (see station finder here).
We will post an audio file of the interview shortly after the broadcast.
“You know how I stayed alive this long? All these years? Fear. The spectacle of fearsome acts. Somebody steals from me, I cut off his hands. He offends me, I cut out his tongue. He rises against me, I cut off his head, stick it on a pike, raise it high up so all on the streets can see. That’s what preserves the order of things. Fear.” -Bill the Butcher, Gangs of New York
In Martin Scorsese’s fictional historical drama of mid-19th century New York gang violence, the main antagonist, played by Daniel Day Lewis, is called Bill the Butcher. He is a ruthless gang leader who spouts nativist racial denigrations and uses sensational displays of extreme violence to gain power, territorial control, and obedience. In one scene, draped in a tattered American flag, Bill describes how he has kept his power all this time by instilling fear into all his subjects and adversaries – fear from credible threats of violence.
That is essentially a microcosm of how the United States behaves in the international sphere. This principle of ruling by fear and violence, a time-honored tactic of every spiteful thug and mafia don, is one of the primary drivers of the push for President Obama to attack Syria.
In Pentagon-ese, this principle is called “credibility,” but it’s true meaning is much darker than its Orwellian formulation. The Syrian regime has crossed Obama’s “red-line” and so America must prove to Bashar al-Assad and to the world that our threats of aggression and violence are credible, or so the argument goes.
There is a perfect example of this line of thinking in yesterday’s Washington Post. David Ignatius, in a column entitled “In Syria, U.S. credibility is at stake,” asks, “What does the world look like when people begin to doubt the credibility of U.S. power? Unfortunately, we’re finding that out in Syria and other nations where leaders have concluded they can defy a war-weary United States without paying a price.”
If other nations learn they can “defy” their ruler – us – then “the coherence of the global system begins to dissolve,” Ignatius writes. Actually, the technical political science literature has largely put the “credibility” argument to rest. “There’s little evidence that supports the view that countries’ record for keeping commitments determines their credibility,” write two scholars who have studied the concept.
Never mind, this argument for going to war is alive and well in the media punditry and insular foreign policy elite in Washington, D.C.
Here’s what frustrates Ignatius: If Assad thinks America won’t attack him for ordering the use of chemical weapons – an allegation, by the way, that the U.S. admits it hasn’t confirmed – then he’ll violate international law, and American dictates, with impunity.
“What did Assad and his generals think would happen in response to this blatant violation of international norms?” Ignatius asks. “Apparently, not much…”
Consider how hypocritical this position is. He is insisting that the U.S. deal with Assad’s “blatant violation of international norms” by committing another “blatant violation of international norms.” The Obama administration is planning on bombing Syria without the approval of Congress or the United Nations Security Council. That would make the attacks blatantly illegal.
Does America need to be reigned in from flouting international law by a fear of violent retribution? What sort of “credible” consequences does America face for committing criminal acts?
What Ignatius and others really think is that it is the weaker nations that must fear repercussions for criminal acts. The Exceptional Nation, however, needn’t harbor such fears. The law is for us to break with impunity and and for others to obey.
The credibility issue goes beyond just the Assad regime, for Ignatius. America is also sending signals to Iran that we won’t bomb them when we say we will.
“Unfortunately, history tells us that an ambitious, revolutionary nation such as Iran makes compromises only under duress,” Ignatius writes. “U.S. action against Assad may not deter the Iranians, but it will at least make them think twice about crossing Obama’s ‘red line’ against their acquiring nuclear weapons.”
As effective as Bill the Butcher has been in sticking heads on pikes for all to see, the exact opposite is true here. The Iranians have shown that “under duress,” – that is, when they are militarily surrounded, sanctioned, and threatened with daily ultimatums, they are more incentivized to have nuclear weapons capability, in order to deter an attack from the U.S. or Israel.
Where does the U.S. government get this authority to rule the world by force and fear? It’s not in any of the founding documents, and certainly violates the twin national myths that we have traditionally avoided entangling ourselves in the business of other nations and that we spread democracy and freedom. Is this what American voters elect their leaders for, to act like Bill the Butcher?
The United States has neither the legal or the moral authority to enforce alleged violations of international law. It has no business intervening in Syria and certainly not to preserve the mafia thugs’ principle of “credibility.”
I really can’t add much to this…
At least it’s an honest argument. And it’s the same for many people now pining for another U.S. war in the Middle East: “the law” is just some antiquated, idealistic notion that doesn’t apply to states, especially when you’re the most powerful nation on Earth…our might makes it right.
As President Obama contemplates how and when to commence war crimes in his impending attack on Syria for, at best, dubious reasons, it’s worth remembering that we are already at war.
You’d be forgiven for forgetting. We don’t hear about this one, but the U.S. is still militarily occupying Afghanistan, waiting out America’s longest war.
