Carl Boggs - The Crimes of Empire, Rogue Superpower & World Domination 315
Carl Boggs - The Crimes of Empire, Rogue Superpower & World Domination 315
Carl Boggs - The Crimes of Empire, Rogue Superpower & World Domination 315
Carl Boggs
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction 1
they have surely never been that bad. Hitler and the Nazis, after all,
were irredeemably evil. But there is a question as to whether the Nazi
barometer is a useful standard for measuring one’s own national
legacy of wrongdoing. Does the common murderer, or even serial
killer, feel better or in some way vindicated when compared to Ted
Bundy or Charles Manson? A more salient point, however, is that
Hitler (and the Nazis) were quickly de-legitimated, fought, defeated,
and driven from the historical stage, never to return. And subsequent
generations of fascists and neo-Nazis have made little headway. The
contemporary U.S. empire, on the other hand, has both retained
and expanded its economic, political, and military power across
the planet, emphatically so since the 1980s. Its imperial hegemony
enjoys solid domestic legitimacy while its worldwide presence, at
least militarily, has no serious rivals. Its capacity to bring death and
destruction to any region of the world is unmatched. Furthermore,
while the Nazis carried out their horrendous crimes over a period
of several years, the American behemoth has conducted itself as a
rogue power across two centuries (although in this book I focus
mainly on the postwar decades). By the early twenty-first century the
U.S. global agenda had become the single biggest threat to planetary
survival, for reasons explored in later chapters.
Such arguments cannot be sustained without running head-first
into an ensemble of myths shrouding American political life—
especially in the realm of foreign policy—that remains powerful
despite massive countervailing evidence. Iraq furnishes a nearly
ideal case study in itself, yet the fiction that this or any U.S. military
venture is driven by strictly noble, enlightened goals cannot be
easily dislodged, even among the educated strata. The same goes
for the belief that earlier U.S. criminality is best forgotten at a
time when Washington is struggling mightily to bring freedom and
democracy to a perilous world. Obsession with past history, after
all, fixates on false standards and solves no problems. Other myths
linger, including the belief that U.S. war crimes today are the work
of a few thugs failing to heed standard military discipline. Could
the behavior of U.S. armed forces ever be deliberately unlawful, a
function of political choices, strategic vision and tactical planning?
Perhaps, but such behavior must obviously be the fault of stupid or
incompetent leaders—never systematic or planned, never produced
within the framework of Pentagon agendas—and of course the
wrongdoers are swiftly and severely punished. By this rendering,
the (failed) invasion and occupation of Iraq was a simple miscal-
culation by the Bush presidency, already known for its political
preface xvii
* * *
This book is the third part of a trilogy on U.S. imperial power that
was conceived roughly a decade ago. First in the series, Imperial
Delusions (2004), was intended as a multifaceted analysis of
American global behavior, linking global and domestic (economic,
political, cultural) elements of a power structure that I argue is
increasingly addicted to militarism and war. This work grew out
of an earlier study, begun under the auspices of the journal New
Political Science and published as the anthology Masters of War
(2003), with articles by such antiwar critics as Noam Chomsky,
preface xxi
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
The legacy of U.S. outlawry has its origins in the earliest days of
the Republic as the colonial destruction of Native peoples began
in earnest—a process viewed by the white European settlers as
a God-given mission of enlightenment and social progress. The
settlers left a trail of systematic conquest, slavery, and warfare,
all justified by some variant of the “white-man’s burden,” later
to be identified as Manifest Destiny. This ideology fed not only
the Indian Wars but the plantation slave economy, conquest of
Mexican lands, and later U.S. expansion into Central America and
Asia. Such conquest and expansion required a virulent nationalist
ethos and militarism paying little attention to what is nowadays
called “rules of engagement.” An Indian population estimated to
be as high as 15 million when Columbus arrived in the Western
hemisphere was reduced to just a few hundred thousand by 1900,
the result of Europeans’ inexorable drive for land, resources, power,
and religious hegemony. Through a combination of slave economy
and westward expansion the white-settler strata had by the mid
nineteenth century built a cruel regimen of exploitation and violence
fueled by unmitigated racism.
The idea of Manifest Destiny actually goes back to the pre-revolu-
tionary period when the Puritans, animated by a mixture of religious
zeal and Enlightenment ideals, moved to conquer new frontiers they
believed were inhabited by primitive savages unable to properly
develop the land they occupied. Early white settlers were colonialists
in the fullest sense, motivated by a sense of inalienable rights which,
at the time, meant entitlement to other peoples’ territory. While
upholding a new “empire of liberty,” the Puritans saw themselves as
harbingers of a liberal revolution that was destined to sweep away
all obstacles to human progress—progress that, of course, would
introduction 11
* * *
While Bush and the neocons have, with the impetus of 9/11 and the
war on terrorism, taken U.S. outlawry to higher levels, the historical
pattern had in fact been clearly established. The subsequent
trajectory of militarism and warfare, ideologically enforced by an
ethos of national destiny, has taken multiple and overlapping forms,
essentially as follows:
1. U.S. violation of international agreements, treaties, and laws
has flowed from the historical trajectory, beginning with the first
Indian wars. American outlawry since World War II, from Korea to
Iraq, exhibits many parallels with the nineteenth-century attempts
to pacify and destroy Indian resistance. Hundreds of treaties signed
with Native tribes were abrogated or ignored, depending on the
priorities of the settlers, the military, and the federal government.
Spanning nearly two centuries, U.S. outlawry took many forms—
crimes against peace, proxy wars, breaches of rules of engagement,
indiscriminate attacks on civilians, aerial terrorism, support for
death squads and torture, use of prohibited weapons, abrogation
of treaties, overriding of the U.N. Charter.
2. Transgressions have typically been shrouded in moral claims
about overthrowing tyranny, “civilizing” backward populations,
eradicating weapons of mass destruction, carrying out humanitarian
interventions to fight “ethnic cleansers” and “genocidal” villains,
or waging a war on terrorism. Rarely have these righteous pretexts
stood up to close scrutiny.
3. The human consequences of a long colonial and militaristic
history—even if we go back no further than the postwar era—
have few parallels in modern history: millions of deaths, tens of
millions wounded, more tens of millions displaced, several ruined
public infrastructures, and badly damaged environments in Asia, the
Middle East, and Latin America. This legacy remains, unfortunately,
very much alive today.
4. Such criminality has been facilitated by superior American
economic wealth and military technology—that is, within a
framework of modernity, not outside of or against it. With the
development of technowar, increasingly refined by the Pentagon
since World War II, military action has become ever-more calculated
and rationalized, the province of technocratic war planners relying
introduction 15
* * *
culture in the wake of 9/11. By late 2002 and early 2003 the vast
network of corporate media outlets obediently followed suit—
leading newspapers, magazines, local news venues, TV stations,
talk radio, think-tanks, and university institutes, all joining in one
large chorus for war. The media apparatus became an adjunct to
the Bush agenda, disseminating blatant lies and myths about Iraq,
WMD, Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda, and U.S. plans to “democratize”
the Middle East. As Chris Hedges writes, “the notion that the press
was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It
saw itself as part of the war effort.”23 Following a well-established
pattern, the American media aligned itself with a military venture
that became part visual spectacle, part superpatriotic catharsis, part
infotainment—rarely pausing to investigate any of the pressing legal
and moral concerns. As with earlier U.S. interventions in Vietnam,
Panama, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, the media eagerly and blindly
followed every official statement and handout, little attention being
devoted to a critical assessment of U.S. imperial objectives. The
idea that Washington might invade and occupy a sovereign nation
to serve its own geopolitical ambitions was either sidestepped or,
when grudgingly acknowledged, framed as a matter of superpower
entitlement. Thus, at the outbreak of the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq
NBC anchor Tom Brokaw could nonchalantly say: “one of the
things that we don’t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of
Iraq, because in a few days we’re going to own that country.”24
As Bush and the neocons moved inexorably toward war, admin-
istration ideologues, their cavalier attitude toward international law
more transparent than ever, now argued that Washington should
prepare its own global rules, even in the face of hostile American
or world public opinion. Within the anarchic universe constructed
by writers like Robert Kaplan, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, and
Max Boot, a belligerent warrior ethic made perfectly good sense,
especially with the U.S. having to face off against armed-to-the-
teeth madmen like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Legal
“theorists” like John Woo, Eric Posner, Jack Goldsmith, Anne-Marie
Slaughter, and Alan Dershowitz entered the picture, calling attention
to the “limits of international law” while arguing that universal
legal principles could be junked where (as in Iraq) they stood in
the way of pressing U.S. military imperatives. For Dershowitz and
others, moreover, the practice of torture—uniformly regarded as
a violation of human rights—might under the new circumstances
be considered a potentially useful method in the war on terrorism.
Media figures like Rush Limbaugh playfully toyed with reports of
introduction 21
* * *
FORGETTING NUREMBERG
At different times in its history the U.S. has violated every one of the
above principles, generally holding itself above the most hallowed
norms of international law. Its many acts of military aggression have
for the most part been planned, deliberate, systematic, and brutal,
with its increasingly high-tech firepower directed against weak,
small, underdeveloped, and militarily inferior countries. Such acts
have always been carried out in the absence of a serious military
threat to the U.S. arising from those nations or groups targeted
for attack; the U.S. took the first move, usually sidestepping or
ignoring diplomatic initiatives. The American military—since 1945
the most powerful and far-reaching in the world—has conducted
both selective and strategic (area) bombing, used weapons of mass
destruction, wantonly attacked civilian populations and infrastruc-
tures, mined harbors, invaded and occupied foreign territories, set
28 the crimes of empire
SUPERPOWER ETHICS
After the first Gulf War the U.S. relied upon every device available
to it—espionage, inspections, bombing raids, covert action,
economic sanctions—to subvert Iraqi power while moving to secure
its imperial supremacy across the region. As early as 1992 some
neocon ideologues had called for a “remapping” of the Middle
East, beginning with regime change in Iraq (a task left “unfinished”
in 1991), while the U.S. set out to bolster its economic, political,
and military leverage in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. We
have seen how the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was
designed to reorder that nation’s governing, industrial, financial,
and legal structures as a step toward controlling its resources. U.S.
intervention followed several (often overlapping) phases: build-up
to war, invasion, occupation in pursuit of hegemony, reconstruction,
and final consolidation of control and governance. The first two
phases were carried out swiftly and efficiently enough, although
deceitfully, after desperate U.S./British efforts to win U.N. Security
Council backing had failed. Media-centered public relations
campaigns that demonized the Hussein regime were indispensable
to success. Quick battlefield gains, however, turned illusory,
masking enormous political and military disasters to come. The
third phase—occupation—soon turned into a major catastrophe
because of contradictions inherent in efforts by a foreign power to
rule a nation mainly by force, especially where the predatory aims of
the occupier were so transparent. As for reconstructing a society it
had already essentially destroyed, the U.S. goal has been to maintain
enough stability to permit Western corporate penetration of the
economy. However, as of early 2009, the occupation could only be
crimes against peace 35
Bush were all simply a pretext for an illegal war that was, from
the outset, based on resource and geopolitical agendas spelled out
during the previous decade. It follows that “intelligence failures,”
moreover, had nothing to do with faulty decision-making: on the
contrary, intelligence data was manipulated to serve policy ends,
as insiders like Richard Clarke were able to demonstrate.24 CIA
analysts were repeatedly ordered to refashion their findings to suit
phony Bush administration claims, as with Iraq’s supposed nuclear
program and its alleged ties to Al Qaeda.25 Hell-bent on military
action, Washington refused to allow any troublesome evidence to
stand in its way.
The military occupation established a colonial regime that,
with modest British help, the U.S. used to set about remaking the
economic, political, and legal structures of Iraq—itself a violation
of international law, contained in provisions of the fourth 1949
Geneva Convention (chapter III) governing conditions of foreign
control. This convention stipulates that an occupying power is
obliged to respect the laws, customs, and institutions of the nation
it has taken over, but the U.S., motivated by its grand strategy
of reconfiguring the Middle East, had its sights on transforming
everything to satisfy its own objectives. Thus, according to Order
39 (September 2003), signed by L. Paul Bremer III for the coalition
authority, the Iraq economy was to be privatized and opened up to
foreign investment, with U.S. and British corporations having the
inside track. Rather than safeguarding domestic laws and resources,
the U.S. moved to secure its own economic priorities, assuming that
its military could (with help from private contractors) manage the
chaos and violence. As of early 2009 no Western political, military,
or corporate leaders had been held accountable under the Geneva
Protocols, even as Hussein and other former Ba’ath leaders were
being tried, convicted, and (in some cases) executed for war crimes
before the ad hoc Baghdad Tribunal.
U.S. criminality in Iraq has been all the more brazen given the deceit
and cynical contempt for legality that accompanied the American
drive to colonize the Middle East. Everything that took place grew
out of longstanding U.S. economic and strategic aims in the region,
a function in great measure of corporate globalization. The invasion
and occupation—far from being a mistaken overreach by the clumsy
Bush administration—occurred within a definite logic: to open up
Middle Eastern economies to Western corporate penetration. As
Antonia Juhasz writes, this was the Bush agenda from the outset:
in the midst of bloodshed and chaos, U.S. companies were making
crimes against peace 41
billions of dollars in profits from the war, with more tens of billions
and even trillions to be made in the future.26 Following 2003,
according to Juhasz, oil corporations were reaping all-time profits
off the war, as were military-related firms like Bechtel, Halliburton,
Chevron, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon. The year 2004 was
Chevron’s most profitable ever (at $13.3 billion) while Bechtel’s
gains reached a new high at $17.4 billion the same year. To sustain
such profits, however, the U.S. would have to reshape the entire
Iraqi infrastructure, including the government, laws, and social
policies, to allow for maximum foreign investment—a goal that,
while patently illegal, was embraced from the first days of the
occupation. To this end the U.S. began to transform the whole
political and economic terrain—banking, investment, taxation,
copyright laws, trade, the media, even education. This agenda was
already laid out in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document
and reaffirmed later, establishing Washington’s imperial supremacy
in a post-Soviet world, with domination of Iraq a linchpin in the
struggle for Pax Americana.
Although regime change was not originally central to a Bush
agenda, Juhasz points out that it was Bush who finally “unified
military and corporate globalization into one mighty weapon of
Empire.”27 Perpetual war would be needed to confront actual and
potential “threats”—such threats understood as challenges to
U.S. global hegemony. In the build-up to war, Juhasz points out,
the large oil and military companies were supporters of military
action, hopeful of both super-profits from the campaign and an
opening-up of the Middle East to further business investments.
Although Iraqi oil reserves were listed at 112 billion barrels, some
estimates anticipated discoveries of up to 400 billion barrels—which
would amount to the largest deposits in the world. Hussein had
excluded U.S. oil companies from bidding for lucrative contracts
during the 1990s, preferring instead to deal with Russia, France,
and China, and this was surely a major U.S. consideration in the
drive toward regime change.28 With occupation and the setting up
of a puppet government, the U.S. was able to frame a new Iraq
Constitution enshrining Bremer’s Order 39, permitting continued
occupation and new (mostly U.S.) licenses to “reconstruct” the
economy and society. Here the Bush agenda worked to privatize
state-owned industries and resources (including oil), opening up
access to transnational corporations. The new government was
“free” to sign huge contracts with such oil giants as ExxonMobil
and Chevron. In 2004, the U.S., chronically short of combat troops
42 the crimes of empire
terrorism, tyrannical rule. Once again the world is being told that
the U.S. must confront a fearsome, imminent threat to world peace.
The pages of such neocon periodicals as the Weekly Standard were
by 2006 promoting another war even at a time of mounting disaster
in Iraq. In September 2006 Congress enacted and Bush signed the
Iran Freedom Support Act, in the spirit of the 1998 Iraq Liberation
Act, giving Bush (and later Obama) virtual carte blanche to carry
out yet another war of aggression. Seemingly unthinkable just a few
years ago, the supposed need to initiate military operations against
Iran had by early 2007 gained new currency. Thus neocon Joshua
Muravchik urged aerial bombardments of Iran, with or without
U.N. approval, since Iran’s “secret nuclear program” (never shown
to be a weapons program) cannot be tolerated. He is convinced
such attacks will undermine the Iranian government, but if that
fails a ground invasion should be contemplated. Muravchik writes
that “[Iranian leader] Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin.
