An Alternative to War
by
Charles Fink
Dissident Voice
March 3, 2003
Leo
Tolstoy once wrote: "The good cannot seize power, nor retain it; to do
this men must love power. And the love of power is inconsistent with goodness;
but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities—pride, cunning,
cruelty." (1) Along the same lines, former Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger remarked: "In contemporary America, power
increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win
it." (2) And former Attorney General Ramsey Clark:
"The people we admire most are the wealthy, the Rockefellers and Morgans,
the Bill Gateses and the Donald Trumps. Would any moral person accumulate a
billion dollars when there are ten million infants dying of starvation every
year?" (3) The point, which is obvious upon
reflection, is that people in positions of great wealth and power tend not to
be good people. Rather they tend to be greedy, ruthless, power hungry,
dishonest, cruel -- in short, evil people. Why? There is a simple explanation
for this. People who are willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish their
goals -- to succeed in business, to accumulate property and wealth, to win
political office, to triumph over competitors and rivals -- have a greater
chance of success than people who recognize and respect moral boundaries. Good
people recognize such boundaries. Evil people do not. In power struggles,
therefore, evil people tend to come out on top.
It should not surprise us,
then, that George Washington -- the wealthiest man in revolutionary America --
and Thomas Jefferson were slaveholders. Or that the most powerful people in
American history have been liars, thieves, ethnic cleansers, racists, mass
murders. In fact, it is entirely predicable. Not only were Washington and
Jefferson slaveholders, so were nearly half the signers of the Declaration of
Independence. At the time of his death, Jefferson owned well over two hundred
slaves, some of them blood relatives. The land, which now constitutes the
territory of the United States, was stolen, under the leadership of various
presidents, from American Indians, the Mexicans, the Spanish. The Indians were
driven to near extinction. Promises broken. Washington described Indians and
wolves as "both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape." (4) Jefferson told his Secretary of War that "if we are
ever constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it
down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the
Mississippi." (5) In the Battle of Horseshoe Bend,
Andrew Jackson -- another slaveholder -- oversaw the slaughter of eight hundred
Creek Indians, including women and children. Body parts were taken as trophies:
noses, strips of flesh. Jackson boasted of taking Indian scalps. He also signed
the orders to expel the Cherokee Indians from their territory in the Southeast,
an expulsion that became known as the "trail of tears" in which eight
thousand Indians, half of what remained of the Cherokee nation, were killed.
Theodore Roosevelt, whose robust image graces Mount Rushmore, described the
lives of American Indians as "a few degrees less meaningful, squalid, and
ferocious than that of the wild beasts." (6) Not that
he would go "so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead
Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely
into the case of the tenth." (7) It is well known
that Woodrow Wilson was a racist. Perhaps less well known: President Warren G.
Harding was sworn in as a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the Green Room of the
White House.
"Lincoln was a master
politician," wrote economist Murray Rothbard, "which means that he
was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar." He was also a mass
murderer. "Lincoln wanted Southern civilians to suffer," writes Thomas
J. DiLorenzo in his analysis of the Civil War, "which required him to
abandon international law and the U.S. military’s own code as he began to wage
total war. And it was total war waged against fellow citizens -- mostly women
and children and old men -- not an invading army." One example of
Lincoln’s war on civilians was "the policy, adopted almost from the very
beginning, of retaliating against Confederate attacks by holding randomly
chosen civilians as hostages, sometimes shooting them and sometimes burning
their houses or their entire towns to the ground." Another example was the
navel blockade imposed by Lincoln on coastal ports and inland waterways.
"So severe was the blockade of Southern ports that even drugs and
medicines were on Lincoln’s list of items that could not be imported into the
Southern states." This guaranteed suffering and death for untold numbers
of Southern civilians. The reality veiled by the mythology of the Civil War is
that Abraham Lincoln, by means of Federal troops, killed hundreds of thousands
of Americans in the South (including 50,000 civilians), crippled tens of
thousands of others, razed homes, towns, and cities, and crushed political
opposition in the North by imprisoning without trial or even formal charges
thousands of dissidents, anti-war protesters, priests, preachers, state
legislators, newspaper editors -- including, ironically, the grandson of
Francis Scott Key, composer of "The Star Spangled Banner" --
suppressing free elections, and closing down dozens of newspapers that were
critical of his war policies. And why? According to some historians, for no
higher reason than consolidating the power of the Federal government. (8)
President Truman murdered
about 150,000 innocent people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- men, woman,
children, infants, the elderly, even some American prisoners of war. He also
lied about it. "Sixteen hours ago," he told the world, "an
American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army
base." (9) Hiroshima was decidedly not an army base,
no more than Miami or Los Angeles is an army base, but decent people would be
horrified by the truth. (In this same statement, I might mention, Truman
described the atomic bomb as "the greatest achievement of organized
science in history." What does this tell us about Truman’s values?) (10)
Eisenhower lied about
American spy planes flying missions over the Soviet Union. Kennedy lied about
the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion. Nixon lied about the bombing of Cambodia. The
Eisenhower administration backed the revolution in Guatemala that ousted the
democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and launched a decades-long
period of repression, bloodshed, and civil war for the Guatemalan people. 200,000
people were killed before a fragile peace was declared in 1996. Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon presided over the mass murder that was the Vietnam War. 1.7
million killed, according to some estimates (perhaps 3 million, according to
others), including 600,000 noncombatants.
