The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is horrifying, but what is equally disturbing is the knee-jerk reaction by some Americans not only in the media but also from our elected representatives. America has done the very same thing as Russia while claiming the moral high ground.
Make no mistake, what Russia is doing is barbaric, immoral, and a crime against the Geneva Convention, which is a standard for the treatment of prisoners and civilians during a time of war. Violations can bring moral outrage and lead to trade sanctions or economic reprisals against the offending government. I fully support the sanctions against Russia, its banking systems, and the Russian oligarchs. Before we claim the moral high ground, let’s examine what America has done in the past.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana in his book Reason in Common Sense.
• Iran, 1953: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was the target of the earliest coup of the Cold War that the U.S. government has acknowledged. According to the just-declassified CIA-authored history of the operation, “It was the potential … to leave Iran open to Soviet aggression when the Cold War was at its height and when the U.S. was involved in an undeclared war.
• Guatemala, 1954: A coup in 1954 forced President Árbenz from power, allowing a succession of juntas in his place. Classified details of the CIA’s involvement in the ouster of the Guatemalan leader, which included equipping rebels and paramilitary troops while the U.S. Navy blockaded the Guatemalan coast, came to light in 1999.
• South Vietnam, 1963: The U.S. was already deeply involved in South Vietnam in 1963, and its relationship with the country’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, was growing increasingly strained amid Diem’s crackdown on Buddhist dissidents in South Vietnam. According to the Pentagon Papers, on August 23, 1963, South Vietnamese generals plotting a coup contacted U.S. officials about their plan. After a period of U.S. indecision, the generals seized and killed Diem on November 1, 1963.
Let’s also not forget the March 1968 atrocities of the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians.
• Chile, 1973: The U.S. never wanted Salvador Allende, the socialist candidate elected president of Chile in 1970, to assume office. President Richard Nixon told the CIA to “make the Chilean economy scream.” The agency worked with three Chilean groups, each plotting a coup against Allende in 1970. U.S. attempts to disrupt the Chilean economy continued until Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against Allende in 1973. The CIA also conducted a propaganda campaign supporting Pinochet’s new regime after he took office in 1973, despite knowledge of severe human rights abuses, including the murder of political dissidents.
• Panama, 1989: The U.S. invaded Panama to overthrow military dictator Manuel Noriega, whom grand juries in Miami and Tampa indicted on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling, and money laundering. Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Forces were promptly crushed, forcing the dictator to seek asylum with the Vatican Anuncio in Panama City, where he surrendered on January 3, 1990.
• Iraq, 2003: The U.S. entered Iraq with slogans of “Shock and Awe,” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction but ended up with “Weapons of Mass Deception,” Abu Ghraib, “Collateral damage happens,” (Donald Rumsfeld), “You Break It You Own It,” (Gen. Colin Powell) and “We Don’t Want the Smoking Gun to Be a Mushroom Cloud,” (Condoleezza Rice)
• Between 1947 and 1989, the U.S. tried to change other nations’ governments 72 times, including 66 covert operations and six overt ones. How can we ignore the incitements carried out by the western alliance with the expansion of NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, a violation of promises made to Moscow in 1990, and the stationing of NATO troops and missile batteries in Eastern Europe?
As we express our anguish for the people of Ukraine, we should also express our anguish for the people of Iraq, South Vietnam, Panama, Chile, Iran, and Guatemala.
All victims of unjust wars are equally worthy of compassion, and most of all, equal justice. If Putin were to be tried in the International Criminal Court, should not George W. Bush also be tried? Didn’t his administration go before the U.N. to press their case for invasion? If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else, and this blindness leads to catastrophe. No country should ever revel in its moral superiority.
Fact checker 13 was right on former Sec. Albright about the her remark on 60 minutes. In fact at one time I too was going to use this. Her exact words were “The death of 500,000 dead Iraq children was a very hard choice, but the price-we think, the price was worth it.”