Force is the only thing that can stop him.”30 Here, oddly enough,
the current designated enemy is no Hitler on-the-move but rather
a “new Lenin” ostensibly ready to launch world revolution.
As Scott Ritter argues in Target Iran, plans for regime change
in Iran will predictably lead to even greater disaster than what has
taken place in Iraq. He writes that American politicians have been
propagandized into supporting possible military aggression against
Iran, in the absence of evidence that the Ahmadinejad regime is a
threat to U.S. national security.31 The main problem, according to
Ritter, is tenacious Israeli pressure to move before Iran acquires
nuclear-weapons capacity—pressure simultaneously exerted mostly
through the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Thus: “The conflict
currently under way between the United States and Iran is first
and foremost a conflict born in Israel. It is based upon the Israeli
contention that Iran poses a threat to Israel, and defined by Israeli
assertions that Iran possesses a nuclear weapons program. None
of this has been shown to be true.”32 As Ritter shows, it was the
same pro-Israel lobby that influenced Congress members to support
Iranian opposition groups working for regime change. (It is worth
noting here that Iran, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Prolifera-
tion Treaty, is completely entitled to explore and develop atomic
energy, and no inspections process has found that the Iranians have
a weapons program. The Israelis not only have such a program
but possess a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. The same is true
of both Pakistan and India, the latter country receiving nuclear
assistance from the U.S. despite not being an NPT signatory.)
44 the crimes of empire
to their own (often more egregious) crimes that included far greater
saturation bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan.
The World War II experience led to four Geneva Conventions
in 1949 that arrived at international statutes to protect civilian
populations in times of war, breaches of which were defined as
war crimes. Expressly forbidden were willful killing, inhumane
treatment, torture, extensive destruction not justified by military
necessity or wantonly conducted, and mistreatment of prisoners of
war. Both the U.S. and Britain fought hard, against efforts of the Red
Cross, others groups, and many other nations, to eliminate or water
down these Geneva protections, with limited success. Above all, they
hoped to preserve maximum freedom to plan aerial bombardments,
including atomic weapons, since this would become a fixture of
military strategy. Additional Geneva Protocol One (1977) expanded
earlier provisions to include a wider range of civilian objects. Thus
Article 48 (Basic Rule) states that “Parties to the conflict shall at all
times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants
and between civilian objects and military objects and accordingly
shall direct their operations only against military objectives,” while
Chapter II (Article 50) adds that “the presence within the civilian
population of individuals who do not come within the definition of
civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”
Article 50 further states that armed attacks are illegal “which
may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to
civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof,
which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct
military advantage anticipated.” Article 54 prohibits attacks on
objects indispensable to civilian populations, including foodstuffs,
agriculture, livestock, water supplies, and irrigation works. Chapter
IV (Article 57) concludes by stipulating that, “In the conduct of
military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian
population, civilians, and civilian objects.” The U.S. is not a party
to the Additional Protocols, but the statutes are binding on all states
as an element of customary international law.6
During the twentieth century the international moral Zeitgeist,
discussed in the introduction, has evolved to the point where
perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity could
be tried before a tribunal. Moreover, beginning with Nuremberg
and the U.N. Charter, the system of international law pertaining
to war crimes had undergone progressive clarification, although
bringing violators to justice would prove extremely difficult. When
it comes to warfare against civilians, Nuremberg established the
warfare against civilians 51
During the half-century since the end of World War II the U.S. has
been easily the leading purveyor of violence on a global scale—the
dark side of a political culture that champions freedom, democracy,
and peace. No country qualifies as even a close second on this
measure of barbarism. A rather conservative accounting of civilians
killed by the U.S. military since 1945 would number in the vicinity
of eight million, with higher estimates reaching double that figure.
Add to this carnage the number of wounded, maimed, displaced,
and imprisoned—more tens of millions, although no accurate figure
is possible—then a more comprehensive picture of postwar U.S.
militarism and its victims comes into focus. This picture reflects
decades of U.S. warfare conducted against civilian populations and
related targets, from Japan to Vietnam, from Korea to Afghanistan,
from Laos to Iraq. It is an accounting, moreover, that should also
include the massive (often permanent) environmental damage that
warfare against civilians 53
U.S. armed forces have left in their wake, as well as proxy warfare
or secondary acts of violence financed and supported by the U.S.
since the eighteenth century. Sadly, U.S. leaders have never faced
moral, legal, or political accountability, either domestically or inter-
nationally, for wanton attacks on civilians fitting a long-established
pattern of imperialism and militarism.
The rules of warfare have, with rare exceptions, never applied
to U.S. global behavior. Had such rules ever come into play
historically—as seemed to be the case during World War I, when
civilians were spared the brunt of military carnage—they were
mercilessly transcended by the final year of World War II, when large
urban areas inhabited by millions of civilians became deliberate
targets of military action. In the Pacific, this was scarcely limited
to aerial terrorism (to be addressed later) but included ground and
naval combat that appeared devoid of moral restraints on both
sides. For its part, as John Dower explores in great detail, the
U.S. carried out military operations with unbelievable savagery:
prisoners were regularly tortured and shot, soldiers and civilians
were massacred by the hundreds and even thousands, prisoners were
buried alive in mass graves, survivors of sunken ships were strafed
and killed at sea, towns and cities were annihilated with disregard
for human life. Savagery of this kind was hardly isolated, nor was it
always incidental to larger military strategies, much less the result of
“collateral damage.” It fitted an established pattern, accepted within
the logic of the Pacific Theater operations. Thus high-ranking army
officers were heard to say, for example, that “the 41st [unit] didn’t
take prisoners”—a sentiment that was frighteningly ordinary in the
protracted conflict between the U.S. and Japan.8
The legacy of World War II, far from being the morally righteous
“good war” handed down by U.S. propaganda, is one of militarism,
racism, and imperialism on all sides, drenched in unlimited violence,
including violence against innocent civilians. As Dower points out,
for Americans “the Japanese were more hated than the Germans
before as well as after Pearl Harbor ... They were perceived as a race
apart—and an overwhelmingly monolithic one, at that.” He adds:
the social scientists and Asia experts who ventured to analyze the
Japanese “national character” during the war.9
“free-fire zone” for armor, artillery, and air force, with minimal
reliance on infantry. No less than 110,000 aerial sorties were flown,
dropping some 88,000 tons of bombs in just a few weeks, on a
country virtually bereft of air defenses. The USAF pulverized the
Iraqi infrastructure while suffering few casualties of its own (until
later, when illness and death from depleted uranium and other
toxic agents used by the U.S. became visible). At the end of combat,
with nothing left in doubt, American planes bombed and strafed
retreating Iraqi troops, killing at least 20,000 on the “highway of
death”—a gruesome diversion violating The Hague and Geneva
conventions. Bombings, moreover, continued regularly after the
main warfare had come to an end. The U.S. used thousands of
artillery shells and bombs tipped with DU, ensuring that radioactive
substances would remain in the water, soil, and food chain for
decades.23 In all, Desert Storm brought (by conservative estimates)
200,000 deaths to Iraq from direct military engagement, an
estimated half of which were civilians.
Desert Storm was followed by more than a decade of harsh
economic sanctions against Iraq, enforced mainly by the U.S. and
Britain under U.N. auspices and giving rise to as many as one million
civilian deaths. Sanctions were based on the hypocritical insistence
that Iraq (alone) dispose of its weapons of mass destruction—
with no proof, moreover, that it ever possessed a nuclear agenda.
The embargo cruelly and deliberately blocked imports of medical
supplies, water-treatment technology, even certain foodstuffs
that, under an excessively broad definition of “dual use,” might
be considered valuable to the Iraqi military. Sanctions policies
have been employed regularly by the U.S., which started using
this economic weapon in the 1950s. As always, the main victims
in Iraq were civilians, a large percentage of them children. The
1977 Additional Protocols to Geneva prohibit measures depriving
the civilian population of goods indispensable to its survival,
with Article 18 even mandating relief operations to aid a civilian
population suffering “undue hardships owing to lack of support
essential for its survival, such as foodstuffs and medical supplies” as
a result of military destruction. The U.S. at one point had obstructed
every humanitarian effort, initiated by NGOs as well as members of
the U.N. Security Council, to lift sanctions against Iraq. Writing in
Harpers, Joy Gordon characterized the sanctions as a “legitimized
act of mass slaughter,” adding: “Epidemic suffering is needlessly
visited on Iraqis via U.S. fiat inside the U.N. Security Council. With
that body, the U.S. consistently thwarted Iraq from satisfying its
60 the crimes of empire
Since the final months of World War II, the U.S. military has dropped
tens of millions of tons of bombs on several mostly defenseless
countries, with human casualties (the vast majority civilian)
reaching well into the millions. Since the 1920s, war managers
have placed increasing faith in the efficacy of aerial warfare: at
that time planes were envisioned as awesome destructive machines
capable of bringing military efficiency and order to the chaos and
unpredictability of ground and naval operations. Bombing from
high altitudes was a nascent form of technowar. By 1944 and 1945
this faith assumed new dimensions as first Britain and then the U.S.
embraced plans for “strategic” or area bombing in Germany and
Japan, ostensibly to end the war more quickly but in reality mostly
for purposes of revenge, weapons testing, and sending political
messages. With incendiary assaults on German cities (Hamburg,
Berlin, and Dresden the most noteworthy) by the Royal Air Force,
U.S. General Curtis LeMay saw a new model of aerial warfare
with vast possibilities for striking the Japanese, with the idea of
burning cities to the ground while minimizing American casualties.
For U.S. military planners the likelihood of widespread violence
and destruction seemed to open up exciting new opportunities
for warfare. As Sven Lindqvist writes in A History of Bombing:
“People between the wars had been afraid to be bombed back
to barbarism—to filth, starvation, and the rats. But during the
postwar period, especially for American men, barbarism began
to look promising. The threat of destruction opened the door for
male fantasies with roots in the old dreams of the wild west.”34
The strategy of technowar by means of aerial warfare remains a
cornerstone of U.S. military power to the present day.
One problem with aerial bombardment is that it inescapably
obliterates any distinction between combatants and noncombatants,
between military and civilian targets—all the more so for strategic
bombing which, by definition, rains death and destruction more
or less indiscriminately across wide parcels of territory, often in
urban centers. Boasts of “precision bombing” have always been
greatly exaggerated, especially when “targets” themselves are hard
to identify (as in guerrilla warfare) or when bombs or missiles
explode across ever-widening zones. Article 25 of the Fourth Hague
Convention in 1907 states that “bombardment, by whatever means,
of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended,
is prohibited”—still a valid principle of international law.35 Efforts
warfare against civilians 65
and I am that person. I got about five dollars for each corpse
[estimated to be as many as 260,000].41
In any event, if we can say that all nations, victors and losers and
bystanders alike, adhere to principles of universality, then they have
an obligation to face up to their own crimes—something U.S. leaders
have never done.
In 2003, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
in Washington, DC, opened a new annex with its centerpiece a
display of the Boeing B-29 superfortress Enola Gay, which dropped
the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The museum provided an
abundance of technical details regarding the plane but nothing
about its bombing mission or the unspeakable consequences of that
criminal mission. Such lack of information, of course, could hardly
amount to an oversight. The museum director, retired General John
Dailey, said at the opening that the public has no special need for
such details: “We are displaying it in all its glory as a magnificent
technological achievement ... Our primary focus is that it was the
most advanced aircraft in the world at the time.”42 That the Enola
Gay was responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people, nearly
all of them innocent civilians—surely one of the most egregious
war crimes ever—struck Dailey as an irrelevant or trivial fact,
but any rational judgment would have depicted the aircraft as a
conduit of indefensible aerial terrorism—its mission unnecessary
to end the war. Any display with even a modicum of professional
competence and ethical sensitivity would have presented such
information as a central feature of the exhibit. The remarkable
absence of any meaningful contextual facts reveals not only an
ethos of arrogant exceptionalism—the nation being so noble and
democratic that anything it does must automatically be regarded
as beyond criticism—but also the kind of war-crimes denial for
which the U.S. has so frequently scolded other nations (including
the Japanese).
The final months of World War II ushered in a new era in the
history of military combat—aerial warfare with few limits. Strategic
bombing with its inevitable destruction of civilian populations and
related targets was now (above all for the U.S.) perfectly legitimate,
indeed, was the preferred and embellished modality. If World
War II served as a testing-ground for area bombing and use of
incendiary weapons like napalm—and indeed for nuclear devices—
the Korean War offered new opportunities for refining barbarism:
aerial terrorism was pushed to new levels, even without nuclear
68 the crimes of empire
Two decades later, the U.S. had (between roughly 1965 and
1973) dropped eight million tons of bombs on Vietnam—by far
the most intensive aerial bombardments in history, the sum total
equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. The goal was
to conduct massive counterinsurgency operations mainly through
saturation bombing by B-52s, again with little attempt to distinguish
between civilian and military objects. To a degree greater even than
in World War II and Korea, warfare would turn on technologically
planned operations designed to leave no area untouched by the
consequences of scorched-earth warfare. Vietnam marked the real
beginnings of technowar based on a strategy explicitly intended to
minimize ground combat and overall U.S. casualties, though this
modality of war would achieve fuller expression with Desert Storm
in 1991.49 Except for nuclear weapons (considered at least once
by Washington planners), the U.S. used everything in its arsenal,
with the goal of bombing an underdeveloped country into total
submission: saturation attacks with 2000-pound bombs, napalm,
white phosphorous, cluster bombs, chemical defoliants like Agent
Orange, sophisticated missiles, fuel-air bombs, and frightening
amounts of regular ordnance. As Lindqvist writes, there were no
limits in Vietnam: “The rule book said of course that civilians were
not to be bombed. But for the military, rules were not norms to
follow but problems to solve.”50 For U.S. leaders across the entire
Indochina terrain international law had absolutely no relevance.
Waging merciless aerial terrorism against civilian targets, the
U.S. manufactured new and improved napalm designed to adhere
more closely to the skin, burn more deeply, and cause more horrific
injury. During World War II the U.S. had dropped 14,000 tons of
napalm, mainly on the Japanese. During the Korean War the total
was 32,000 tons. But in Vietnam from 1963 to 1971 the total
was about 373,000 tons of the far more debilitating napalm—
eleven times the total used in Korea. Napalm was preferred by the
military since it could destroy wide target areas while incapacitating
human beings with only peripheral hits.51 Its intimidating value must
have been awesome. The air war in general left some ten million
bomb craters in Vietnam alone, along with the aforementioned
destruction of hamlets, towns, farmland, and farm animals, all part
of a consciously planned war of attrition.
There can be no doubt that the U.S. air war was aimed directly
at civilians: aside from the renovated napalm, new weapons were
refined specifically for that very purpose—for example, CBU-24
cluster bombs that spread thousands of fragments across wide
70 the crimes of empire
areas. Lindqvist writes: “When the B-52s carpet bombed, they often
first dropped explosive bombs in order to ‘open the structures’,
then napalm to burn out the contents, and finally CBU-24s to kill
the people who came running to help those who were burning.