President Regan murdered
peasants and government officials in Nicaragua, and lied about it. In 1984,
Nicaragua reported that since Ronald Reagan took office, 910 of their officials
had been assassinated and 8,000 civilians killed. The attacks on peasants were
particularly brutal. "Groups of civilians, including woman and children,
were burned, dismembered, blinded, and beheaded." (11)
In retaliation for a
terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque, President Reagan ordered a military
strike against Libya and its leader, Muammar Khadafi. Bombs rained down on
Tripoli, killing perhaps a hundred people, mostly civilians, including
Khadafi’s adopted infant daughter. Khadafi himself was unharmed.
In 1989, George Herbert
Walker Bush ordered an invasion of Panama to capture a reputed drug lord,
Manuel Noriega. The bombing raids on Panama City ignited a firestorm in a poor
neighborhood, killing thousands of people. In total, somewhere between 2,500 --
according to the United Nations -- and 4,000 -- according to the Association of
the Dead of December 20 -- Panamanians were killed, the vast majority innocent
civilians. 20,000 people lost their homes. At least fifteen mass graves have
been identified scattered across Panama containing hundreds, possibly thousands
of bodies. Among the excavated remains: Children. People shot, execution style,
in the back of the head. The elderly. (12)
In retaliation for terrorist
attacks on American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, in which hundreds of
people, including twelve Americans, were killed, President Clinton ordered
bombing raids on targets in Africa and Afghanistan. One target was the Al Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Clinton apparently lied about the incident,
claiming, in the absence of supporting evidence, that the plant was used to
manufacture chemical weapons. It was not. It did supply about 50 percent of
Sudan’s medicine, and about 90 percent of the most critical drugs. The Al Shifa
plant was destroyed, and as a result untold numbers of innocent people all over
Africa -- tens of thousands, according to some estimates -- were condemned to
die from treatable diseases.
And these are just a few
examples. We tend to look upon the rich and powerful with respect, even
reverence. Not only is such deference undeserved, as I have argued, it is also
dangerous; it clouds our moral vision and prevents us from seeing how power is
often abused. (One example, which I will not explore further, is the ease with
which Christians make excuses for the Old Testament God -- a being who,
according to the testimony of the Bible, committed, endorsed, or tolerated
genocide, transgenerational punishment, total war, slavery, incest, the
slaughter of first-born children, the execution of homosexuals, and animal
sacrifice.)
A few months ago I read an
article in the New York Times by a Cambodian refugee, Youk Chhang: "In
1977," he begins, "my oldest sister, who had two little daughters,
was accused of stealing rice from the collective kitchen. Despite her repeated
denials, the Khmer Rouge cadre refused to believe her, and to prove his
allegation, he took a knife and cut open her stomach. My sister’s stomach was
empty, and she died." He goes on: "Even if God can forgive that Khmer
Rouge cadre, the man’s responsibility as a human being for what he did to my
sister remains. Her murder was just one of millions of crimes committed by the
Khmer Rouge, crimes that remain unjudged and unpunished. The Khmer Rouge have
gotten away with murder." (13) From 1975 to 1979,
under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million
people in Cambodia through a combination of mass executions, starvation, and
slave-labor practices. For his role in all this, Pol Pot was sentenced to house
arrest.
And this is hardly unusual.