When I decided to write my article “The U.S. has been No Different than the Invading Russians” I tried best not to be an apologist for either side. Unfortunately, one comment posted that the article is “ludicrous and offensive.” The comment finishes with “To say it is the same as what Putin is doing now is facile, lazy and frankly bullshit.” My objective in writing the article was to be as accurate and objective as possible. Seems I didn’t succeed according to one reader’s comment. My article listed Iraq, South Vietnam, Panama, Chile, Iran, and Guatemala I could have listed many more going back more than one hundred years. The person writing the comment wondered when the US intentionally targeted maternity hospitals, people in bread lines, and museums and theatres? Well, here are some examples of what the United States did during WWII. Around fifteen German cities were firebombed during WWII, in which the destruction of these cities was almost total. One of these was the German city of Dresden where 3,400 tons of explosives were dropped on the city by 800 American and British aircraft. The firestorm created by the two days of bombing set the city burning for many more days, littering the streets with charred corpses, including many children. Eight square miles of the city were ruined, and the total body count was between 22,700 and 25,000 dead, according to a report published by the city of Dresden in 2010. The hospitals that were left standing could not handle the numbers of injured and burned, and mass burials became necessary. This indiscrete firebombing spared no maternity hospitals, people in breadlines, museums, or theatres. The bombing of Tokyo with a series of firebombing on March 9-10 1945 is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history with 16 square miles were destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless. All together 67 Japanese cities were firebombed. In the book, 2021 Bomber Mafia about the firebombing of Japan, General Curtis LeMay said “these atomic bombs were superfluous.” General LeMay was also quoted as saying “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Of course, General LeMay also said this about the bombing over North Vietnam he suggested that rather than negotiating with Hanoi, the United States should “bomb them back to the stone age,” by taking out factories, harbors, and bridges “until we have destroyed every work of man in North Vietnam.”
While writing the article I kept thinking about what readers would think or say. And I kept thinking that we don’t always like someone holding up a mirror to us, especially over something that we said or did. But the one that kept recuring was from the movie A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson said his famous line “you can’t handle the truth”.
While I don’t agree with the conclusion we have been “no different” than Russia in prosecuting our own wars, I don’t dispute the facts Clyde presents. I just think that there is false equivalence when comparing the mistakes and crimes of a democratic society and the aggression of an authoritarian state. We have the ability and obligation to error correct and learn from the past: an authoritarian system by definition holds no such potential. By only highlighting only that some of the results are the same, one loses sight of that fundamental moral difference in two systems of government: democracies make mistakes and can sometimes do terrible things to people in war, but has the capacity to correct, to avoid, to learn, to repent, and to atone; authoritarian governments invariably lead to atrocities in war and unaccountable crimes. Our system is morally superior even if the results are sometimes – tragically – no better.
Michael, we do not know that Ukrainian civilians have been deliberately targeted. Casualty numbers available (~6000 Ukrainian soldiers, <800 Ukrainian civilians) suggest they have not been (1:1 soldier/civilian would be more typical) . However, even if some have, you offer no proof that there is a general widespread order from “on high” to target civilians. We know of many cases where the US military has deliberately targeted civilians (there were several just in the Chelsea Manning leaks), but this does not mean it has been or is the policy of the US military or US presidents to target civilians in combat zones.
However, even if civilians are not “deliberately targeted”, how many do you have to kill before you conclude that what you are doing is not right? Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said on 60 minutes in 1996 that half a million dead Iraqi children due to US sanctions were “worth it”. How many children is the US killing today with sanctions on Afghanistan, Iran, Syria & Venezuela (among others), and what is the acceptable number?
You argue the people of Russia have no agency because of Putin (and probably would make the same argument about Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria). If what you say is true, Michael, citizens of the US still has no moral standing precisely because we (almost) universally do not use our power to even try to affect change for any of those places (mostly, we don’t even notice or pay attention).
I still think the US is better than Russia in many ways. But we are not exceptional. We are just less evil.