Often time-released cluster bombs were dropped in order to kill
those who did not come before the danger was over—or so they
thought.” Lindqvist reports that, after the war, the Pentagon
conceded that nearly a half-million of these bombs were “directed
only at living targets.” The total was 285 million little bomblets
altogether, “or seven bombs for every man, woman, boy, and girl
in all of Indochina.”52
Massive bombing campaigns were waged against North Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos, especially after the Tet Offensive in early
1968. Nixon and Kissinger were dedicated to broadening the war
of attrition by means of extended carpet bombing. That meant
systematic destruction of farmlands, villages, towns, and civilian
infrastructures such as dams, dikes, irrigation systems, and water-
production facilities. According to Marilyn Young, the intensity of
the bombing in Vietnam and Laos was so great that organized life
was no longer possible in most of the villages. During peak attacks
in 1969, U.S. planes conducted overflights daily, their goal to leave
nothing standing—their purpose to annihilate the “material basis
of civilized society.” In late 1969 one observer stated that, “after a
recorded history of seven hundred years, the Plain of Jars [in Laos]
disappeared.”53 Throughout 1968 and 1969 some 230,000 tons of
bombs were dropped on Laos, wiping out the livelihood of 150,000
farmers in the region. The U.N. observer George Chapelier reported
that “nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and
holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. All of the interlocutors,
without any exception, had their villages completely destroyed.”54
These rank among the most horrific war crimes in modern history. As
both material and psychological warfare, U.S. aerial bombardments
often went far beyond their stated aim of interdicting supply lines.
They were integral to a total-war strategy meant to demoralize the
enemy, wreck the infrastructure, destroy the workforce, and simply
convey a message of high-tech military supremacy.
The Indochina catastrophe was followed 15 years later by the
first Gulf War, during which the U.S. flew 11,000 sorties dropping
several million tons of bombs on Iraq, more than half of them on
densely populated urban centers such as Baghdad and Basra. Here
again we find a clearly deliberate plan to destroy the Iraqi infra-
structure, with the stated objective of leaving the country in a state
warfare against civilians 71
A PATTERN OF ATROCITIES
the first roadside casualties. What became clear is that the Marines
would likely have blocked any investigation into the atrocities were
it not for the Time magazine report. As for the documentary, its
purported “balance” left the impression that there were two equally
valid sides to the narrative—that the familiar resort to self-defense
might be a valid justification for the systematic murder of unarmed
civilians. Even more puzzling, the Frontline program suggested that
the Haditha episode provided a wake-up call, giving new impetus
for American troops to win the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi
people. Nothing was mentioned about ending an illegal occupation
where Haditha-style atrocities were common, indeed an inevitable
part of the U.S. intervention.
A few months after Haditha, in the village of Ishaqi, army troops
brutally murdered eleven civilians in one home, including four
children under age seven, their corpses riddled with bullets.89 A
by-product of the U.S. pursuit of insurgents, this massacre (like
others that came to light) was written off as “collateral damage,”
an unfortunate but necessary result of the war on terror—and no
one was prosecuted. Such “escalation of force” incidents mounted
as the U.S. occupation heightened Iraqi antagonism and resistance,
although they have been rarely investigated much less punished.
Haditha and Ishaqi represent only two of dozens, more likely
hundreds, of similar atrocities in an environment where large-scale
killing of civilians is the logical outcome of an occupation that
breeds popular anger and hostility, where ordinary people become
the enemy, and where rules of warfare have all but vanished.
With several years of war and occupation having brought
sustained violence, chaos, and breakdown to Iraq—in a word,
ruin—the burden has fallen overwhelmingly on the civilian
population. As in the case of Vietnam, many Americans seemed to
believe that “winning” (an elusive notion at best) requires maximum
body count—that is, killing as many Iraqis as possible. One army
Specialist, Michael Richardson, was quoted as saying: “There was
no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in
uniform. I just pulled the trigger. It was up close and personal the
whole time, there wasn’t big distance. If they were there, they were
enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren’t.”90 It
is important to repeat here that such murderous sentiments were
from most reports (including those at Abu Ghraib) widely held
among American military personnel—all the way to the top of the
organizational hierarchy.
warfare against civilians 83
A CULTURE OF DENIAL
Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who
have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and
have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this
obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the
Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully to war.
84 the crimes of empire
Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in
the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and
cruelty... We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the
problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler...
They should have challenged and they should have resisted; and
if we were only there, we would have showed them... But America
is different. That is what we’ve all been brought up on... But if we
have learned anything [from history] it is that these lovely things
about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist
and aggressive and mean to other people from the beginning.
And we’ve been aggressive and mean to people in this country...
Now how can we boast that America is a very special place? It
is not that special.91
war crimes by proxy. The state of Israel has in many ways served
as an American imperial outpost in the Middle East, subsidized
by every conceivable form of economic, political, diplomatic, and
military backing—a relationship that is, indeed, sui generis. By the
1990s, thanks to U.S. largesse, Israel possessed the fourth largest
army in the world that, over such a limited terrain, guaranteed a
level of militarism appropriate to an occupying garrison state. Israeli
militarism has helped to bolster an apartheid system marked by
ongoing, flagrant violations of international law: forcible settlement
of land, illegal arrests, torture, relocation of civilian populations,
harsh curfews, killings, assaults on cultural institutions, wanton
bulldozing of homes and property, depriving inhabitants of basic
services needed for survival, and outright military assaults as in
Gaza during early 2009. Such actions involve clear violations of
the Fourth Geneva Convention, along with the U.N. Charter and
other statutes of international law, but efforts to hold the Israelis
accountable have been regularly blocked by the U.S., ensuring a
worsening occupation of Gaza and the West Bank through repeated
vetoes of U.N. resolutions. Further, as of 2000 there were some 5.5
million Palestinian refugees located in 59 camps, local inhabitants
denied the right to return to their homes in contravention of U.N.
Resolution 194 and general provisions of international law. Perpetual
violence is the logical outcome of this horrid state of affairs. As
Michael Neumann rightly points out: “Israel is the illegitimate child
of ethnic nationalism. The inhabitants of Palestine had every reason
to oppose its establishment by any means necessary.”21
In November 1967 the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed
Resolution 242, stating the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of
territory by war” and called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied
territories, that became the basis of an international consensus
opposed only by the U.S. and Israel. Since 1967 the U.S. has been
Israel’s reliable weapons supplier and financial patron, accompanied
by a fierce rejectionism regarding the establishment of a Palestinian
state grounded on the universal principle of self-determination.
Over several decades the U.S. has repeatedly vetoed any move
toward a two-state arrangement, the only conceivable solution to
the conflict. Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation has been
met with sustained force and repression, fully supported by the U.S.
whether Democrats or Republicans were in power. Israeli leaders,
from moderate to extreme, have set out to destroy any vestige of
a Palestinian opposition viewed as nothing but savage terrorism.
To solidify Israeli hegemony a settler movement has been allowed
102 the crimes of empire
end the Israelis bombed civilian populations at will, took over nearly
half the country, destroyed most of Beirut, and left the country in
shambles. The invasion itself was, of course, a crime against peace.
Outnumbering PLO fighters by twelve to one, the Israelis mobilized
172,000 troops, 3500 tanks, 4000 armored personnel carriers,
and 602 combat aircraft—all reinforced by a constant infusion of
U.S. funds and equipment.29 In a bloody 67-day campaign dubbed
“Peace for Galilee,” Israel attacked urban centers, destroying
homes, schools, hospitals, and whatever else could be targeted.
The human toll: an estimated 20,000 killed, tens of thousands
wounded, and 600,000 people driven from their homes. The Israelis
attacked refugee camps with abandon for “harboring terrorists.”
Terror weapons were used, including incendiary devices and anti-
personnel bombs.30 During the siege of Beirut, moreover, Israel
set up a blockade to cut off supplies of water, food, medicine, and
energy sources—yet another crime against humanity. At the end of
this one-sided “war,” aside from the aforementioned refugee camp
massacres, the IDF systematically targeted unarmed civilians in
flight along roads of escape from the warfare.31
The U.S.–Israel client-state relationship is solidified and
legitimated by the indefatigable and well-financed work of the
Israel lobby comprised of groups like AIPAC, the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Zionist Organization of
America (ZOA), various Christian Zionist organizations, and the
Israel Policy Forum (IPP) with crucial support from think-tanks
like AEI, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and the
Hudson Institute—a political force massively documented by the
work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in The Israel Lobby
(2007). As the authors show, the lobby has powerful influence
throughout American political culture, as illustrated by the fact that
both Democrats and Republicans have adopted virtually identical
policies on the Middle East. Above all this means unwavering and
unconditional Washington support for Israel across the board:
rejection of a viable two-state solution, tacit acceptance of new
Jewish settlements in violation of international law, silence regarding
the erection of barricades and walls, support for military aggression
in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009, willingness to go along with
the unlawful occupation of Palestinian lands, refusal to deal with
daily human rights violations such as home demolitions and the
detention of thousands of prisoners without due process, and huge
shipments of economic and military aid. As Mearsheimer and Walt
war crimes by proxy 105
nearly 7000 casualties, mostly civilians who could not escape the
brutal, multi-tiered, round-the-clock operations of the IDF. One
of the world’s most powerful war machines battered a helpless
population into submission, attacking homes, office buildings,
schools, hospitals—anything that moved—while telling the world
that painstaking attempts were being made to avoid civilian losses.
The lengthy Gaza blockade had already reduced a poor, desperate
population to further misery. The apparent Israeli goal was to
destroy the social foundations of Hamas, a political organization
that Israel and the U.S. had long defined as “terrorist” even after
its fairly won election in early 2006. While Israel claimed to be
exercising the right of self-defense, no such right was permitted
Gazans long trapped in a miserable open-air prison—though
resistance to an illegal occupation was entirely legitimate.
Using F-16 planes, attack helicopters, tanks, and armored
bulldozers—mostly supplied by the U.S.—along with large-scale
infantry units, the Israelis spared nothing in their drive to annihilate
Palestinian resistance. Every possible civilian structure was attacked,
including such “targets” as a United Nations food warehouse in
Gaza City. A Los Angeles Times story from the small Gaza town
of Khozaa reported such disturbing horrors as Israelis slaughtering
groups of civilians who displayed white flags of surrender in open
space. The IDF fired indiscriminately on civilians, including women
and children, attacked ambulances and other medical emergency
crews, conducted all-night barrages against residences, shot
randomly at fleeing civilians, bulldozed dozens of homes, and used
inhumane weapons, leaving in their wake three days of carnage
visited on a population trapped, with nowhere to go. Reporters
found noxious signs of white phosphorous throughout Khozaa,
with scores of people seared and killed by the banned chemical.
Everything was carried out with sadistic brutality. Observing one
bulldozer demolishing homes, the reporter writes: “He picked up
the side of the house like it was a box of matches ... We could see
the bulldozer driver chewing gum and smiling like it was all a
game.”42 Streets, buildings, and morgues were left with dead bodies.
Emotional charges of war crimes came from even within the Israeli
military, replete with accounts by soldiers of indiscriminate killing
of civilians—many trapped in their homes, with nowhere to hide
or run. In narrative accounts carried throughout the Israeli media,
soldiers reported wanton assaults in densely populated areas of
Gaza, saying the predominant Israeli attitude was that anyone
in sight must be a “terrorist.” Said one IDF member: “I call this
war crimes by proxy 109
PERPETUAL WAR
reserves for itself the right to manufacture, deploy, and use nuclear
weapons in violation of the NPT and other protocols. Washington
has come to accept large WMD programs for friendly nations such
as Israel, Pakistan, and India, even as Bush (in February 2004) called
WMD “the greatest threat before humanity today.” In fact the U.S.
has tabled NPT amendments designed to place roadblocks to new
nations acquiring nuclear devices. Israel, which possesses as many
as 200 nuclear warheads, remains outside the NPT, firmly rejects
any inspections process, and has never been the object of threats
or inducements concerning the weapons it already possesses. As
the only Middle East state with a nuclear arsenal, Israel—hostile
to most Arab and Muslim nations in the region—clearly figures
in the proliferation dynamic. In 1974 Egypt and Iran sponsored
a U.N. resolution calling for a Middle East nuclear-free zone but
Israel opposed it while the U.S., then as later, furnished political
cover for the Israelis, who in 1981 attacked the lone nuclear reactor
built by the Iraqis.
As for Pakistan, the U.S. rewarded the Musharraf regime in 2002
with a three-billion dollar aid package for its (marginal) assistance
in the war on terror, indirectly giving the Pakistanis a green light to
expand their nuclear capacity at a time when Bush and Rumsfeld
were issuing dire warnings to Iran and North Korea about their
nuclear plans. Actually Pakistan, like India and Israel, never signed
the NPT or even the 1996 CTBT, which would have prohibited its
nuclear testing in 1998. (The NPT was signed by Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea, which later withdrew, and provides for the peaceful
development of nuclear energy, which as of 2009 Iran claimed it was
pursuing.) The fact that Pakistan and India, along with Israel, have
been able to avoid U.N.-sponsored inspections—the very inspections
demanded of both North Korea and Iran—has drawn nary a protest
from the U.S. despite the long-simmering tensions between India
and Pakistan over Kashmir not to mention the highly explosive
situation within Pakistan itself. A crucial issue remains: if such
nations as Israel, Pakistan, and India, following the pattern of major
nuclear powers, can insist that atomic weapons are needed for their
military defense, how can these nations credibly deny the very same
motive to other, even weaker, states? Mohamed ElBaradei, director
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), recently asked
pointedly why it is “morally reprehensible for some countries to
pursue weapons of mass destruction yet [is] morally acceptable for
others to rely on them for security while continuing to refine their
capacities and postulate plans for their use.”16
weapons of mass destruction 123
violating the spirit if not the substance of the 1967 Outer Space
Treaty (discussed more fully later).
In the U.S. the permanent war economy has given rise to the
largest and most sophisticated academic-scientific nuclear system
ever assembled. Thanks to Pentagon and government largesse, this
work has been centered in three large laboratories: Sandia and Los
Alamos in New Mexico and Livermore in California. Research and
development is overseen by the Pentagon, Department of Energy
(DOE), and the University of California, Berkeley. Thousands of
scientists are awarded scholarly status, generous salaries, and a
patriotic niche in the social order, resulting in an elite community
that Helen Caldicott refers to as a “scientific bomb cult.”19 In an
atmosphere where production of nuclear weapons capable of killing
hundreds of millions of people is viewed with great enthusiasm,
signifying a mix of aesthetic beauty, scientific creation, and political
obligation, even slight expressions of dissent are regarded as
puzzling, reprehensible. It is a milieu in which untold numbers
of civilian deaths are considered “collateral damage,” a prospect
shrouded in esoteric techno-strategic discourse and game-theoretical
models embraced at major universities.
Inspired by the Bush administration’s revival of nuclear politics,
the three major nuclear labs entered into fierce competition over
design and production of a new generation of atomic weapons,
highly skeptical of well-known NPT stipulations requiring the
nuclear powers to move toward disarmament. Teams of military,
corporate, and scientific elites work virtually non-stop with the aid
of supercomputers to design new bombs and missiles such as the
“reliable replacement warheads” (RRWs) approved by Congress
in 2005. In their drive to ensure overwhelming U.S. nuclear
supremacy, these teams ridicule even the most ambiguous talk of
arms control, their proponents seen as unpatriotic “crazies” and
“wackos.” International law is for utopian dreamers.20 The weapons
labs received a huge contract in March 2007 to develop a refined
hydrogen bomb, projected to cost tens of billions of dollars—part
of the RRW project.21 The Pentagon wanted to employ sophisticated
computer modeling exercises in order to sidestep the nuclear testing
moratorium in place since 1992.
As Robert Jay Lifton observes, throughout the postwar years
U.S. leaders set out to perfect a “godlike nuclear capacity” enabling
them to shape history.22 Despite a current fixation on “pragmatism”
and “realism” in foreign affairs, the Pentagon has embraced
apocalyptic visions of warfare involving massive levels of violence
126 the crimes of empire
have routinely fired DU rounds in Iraq. When shells hit their target,
they release the insoluble chemical agent uranium oxide, a form of
radioactive dust that spreads rapidly. At the time of the Iraq invasion
the Pentagon had more than one billion pounds of nuclear waste
available, a by-product of processes used to make reactor fuel and
nuclear weapons, much of it converted to reinforce conventional
weapons in the Middle East, with deadly results. While the figures
are not yet exact, reports indicate that the U.S. deployed some 350
tons of DU during the first Gulf War, followed by ten tons in the
Balkans and more than 1000 tons in Iraq after 2003.37 In each case
the U.S. left behind a toxic wasteland with horrific consequences for
people, crops, animals, and of course the general ecology.