The current plan is for the Obama administration to significantly reduce U.S. military presence next year, while maintaining extensive and expensive training programs for Afghanistan’s still inept military and police so they can go on fighting the strong-as-ever Taliban insurgency. In addition, billions of dollars worth of taxpayer money will continue to be sent to the incredibly corrupt Afghan state, which many say will collapse absent foreign support – proof of how worthwhile our 12 years of blood, treasure, violence, counter-insurgency, and state-building has been, I suppose.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle makes the case to cut our losses and get the hell out of the country as completely as possible:
Outright withdrawal might damage the United States’ prestige, but so would a slow-motion version of the same defeat — only at a greater cost in blood and treasure. And although a speedy U.S. withdrawal would cost many Afghans their lives and freedoms, fighting on simply to postpone such consequences temporarily would needlessly sacrifice more American lives in a lost cause.
It’s not really clear to me how much worse the lives and freedom of Afghans would be if the U.S. withdrew completely, but I take his point.
The reluctance the Obama administration has shown in getting out of Afghanistan is based on the same ridiculous pretensions at work in his drive to bomb Syria: face saving.
David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy said as much last year, even going so far as to claim Obama himself opposed his own troop surge in Afghanistan and didn’t believe in its efficacy. “So why did he do it?” Rothkopf asked. “The answer is that that Obama was leaving Iraq and could not afford to look weak in Afghanistan at the same time or he would come under political attack from the right.”
Obama recommitted America to war in Afghanistan for the sake of prestige, political reputation, and our vaunted “credibility.” Those are the same reasons the Vietnam War carried on for so long. They are the same reasons the Afghan war will go on past our supposed 2014 withdrawal date. And they are the same reasons we are being set up for another debacle in Syria.
Without whistleblowers, the mainline media outlets are more transfixed than ever with telling the official story. And at a time like this, the official story is all about spinning for war on Syria.
Every president who wants to launch another war can’t abide whistleblowers. They might interfere with the careful omissions, distortions and outright lies of war propaganda, which requires that truth be held in a kind of preventative detention.
By mid-week, media adrenalin was at fever pitch as news reports cited high-level sources explaining when the U.S. missile attacks on Syria were likely to begin, how long they might last, what their goals would be. But what about other (potential) sources who have documents and other information that contradict the official story?
It’s never easy for whistleblowers to take the risk of exposing secret realities. At times like these, it’s especially difficult – and especially vital – for whistleblowers to take the chance.
When independent journalist I.F. Stone said "All governments lie and nothing they say should be believed," he was warning against the automatic acceptance of any government claim. That warning becomes most crucial when a launch of war is imminent. That’s when, more than ever, we need whistleblowers who can leak information that refutes the official line.
There has been a pernicious method to the madness of the Obama administration’s double-barreled assault on whistleblowers and journalism. Committed to a state of ongoing war, Obama has overseen more prosecutions of whistleblowers than all other presidents combined – while also subjecting journalists to ramped-up surveillance and threats, whether grabbing the call records of 20 telephone lines of The Associated Press or pushing to imprisonNew York Times reporter James Risen for not revealing a source.
The vengeful treatment of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, the all-out effort to grab Edward Snowden and less-publicized prosecutions such as the vendetta against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake are all part of a government strategy that aims to shut down unauthorized pipelines of information to journalists – and therefore to the public. When secret information is blocked, what’s left is the official story, pulling out all the stops for war.
From the false Tonkin Gulf narrative in 1964 that boosted the Vietnam War to the fabricated baby-incubators-in-Kuwait tale in 1990 that helped launch the Gulf War to the reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction early in this century, countless deaths and unfathomable suffering have resulted from the failure of potential whistleblowers to step forward in a timely and forthright way – and the failure of journalists to challenge falsehoods in high government places.
There are no "good old days" to point to, no eras when an abundance of whistleblowers and gutsy reporters thoroughly alerted the public and subdued the power of Washington’s war-makers. But we’re now living in a notably – and tragically – fearful era. Potential whistleblowers have more reason to be frightened than ever, and mainline journalists rarely seem willing to challenge addiction to war.
Every time a president has decided to go to war against yet another country, the momentum has been unstoppable. Today, the craven foreshadow the dead. The key problems, as usual, revolve around undue deference to authority – obedience in the interests of expediency – resulting in a huge loss of lives and a tremendous waste of resources that should be going to sustain human life instead of destroying it.
With war at the top of Washington’s agenda, this is a time to make our voices heard. (To email your senators and representative, expressing opposition to an attack on Syria, click here.) A loud and sustained outcry against the war momentum is essential – and so is support for whistleblowers.
As a practical matter, real journalism can’t function without whistleblowers. Democracy can’t function without real journalism. And we can’t stop the warfare state without democracy. In the long run, the struggles for peace and democracy are one and the same.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books includeWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