Your denial of the obvious crimes of the Russian military cast doubt on your motives for posting this. The fact that you do so anonymously if even more telling. I’ll leaving this here, but I warn readers that I strongly suspect the motives of the commenter. #PutinsUsefulIdiots
“Please let us know when the US intentionally..”
I see here that the key word is “intentionally.” In all of our post-WWII conflicts, how many of the bombs dropped reached a precise target? Do you see how ridiculous that is as a point of discussion when the real issue is why were we engaged in the conflict to begin with?
The death, destruction, and upheavals caused by war are measured in numbers, dead and wounded soldiers and civilians, refugees, orphans, property damage, etc…This is what all wars have in common. The intentions of the aggressor are mostly irrelevant. And how would you even begin to differentiate the levels of brutality in modern warfare?
Anyhow, this post by Mr. Steele is about looking at our own history before reveling in our moral superiority. In these past few weeks of watching Ukraine, I’ve seen absolutely no evidence that the rest of the world thinks that we are the ones with moral superiority. What Ukraine needs is our money and weapons.
So, my way of looking at this is that there is always an opportunity to do better. In the last half of the 20th century, we squandered every bit of goodwill and moral authority gained from WWII. And then there was Iraq in 2003. Maybe we’ll do better from this point onward. It does seem to be an opportunity.
This equivaency is ludicrous and offensive. Please let us know when the US intentionally targetec maternity hospitals, people in bread lines, and museums and theatres where hundreds were sheltering from artillery? To be clear all the examples the author lists are true and shameful. To say it is the same as what Putin is doing now is facile, lazy and frankly bullshit. But hey! I’m sure he appreciates it …
Good grief, Michael, I don’t even know where to start.
Try this:
“Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.” (I’ve actually seen higher numbers than this.)
Who do you suppose got hit? Who suffers the consequences of unexploded ordnance for decades? That’s why the numbers look like this:
“In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.”
That’s over 3 million dead, mostly civilians.
And the war dragged on because the Americans just couldn’t figure out how to get their “peace with honor” long after no one gave a rat’s ass about the Domino Theory.
At the risk of drawing “an equivalence between our own past mistakes and follies (and possibly crimes…) and those of our authoritarian adversaries…” I think I can say with certainty that the people under the bombs and digging the graves and rebuilding their country from rubble do not give a damn if the bombs came from a dictator or a democratically elected president. Would you?
Of course not. You are absolutely right that the victims in ANY war don’t care WHY they are being killed and immiserated. While that’s ALWAYS true, it doesn’t change the fact that we have the opportunity and obligation to prevent the American government from making such mistakes – the Russians had no such opportunity. That’s the fundamental difference I am highlighting.
While I agree that Bush II should also be tried for war crimes for making war on Iraq on false pretenses and lies, I don’t agree with the overall premise that American aggression, coups, and wars have been “no different” than Russia’s today. The major flaw in that conclusion is the means by which the decision to use armed force was arrived at, and the deliberate targeting of civilians.
As a democratic polity, we all share in responsibility for American decisions to use force in those conflicts you mention, which at least required a degree of consent from the public; this war in Ukraine is the product of just one man’s flawed thinking and moral failure – Putin’s.
Secondly, despite some notable lapses and the horrible euphemism ‘collateral damage”, America has generally fought our wars with at least an effort to abide by the Geneva Conventions and not deliberately target civilians, whereas that seems to be Putin’s main strategy for ‘winning’ the war in Ukraine.
In conclusion, while it might be tempting draw an equivalence between our own past mistakes and follies (and possibly crimes…) and those of our authoritarian adversaries, it is ultimately a false equivalence that doesn’t shed much light on the public morality of the American empire. If it is useful at all, I would suggest that it is useful in considering how much impunity we have granted our politicians for their policy decisions in the past, and work to build more accountability mechanisms into our foreign policy decision making. Impunity for poor, or even criminal, decisions only invites more adventurism and brutality.