Upon impact with a target, DU disintegrates into a widening mist
of particles that, once inhaled or ingested, can produce cancer, kidney
disease, genetic defects, and general immune-system breakdown.
When one considers that the amount of DU used by the U.S. military
in Iraq alone produced radiation levels equal to all previous nuclear
testing worldwide combined, it is easy to see that the health effects
are likely to be catastrophic. Iraqi doctors tried desperately to bring
attention to the vast increase in cancer rates and birth deformities
since 1991, with only limited success. Some reports indicate that
the incidence of cancer skyrocketed by nearly 250 percent—with
leukemia and birth defects found at similarly alarming rates. Many
cancer and leukemia patients, especially numerous in southern Iraq,
were under five years old. Meanwhile, tests conducted by Leuren
Moret and others showed that DU emissions rose dramatically not
only in Iraq but across the entire Middle East.38 Moret argues that
DU use amounts to a new form of chemical warfare the terrible
consequences of which are just now beginning to surface in humans
and the environment.39 Dr. Ahmad Hardan, a special adviser to the
World Health Organization, refers to the widespread dispersion of
DU in Iraq as a new, more insidious mode of terrorism practiced
uniquely by the U.S.
As in most cases of chemical and biological warfare, the
perpetrator also turns out to be a victim of its own malfeasance—
the architect of weapons of mass destruction often becoming its
own enemy. Large-scale casualties among U.S. troops from DU
poisoning are by now generally acknowledged by observers familiar
with battlefield conditions in Iraq, although firm evidence so far
remains elusive. It is believed by many close to the military that DU
emissions in 1990 and then again in 2003 and later gave rise in part
to Gulf War Syndrome among both Iraqi and American soldiers.40
132 the crimes of empire
had become a major center for researching insect vectors that could
carry such lethal diseases as smallpox, cholera, and encephalitis.49
The Pentagon had been working to refine its bioweapons program
so that it could occupy a niche alongside its nuclear capacity. Aside
from the Far East lab, the U.S. army’s Special Operations Division
at Fort Detrick, Maryland, produced germ agents and delivery
systems that received high praise for their effectiveness. Stephen
Endicott and Edward Hagerman write: “It is significant that this
was the first time in modern military history that biological warfare
was incorporated into doctrine as a weapons system.”50 Needless
to say, these aggressive and sophisticated programs adhered to
no international laws, precedents, or limits outside the Pentagon’s
own dictates.
In Korea the U.S. extended its practice of unlimited warfare to
not only strategic bombing and wanton attacks on civilians but also
to WMD. As we have seen, the U.S. military strategy in Korea was
to wear down and ultimately annihilate the enemy. Atrocities were
routinely committed from the air and on the ground. USAF bombing
campaigns, as earlier in Japan and later in Vietnam, were nothing
short of barbaric. Cities were destroyed and prisoners of war were
sometimes killed en masse, as at No Gun Ri and Pyongyang. As
Endicott and Hagerman write: “These acts in Korea indicated
again that the U.S. subscription to laws of war and treatment of
prisoners was no check on its political and military leaders’ use
of whatever methods and weapons were considered necessary to
achieve their goals.”51 Faced with a seemingly endless stalemate
on the battlefield through 1951 and 1952, the Truman administra-
tion looked desperately for breakthrough solutions. One possibility
was to expand the war further into civilian population centers
and related targets, to which end the USAF demolished eleven
hydroelectric plants along the Yalu River in June 1952. Another
response, mercifully never followed, was President Eisenhower’s
resurrection of Truman’s earlier threat to use atomic bombs in order
to break the quagmire. A third response, evidently carried out with
great vigor but minimal success, was biological warfare. In the
words of Endicott and Hagerman:
Evidence of U.S. biological warfare came not only from Korean and
Chinese government archives, from an independent commission of
scientists, and from extensive testimony on the ground, but also from
confessions of American airmen (later recanted, apparently under
pressure) and eventually from scholarly research. Disease-carrying
vectors—fleas, beetles, flies, and mosquitoes, for example—were
found in at least 15 Korean locations from late 1950 into early
1951. These insects, largely unknown to the area, were infested
with plague, smallpox, cholera, encephalitis, and other epidemic
diseases leading to at least 39 deaths and more than 7000 illnesses,
traceable to the use of bioweapons.53 An independent commission
found that “the peoples of Korea and China had indeed been the
objects of bacteriological weapons,”54 many of them targeted at
Pyongyang and several nearby provinces. The U.S. apparently
hoped the rapid spread of deadly diseases would instill panic among
Koreans and Chinese, resulting in a collapse of combat morale—
but the outbreaks, while frightening, were quickly contained by
systematic and effective public-health campaigns. It seems evident,
moreover, that the biological attacks were so ineffective that the
Pentagon decided to abort them within several weeks of the first
attacks, and the military stalemate continued. In any event, the
overall impact of the illegal U.S. biological warfare campaign on
Korean–Chinese battlefield efforts was negligible.
One long-term result of the Korean failure was reduced pressure
for the U.S. to sustain its bioweapons program and strategy—
that is, to build huge stockpiles of toxins along with appropriate
delivery mechanisms. In the end, biowarfare simply contained far
too many limits and contradictions to be militarily efficacious. The
program appeared to be largely, but not entirely, dismantled after
1953, although, as we have seen, testing did continue sporadically
beginning in the early 1960s. We know that the Pentagon, whatever
its anti-WMD rhetoric, has never abandoned contingency plans
for the use of both chemical and biological weaponry. Today, in
collaboration with a number of universities, it has expanded its
biological warfare testing programs at such locales as the Dugway
Proving Grounds—ostensibly for “defensive” purposes—in violation
of the BWC. That the very idea of biological warfare, long regarded
as barbaric and illegal, remained alive for the U.S. armed forces—in
weapons of mass destruction 137
In June 2006 Dr. Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons
inspector, presented a report to the U.N. titled “Weapons of Terror,”
authored by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission with
the intent of ultimately freeing the world of nuclear, chemical,
and biological warfare.56 The work of an independent project, the
report asks nations of the world to address vital issues of WMD
before it is too late—before, that is, some cataclysmic military event
occurs. In focusing on issues of disarmament and non-prolifera-
tion, the Commission offered no less than 60 proposals that ask
all countries, especially those in possession of WMD, to revisit
and hopefully alter policies that over the past several decades have
only worsened prospects for disarmament and non-proliferation.
The report calls on nations to take international laws and treaties
far more seriously than they have hitherto, implicitly (and in places
explicitly) calling the U.S. to account for its actions in blocking arms
control, disarmament, and moves toward curtailing proliferation.
Here we explore several of the Commission’s proposals (numbered
according to their original location) with particular reference to
questions of American outlawry raised in this chapter.57
with the U.S. being largely (though not only) to blame for the
paralysis. At present, moreover, the U.S. is moving toward the
manufacture of a new cycle of atomic weapons and seems ready
to modernize its existing warheads.
2. “All parties to the [NPT] should implement the decision on
principles and objectives for non-proliferation and disarmament,
the decision on strengthening the [NPT] review process and the
resolution of the Middle East as a zone free of nuclear and all
other weapons of mass destruction.” Note: The review process
has been substantially weakened, as indicated by the 2005
failure, owing in great measure to American obstructionism.
The idea of turning the Middle East into a nuclear-free zone
has been proposed by Egypt, Iran, and others but consistently
opposed by the U.S. and Israel, which together deploy hundreds
of nuclear warheads in the region. Israel, moreover, has never
signed the NPT.
6. “Negotiations must be continued to ... improve the outlook
for the common aim of establishing a Middle East zone free
of weapons of mass destruction. The international community
and Iran should build mutual confidence through measures
that should include: reliable assurances regarding the supply
of fuel-cycle services; suspending or renouncing sensitive
fuel-cycle activities for a prolonged period of time by all states
in the Middle East; assurances against attacks and subversion
aiming at regime change; and facilitation of international trade
and investment.” Note: Both the U.S. and Israel have failed
miserably on every count here. Neither country—along with
India and Pakistan—has moved toward halting fuel-cycle
activities, nor do they allow monitoring of such activities. The
U.S. demand that Iran suspend its nuclear program is both
illegal and counterproductive insofar as Iran (in contrast to
Israel and India) subscribes to the NPT and has full rights
within it. Further, both the U.S. and Israel have continued
to make armed threats against Iran while rejecting normal
diplomatic and trade relations. There have been no guarantees
against military attack or regime subversion despite repeated
efforts by the Iranians to restore normal relations and agree to
a treaty of mutual non-aggression. In this as in other spheres
Washington has merely aggravated an already tense situation.
7. “The nuclear-weapon states party to the [NPT] should provide
legally binding negative security assurances to non-nuclear-
140 the crimes of empire
national security. The Russians, for their part, retain the same
nuclear options but have indicated a willingness to negotiate
reductions based on Washington reciprocity.
17. “Russia and the United States should agree on reciprocal steps
to take their nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert and should
create a joint commission to facilitate this goal. They should
undertake to eliminate the launch-on-warning option from
their nuclear war plans.” Note: Nearly two decades after the
end of the Cold War, neither Russia nor the U.S. has moved to
defuse this frightening level of nuclear readiness, which places
the entire world at the mercy of superpower technology.
20. “All states possessing nuclear weapons must address the issue of
their continued possession of such weapons. All nuclear-weapon
states party to the [NPT] must take steps toward nuclear
disarmament, as required by the treaty and the commitments
made in connection with the treaty’s indefinite extensions. Russia
and the United States should take the lead... While Israel, India,
and Pakistan are not parties to the [NPT] they too have a duty to
contribute to the nuclear disarmament process.” Note: Not only
have Russia and the U.S. failed to take the lead in pushing for
nuclear disarmament, they have essentially refused any genuine
initiatives, as show by the 2005 review fiasco. In this respect
as in others, Russia and the U.S. have failed to live up to their
obligations within the NPT, while Israel, India, and Pakistan
continue blithely along their outlaw path, contemptuous of the
NPT and the limitations it seeks to impose.
22. “Every state that possesses nuclear weapons should make a
commitment not to deploy any nuclear weapons, of any type,
on foreign soil.” Note: For many years the U.S. has deployed
nuclear weapons in Europe, Korea, and elsewhere—the only
nation in the world that regards itself as entitled to such a
global military presence. Any suggestion that Washington
ought to reconsider this policy is rejected out of hand.
23. “Any state contemplating replacement or modernization of its
nuclear-weapon systems must consider such action in the light
of all relevant treaty obligations and its duty to contribute to
the nuclear disarmament process. As a minimum, it must refrain
from developing nuclear weapons with new military capabilities
or for new missions.” Note: The U.S. is presently relying on
its three nuclear-weapons laboratories to develop new cycles
142 the crimes of empire
the use and abuse of treaties to facilitate the violent conquest and
destruction of Native American populations as part of “settling the
West.” Much of this history covers familiar terrain but some crucial
(if often obscured) elements of it deserve renewed emphasis in the
context of the outlaw trajectory explored in the present chapter.
The lengthy process of American nation-building, construed
in mainstream texts as a noble, democratic, civilizing mission,
became one of the most destructive episodes in human history—
one justly deserving the label “genocidal.” It could, without much
exaggeration, be described as a sustained policy of extermination.
An indigenous population numbering as many as 15 million at
the time of Columbus was, by 1900, reduced to a mere 237,000
defeated, terrorized people forced onto mostly barren reservations.2
This catastrophe followed many decades of conquest and forcible
removal in which lawful treaties, negotiated with dozens of tribes
occupying their own land, would be systematically abused and
dismissed within a strategy of protracted warfare that white
colonialists pursued as their God-given right. Having signed more
than 400 treaties beginning in the late eighteenth century, the U.S.
government broke virtually every one of them, justifying Vine
Deloria’s sad conclusion that “it is doubtful that any nation will
ever exceed the record of the United States in perfidy.”3 This record
is no arcane, distant memory but rather persists across the entire
history of U.S. foreign and military policy.
As Deloria points out, the long trajectory of Indian population
removals and physical destruction, punctuated with massacres,
clearly shows the U.S. never intended to honor treaties it signed
in actual practice, for they were simply another weapon in its
vast arsenal of warfare.4 The political foundation for displacing
Indians was to be found in the discovery doctrine, first enunciated by
Christian leaders, whereby the “rights of native tribes to their land
would be taken away in favor of those Europeans who happened to
‘discover’ the land”—simply another rationale for theft and, in the
process, mass murder. As more European settlers moved westward,
treaties were signed between the U.S. government and retreating
tribes with the supposed aim of ensuring peace on the frontier and
security for tribal peoples in their (redesignated) homelands. Yet
while the tribes generally held to their promises, the U.S. failed
to do so, continuing its theft of land as changing conditions on
the frontier provided new opportunities for property confiscation
and resource theft. More than two billion acres of indigenous
territory was stolen at the point of a gun, assisted by creative but
a tale of broken treaties 149
that whites “gave” Indians their land but the tribes had failed to
“develop” it as required. In reality, as Deloria observes, “practically
the only thing the white men ever gave the Indian was disease and
poverty.”15 Of course the reverse of Washington propaganda was
the actual case: Indians were routinely forced to “give” away their
ancestral lands to the militarily superior white forces. Throughout
this long process of fraudulent treaty making it was always possible,
moreover, for Congress to pass legislation superseding earlier treaty
provisions—and of course the tribes had no way to effectively fight
back. Over the years, by signing and then breaking treaties, the U.S.
was able to gain absolute domination over the lands and lives of
Native Americans.
This record of betrayal and lawlessness established a strong
precedent for subsequent U.S. behavior in the world. The legacy
of national exceptionalism and colonial arrogance runs deep. As
Deloria writes:
The Indian wars of the past should rightly be regarded as the first
foreign wars of American history. As the United States marched
across this continent, it was creating an empire by wars of foreign
conquest just as England and France were doing in India and
Africa. Certainly the war with Mexico was imperialistic, no
more or less than the wars against the Sioux, Apache, Utes, and
Yakimas. In every case the goal was identical: land.16
was that Kellogg-Briand might lead toward a new world legal order
going beyond previous conventions and treaties. In 1942 the same
countries signed the Atlantic Charter, an updated effort to create
a framework of peaceful international relations, which eventually
paved the way toward the U.N. Charter, framed in June 1945 to
replace the defunct League of Nations (never supported by the U.S.).
Benefiting from momentum created by the Nuremberg and Tokyo
tribunals, the U.N. would be the first truly international body to
ensure world peace: outlawing warfare, guaranteeing sovereignty
and equal rights among nations, affirming a code of human rights,
embracing the principle of universality. By the late 1940s, following
the most destructive war in history, the U.N. Charter had emerged
as a crucible of hopes and dreams for a world that might finally
be liberated from the scourge of warfare and oppression. Toward
this end the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created
under U.N. auspices in December 1948 and adopted by the General
Assembly in August 1949.
From the outset, however, the U.S. (with a few of its allies) was
able to dominate U.N. deliberations owing to its superpower status,
preponderant military force, economic leverage, and veto rights as
a member of the five-nation Security Council. As quickly shown by
the U.S. intervention in Korea (1950–53), conducted as a legitimate
U.N. operation, the U.S. was strong enough to pursue its own global
interests through the world body despite the nuisance of occasional
Soviet vetoes in the Security Council. (For the vote on Korea the
USSR was mysteriously absent.) Over time, however, as U.N.