Ironically, those who are the least responsible for war -- specifically,
children and other civilians -- are the principal victims of war -- on average,
over 90 percent of those killed in war are innocent people -- while those who
are directly responsible for war -- people in leadership roles -- are unlikely
to pay any price for the slaughter. While thousands of innocent people have
been killed in the invasion of Afghanistan -- about 4,000 according to some
estimates -- what of the senior officials of Al Qaeda, or of the Taliban? On
December 20, 2001, the New York Times reported: "Virtually the entire top
leadership of the Taliban has survived the American bombing and eluded capture
by American-backed Afghan forces." To date, the whereabouts of Osama bin
Laden and Mullah Omar are unknown. In fact, locating the people actually
responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11 is no longer even a
priority. "I wouldn’t call [getting bin Laden] a prime mission," said
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers. (14)
If the police, in pursuit of
an accused drug dealer, destroyed an American neighborhood and killed thousands
of innocent people, the public would demand that those who planned and
organized the operation be held accountable for the massacre. Yet, when George
Herbert Walker Bush conducted a military invasion of Panama, ostensibly for the
purpose of arresting Manuel Noriega, killing thousands of innocent people in
the process, there was no public outcry. Indeed, Bush was applauded for his
bold action. (The original pretext for his son’s invasion of Afghanistan, in
which thousands of innocent people were killed, was to capture or kill Osama
bin Laden. The apple does not fall very far from the tree.) This was due, in
part, to slanted media coverage of the event. Americans might have reacted
differently if they had been fully informed about the carnage. But it goes
deeper than that. People simply don’t demand that authorities play by the same
rules as everyone else. And that is the problem.
If the aim of conventional
war is mass murder, it has an impressive record; but if its aim is to deter
people in positions of authority from abusing their power, or to protect
ordinary people from such abuses, or to hold those who create wars responsible
for their actions -- if it has, in short, some constructive, humane purpose in
world affairs, its record is much less impressive. One could not ask for a clearer
statement of the official point of view than the following, contained in the
Church Committee report on CIA-sponsored assassination attempts (italics
added): "Once methods of coercion and violence are chosen, the probability
of loss of life is always present. There is, however, a significant
difference between a cold-blooded, targeted, intentional killing of an
individual foreign leader and other forms of intervening in the affairs of
foreign nations." (15) There is, in other words,
a significant difference between killing one foreign leader and the wholesale
slaughter of ordinary people -- the implication being that selective
assassination is more reprehensible than mass murder, at least from the
standpoint of state officials.
Or consider the following
passage from a New York Times article on the trial of Slobodan Milosevic:
Lawyers, human rights workers and victims of the
Yugoslav wars arrived here today on the eve of Slobodan Milosevic’s trial,
hailing a new era of accountability for war crimes despite anger about other
suspects who are still free.
Mr. Milosevic, the former leader of Yugoslavia and its
dominant republic, Serbia, will be the first head of state to face charges so
grave: genocide for the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with crimes
against humanity and violations of the Geneva conventions for the wars in
Croatia and Kosovo, the southern province of Serbia.
Experts say that Tuesday’s trial underscores a
significant broadening of international criminal justice: that even heads of
state can be tried for war crimes, including those that took place inside their
own borders. This trend has not pleased everyone: the United States has balked
at supporting a permanent international criminal court, for fear its own
officials may someday be tried there. (16)
Another Times article reads:
With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet increasingly
unlikely here, victims of the Chilean military’s 17-year dictatorship are now
pressing legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A.
Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots to
overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in the early
1970’s….
In another action, human rights lawyers here have
filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger and other American officials,
accusing them of helping organize the covert regional program of political
repression called Operation Condor. As part of that plan, right-wing military
dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay
coordinated efforts throughout the 1970’s to kidnap and kill hundreds of their
exiled political opponents.
Argentina has also begun an investigation into
American support for and involvement in Operation Condor. A judge there,
Rodolfo Cancioba Corral, has said he regards Mr. Kissinger as a potential
"defendant or suspect." But lawyers say it is virtually impossible
for a foreign court to compel former American officials to answer a summons.
During a visit by Mr. Kissinger to France last year,
for instance, a judge there sent police officers to his Paris hotel to serve
him with a request to answer questions about American involvement in the
Chilean coup, in which French citizens also disappeared. But Mr. Kissinger
refused to respond to the subpoena, referred the matter to the State
Department, and flew on to Italy. (17)
Another Times article:
Israel challenged the United Nations today by once
again blocking a proposed fact-finding mission to examine fighting earlier this
month in the Jenin refugee camp, prompting Secretary General Kofi Annan to
consider disbanding the investigative team.
Israeli officials said they preferred the short-term
cost in world opinion of resisting the United Nations to the long-term risk of
possibly exposing the army to war-crimes trials in what they feared would be a
biased investigation.
As Palestinian officials charged a cover-up, Israel’s
prime minister, Ariel Sharon, a former general who has fought in all of
Israel’s wars, invoked his own service as a soldier in declaring that he would
protect Israel’s troops now.
"No effort to doubt us or put us on an
international trial will prevail," Mr. Sharon declared.
The Bush administration, with
characteristic moral clarity, is willing to simply drop the matter:
The United States originated the United Nations
resolution that set up the fact-finding mission in mid-April, and gave the
inquiry aggressive backing last week. But today, in yet another shift by
Washington, the Bush administration offered little more than the wan
observation that it could do nothing if Mr. Annan dropped the inquiry.
