Nationalism - American Style

Love, American Style

by David Michael Green February 22, 2008 - 10:30am
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/user/david_michael_green

"Outside I hear the ground shaking
Up from underneath
It's only when the empire's breaking
That you see their teeth"
-- Al Stewart, "Rain Barrel"

Americans love to think that we're a peaceful people, and that we fight wars only when we must.

Unfortunately, you can count in nanoseconds how long those assertions hold up when exposed to such insidious commie dirty tricks as the application of logic or the examination of empirical history.

Sure, any war can be spun as some necessity against some Very Bad Person, preferably of brown skin, slanted eyes and/or differing deity. Not only can any war be so spun, probably every war there ever was has been, at least since the days when governments had to start offering some justification or another for their little foreign adventures.

But pick your barometer - any one will work - and you'll quickly see who are the militant folks on the planet. For America, it turns out - gulp - to be that bloated, frightened meth-addict staring back at us in the mirror, not some overseas evil emperor du jour.

For example, suppose you wanted to measure comparative national war-like tendencies by simply counting wars. Since World War II, the US has messed around, in ways big and small, in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Lebanon, Granada, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan again, and Iraq again. No country in the world can begin to match this record in the last half-century. And I'm not even listing here the covert operations (almost everywhere), including the ones that toppled democratically elected governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile, etc.), the long-term occupations of Latin American countries by the US military, the gunboat diplomacy of the American Navy around the world, the aiding and abetting of other killers (Saddam invading Iran, for example, apartheid South Africa or the Israeli occupation of Palestine), the militarization of the oceans and of space, or the myriad other ways in which the US leads the planet in aggressive tendencies. (For a whole century's worth of overseas fun - not even counting the big stuff - Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow is highly recommended reading.)

Who has China been invading lately? Russia? Fidel? Those perfidious (and perfumed) French? Heck, even Saddam couldn't touch this record for aggression, especially once you account for the fact that the US government assisted his foreign soiree into Iran (complete with the chemical weapons, of course) and likely green-lighted the one into Kuwait as well. And let's even grant that one or two of those American adventures had some measure of altruism associated with them, as perhaps the Balkan or Somalian affairs might have (I'd like to know the full story before making that judgement). Isn't the sheer volume of them - especially relative to the number of wars other countries have fought - a bit problematic for maintaining the pretense of America's pacific intent? My conservative (in both senses of the word) list above goes to nearly twenty. Isn't that a bit much for a peace-loving country?

But scratch that measure if you must (perhaps it cuts too close to the bone). Maybe we can detect America's dislike for war in another metric, say military spending. Oops. Turns out that's going to be a bit problematic too. I guess it won't be a huge surprise to anybody that the US spends more on 'defense' than any other country in the world. Maybe that's not so completely absurd, given that we have the third largest population on the planet. (At least it's not entirely out of line if you set aside the slightly inconvenient fact that the two larger countries are about four times bigger than we are). But here's the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That's right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won't equal America's alone. What's more, that doesn't even include the $100 billion or so that we're dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans' (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, and will continue to, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward two trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn't have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I'm sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? We love it so much that we outspend nearly 200 other countries in the world - combined! - in buying shit for war? And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!

Okay, okay, so that one didn't work out so well either. The good news is that at least we don't make the world an uglier place by continually inventing new and more vicious weaponry. Not us peace-loving Americans! You know, like atom bombs, napalm, bunker-busters, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, space lasers, phosphorous bombs and stuff like that! Who would build such things? What kind of depraved mind would harness so much of its scientific and industrial establishment to such ends? Who would... er... um... Hey, wait a minute! What do you mean that we invented and manufactured all those things?!?! I thought we were the peace-loving people! Meanwhile, can I interest you in some depleted uranium at a very, very attractive price?