General Assembly membership grew rapidly to include dozens of
new (mostly third-world) countries—many at odds with Washington
agendas—U.S. capacity to mobilize consensus behind its foreign-
policy objectives grew more problematic. Its power to manipulate
a majority of General Assembly members was so weakened that by
the 1970s it frequently wound up among small minorities opposing
General Assembly resolutions.18 The U.S. increasingly found itself
politically isolated despite its preponderant economic and military
power. Since the late 1960s, the U.S. has taken the lead in vetoing
Security Council resolutions, many of them condemning either U.S.
or Israeli military actions. Thus, even where the U.S. was unable
to bend the U.N. toward its own interests, it still retained enough
power not only to block resolutions but to water them down in
either the General Assembly or Security Council. By the turn of
the new century, Washington had built such an enduring record
of rejectionism at the U.N. that it effectively undermined the body
a tale of broken treaties 155
four decades after the treaty was initially framed. But this was no
great turning-point: modifications to the Convention demanded
by Washington effectively gutted major provisions, at least where
U.S. culpability might be at issue. Everything was arranged to
give Washington maximum freedom to interpret the Convention
as it chose, to protect itself against any possible charges. Thus
Reservation I (2) states “that nothing in the Convention requires or
authorizes legislation or other action by the United States prohibited
by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United
States.” A second reservation mandates that before any legal process
can be brought before the International Court of Justice the U.S.
has the right to give its specific consent. Finally, there is a provision
stating that “acts in the course of armed conflicts committed without
the specific intent required by Article II [of the Convention] are not
sufficient to constitute genocide as defined by this Convention.”30 In
other words, U.S. “sovereignty” reservations are broad and flexible
enough to remove any possibility its citizens might be prosecuted
for the crime of genocide. That charge, it turns out, is appropriate
only for others lacking the benefit of such protective “sovereignty”
clauses. Formal objections to these outrageous American exemptions
were raised by many signatories to the Convention—exemptions
widely regarded as a violation of international law—with Holland
flatly refusing to accept U.S. ratification under these terms.
A prelude to later U.S. rejectionism in the case of the International
Criminal Court, Washington’s obsession here with immunity from
prosecution would have a debilitating impact on the quest for
global justice. Exempting the very nation most likely to be guilty
of military-related crimes makes little moral, legal, or political
sense. High-sounding rhetoric about Nazi genocide at the end of
World War II would unfortunately never be translated into universal
political discourses or legal codes, thanks to continued U.S. excep-
tionalism. The leading superpower insisted on the absolute freedom
to behave as it chooses. The result has been a truncated Genocide
Convention, leaving only ad hoc procedures created to punish those
hostile to U.S. national interests. As Ward Churchill writes: “The
upshot is that after a half-century of blocking implementation of
the Genocide Convention, the United States has moved decisively
to dominate it, harnessing international law entirely to the needs
and dictates of American policy.”31
Far from being systematically investigated, prosecuted, and
punished, therefore, potential instances of genocidal behavior have
been sidestepped or ignored, above all where U.S. culpability might
a tale of broken treaties 163
were convicted (with some put to death) before they could be tried
for the more serious crime. (Some Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, as
mentioned, were found guilty of “crimes against humanity” rather
than genocide.)
Whatever its flaws—and leaving aside the outrageous U.S.
“reservations”—the Genocide Convention could have been invoked
against American government and military leaders on at least three
occasions: Korea, Indochina, and Iraq. Enough details of the massive
death and destruction that Washington brought to these regions have
been presented in other chapters of this book (much of it available
from other sources) to substantiate charges of genocide, even given
the requirement of having to prove specific intent. It can be shown
that these offenses involved planned military aggression on behalf
of specific global objectives, wanton attacks on civilian populations
and related targets, and protracted operations across months and
years. Whether these crimes qualify as “genocide” or simply “crimes
against humanity,” they surely merit investigation and prosecution
at a level far exceeding charges leveled against Milošević, Hussein,
Pol Pot, and others who were actually prosecuted. The fact that
U.S. war planners have never been brought to justice has little to do
with obvious flaws in the Convention and much more to do with
superpower immunity from legal action. Ironically, the U.S. falls
back on precisely the same rationalization invoked by the Nazis:
national laws and priorities must take precedent over general moral
and legal principles (which in fact are more effectively codified today
than in the 1940s). Yet the thesis put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre at
the Russell Tribunal—where he argues that imperialism logically
produces genocidal outcomes—would appear even more compelling
in 2009 as the U.S. continues its pursuit of world supremacy.32
The case against the U.S. in Iraq would seem to be especially
compelling. Since 1991 Washington has started two bloody wars
against the country, bombed it many times in between, imposed
a harsh economic sanctions program, sponsored covert action,
carried out wanton destruction of civilian targets, set up a
military occupation regime giving rise to horrendous civil strife,
decimated the public infrastructure, and practiced widespread
torture at detention centers. As of early 2009, U.S. intervention
had accounted for up to two million deaths and an estimated three
million refugees—all in the interest of regime-change that, as shown
in the historical documents, was carried out to serve American
geopolitical interests. Evidence shows that the U.S. had planned
these operations years in advance, visible in numerous reports
a tale of broken treaties 165
targets of these same leaders (Serbs, Iraqis), have been pursued with
a vengeance. As for the U.S., its notorious “reservations” permit
it to veto any legal action brought against it at the ICC. In the
case of Israel—aside from claims that victims of its actions “never
existed”—its own domestic laws state that genocide can only be
a “crime against the Jewish people,” meaning that Israel must be
considered innocent by reason of its own national and racial excep-
tionalism. For both nations, in other words, “genocide” turns out
to be an ideologically laden category, a criminal action for which
only designated “others” can be held legally responsible.
IMPERIALISM IN SPACE
the U.S. set out to become the sole “master of space,”35 giving it
dramatic military advantages over all possible competitors—one
signpost of revived American imperial objectives. Although (as of
early 2009) the Pentagon had yet to introduce nukes into space, a
future program could involve hundreds of nuclear-armed satellites
orbiting the earth in multiple directions. Seeing both geopolitical
and economic benefits to this, the Council on Foreign Relations—
backed by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise
Institute, and several university think-tanks—has strongly pushed
for a more expansive view of the space program combined with
traditional missile-defense priorities. Corporations like General
Electric, TRW, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon have developed
vested interests in these projects, as have assorted university research
and development programs.36
Weapons the Pentagon expects to be integral to the U.S. Space
Command’s “Vision for 2020” include laser-beam devices,
particle-beam instruments, and other systems tied to orbiting
nuclear reactors used for sources of power. This could signify not
only weapons in space but nuclear devices deployed side-by-side
with them. In its Project Prometheus the National Aeronautical
and Space Administration (NASA) has laid out plans for nuclear-
powered rockets. Already by 1999 these schemes had so alarmed
government leaders, military officials, and scientists around the
world that a U.N. General Assembly resolution aimed at short-
circuiting an arms race in outer space was signed by 138 nations,
with the idea of preserving space for strictly peaceful uses—just
as the original OST intended. Ominously, both the U.S. and Israel
(alone) refused to sign the declaration. Since then the Bush admin-
istration has done everything in its power to subvert an arms race,
but with different priorities in mind—by moving to solidify its own
(unilateral, monopolistic) control of outer space. This stratagem,
however, could well be frustrated as the Russians, Chinese, and
others seek to counter American maneuvers, further compromising
the intent of OST.
The threat of nuclear proliferation is likely to worsen, sooner
or later, as U.S. space militarization intensifies, setting off global
fears and responses. One problem is the atomic component of the
space program itself: with reactors in place, how long will it take
the Pentagon to nuclearize its military strategy? Another problem is
the expansion of ground-based missile-defense systems that, as we
have seen, bolsters U.S. offensive as well as defensive capabilities.
The idea of a vast network of interceptor missiles designed to block
168 the crimes of empire
This problem, and with it U.S. refusal to join the fight against
global warming, surely went much deeper than a small circle of
obstructionist Bush Republicans. Some large corporations, along
with their lobbies, think-tanks, media outlets, and sympathetic
university research teams (often business funded) have also done a
remarkable job trying to discredit work linked to climate change.
Their main focus was to provide “scientific findings” showing
that the overheating of the earth is a function of a long natural
ecological cycle detached from human economic activity. For them,
the international consensus revolves around fear-mongering that, if
followed, would destroy the foundations of American efficiency and
growth, the idea being that huge energy corporations—many of them
lavish contributors to the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns—ought
to be left alone, unregulated, free to conduct business-as-usual.
Right-wing think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute have
advanced this ideological obfuscation, while lobbies of dozens of
corporations have fought strenuously for their anti-regulatory
agenda. Much lobby and think-tank activity has been funded
by ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company and the most
aggressive force behind global-warming denial.46
The ExxonMobil-supported groups, recipients of tens of millions
of dollars since 2000 alone, have relentlessly attacked global-warm-
ing research as “politicized science,” often comparing it to what the
Nazis and Soviets did with science in the 1930s and 1940s. They
have framed regulatory efforts as a new threat to freedom and
democracy and a violation of free-market principles. ExxonMobil
has contributed not only to think-tanks like AEI but to such university
research programs as Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project
(beneficiary of $100 million). An army of lobbyists has received $55
million from the oil giant since 2000. The larger picture is equally
grim: Washington lobbying efforts between 2001 and 2005 received
roughly $460 million from utilities, $283 million from oil and gas
companies, $177 million from auto manufacturers, $56 million
from mining firms, and $448 million from agribusiness.47 Such vast
mobilization of corporate resources demonstrates that U.S. business
elites are not ready to sacrifice short-term profits even in the face
of imminent ecological crisis.
The overriding thrust of such lobbying efforts, whether on melting
polar ice-caps, deforestation, pollution, or species extinction, is
that observable ecological changes have little or nothing to do
with corporate behavior but instead are a function of “natural”
174 the crimes of empire
U.S. remained the only G-8 nation to refuse the Kyoto Protocol.
Whether President Obama, far more committed than Bush to
“green” development as a means of curtailing global warming,
can break with the neoliberal model and corporate priorities to
effectively face the new challenge—and join the global consensus—
remains to be seen.
6
War-Crimes Tribunals: Imperial Justice
by this precedent, which laid the basis of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
leaders of 133 nations condemned the move at the April 2000 South
Summit, stating: “We reject the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian
intervention, which has no legal basis in the United Nations Charter
or in the general principles of international law.”8 In the end, the
ICTY was nothing more than a manifestation of this illegitimate
scheme. As Mandel correctly notes, “the role that the ICTY was
born to play came in the Kosovo war. This had nothing to do with
trying and punishing criminals and everything to do with lending
credibility to NATO’s cause.”9
As quintessential ad hoc victor’s justice, the ICTY fit perfectly
the ethos of U.S. exceptionalism: it would embody the rule of the
most civilized and enlightened of states dedicated to bringing peace
and order to an anarchic world infested with tyrants, rogues, and
terrorists. While The Hague Tribunal was supposedly erected to
purge evil monsters like Milošević from the world scene, in actuality
it was the U.S./NATO elites, their military option grounded in
familiar claims of moral supremacy, that ultimately most resembled
the Nazis, mimicking Hitler’s resort to higher values when he
justified his invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union,
and other countries. The Kosovo war could indeed be viewed as
fascist in substance, a view echoed by Nuremberg judge Walter
Rockler, who referred to the U.S./NATO actions as “flagrant military
aggression” comparable to what the Germans were prosecuted for
and convicted.10 Interestingly, the U.S. moved aggressively to ensure
that statutes prohibiting crimes against peace would be excluded
from the ICTY agenda.
The political effect of The Hague proceedings effectively concealed
the long sordid involvement of the U.S. and its NATO allies in the
Balkans, which became more evident nearly a decade after the saga
was brought to a close as the U.S./NATO domination of the region
was finally solidified. By 2007 the familiar self-righteous ruminations
heard in Washington and other Western capitals concerning
Serb ethnic cleansing and genocide started to ring hollow as the
geopolitical agenda came more clearly into focus. The propaganda
was stripped of its ideological power. Nowhere has it been shown that
Milošević ’s supposed drive toward a Greater Serbia was motivated
by goals of ethnic purity—or in fact was driven by anything
beyond understandable efforts to preserve Yugoslav nationhood
against external subversion and intervention. Was ethnicity more a
factor for Serbs than for Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, or Kosovar
Albanians? Belgrade itself was and remains today an extremely
War-crimes tribunals: imperial justice 185
Long before the first trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants
for assorted war crimes moved toward its preordained guilty verdict,
the ad hoc Iraq Tribunal revealed itself as yet another naked U.S.
exercise in one-sided punitive justice. The first court, convened in
October 2005, found Hussein and six other former Ba’ath Party
leaders guilty of war crimes for the killing of 148 people at the
village of Dujail in 1982—a verdict rendered on November 5, 2006
and followed by the videotaped execution of Hussein in December.
Two others, Awad Hamed Bandar (head of the Revolutionary Court)
and Barzan Ibrahim Hasan (intelligence chief) were also sentenced
to death, with others given long prison terms. (A second trial begun
in August 2006—this one stemming from charges of genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity for the killing of Kurds during
a 1988 military campaign—was set aside once the defendants were
convicted of the Dujail offenses.) Not surprisingly, the verdicts were
greeted by President Bush as a “great milestone” in the march
toward global justice, a “turning point” in the achievement of peace
and democracy in Iraq.20
Like Bush, the entire U.S. political and media establishment
heralded both the Iraq Tribunal and its guilty verdicts as a wondrous
exercise in international law, praised lavishly for its quick dispatch
War-crimes tribunals: imperial justice 191
of one of the world’s leading tyrants. In fact the Iraq Special Tribunal
(later renamed the Iraq Higher Criminal Court, or IHCC) had been
repudiated by the global community as a sorry effort by the Bush
administration to cover its own more terrible crimes and simulta-
neously deflect public gaze from its costly and disastrous military
intervention. As Washington politicians and the media pundits
carry on about the virtues of international law and human rights,
their carefully orchestrated legal processes have quickly turned
into a mockery of juridical norms—for Iraq, as for Yugoslavia,
we had a special tribunal set up to punish the designated enemy.
All that surrounds and defines the Baghdad court, buried deeply
within the high-security Green Zone—military occupation, puppet
government, uncontrollable civil strife, and collapse of social order,
not to mention full U.S. institutional, logistical, and financial
support for the entire operation—has reduced the trials to comical
farces, their procedures manipulated and outcomes predetermined.
Following the ICTY pattern, the Iraq tribunal was heralded
by the Western media as a “triumph of international norms of
legality,” a “Grotian Moment” signaling a new phase in the history
of war-crimes prosecution. Here as elsewhere imperial exuberance
recognizes few limits: as the tribunal opened President Bush could
say “this trial is indicative of the change that has taken place in
Iraqi society ... Today there is a new system, a juridical system in
place that will give Saddam Hussein a chance to make his case in
court.”21 According to Christopher Reid, the U.S. regime liaison
officer for the IHCC, “Saddam is on trial because the Iraqi people
have chosen to embrace the rule of law and discard the methods
of the former regime.”22 Vanderbilt law professor Mike Newton,
who helped set up the tribunal, termed the proceedings an epic legal
moment, “arguably the most important war-crimes proceeding since
Nuremberg [with] the trial of Saddam Hussein likely to constitute a
... legal development so significant it carries the potential to create
a new customary international law or radically transform the inter-
pretation of treaty law.”23 Professor Ronald Sievert of the University
of Texas, who worked tirelessly to train prosecutors and judges at
the IHCC, indicated that the tribunal would bring together Iraqi
and international law in a context where the entire world would
be watching to see how the Ba’ath tyranny would be brought to
justice.24 International law scholar Christian Eckart of Cornell
University embraced the tribunal as “a new start based on firm
legal principles,” adding: “The trial might hereby serve as another
mosaic stone in establishing the rule of law and deter others from
192 the crimes of empire
Hussein had exceeded its limits. The defense fought back within
its limits, arguing that the U.S. military occupation hovered over
and dictated virtually every phase of the trial, but such relevant
objections were ruled out of order by the chief judge. Whenever
Bashra Khalil, Hussein’s lead attorney, sought to bring elements of
political reality into the courtroom, Abdel Rahman denied every
protest and motion. In early July 2006 the judge denounced Khalil
as an ordinary gangster, unfit for legal duty, and had her dragged
unceremoniously from the courtroom.
