The nation that cried ‘wolf’
MIAMI – Many in the U.S. political elite, from the president to the politicians in Congress to the establishment pundits, are worried that if the United States does not launch a military attack on Syria it will lose an intangible but important thing: “credibility.”
Really? Credibility, what credibility? In 2003, the George W. Bush regime abused so brazenly what is best described as the gullibility of the American people, who unlike the rest of the world initially supported the Iraq war by a large majority, that even this seemingly inexhaustible resource (American gullibility) has dried up just when Barack Obama needs it most.
Proof for the depletion of the gullibility stock is evidenced by the fact that, even in the United States, the most recent public opinion polls show a large majority of Americans oppose U.S. military action against Syria. Internationally, not even Great Britain, one of the handful of countries that supported Bush’s Iraq misadventure, is on board on this one. Russia and China stand ready to cast their veto at the UN Security Council, which would make an attack against Syria as much a violation of international law as Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
There is a mixture of cynicism, ignorance, and misplaced patriotism in evoking credibility when it comes to the United States use of force. With rare exceptions, notably World War II, U.S. bellicosity historically has been wrapped in a tissue of lies. Native Americans were the first to fall prey to false promises and treaties that proved not worth the paper upon which they were printed. Treaty or no treaty, white settlers were out to steal the Indian land, and they did, at the point of a gun. The Mexican War, which resulted in another enormous land theft, was justified under the false premise that Mexican soldiers had attacked U.S. troops on American soil. The skirmish actually took place in Mexican territory, but who cared (other than Mark Twain and a few other oddballs) when the rewards (California, Arizona, New Mexico, etc.) were so sweet.
Skipping a lot of history – and plenty of lies – we come to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, which the Kennedy administration insisted was an all-Cuban affair, to the point of lying to its own UN ambassador and through him to the whole world. A few years later, Lyndon Johnson got congressional approval for a vast escalation of the Vietnam war, the Tonkin Resolution, by invoking an attack that never happened. And who can forget Colin Powell, an honorable man who allowed a dishonorable administration to use and destroy his own credibility, making an entirely false case for the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq?
Too often, the United States has cried “wolf” – remember Ronald Reagan’s ridiculous argument for the contra war, that the “proximity” of Sandinista Nicaragua posed a threat to the U.S. southern border? – when it has been the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Thus the United States has fully earned the skepticism that now pervades the American people, both parties in the U.S. Congress, and the international community regarding military action against Syria.
Moreover, the Iraq deception is too recent to forget, the parallels and ironies too striking to ignore.
The Bush administration communicated a high degree of confidence that Iraq had WMD. Ditto for the Obama administration regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. But how do we know this time it’s different? We don’t. Indeed, over the weekend, AP reported that “The White House asserted Sunday that a “common-sense test” dictates the Syrian government is responsible for a chemical weapons attack that President Barack Obama says demands a U.S. military response. But Obama’s top aide says the administration lacks “irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence…” The Huffington Post, for its part, points out that the U.S. public has not been shown any conclusive evidence in support of Washington’s accusations.
Bush invoked an old UN Resolution as a legal justification for the Iraq war, despite the fact that just before the war the UN Security Council refused to approve the invasion. Now the Obama administration is claiming that the treaty banning use of chemical weapons justifies a strike. But by attacking Syria without UN Security Council support Obama would be reprising Bush’s illogic: breaking international law in order to enforce an international law.
And just as the UN Resolution employed by Bush did not legally empower the United States to enforce it unilaterally, the Geneva Conventions ban on chemical weapons does not authorize any country to enforce it as it sees fit. Moreover, the United States not only failed to act, it actively supported Iraq at a time when that country was using chemical weapons in its war of aggression against Iran and the massacre of its own Kurdish population.
The parallels exist despite the vast difference between Obama, as even-tempered, well-informed and honest a politician as could win the White House, and Bush, a clever, cynical ignoramus eager to arrogantly rub in American supremacy. They exist because what is at work is not character, personality, style, or knowledge. What is involved is the logic of empire. “Credibility” is double-speak for the capacity to reliably produce fear and compliance, to say “my will is the law,” and make it stick.
For all this, Assad may have used chemical weapons against its own people although, speaking of common sense, it makes little sense for him to have made such a risky move when his side was winning with conventional weapons. Thus we need better evidence than “common sense” before proceeding. Moreover, whatever is done needs to be done legally, that is with UN Security Council approval. The days when the United States deputized itself to enforce a UN resolution in the face of the UN’s clear disapproval should have been over with Bush. And if military action is to be legitimately undertaken, it should first be shown that, unlike the case of Iraq, it would not do more harm than good.
