NYT: Unlike
Russian Wars, US Wars ‘Promote Freedom and Democracy’
By Adam Johnson
February
09/10,, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-The New York Times, in its recent rebuff of
comments President Donald Trump made about Russia, seems
not to have evolved its understanding of US geopolitics
past an 8th grade level. Trump had been asked by Fox
News’ Bill O’Reilly (2/5/17)
why he wouldn’t condemn Vladimir Putin, whom O’Reilly
called a “killer.”
“You got a lot
of killers,” Trump told O’Reilly. “What, you think our
country’s so innocent”
Naturally, this
prompted a torrent of pearl-clutching from liberal
patriots aghast that the president could equate the
moral worth of the United States with that of the
dastardly Russians. Most prominent among these was the
New York Times, whose editorial board published a
flag-waving scolding called “Blaming America First”
(2/7/17):
Asserting the moral and political superiority of the
United States over Russia has not traditionally been
a difficult maneuver for American presidents. But
rather than endorsing American exceptionalism, Mr.
Trump seemed to appreciate Mr. Putin’s
brutality—which includes bombing civilians in Syria
and, his accusers allege, responsibility for a trail
of dead political opponents and journalists at home—and
suggested America acts the same way.
Oh my, the
horror.
A rough look at
the actions in question since Putin has been in office
reveals this outrage to be, at best, misplaced. One
tally by Airwars, a Western nonprofit,
puts the
total number of Syrian civilians killed by Russia
since it entered the war in September 2015 at just over
4,000, or 0.8–0.4 percent of the 500,000 to 1 million
civilians who died due to George W. Bush’s
unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003. Add to this the
thousands of other civilians killed in other theaters of
the “War on Terror” under the Bush and Obama
administrations, including Afghanistan, Libya and Syria
itself, and the idea of pointing to respect for civilian
lives as something that elevates the United States above
Russia seems a little absurd.
The Times
goes on to insist that “no American president has done
what Mr. Putin has done,” including “invading Ukraine”
and “interfering in the American election.” Of course,
American presidents have invaded other
countries and intervened in other
elections, but for reasons unclear, the Times
suggests that those two cases are the ones that indicate
the US’s moral superiority over Russia.
The New York
Times briefly mentions the Iraq War and torture, but
whistles past these episodes by insisting they were
“terrible mistakes.” The Times seems to be under
the impression that Russia kills innocents for laughs,
while the United States does so only with the best of
intentions:
At least in
recent decades, American presidents who took
military action have been driven by the desire to
promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with
extraordinary results, as when Germany and Japan
evolved after World War II from vanquished enemies
into trusted, prosperous allies.
That US
invasions “have been driven by the desire to promote
freedom and democracy” is not argued, let alone proved;
it’s presented as an article of faith. As the Times’
“recent decades” go back to World War II, the United
States presumably killed an estimated
3.8
million in Vietnam “to promote freedom and
democracy”—despite President Dwight Eisenhower
admitting that given the chance, 80 percent of the
Vietnamese people would have voted for Ho Chi Minh, the
leader whose government the US opposed. Implicitly, the
US’s use of
covert terror to try to overthrow the elected
government of Nicaragua, and US military support for
death squad regimes elsewhere in Central America,
were likewise motivated by a longing for freedom and
democracy.
As FAIR (9/30/16)
has noted, the most important function of major
editorial boards is to be gatekeepers of national
security orthodoxy. And there is no more axiomatic
orthodoxy than American
exceptionalism. One can handwring over “mistakes,”
even occasionally do harsh reporting on American war
crimes—so long as one arrives back at the position of
American moral superiority. “Yes, America has made
mistakes,” the good liberal insists, “but at least
we don’t do this other bad thing that is, unaccountably,
uniquely disqualifying.”
Clearly,
Trump’s motives in questioning American innocence were
anything but liberal or noble. He was evoking America’s
own sins not to challenge them, but to apologize for
those of the Russian president and, preemptively, his
own. But the outrage over Trump’s comments from pundits
and editorial boards did not seek to spotlight his
cynicism and its dark implications, but rather to insist
that the United States is, in fact, on a higher moral
plane than Russia. This is a childish assertion that
serves to flatter the ego of American readers while
legitimizing their government’s crimes.
Adam
Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.You can find him on
Twitter at
@AdamJohnsonNYC.
You can
send a message to the New York Times at
letters@nytimes.com
(Twitter:@NYTimes).
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most effective.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House.
Noam Chomsky - The Crimes of U.S. Presidents
Chomsky goes
through some of the crimes of the post-war presidents.
From 2003.
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