As the Hussein trial degenerated into theatrical chaos, criticism
from legal observers outside Iraq (and the U.S.) intensified, little of it
reaching the American media. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
usually quite congenial to U.S. interests, decided to bar assignment
of U.N.-appointed lawyers and judges to the IHCC, pointing out
that the tribunal failed to meet “relevant international standards.”26
The guilty outcomes were sure to be tainted accordingly, as another
exercise in victor’s justice—though of course not enough to save
Hussein and other defendants from their fate. As for the death
penalty that was handed out to Hussein and two others, it was
repudiated by international courts and most legal systems outside
the U.S., but this did not impede tribunal organizers from imposing
it as a penalty for war crimes. Among other groups, Amnesty
International harshly condemned the death sentences.27
As at The Hague, deeper problems marred the Baghdad tribunal,
starting with its absence of legal and political legitimacy. How can
a court established under foreign military occupation, itself the
product of an illegal invasion, be considered remotely fair and
independent? Neither the client Iraq government nor the war-crimes
body could survive a single day without U.S. military power, which
naturally lacks any international mandate. Tribunal statutes were
created and imposed by U.S. armed forces, political and academic
personnel, fully at odds with the requirement of an independent
judiciary. The initial Hussein trial, limited to one relatively minor
charge, was designed to show that the post-Ba’ath government was
sovereign, efficient, and democratic—that is, a viable alternative
to the Hussein regime—but in actuality the state system in place
under U.S. occupation had no power over such crucial issues as
taxation, investment, banking, trade, media control, and of course
foreign policy. (In one parliamentary session during 2006 legislators
passed just four minor bills over a span of five months.) The IHCC
itself was a textbook violation of the Geneva Protocols that forbid
an occupying power to dismantle domestic institutions in favor of
War-crimes tribunals: imperial justice 195
held responsible for everything that follows, in this case the ensuing
atrocities, infrastructure collapse, social breakdown, civil strife,
torture of detainees, everything. Unfortunately, those responsible
for the carnage are unlikely to be held accountable before legal
proceedings set up by these very criminal offenders. (Washington
and its allies were, however, identified as major war criminals at a
series of “trials” conducted by gatherings of witnesses, researchers,
and journalists at the World Tribunal on Iraq [WTI]—but this body,
of course, had no effective legal powers.)
Given this historical backdrop, prospects for a renewed legal
order, or “Grotian Moment,” imagined by U.S. legal scholars and
politicians is utopian in the extreme.29 Both the IHCC and the
long series of post-invasion atrocities—mass detentions, human
rights abuses, wanton attacks on civilians, destruction of public
services, torture, etc.—are integrally linked to the original act of
military aggression, part of a planned, deliberate, and systematic
U.S. agenda (with help from others) to reconfigure Iraq and the
Middle East. In the end, the IHCC has served as yet another vehicle
of military occupation in Iraq. International law scholar Leila
Sadat, reflecting on the work of the Iraq tribunal, condemned the
proceedings and the outcome alike as lacking credibility, another
highly-politicized show trial.30 In August 2006 Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, who earlier had dismissed statutes of the Geneva
Conventions as “obsolete,” visited Baghdad, proclaiming that the
existing government and its war-crimes trials had ushered in a new
era based in the “rule of law.” But the laws of an occupied Iraq—like
those internationally—have been too consistently subordinated to
U.S. interests for such claims to be taken seriously. Those waxing
eloquently about the “rule of law” turn out to be the most brazen
and fearsome violators, whose culpability extends to the very top
of a power structure that Gonzales represented. In Bill Van Auken’s
words: “the illegitimate persecution of Saddam Hussein and his
associates only begs the question of when those in Washington who
are responsible for far greater bloodshed will be brought to account
for waging an illegal war of aggression.”31
idea that the U.S. ought to be free to stand outside the canons of
international law. Such exceptionalism, of course, renders the Court
and its procedures a mockery, since, as noted, laws and processes
demand universality to be legitimate and efficacious. At precisely
the time all this was taking place, Rumsfeld outlined a series of
sweeping proposals that would drastically weaken congressional
oversight of the Pentagon—seeking greater military freedom to
conduct domestic and global operations, a move largely justified
by the war on terrorism. U.S. efforts to subvert an independent
court coincided not only with Washington’s preference for ad hoc
tribunals it could easily manage but with Bush’s overall aggressive
foreign policy.
In summer 2002 the U.S. Congress passed the American Service
Member’s Protection Act, with the aim of intimidating nations
that had ratified or were in the process of ratifying the ICC and
empowering the President to fight the Court as a threat to U.S.
sovereignty. The Act prohibits U.S. cooperation with the ICC for
any purpose. It insists upon complete U.S. troop immunity from
prosecution abroad—an implicit recognition that, with military
forces scattered around the globe and intervention somewhere
almost routine, the U.S. finds itself uniquely vulnerable to war-crimes
indictments. Known as the “Hague Invasion Act,” it bans the U.S.
from giving military assistance to any state belonging to the ICC.
As Sands writes in Lawless World, the topic of ICC jurisprudence
is one that predictably reduces American politicians, the media, and
normally tepid academic gatherings to fits of hysteria.35
U.S. disdain for ordinary canons of international law and human
rights was further revealed by Bush’s cavalier outlook on the torture
of prisoners, long a staple of American intelligence practices in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and various secret CIA locations—
and still defended, though more obliquely, in the wake of Abu
Ghraib and related scandals. In February 2002 Bush, saying “I
don’t care what the international lawyers have to say, we’re going
to kick some ass,” upheld harsh and abusive interrogation methods
known to violate both the Geneva Protocols and the International
Torture Convention (a position that was later softened). According
to international law, detainees’ rights can be challenged only in
recognized courts of law but this did not stop Bush and Rumsfeld,
emboldened by advice from their circle of neocon legal “theorists,”
from embracing coercive methods of interrogation, otherwise
known as an “alternative set of procedures.” In 2004 Bush called
for drastic changes in the War Crimes Act through amendments
War-crimes tribunals: imperial justice 199
tribunal would have brought charges against these and a long list
of U.S. government and military leaders. For the illegal invasion
and occupation of Iraq dozens of Washington figures, including
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Powell along
with high-level Pentagon officers and military leaders in the field,
could have been indicted. The problem is that no tribunal has
been created with enough power and legitimacy to challenge the
major superpower: war-crimes trials are reserved for the weak and
vanquished. Moreover, to date no U.S. political or military elites
have been brought to trial for their criminal actions in Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia—and indeed scarcely anyone in mainstream
American public life has suggested such a prospect. Henry Kissinger,
an architect of saturation bombing across Indochina (that is, the
wanton destruction of civilian populations) remains free to conduct
his life as a celebrity elder statesman, a regular on op-ed pages and
the talk-show circuit. Kissinger was perhaps the leading war planner
between 1968 and 1972, much of it involving massive chemical
warfare, with the loss (in just this period) of perhaps two million
lives. Reports indicated that Kissinger was even prepared to use
nuclear weapons to destroy Vietnamese resistance.38 One question
posed by the genocidal Vietnam legacy is this: with major war
criminals like Kissinger and Nixon (along with McNamara, Dean
Rusk, and JFK before them) having evaded prosecution, what can
be the legitimacy of any war-crimes proceedings that nowadays will
be tarnished by (valid) accusations of double standards?
The International Criminal Court, as mentioned, has yet to
achieve the efficacy needed to prosecute war crimes on a large
scale—a major roadblock being U.S. rejectionism. The limits of
ICC power were revealed in June 2007 when its chief prosecutor
reported that the Sudanese government refused to cooperate with
efforts to indict a senior official and a militia leader for war-crimes
offenses in connection with ongoing attacks on civilians in the Darfur
region.39 Prospects for bringing anyone to justice amidst the carnage
seemed bleak. So far, as we have seen, the only “successful” postwar
trials of leaders (and others) for war crimes have taken place under
the auspices of ad hoc tribunals arranged to suit U.S. geopolitical
agendas at The Hague and in Baghdad. Aside from the ICTY and
IHCC, the court receiving most attention—one promising to restore
international justice and rule of law—has been the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), set up in Tanzania in 1994
and empowered to prosecute Rwandans for genocide and other
crimes linked to a series of massacres beginning in 1994. One
War-crimes tribunals: imperial justice 203
* * *
Central America, and, more recently, the Middle East. The decades
of Indian Wars brought not only well-known massacres—at Sand
Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee, for example—but unspeakable
acts of individual brutality: beatings, scalpings, mutilations, sexual
assaults, kidnappings, prisoner mistreatment, and shootings along
with full-scale attacks on civilians. Captives were often summarily
executed, including women, children, and the elderly. Dwellings
were routinely burned to the ground, food stores destroyed, and
both ponies and buffalo slaughtered by the thousands. Dying
Indians were commonly tortured, killed, and mutilated. All of these
atrocities took place, for example, when General George Armstrong
Custer attacked a defenseless settlement of mostly Cheyenne women
and children at the Washita River in Oklahoma in 1868, a massacre
that solidified Custer’s credentials as a heroic Indian fighter.4
At Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, the carnage wrought by the
fanatically pious Colonel John Chivington had been even more
barbaric, the individual atrocities even more gruesome. Reflecting
on Chivington’s God-ordained massacre, a lieutenant from the
New Mexico Volunteers wrote: “Of from five to six hundred souls
[killed,] the majority of which were women and children ... I did
not see a body of a man, woman, or child but was scalped, and
in many instances their bodies were mutilated in a most horrible
manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out. I heard
one man say that he had cut out a woman’s private parts and had
them for exhibition on a stick. I heard another man say he had cut
the fingers of an Indian to get the rings on the hand.”5 According
to this and many similar reports, soldiers used knives to rip apart
bodies, and none were spared.6 Torture, butchery, mutilation—there
seemed to be no limits to barbarism on the frontier. Such atrocities,
as it turned out, were hardly aberrant, but were repeated time
and again, finally culminating in the Wounded Knee massacre of
1890, where more than 3000 defenseless women and children were
slaughtered with most of the wounded tortured before they were
killed. No disciplinary action was ever taken against U.S. military
officers responsible for such horrors which, in the final analysis,
helped pave the way toward unchallenged white-colonial power
over the continent.
While international law has been steadily refined since the late
nineteenth century, with prohibitions against torture and kindred
abuses established and codified, in fact U.S. global behavior in this
regard has changed very little—an apparent extension of what
occurred during the Indian Wars. One obvious difference is that
Torture and other atrocities 211
an evil force was not only tolerated but actively encouraged to the
point where it became integral to the military culture. Veterans have
repeatedly described their officers, comrades, and even chaplains
as urging them to carry out blood revenge—acts made possible, as
Rhodes observes, by a nearly total loss of restraint.16 In the field,
U.S. troops were “violently coached by their leaders, began beating
up prisoners, torturing prisoners, executing prisoners—began, that
is, expanding their range of violent performances.” According to
one participant in this barbarism, “the voices of authority in the
company—the platoon sergeants and officers—acknowledged that
[executing prisoners] was a proper way to behave. Who were the
grunts to disagree with it? We supported it.”17
Atrocities in Vietnam were the inevitable modus operandi of
a ruthless U.S. war of attrition, planned by the liberal architects
of technowar and counterinsurgency. Thus by the late 1960s the
Phoenix Program set up by the CIA was already responsible for the
illegal detention and torture of untold thousands of captives. Under
this program, moreover, U.S. operatives assassinated an estimated
21,000 Vietnamese officials in the South. As the war expanded,
Navy SEALs and other units mounted raids to destroy homes,
capture and torture people, and conduct summary executions at
random, devoid of any rules of engagement. By the end of the war
many hundreds of thousands (mostly civilians) had been rounded
up, detained, and subjected to unspeakable brutality—all of it
condoned or at least ignored all the way to the top of the military
and government leadership.18 It was rooted in the very conduct of
warfare. Many of these atrocities were revealed to the American
public by the Winter Soldier hearings and testimony in 1971, but
its impact on the political culture was sadly minimal. Indeed the
hearings were barely covered in the mass media while politicians
seemed inclined to dismiss the atrocities as just another unfortunate
expression of modern (or any) warfare.
The record of U.S. criminal behavior in Central America hardly
compares with that in Asia, but it covers a lengthier historical
period during which the CIA, military, and proxy groups detained,
tortured, and killed tens of thousands of people in Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua. Such atrocities
resulted from established operational procedures at times when
U.S.-supported oligarchical interests were challenged or overturned
by oppositional movements. As Jennifer Harbury shows in her well-
researched study of torture across Central America: “A review of
the materials leads relentlessly to just one conclusion: that the CIA
Torture and other atrocities 215
The events of 9/11 set in motion new U.S. political and legal
maneuvers that would overtly challenge basic provisions of
international law, justified by the urgent need to fight global
terrorism. By late 2001 the U.S. was already setting up detention
facilities to house and interrogate hundreds (eventually thousands)
of prisoners associated with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other
Muslim groups thought to be involved in jihadic violence. According
to the Bush administration, 9/11 ushered in a new kind of war
requiring legal, political, and military flexibility in its pursuit—a
radical departure from the familiar clash between rival nation-states.
Toward this end Bush issued a secret executive order in late 2001
giving the CIA special power to detain and investigate prisoners,
followed (in February 2002) by a broader executive order stating
that, since terrorist suspects were not conventional prisoners of war
but rather “unlawful enemy combatants,” the U.S. was not subject
to international legal provisions regarding treatment of detainees.
These orders in effect opened the door to torture and other abuses
of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a camp set up beyond the reach
of American domestic jurisdiction, and elsewhere at mostly secret
locations. Legal rationalizations (for such practices as torture and
denial of due process) came from officials within the Bush admin-
218 the crimes of empire
said the U.S. had no legal justification for dismissing Geneva III,
after which her reappointment was blocked by the U.S.
While Bush’s orders effectively snubbed the U.S. judiciary as well
as international law, they served to immunize American government
and military personnel from war-crimes charges where treatment
of detainees was involved. The result was a green light for torture
and denial of due process at detention centers in Afghanistan,
Guantanamo, and (later) Iraq—despite a refusal to concede as much
by top officials in Washington. The Pentagon spelled out a three-tier
interrogation plan that would presumably be implemented first at
Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Thus
“Category I” would involve yelling, deception, and intimidation;
“Category II” the use of stress positions, deprivation, hooding,
isolation, use of phobias, and removal of comfort items; and
“Category III” severe physical harm including temporary suffocation
and exposure to extreme cold or heat. At least 24 of these methods
were approved by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in April 2003,
while CIA “rendition” measures at secret detention centers seemed
to proceed with few if any constraints.
By early 2002, as hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan were
taken bound, shackled, and hooded to Guantanamo, stark images
of human rights abuses began to surface despite the relative secrecy
of the operations. Prisoners arrived from more than 40 countries.
Whatever the stipulations of international law, the Bush administra-
tion was determined to squeeze information out of detainees—people
that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had already concluded were evil
threats to U.S. security—by any means necessary. Prisoners were
stripped of all rights and detained indefinitely with no charges filed
and no access to lawyers or courts, a state of affairs that for some
persisted up to three years. A Red Cross inspection conducted
in October 2003 found conditions at Guantanamo horrid, with
physical and mental abuses rampant. The abuses recorded at
that time were many: long-term solitary confinement, lengthy
interrogation sessions, exposure to heat and cold, beatings, use of
pepper spray, guns held to prisoners’ heads, inadequate food, and
stress positions, to name some.29 Many cases of sexual and religious
humiliation were reported as well. Prisoners had little or no privacy
and were often denied exercise privileges. Harsh discipline was
standard treatment, especially in cases where suspects were viewed
as non-cooperative. Camp Delta, built in 2003 by KBR, came to be
known as an American “Devil’s Island” where prisoners were kept in
maximum security. Such treatment was justified by U.S. officials who
220 the crimes of empire
The CCR took its case through the American court system, first
losing at the trial level and then at the district court before a
surprisingly positive ruling was handed down by the Supreme Court
(Rasul et al. vs. Bush) in June 2004. By a 6 to 3 vote the Court
decided that U.S. federal courts had jurisdiction to determine the
legality of prisoners held at Guantanamo, in effect restoring due
process and declaring the military commissions illegal. This ruling,
along with media revelations of the conditions at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo, forced the Bush administration onto the defensive
as the Pentagon and CIA moved to ameliorate some of its worst
“detention methods.”
