Trump blurts out
the truth about US killings and the media goes wild
By Bill Van
Auken
February 09/10,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS
" -The
furor unleashed by the remarks of President Donald Trump
in response to Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly’s
calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a killer”
during an interview broadcast Sunday has continued to
reverberate, drawing hypocritical condemnations from
leading figures in both the Republican and Democratic
parities.
In response to
O’Reilly’s denunciation of Putin, Trump stated: “There
are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What,
do you think our country’s so innocent?”
Trump went on
to cite Iraq in support of his statement. O’Reilly’s
face went slack. He clearly did not know what to say.
The new leader of the “Free World” had wandered
seriously off message.
As far as the
capitalist politicians of both parties and the media are
concerned, Trump committed an unpardonable offense:
he—in this one instance, and for purely pragmatic
reasons related to his immediate political needs—had
said something true about US imperialism’s role in the
world.
The official
posture of outrage over Trump’s off-hand comment will
have little effect on the broader public. Do the
politicians and media really believe that the public is
so naïve and its memory so short? The United States is a
country where The Bourne Identity and its
innumerable sequels--whose basic premise is that the US
government is run by murderers--are among the most
popular movies of the last twenty years. This premise is
well grounded in fact. Over the past 70 years,
presidents and other high government officials have been
implicated in the authorization and implementation of
countless atrocities. Many of these crimes have been
substantiated in official government reports and
congressional hearings.
In a review of
Joshua Kurlantzick’s A Great Place to Have a War:
America in Laos and the Birth of the
Military CIA, reviewer Scott Shane wrote in the
February 3 edition of The New York Times :
“Speaking last
September in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, Barack
Obama mentioned a staggering fact: that the United
States had between 1963 and 1974 dropped two million
tons of bombs on the country, more than the total loosed
on Germany and Japan together during World War II. That
made Laos, which is slightly smaller than Michigan, the
most heavily bombed nation in history, the president
said. More than four decades after the end of the war,
unexploded ordnance is still killing and maiming
Laotians, and Obama announced that he was doubling
American funding to remove it.”
Calling
attention to information in Kurlantzick’s book, Shane
noted: “In his first presidential term, Richard M. Nixon
escalated the bombing from about 15 sorties per day to
300 per day. ‘How many did we kill in Laos?’ Nixon asked
Henry Kissinger one day in a conversation caught on
tape. Kissinger replied: ‘In the Laotian thing, we
killed about 10, 15’--10,000 or 15,000 people, he meant.
The eventual death toll would be 200,000.”
When it comes
to killing, the US Government is without equal. In
multiple wars of aggression, from Korea to Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the proxy war for
regime-change in Syria, US imperialism has killed and
maimed tens of millions.
The chief
accusation being leveled against Trump--by both supposed
liberals in the Democratic Party and right-wing
Republicans--is that he implied a “moral equivalence”
between Russia and the US. This was a phrase used during
the Cold War to justify every crime committed by the US
and its allies, from Latin America’s bloody
dictatorships to the Apartheid regime in South Africa,
on the grounds that there could be no “moral
equivalence” between the leader of the “Free World” and
the Soviet “Evil Empire.”
There is, in
fact, no equivalence. When it comes to killing and
global thuggery, Putin is a small fry compared to the
leaders of the United States.
That the
Democratic Party jumps on this reactionary bandwagon
only proves that there is nothing progressive whatsoever
in its purported opposition to Trump. This was
exemplified Monday by the remarks of California
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a supposed “left” Democrat
and leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus,
who suggested that Trump should be impeached for
“wrapping his arms around Putin while Putin is
continuing to advance into Korea [sic].”
Underlying the
furor over Trump’s remarks are fierce divisions over US
imperialist strategy and Washington’s preparations for
war that have been brought into the open with the change
of administrations.
These
differences have been exacerbated by recent events in
Syria. The Syrian government’s retaking in December of
eastern Aleppo, the last urban stronghold of the
US-backed “rebels,” represented a colossal setback for
US policy in the Middle East.
There are
bitter recriminations within the foreign policy
establishment over the Obama administration’s backing
off of its “red line” in 2013, when it nearly went to
war over false charges of Syrian government use of
chemical weapons. Within these circles, there are many
who feel that a military intervention would have been
better for US interests, no matter what new catastrophe
it unleashed.
An article
published in the Washington Post Monday,
warning that the US faces “a far stronger Iran” after
“years of turmoil in the Arab world,” spelled out the
situation that Washington now confronts in stark terms:
“Iran and
Russia together have fought to ensure the survival of
President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and they are now
pursuing a peace settlement in alliance with Turkey that
excludes a role for the United States. America has been
left with few friends and little leverage, apart from
the Kurds in the northeast of the country.
“Russia
controls the skies over Syria, and Turkey wields
influence over the rebels, but Iran holds sway on the
ground ...”
Talk of
“respecting” Putin, possible collaboration with Russia
against ISIS in Syria, and an easing of sanctions is
not, as the Democrats have suggested, evidence of some
secret control exercised by the Kremlin over Trump. It
is, rather, part of a definite strategy of peeling
Russia off from Iran in order to pave the way for a new
war in the Middle East, while sharply escalating
provocations against China.
Citing unnamed
administration officials, the Wall Street Journal
spelled this policy out on Monday: “The administration
is exploring ways to break Russia’s military and
diplomatic alliance with Iran... The emerging strategy
seeks to reconcile President Donald Trump’s seemingly
contradictory vows to improve relations with Russian
President Vladimir Putin and to aggressively challenge
the military presence of Iran.”
Trump’s chief
White House strategist and adviser, Stephen Bannon, a
student and admirer of Adolf Hitler, no doubt views the
administration’s pivot toward Moscow through the
historical prism of the Stalin-Hitler pact, which set
the stage for the Second World War, a war that
ultimately claimed 20 million Soviet lives.
Putin’s
government is susceptible to such maneuvers. It shares
all of the stupidity, backwardness and shortsightedness
of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy headed by
Stalin. Putin sits atop a regime that represents a
rapacious clique of oligarchs who enriched themselves
through theft of state property and the extraction and
sale of the resources of the former Soviet Union. They
are anxious to see US sanctions lifted so that they can
accelerate their accumulation of wealth at the expense
of the Russian working class.
Within the US
political establishment and Washington’s vast military
and intelligence apparatus, there exists sharp
opposition to Trump’s turn in foreign policy. Immense
political, military and financial resources have been
invested in the buildup against Russia, from the coup in
Ukraine to the deployment of thousands of US and NATO
troops on Russia’s western border. There are concerns
within ruling circles that a shift in imperialist
strategy is reckless and poses serious dangers.
While popular
attention and outrage have been focused on Trump’s
anti-democratic executive orders imposing a ban on
Muslims and refugees, ordering a wall built on the
southern border, and laying the groundwork for a mass
dragnet against undocumented immigrant workers, within
the ruling class a serious fight is being waged over
global imperialist strategy.
This fight over
policy is between two bands of cutthroats, each of which
is committed to an escalation of US militarism to
further the profit interests of the US-based banks and
transnational corporations. Whichever one wins out, the
threat of world war, rooted in the crisis of global
capitalism, will only grow.
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expressed in this article are solely those of the author
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Information Clearing House.
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