The New York Times—along with many others—took righteous umbrage when President Trump, asked why he insisted on cozying up to a “killer” like Vladimir Putin, responded by saying “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
The Times earnestly, though, one must say, rather innocently, acknowledged our own lack of innocence:
“There’s no doubt that the United States has made terrible mistakes, like invading Iraq in 2003 and torturing terrorism suspects after Sept. 11. President Barack Obama often drew fire from Republicans for acknowledging the obvious — there are limits to American power and sometimes decisions to employ military force have resulted in “unintended consequences.” American drone strikes against extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, have sometimes killed civilians.”
Let’s go through that a little, New York Times. The invasion was not a mere “mistake,” even a “terrible” one. It was an act of deliberate deceit. The Bush Administration did not invade Iraq because it believed Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”1 but rather because it wanted to take over the Middle East, establishing the U.S. as the supreme military power in the region, allowing us to control world’s oil supply, ensuring that no country could use it as a weapon against us (and to ensure a decent ROI for American oil companies as well), guaranteeing the safety of Israel as lagniappe.2 Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result, and chaos that resulted from that stunningly misguided and mismanaged war continues to this very day, as the NYT well knows.
Neither was the torture of terrorist “suspects” (often, scapegoats) a “terrible mistake”, something that we didn’t “mean” to do but somehow did. These were deliberate acts of cruelty, largely undertaken not to obtain information but for revenge, to make someone else suffer for our own emotional distress. As for drone strikes against “extremists” that sometimes result in the deaths of “civilians”, since when does the U.S. get to kill citizens of other countries for being “extreme” (or rather, suspected of being extreme)? The Times also “forgets” that the Obama Administration included any and all military-age males in its “extremist” body counts—“we know you’re guilty because we killed you.”
The Times simply cannot imagine that the U.S. ever acts for selfish reasons, for military and economic aggrandizement—even, as in the case of both Iraqi invasions, for example, for partisan political advantage. The U.S. government isn’t as corrupt as Putin’s—not yet, anyway—but in terms of international wreckage, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and in Yemen, we’re way ahead of Russia. And, until the Times and, well, practically the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment, come to terms with our ruthlessness—to see ourselves as others see us—we’ll stay that way.
- I’ve argued this point at least a thousand times. Go here for a discussion highlighting the Times’ sorry, and egregious, role in that deceit. ↩︎
- In the early, “shock and awe” days of the Iraqi invasion, President Bush generously allowed critics carte blanche to attack his policy, with two exceptions: “You can’t say it was about oil or Israel.” Guess what? It was about oil and Israel. ↩︎