"We continue to be quite supportive of the
idea," said a senior Bush administration official. "But if he decides
it isn’t worth the trouble, we’re not going to be able to push it on our
own." (18)
Interestingly, the Bush
administration can "push it on its own" when it comes to violating
international law, but not when it comes to enforcing it.
A story on NPR (June 5,
2002):
Bob Kerrey led a U.S. Navy SEAL team into the
Vietnamese village of Thanh Phu in search of a high-level Viet Cong meeting one
February night in 1969. But in war things seldom go as planned.
Last year, Kerrey, a former U.S. senator and
presidential candidate, publicly acknowledged that his team mistakenly gunned
down more than a dozen women and children in the raid. Recently, the Vietnamese
government accused Kerrey of unspecified war crimes in connection with the
incident.
It is doubtful whether
Kerrey will ever be tried as a war criminal. He will, however, receive royalty
checks for the book he has written about his experiences in Vietnam.
If those who benefit from
war are unlikely to be held accountable for their actions, as the record seems
to indicate, what incentive do authorities have to pursue peaceful,
constructive solutions to terrorism, to struggles for independence, to
international disputes? On reflection, there is a practical alternative to the
"war on terrorism," and this is to hold terrorists accountable for
their actions while at the same time protecting the rights of innocent people.
Those who support war stand this principle on its head, for war, especially
modern war, punishes the innocent rather than the guilty. "Everybody wants
to know where Osama bin Laden is. The next question is, who cares?" said
one Pentagon official. (19) An amazing statement. Imagine
telling a man whose wife has been murdered: "We never found the man who
murdered your wife, and probably never will, but we did destroy the
neighborhood where he lived, killing lots of innocent people. But who
cares?" The sad truth is that this is what the Pentagon is telling the
husbands, the wives, the children of the victims of September 11.
A simple concept: holding
authorities accountable for their actions. What would this mean? Among other
things, it would mean prosecuting Henry Kissinger for his role in the bloody
revolt that destroyed the progressive democratic government of Salvador Allende
in Chile in 1973 and launched a protracted period of misery and repression for
the Chilean people. It would mean trying Former Secretary of State Madeline
Albright for crimes against humanity for her support of the genocidal sanctions
against Iraq. It would mean prosecuting George Herbert Walker Bush, Dick
Cheney, and Colin Powell as murderers for the bloody invasion of Panama. It
would mean trying Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, as a war criminal for
his part in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982 in which up
to 1,800 civilians were killed, as well as for more recent war crimes in Jenin.
Surely, Osama bin Laden and
other senior members of Al Qaeda should be held accountable for the deaths of
thousands of innocent people in New York and Washington. But by the same token,
shouldn’t George W. Bush and other senior members of his administration --
including two seasoned mass murderers, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell -- be held
accountable for the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan? Or
does killing innocent people not count as murder when it is committed by an
American president and his supporters -- in a flurry of flag waving, employing
the most powerful military in the history of the world -- against nameless,
faceless, forgettable people in a foreign land?
Charles K. Fink is a contributor to Alternative Press
Review (www.altpr.org), where this article
first appeared.
1. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You.
2. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years
(Little Brown, p.6).
3. From an interview with Derrick Jensen, The
Culture of Make Believe, p. 580.
4. Quoted in Stephen Shalom’s Imperial Alibis
(South End Press, 1992), p.12.
5. Quoted in Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make
Believe (Context Books, 2002).
6. Quoted in Howard Kahane’s Logic and Contemporary
Rhetoric, p. 286.
7. Quoted in Stephen Shalom’s Imperial Alibis,
p.13.
8. Quotations from Murray Rothbard, “America’s Two
Just Wars: 1776 and 1861,” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories,
ed. John Denson (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction, 1997), p. 131; and Thomas
J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln (Prima Publishing, 2002), pp. 178-180.
9. “Harry S. Truman, Statement on the Atomic Bomb,
1945,” in John Mack Faragher (et. al.) Out of Many: A History of the American
People, Document Set, Vol. II, pp. 385-6.
10. Ibid, p.386.
11. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 293.
12. See the excellent documentary The Panama
Deception, available from Rhino Home Video, from which these facts were
gathered.
13. The New York Times, February 14, 2002.
14. Reported in the Asheville Global Report, No. 164,
March 7-13, 2002.
15. Quoted in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of
the United States, p. 555.
16. The New York Times, February 12, 2002.
17. The New York Times, March 28, 2002
18. The New York Times, May 1, 2002.
19. Ibid.