Okay, but we must be good neighbors, really, because we're always the ones who are pushing for all sorts of international treaties to limit war, weapons and the worst practices of nasty governments. You know, for example, how we signed on to the United Nations Charter (which we more or less also wrote), and its requirement that states may only use militarized aggression in the case of self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council to do so in a collective security operation. Hey, sometimes we even comply with it! Or maybe you prefer the treaties against land mines, child soldiers or the weaponization of space, which we're pretty much the only folks not signing? The "quaint" and "obsolete" Geneva Conventions against torture and war crimes? How about the International Criminal Court, which John Bolton led the Bush administration into single-handedly trying to destroy? Hmmm... Wonder why they would have wanted to get rid of that? Gee, I thought genocide and war crimes were a bad thing! America is the world leader in supporting human rights and seeking peace. So, remember, if you hear someone tell you that we've been abdicating, avoiding, ignoring and destroying all these (and myriad other) treaties that seek to end or prevent war, it's just the liberal America-hating media elites telling lies again, because they want us to lose our wars. (And why would they want that? That's easy! So some other country can march in, take away their enormously profitable media franchises, steal their mansions and yachts, and then hang them for treason and pillaging, of course. Who wouldn't trade their current set-up for that? Trust me, these guys know a good thing when they see it.)

Alright, alright, so it turns out that none of these measures of warlike tendencies turned out so very well. American is winning these contests about as often as is Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. And with about as much grace, too. But at least the rest of the world thinks of us as nice, peaceful neighbors, right? Well, actually, they sometimes do! Just not now. And just not when we're, uh, engaged in most of our wars. Vietnam wasn't exactly appreciated out there in the global community, and that opinion hasn't changed a whole lot, even after we've established a lovely little trading relationship with that same communist country that we once argued would be so dangerous if it went... er, well, communist. You know, like China! That's why we don't trade with them now, or - perish the thought - make ourselves vulnerable by allowing them to finance our national binge borrowing. No sense aiding and abetting the enemy, eh?! (This is getting so confusing, though. Are communists our friends or our adversaries? Are we trying to help them or hurt them? Why does it seem like it depends on how much money there is to be made?)

Sorry - I digress. Despite ourselves, America is in fact sometimes admired in world opinion. But not when we play our war games. People didn't like Vietnam, they didn't like Central America in the 1980s, they didn't care for Iran, Guatemala or Chile, Granada or Lebanon, and they resent the hell out of our support for Israeli colonialism in Palestine. They can't stand America's duplicity, hypocrisy and arrogance when it comes to so many aspects of international diplomacy, including the aforementioned treaties we've avoided when we're not trying to destroy them. Yet nothing has so inflamed world opinion as the gross transgression against international law and human morality that is Iraq. America's standing in world opinion isn't the only measure of how comparatively warlike we are, but it certainly is a valid one. When everybody else in the neighborhood hates you, or hates something you do, it's a moment for a little reflection and introspection, isn't it? Unless, of course, you're just an asshole. Then why bother?

No, America's standing in world opinion isn't the only barometer of our aggressive tendencies, but then again, every single one of them we've examined has turned out the same. We fight by far and away more wars than any other country in the world. We spend way more money on our military than every other country in the world, combined! - nearly 200 hundred of them altogether! We out-do the world in creating new and vicious ways to liberate more and more people from the ongoing hassle of being alive. We abdicate every treaty meant to keep the dogs of war at bay, from ABM to Geneva to the UN Charter. Or else we smash them. And, finally, we are admired for our peaceful tendencies in every part of the world. Except where we're not. Which turns out to be just about everywhere nowadays.

What a record, eh? Even the East German judge has to give this puppy a high score for consistency! Even if you disqualify one of these measures for some reason or another, surely the fact that they all point in the same direction is uncomfortably telling.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. Much as I'd like to be, I'm not a pacifist, because I realize that there are genuinely bad actors out there who can't be tamed by a Dick Cheney charm offensive, or beaten into submission by a Condoleeza Rice piano sonata. I'm glad the US military was there to stomp Hitler. Maybe even Korea, Bosnia and Kosovo could be justified as a response to aggression, though here it gets murkier. But Vietnam? No way. Today's Iraq war? Utterly shameful. The Mexican War? Spanish-American War? Cuba? Nicaragua? Guatemala? Granada? Be serious. Way too often America's pacific intentions are harder to find than the elusive Higgs boson particle. Probably you'd need a massive supercollider and a bunch of expensive detection equipment to do it, too.