In October 2006, however, Congress passed the Military
Commissions Act (MCA), which essentially overrode the
Supreme Court decision as it restored power to the executive in
its empowerment of the commissions. All the previous claims—
virtually every one a violation of international law—were restored
through legislative action. Harsh methods of interrogation seemed
to be validated within the vague and slippery language of the
Act. More disturbing, the MCA gave the President authority to
reconfigure both Geneva III and the War Crimes Act of 1996,
presumably to give U.S. personnel immunity from prosecution
under international law, including for charges of torture. The MCA
received little attention in the American mainstream media.34 In
June 2007, however, as discussed previously, a federal judge ruled
against the commissions on grounds they lacked jurisdiction over
prisoners of war—again refuting the Bush–Pentagon contention
that Guantanamo detainees were “unlawful combatants.” Despite
this legal setback, the Pentagon vowed to push ahead with its
special prosecution of captives—a maneuver that further isolated
the U.S. from the global human rights community, until President
Obama issued an executive order in January 2009 closing down
Guantanamo (to be implemented within a year).
222 the crimes of empire
In the end, moral outrage over the Abu Ghraib events did not
seem to reverberate very deeply across the political culture or within
the military establishment. The general outlook appeared to be that
the abuses were isolated, at odds with American traditions, and,
however shocking, clearly understandable in the epic struggle to
defeat the plague of terrorism. A common response was to minimize
or deflect attention from the events. Thus Senator James Inhofe
(R–Oklahoma), a leading member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, mocked the idea that the abuses deserved outrage:
“I’m probably not the only one up at this table more outraged by
the outrage than we are by the treatment [because they] are not
there for traffic violations ... They’re murderers, they’re terrorists,
they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood
on their hands. And here we’re so concerned about the treatment
of those individuals.”53 Said radio host Rush Limbaugh, whose
audience numbers several million: “This is not different than what
happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin
people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort,
and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a
good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m
talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever
heard of emotional release?”54 Fouad Ajami, director of Middle
East Studies at Johns Hopkins, commented that most of the anger
over Abu Ghraib was “contrived anger” outside Iraq—most of
it coming from people who never uttered a word about Saddam
Hussein’s atrocities.55 As for the Pentagon, it spoke loudly when, in
summer 2006, General Miller—supervisor of detainee operations
at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—was allowed to retire without
facing disciplinary action of any sort. On the contrary, Miller was
awarded a Distinguished Service Medal and praised by Rumsfeld
for an outstanding career at the very time HRW said he should be
hiring lawyers for his defense rather than getting military awards.
In the documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), Rory Kennedy’s
interviews with participants in the events revealed a similar
willingness to downplay or even justify the mistreatment. One or two
of the guards expressed some contrition, as did Karpinski who, as in
the case of others on the scene, framed the problem in more general
terms: soldiers, fearful, stressed out, and vengeful were turned into
robots simply following orders, or at least what they believed were
expectations in a difficult war to defeat terrorists. Most interviewees
justified the horrors which, regrettably, were unavoidable in dealing
with a large assemblage of ruthless criminals bent on mayhem and
230 the crimes of empire
MERCENARY TERRORISM
Nobody knows who they are. If they are asked anyway, they bully
people.”75 Another Iraqi official referred to the PMC operatives,
quite appropriately, as nothing but a pack of criminals.
The U.S. government does not count PMC workers as soldiers
and therefore does not count those killed while on duty as part of
overall casualty statistics, allowing this significant part of military
engagement to be hidden from view. It is generally believed,
moreover, that “privatization” augments the corporate potential
for war-making profits. And since PMCs function mostly outside
any system of legality, their capacity to commit atrocities of the
sort attributed to Blackwater in September 2007 is heightened.
Rules of engagement are thrown to the wind. It is for this and
other reasons that such contracting work was declared illegal by the
Geneva Conventions. At the same time, the oft-heard argument that
PMCs constitute a fundamental remaking of the U.S. war machine
or allow for a renovated combat force seems far-fetched. After all,
the familiar military-industrial complex has always been just that,
a tight, ever-expanding partnership between the Pentagon and huge
corporations with consistently high profits accruing to dozens of
major contractors. Viewed thusly, “privatization” hardly suggests a
radical departure from the past but rather a different arrangement
of priorities within the larger war machine. As for U.S. personnel
in the field, while military forces are indeed subject to more rigid
formal controls than workers at the PMCs, their record of war
crimes and human rights abuses has nonetheless far exceeded that
of the private contractors, even in Iraq. The PMCs, which have
actually been deployed for decades, must therefore be seen as just
an augmented extension of Pentagon operations instead of some
new out-of-control monster.
What generalizations, then, can be set forth about the U.S. legacy
of atrocities (including torture) of the kind explored in this chapter?
What are the historical circumstances surrounding American global
outlawry? We have already seen how practices of illegal detention,
murder, assassination, torture, and myriad human rights abuses
are neither isolated nor particularly novel but fit a longstanding
pattern of behavior geared to imperial ambitions going back long
before the Bush administration. Barbarism is not the product of
mistakes or deviations from supposedly exemplary professional
norms, much less the evil machinations of a few sadistic thugs. Such
238 the crimes of empire
For human beings to reach the point where killing (and mass
killing) can become a routine, orderly, sometimes even rewarding
part of an assigned mission, they must undergo what Richard
Rhodes calls a “brutalization process”—a psychological conversion
typically begun in armed-forces basic training, or its equivalent, and
then accelerated during combat.5 The idea is to strip away moral and
personal inhibitions so that troops will be prepared for a kill-or-be-
killed environment. Individuals must be socialized into an intensely
conflicted milieu where the darkest human behavior can seem
“normal”: violence, cruelty, hate, rage, traumas, insanity. From this
point, the carrying-out of atrocities becomes all the more thinkable
as the brutalization experience knows few limits. Participants
come to view extreme violence as simply part of an organizational
task—or in any event approved (formally or informally) by military
superiors. After all, basic training instructs all personnel to follow
orders, under all circumstances, and wartime conditions permit no
exceptions. Yet if the military culture tends to produce a universal
inclination toward extreme violence, the U.S. armed forces have
nonetheless occupied a special place when it comes to war crimes.
There are several reasons for this, including the constant pressures
of maintaining imperial hegemony, the duration, scope, and severity
of transgressions, the unprecedented levels of armed might wielded
by Washington, and a long history of evading legal accountability.
Perhaps the best example of this special status is Vietnam: the
U.S. brought more than a decade of death and destruction there to
wage counterinsurgency warfare against the Communist enemy.
Repeated war crimes were an inescapable outcome of this protracted
campaign, as we have seen. Atrocities like My Lai represent not so
much isolated episodes of barbarism as a microcosm of the entire
catastrophe. There were many (though mostly smaller) instances
of the sort, not to mention ongoing saturation bombing and
chemical defoliation that in the end killed far more people than
the accumulated local atrocities. As for My Lai itself, even before
the massacre the leaders and soldiers of Charlie Company had been
expanding their range of violent actions, one GI saying “it came
to the point where a guy could kill anybody.”6 There was so much
hatred of the Vietnamese that ordinary soldiers felt ready to empty
their magazines into the heads of women and children without
much thought or emotional response. Far from sheer madness, such
behavior was closer to the “normal” category in Vietnam, so that
My Lai came as no great shock to those in the field. One sergeant
was quoted as saying “Before you leave here sir, you’re going to
Postscript: the routinization of mass murder 253
learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average
19-year-old American boy.”7 When the My Lai massacre unfolded,
reports were that troops were “shooting at everything in sight,
children, men, women, and animals,” all (with a few exceptions)
ready to follow orders as civilians were lined up to be murdered.
Reports indicated that many took great pleasure in the slaughter.8
Investigations into the My Lai massacre reveal that Charlie
Company was indeed comprised of average soldiers who had
become quickly integrated into the universe of search-and-destroy
missions they were carrying out in early 1968.9 As noted, standard
orders were for soldiers to be aggressive and to maximize “body
count”—orders that converged with a mood of revenge shared by
GIs angry over VC attacks on their own units. Some men claimed
that a superior, Lt. Col. Frank Barker, had issued commands to the
effect that everyone in the hamlet (considered a VC stronghold)
should be eliminated, a charge denied by Barker. What is known is
that Charlie Company entered My Lai with guns blazing, shooting
at everyone and everything, some soldiers following organizational
discipline and other behaving more or less spontaneously. As for
Lt. Calley himself, he would later say (at trial) that “all orders
were to be assumed legal, that a soldier’s job was to carry out any
order given to him to the best of his ability.”10 Like other similar
episodes, My Lai can be described as a “sanctioned massacre”—
that is, a form of ruthless, systematic mass violence carried out
within combat operations that at least appear to be legitimated by
superior command.11
According to Kelman and Hamilton, sanctioned massacres
ultimately depend on three interwoven organizational and
psychological dynamics. First, they must be seen as authorized
by superior officers, where questions of individual decision-mak-
ing and moral choice appear decisively ruled out. As we have
seen, military personnel are thoroughly trained in the practice of
following orders—any failure to do so likely to be met, in wartime,
with a summary court martial or worse. Such orders, moreover,
do not always have to be formal; they can be informal, a function
of implicitly understood expectations or even the mood of the
moment. Second, they are a product of routinization, above all the
strong social and psychological pressures brought to bear on the
battlefield. Troops are trained to focus on the immediate tasks at
hand, the details of a job they are programmed to complete at the
highest level, no questions asked or even permitted to be asked. It
follows that combat operations can easily morph into indiscriminate
254 the crimes of empire
that My Lai was just a predictable outcome of war, that the enemy
got what he deserved, that the VC itself was responsible because
it hid amongst the inhabitants, that the Commies in any case were
doing worse things, and so forth. According to one Gallop Poll
survey in 1969, only 13 percent of respondents thought the GIs
were guilty, the rest believing, no doubt, that Americans were
not capable of such crimes. A Time magazine poll showed that
a majority expressed sympathy for Lt. Calley.16 President Nixon,
calling My Lai an “isolated episode,” expressed fear that giving too
much public attention to the massacres would hurt the U.S. image
and further erode popular support for the war (which was already
ebbing). Rep. Don Fuqua (R–Fla) introduced a resolution giving Lt.
Calley an opportunity to present his case before a joint session of
Congress. Well after details of the massacre surfaced in the media,
Lt. Calley enjoyed widespread backing by a public generally willing
to give him every benefit of the doubt. When Tony Nelson’s musical
tribute to mass murder, “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley,” hit the
airwaves, it sold more than 200,000 copies. Many believed Calley
himself was the main victim who should never have been tried
for war crimes. When Calley was eventually found guilty at court
martial, the verdict was overwhelmingly (by 78 percent) opposed by
the American public.17 The conviction brought outrage and protests,
most urging that Lt. Calley be freed immediately or at least pardoned
by Nixon. Several states passed resolutions favoring a pardon. In the
two months following the trial, the White House received 200,000
letters in support of Lt. Calley, whose brief sentence for killing
21 civilians was served mostly under house arrest. Many media
pundits and politicians argued (in part correctly) that Calley—a
mere platoon leader—was being scapegoated for atrocities endemic
to the whole Vietnam campaign and for which higher-level officers
and even government officials should have been culpable.
The main argument here is that the vast majority of the American
public, along with important sectors of the political, media, and
military establishments, were little troubled by revelations of
barbaric war crimes of which My Lai was only the tip of the iceberg.
Instead of moral opprobrium, there was a facile willingness to forget
and move on, often reciting the fashionable platitude that, in the
end, “war is hell” under all conditions—a refrain rightly condemned
at Nuremberg. While the evidence against Lt. Calley was as solid
as it could have been (many on the scene attributed more than
100 killings to him), Americans preferred to look the other way,
believing that in the final analysis he was a good soldier just doing
256 the crimes of empire
INTRODUCTION
1. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006),
p. 267.
2. Ibid., p. 270.
3. David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 153.
4. Ibid., p. 154.
5. Philippe Sands, Lawless World (New York: Viking Press, 2005).
6. Richard Falk, Human Rights Horizons (New York: Routledge, 2000), ch. 10.
7. David Chandler, “International Justice,” New Left Review
(November–December, 2000), p. 63.
8. Noam Chomsky, Rogue States (Boston: South End Press, 2000), p. 17.
9. See Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-Buidling Lite,” New York Times Magazine
(July 28, 2002).
10. Robert Jay Lifton, The Superpower Syndrome (New York: Nation Books,
2003), p. 112.
11. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003),
p. 27.
12. Ibid., p. 27.
13. Ibid., p. 76.
14. Ibid., p. 87.
15. Ibid., p. 99.
16. Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul, p. 187.
17. Ibid., p. 191.
18. See Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, The Limits of International Law
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
19. Antonia Juhasz, The Bush Agenda (New York: Regan Books, 2006), p. 298.
20. For further elaboration of the argument that Republicans and Democrats have
converged ideologically during the past two decades, see Carl Boggs, The End
of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (New York:
Guilford Publications, 2000), chs 1–4.
21. Edward Herman, “The New York Times Versus Civil Society,” Z Magazine
(December 2005), p. 54.
22. Ibid., p. 54.
23. Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public
Affairs, 2002), p. 143.
24. Cited in Norman Solomon, War Made Easy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and
Sons, 2005), p. 26.
25. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 144.
26. Ibid., p. 143.
27. Sands, Lawless World, p. 48.
28. See Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).
262
Notes 263
29. See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder (London: Pluto
Press, 2004) and David Model, Lying for Empire (Monroe, ME: Common
Courage Press, 2005).
30. See Carla Del Ponte, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s
Worst Criminals (New York: Other Press, 2009).
CHAPTER 1
1. See William Blum, Killing Hope (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995),
and Rogue State (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
2. On U.S. aggression in Korea, see Bruce Cumings, et al., Inventing the Axis
of Evil (New York: The New Press, 2004), pp. 1–27; Blum, Killing Hope,
pp. 45–55; and Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States
and Biological Warfare (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998),
pp. 88–106.
3. On President Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam war planning and escalation,
see Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David McKay, 1976),
pp. 142–66, and Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), pp. 60–105.
4. See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London: Verso, 2001).
5. See Philip E. Wheaton, Panama Invaded (Trenton, NJ: The Red Sea Press,
1992), pp. 13–20.
6. Ibid., pp. 143–58.
7. The U.S. flew 110,000 air sorties against Iraq during Desert Storm, resulting
in at least 200,000 deaths. According to the Red Crescent Society of Jordan,
113,000 civilians were killed in just the final week of the war. See Ramsey
Clark, et al., War Crimes (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1992), p. 15.
8. Anthony Arnove, ed., Iraq Under Siege (Boston: South End Press, 2000),
esp. chs 1–3, 11, 12, and 13.
9. See Clark, et al., War Crimes, pp. 9–25. Nineteen charges in all were listed.
10. Dilip Hiro, Iraq: in the Eye of the Storm (New York: Nation Books, 2002),
chs 5–9.
11. Wesley Clark, quoted in Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation (London: Verso,
2000), p. 124.
12. See Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, pp. 176–200.
13. On the U.S. attack in Yemen, see the Los Angeles Times (November 5, 2002).
14. Quoted in Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on
Terror (New York: The Free Press, 2004), p. 24.
15. On the Bush administration efforts to manipulate information concerning Iraq’s
supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction, see James Bamford, A
Pretext for War (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), pp. 294–307.
16. On the illegality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see Sands, Lawless World,
pp. 185–7.