And god knows I'm not blaming the troops for this. Indeed, too often they're the second victims (the truth being the first) of policymakers like Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, for whom war is a game and people are pawns.

But because of these monsters and the record they've created, Americans have to face an ugly and unfortunate fact. Despite what your sixth grade civics teacher told you, we're not the white-hats of the world. Or at least not often enough. We just like to think we are.

But thinking and being are, alas, two different things, as we found out going into Iraq - thinking we'd be greeted with chocolates and flowers.

We may get them yet, however. Perhaps they'll be handed to us at the exit ramp, as the next president extricates a sobered United States from the disaster of its latest example of bringing love, American-style to the world.

Accept our values or die

The West to the World: Accept Our Values or Die

http://www.alternet.org/audits/77373

By Abid Mustafa, Middle East Online. Posted February 21, 2008.

The forceful imposition of Western values is far more of a threat to world peace than Muslim nations gaining WMD.

Whenever western governments mention weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and Muslims in the same breath, the western media immediately breaks into a wild frenzy warning its people that a catastrophic event of epic proportions is about to unfold.

Old European fables of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword are reinvented to convey the impression that Muslims are extremely dangerous, highly irresponsible and pay scant regard to human life. Hence the mantra of disarming Muslim countries of WMD has become the rallying cry of the West directed against the Muslim world.

In some cases the arguments are extended to justify the West's ongoing policy of regime change in Syria, Iran and perhaps Pakistan. However, a close study of Islamic rule in the past contradicts the popular western myth that Muslims are bloodthirsty people anxious to wipe out the rest of mankind in the name of Islam.

The same however, cannot be said about the West. The West armed with its secular doctrine and materialistic world-view proceeded to exploit, plunder and colonize vast populations in order to control resources and maximize wealth.

In pursuit of these newfound riches the West succeeded in destroying civilizations such as the Incas, American Indians, Aztecs, and Aborigines. Those who survived colonization were forcibly converted to Christianity, stripped of their heritage and sold into bondage to western companies. For the indigenous people of Africa, India, Asia, the Middle East and others, the promises of freedom quickly evaporated and were replaced by colonial rule. Rather than show remorse towards such atrocities the West could only gloat at its achievements.

Technologies such as cannons, pistols, steam engines, machine guns, airplanes, mustard gas etc only hastened the acquisition of colonies and the exploitation of their people. Resistance offered by the natives towards their colonial masters was met by brute force -- often resulting in the destruction of entire communities. When the West was not destroying the natives they were too busy annihilating each other in a desperate bid to cling on to their precious colonies. World Wars I and II are prime examples of the destructive nature of western values.

This is a description of the Old World where countries like England, France, and Germany built empires and accumulated immense wealth on the death and destruction of millions of innocent people. Is the New World (America leading the West) any different today?

Take the example of the New World and its relationship with Afghanistan and Iraq. Liberation has become occupation; democracy has given way to colonial rule, devastation is termed precision bombing and the slaughter of innocent Muslims is described as collateral damage. Meanwhile, American and British oil companies are queuing up to exploit the oil wells of Iraq and transport the energy reserves of the Caspian Sea to Europe via Afghanistan.

The Islamic Khilafah in the past never treated mankind in such a barbaric fashion. Neither did the Khilafah spread Islam by force nor destroy civilizations. When Islam spread to Egypt, many Coptic Christians did not embrace Islam and today they still number approximately 7 million. Likewise, when India was opened up to Islam the inhabitants were not coerced into accepting Islam. India today has a population of more than 750 million Hindus.

Compare this to extermination of Muslim and Jews in the courts of the Spanish Inquisitors during the much-coveted European renaissance. Those Jews that survived this Spanish holocaust, were warmly welcomed by the Ottoman Caliphate. In Islamic Spain they flourished and became important members of Islamic society.

Today the world has more to fear from the destructive nature of western values than WMD. In the past these values were enforced upon nations either through direct colonial rule or through tyrannical regimes loyal to the West. Presently, the greatest danger facing mankind is the constant threat of the West imposing its values on the rest of the world through WMD.

See more stories tagged with: colonization, europe, afghanistan, iraq

Abid Mustafa is a political commentator who specializes in Muslim Affairs.