17. Ibid., pp. 201–3.
18. See Hiro, Iraq, p. 82.
19. Ibid., p. 129.
20. Ibid., p. 88.
21. Ibid., p. 92.
22. See James Bamford, “How Public Relations Gave us the War in Iraq,” Rolling
Stone (December 1, 2005), p. 53.
264 the crimes of empire
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
1. For more details on this point, see William Blum, Rogue State (Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press, 2000), chs 4–10.
2. Thus, at the ICTY in The Hague, Serb leader Slobodan Milošević was charged
with a series of war crimes that fall under the category of “aiding and abetting”
criminal activity. Within Article 7 (1) of the Tribunal, Milošević was accused
of participating in a series of “joint criminal enterprises,” including providing
financial, material, and logistical supports to various regular and irregular
forces in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Milošević was said to “share the
intent” of other participants in joint criminal enterprises, fully aware of the
consequences of their [others] actions. See Norman Cigar and Paul Williams,
Indictment at The Hague (New York: New York University Press, 2002),
pp. 292–8.
3. Ibid., pp. 96–7.
4. The U.S. has led the world in arms sales throughout most of the postwar years,
reaching nearly 60 percent of the total by 2003. For an overview of global
weapons sales, see Gider Burrows, The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade
(London: Verso, 2002), ch. 1.
5. See Blum, Killing Hope, p. 194.
6. Between 1980 and 2000 Turkey received nearly $12 billion in U.S. military
aid in addition to some $6.5 billion in combined grants and direct loans
(www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/turkey). Turkey has been described as the worst
human rights abusing state in the European region, its armed forces carrying
out repression with sophisticated weapons supplied mainly by the U.S. See
Burrow, The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade, pp. 55–6.
7. See Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States (Atlanta:
Clarity Press, 2004), p. 23.
8. Ibid., pp. 37–41.
9. Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987), pp. 15,
18.
10. Ibid., p. 27.
11. Blum, Killing Hope, p. 232.
12. Gareau, State Terrorism, p. 62.
13. On human rights violations in Guatemala, see Chomsky, Turning the Tide,
pp. 28–30; Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 229–39; and Jennifer Harbury, Truth,
Torture, and the American Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), pp. 32–40.
268 the crimes of empire
CHAPTER 4
1. www.en.wikipedia.org
2. U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (March 2002). For a larger overview of American
nuclear policy, see Christopher Paine, “The Moscow Threat: Making Matters
Worse,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (December 2002), and Julian Borger,
“U.S. Plan for Nuclear Arsenal,” Guardian (February 19, 2003).
3. Gordon, “Cool War,” p. 43.
4. Ibid., p. 44.
5. Ibid., p. 49.
Notes 269
6. See Robert Aldrich, First Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 21–42.
7. Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, p. 126.
8. Aldrich, First Strike!, pp. 255–74.
9. Karl Grossman, Weapons in Space (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001),
pp. 9–17.
10. Quoted in Model, Lying for Empire, p. 70.
11. See Endicott and Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare,
pp. 97–8.
12. David Model, “The Nuclear Peril,” Z Magazine (July–August 2006). See
also “The End of Arms Control,” The Defense Monitor (December 2006).
K. Gajendra Singh refers to the NPT as enforcing a global nuclear “apartheid
regime” (www.uruknet.info). Mohamed ElBaradei, director of IAEA, has said
that it is “morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass
destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security to
continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use” (New York
Times, February 12, 2004).
13. Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger (New York: The New Press, 2002),
p. 5.
14. Quadrennial Defense Review (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2001).
15. Robert McNamara, in Foreign Policy (May–June 2005).
16. New York Times (February 12, 2004).
17. See Fred Kaplan, “India’s Summer,” at www.slate.msu.com
18. Los Angeles Times (February 25, 2007).
19. Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, p. 15.
20. Los Angeles Times (June 13, 2006).
21. Los Angeles Times (March 2, 2007).
22. Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, p. 24.
23. Ibid., p. 41.
24. Ibid., p. 117.
25. Ibid., p. 130.
26. On the statutes of the Chemical Weapons Convention, see www.en.wikipedia/
cwc.org
27. Blum, Rogue State, pp. 105–6.
28. See David Rose, “Weapons of Self-Destruction,” Vanity Fair (August 2006),
p. 110.
29. www.newsbbc.co.uk
30. Los Angeles Times (April 19, 2002).
31. See Rose, “Weapons of Self-Destruction,” p. 112.
32. See Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Vietnam (New
York: Trolley, 2004).
33. Peter Pringle, “Chemical Weapons,” in Gutman and Rieff, eds, Crimes of War,
pp. 74–5.
34. Blum, Rogue State, pp. 121–2.
35. Los Angeles Times (November 28, 2005).
36. Ibid.
37. www.bushfash.com
38. See Stephen Lendman at www.globalresearch.ca/index (January 19, 2006).
39. See Peter L. Pellett, “Sanctions, Food, Nutrition, and Health in Iraq,” in
Arnove, Iraq Under Siege, pp. 151–68.
270 the crimes of empire
CHAPTER 5
41. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued four
reports in 2007. See www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/assessments-reports.htm
42. Los Angeles Times (April 7, 2007).
43. Sands, Lawless World, p. 70.
44. Los Angeles Times (December 17, 2005).
45. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “The Junk Science of George W. Bush,” The Nation
(March 8, 2004).
46. See Chris Mooney, “Climate of Denial,” Mother Jones (June 2005), p. 36.
47. On Washington lobbying efforts against measures to fight global warming,
see In These Times (April 2007).
48. On the increasing closure of the public sphere, see Boggs, The End of Politics,
and David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine (New York: Crown
Publishers, 2004), chs 1–3.
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
50. www.hrw.org/englishdocs
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. See JoAnn Wypijewski, “The Final Act at Abu Ghraib,” Mother Jones (April
2008).
57. Cited in ibid., p. 40.
58. Cited in ibid., p. 35.
59. On the efforts of Blackwater and other PMCs to resist UCMJ legal jurisdiction,
see Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful
Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2007), pp. xxi–xxii.
60. Los Angeles Times (September 18, 2007).
61. Los Angeles Times (September 22, 2007).
62. Los Angeles Times (September 18, 2007).
63. Ibid.
64. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_contractor
65. See Ken Silverstein, Private Warriors (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 172–3.
66. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_contractor
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Los Angeles Times (May 31, 2007).
70. Scahill, Blackwater, pp. xvii–xviii.
71. Ibid., p xx.
72. Ibid., p. xxiv.
73. Ibid., p. 289.
74. Los Angeles Times (September 21, 2007).
75. Ibid.
76. See Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clark, Torture: When the Unthinkable is Morally
Permissible (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. vii, viii.
77. San Francisco Chronicle (August 1, 2007).
CONCLUSION
1. On the spread of U.S. military bases around the world and development of
the “new imperialism,” see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New
York: Henry Holt, 2004), ch. 1.
2. Ibid., p. 30.
3. See Carl Boggs, Imperial Delusions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2006), chs 1–4.
4. Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 278.
5. Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, p. 103.
6. Matt Taibbi, “John McCain’s Lust for War,” Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008),
p. 34.
7. The Defense Monitor (March/April, 2008).
8. See Steve Rendell, “What National Intelligence Estimate?,” Extra (March/
April, 2008).
276 the crimes of empire
9. On the general U.S. record of obstructionism at the United Nations, see Blum,
Rogue State, pp. 184–99. On U.S. efforts to manipulate the U.N. in the lead-up
to the Iraq invasion, see Bennis, Before and After, pp. 106–36.
10. Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, p. 215.
11. See Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
12. The Defense Monitor (March/April, 2008).
POSTSCRIPT
9/11 terrorist attacks 14, 20, 33, 72, Albright, Madeleine 33, 181, 186
91, 200, 217 Ali, Tariq 48
60 Minutes 223 Alien Tort Claims Act (1789) 235
Abdel Rahman, Raouf 193 American Civil Liberties Union
Abrams, Elliot 107 (ACLU) 228, 235
Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq) 16, 48, 80, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) 42,
145, 199, 215, 223–32 104, 167, 173
and PMCs 232 American Indian Movement (AIM)
responses to abuses 73, 198, 207–8, 152
221, 229, 239, 240 American Service Member’s Protection
responsibility of higher officers Act (2002) 198
226–8, 230–1, 238, 259 Amnesty International 90, 95, 102,
accountability 1–2, 161, 179, 180, 103, 194, 218, 241
195, 199, 249 Anak (Korea) 75
Achcar, Gilbert 22 Annan, Kofi 194
aerial bombardment anthrax 129, 134
anti-personnel bombs 86, 104, 114, Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (ABM)
145 113, 120, 146
carpet bombing 49, 70 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons 169
and civilian casualties 50, 54, 59, Al Arabiya TV 24
61, 64–73, 178, 185–6, 211 Arbenz, Jacobo 95
precision bombing 64, 73, 87–8 Archivo 95
saturation bombing 50, 54, 66, 68, Arendt, Hannah 259
69, 86, 115, 178, 211, 252 Argentina 180
aerial terrorism 14, 32, 53, 64, 67, 69, Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 31
73, 115, 181, 185, 188 Arkan’s Tigers 90
Afghanistan 23, 24, 89, 115, 121, 144, arms race 146, 156, 166, 167, 168–9
244 Atlantic Charter (1942) 154
mercenaries 235 axis of evil 119
torture camps 21, 145, 192, 198,
217, 219, 223, 227 Ba’ath Party 37, 115, 190, 191
U.S. atrocities 80 Bagaric, Mirko 239
U.S. proxy wars 89, 90, 92 Baghdad 61, 73
and war on terror 33, 72, 121 Bagram Air Force Base 219
Agent Orange 69, 127, 128–9 Balkans
Ahmadinejad regime 43, 44 U.S. use of chemical weapons 130,
AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs 131
Committee) 23, 104 U.S./NATO war in 8, 22, 32–3, 47,
Ajami, Fouad 229 97–100, 115
Alabama 149 see also Bosnia; Yugoslavia
Alamogordo 126 Bamford, James 39
Albanian separatists 99 Bandar, Awar Hamed 190
277
278 the crimes of empire
Barker, Lt. Col. Frank 253 and Abu Ghraib revelations 207,
Bechtel 10, 41 224
Beirut, siege of 104 attitude to torture 198–9
Belknap, Michael 254 and chemical and biological
Bell Telephone Hour 213 weapons 132, 134
Ben Tre (Vietnam) 128 and climate change 170, 171, 172–5
Bennis, Phyllis 63 and ICC 176, 197–9
Berger, Samuel 38 and international law 9, 14, 45,
Berlin 64, 178 147, 155, 159, 166, 192, 218–19,
Bertrand Russell Tribunal 57 239
Betts, Corporal Joshua Lee 226 and Iran threat 245–6
BG (bacterium) 134 and Iraq Tribunal 190–3, 195
Biden, Joseph 24 military commissions 218–19
Bilmes, Linda 248 and nuclear weapons 15, 119–20,
bin Laden, Osama 20 121–4, 167–8
biological weapons 114, 133–7, 156 and regime change plans 38, 39–40,
U.S. testing programs 134, 136 41, 43, 105
Biological Weapons Convention and rendition 239
(BWC) 113, 133–4, 136, 145 sanctions against Iraq 115, 116
Bishop, Maurice 30 and treatment of detainees 204,
Blackwater 10, 232, 233–6, 237 207, 217–18, 220, 221, 222, 224,
Blair, Tony 33, 186, 192 231–3
Blix, Dr. Hans 138, 143 and U.N. 155–6, 159
Blum, William 28 war against Iraq 17, 20–1, 35,
body count 250 42–3, 84, 88, 129, 155
maximizing 56, 60, 74, 76, 82, 251, see also Iraq War
258 war crimes 46, 202, 205, 258, 260
and My Lai massacre 251, 253, 254 and weaponization of space 168
Boeing Company 235
Bolivia 180 Caldicott, Helen 120, 125
Bolton, John 159 Calley, Lt. William 57, 77, 204, 251,
Boot, Max 20 253, 255
Bosch, Juan 30 Cambodia 29, 55, 70, 163, 202
Bosnia 90, 92, 98, 185, 235 Camp Bondsteel 100
Bosnian Muslims 97, 185 Cardona, Sgt. Santos 226
botulinum 129 Caribbean 11, 30
Bozeman Trail 151 Carr, Caleb 49
Bremer, L. Paul, III 40, 233 Carter administration 96
Brody, Reed 228 Center for Constitutional Rights
Brokaw, Tom 20 (CCR) 205, 220–1
Bundy, McGeorge 29, 258 Central America 10, 11, 30, 90,
Bush Doctrine 5, 34, 35, 242 214–16, 236
see also preemptive war U.S. proxy warfare 93–7
Bush, George H.W./first Bush adminis- Chalabi, Ahmed 18, 38
tration 31, 58, 71, 98 Chandler, Captain Melbourne 75
Bush, George W./second Bush adminis- Chandler, David 8, 22
tration 24, 25, 46, 244 Chapelier, George 70
and 9/11/war on terror 14, 35–6, Charlie Company 251, 252, 253, 254,
72, 112, 120, 144, 217–18 257–8
index 279
Charter of the International Military Clark, General Wesley 32, 33, 186,
Tribunal 49, 51 207
Chechnya 92 Clark, Julie 239
chemical weapons 55, 69, 72, 86, Clarke, Richard 40
126–33, 156, 252 climate change see global warming
effects of 128–9, 131, 132–3 Climate Change Conference
and international law 127–8, 129 (Montreal) 171–2
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) Clinton, Bill/Clinton administration
113, 127, 130, 145 attacks on Al Qaeda 73
Cheney, Dick 35–6, 38, 192, 202, 219, and Balkans 32, 33
258 and climate change 171
Chevron 10, 41 and dangers of WMD 129
Cheyennes 151 and Haiti 31
Chile 89 and ICC 176
China, and climate change 172, 174 and Saddam Hussein 37, 38
Chivington, Colonel John 210 sanctions against Iraq 115, 116
Choctaws 150 and sea resources 146
cholera 135, 136 and treatment of detainees 217
Chomsky, Noam 5, 22, 84, 86, 95, 96–7 and war crimes 33, 186
Christian Phalange 103
Clinton, Hillary 24, 244
Christopher, Warren 98
cluster bombs 69–70, 107, 115
Churchill, Ward 48, 162
Coalition Provisional Authority 195
CIA
coalition of the willing 36
and Central America 93, 95–6
Cohen, William 33, 186
covert operations 26
Cold War 29, 89, 91, 92, 117, 161
detention methods 214–15, 216–17,
collateral damage 21, 52, 53, 63, 125
221, 223, 224, 227, 232
see also civilians
detention sites 145, 198, 232
Colombia 89, 90, 130, 235
and Indonesia 91–2
Columbus, Christopher 10, 148
and Iran 123
and Iraq 37–8, 39, 40 Columbus Day 13
rendition programs 24, 207, Communism 28, 29, 161
216–17, 219, 235, 238, 239 Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI)
use of PMCs 234, 235 91
and Yugoslavia 98, 99, 100 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
Cigar, Norman 181 (CTBT) 113, 119–20, 122, 142,
civilians 156
attacks on 14, 115, 145, 185–6 Contras (Nicaragua) 96
and intent 83–4, 86, 88 Convention Against Torture 198, 209,
and military necessity 52 220, 228
casualties 15, 34, 48–88, 94–5 corporations, profits from U.S.
through aerial bombardment 50, interventions 9–10, 40–1, 100
54, 59, 61, 64–73, 178, 185–6, Council on Foreign Relations 167
211 counterinsurgency 29, 52, 69, 94, 214,
through economic sanctions 215
59–60 Cowan, Lt. Col. Bill 223
World War II 49–50, 53, 64, Creeks 149
65–7, 178 crimes against humanity 1, 51, 160,
see also collateral damage 164, 197, 241
killed by PMC employees 233 see also war crimes
280 the crimes of empire
immunity for US personnel war on terror 5–6, 14, 33, 105, 144,
197–8, 205, 206, 218, 221 198, 220
prosecutions 77, 78, 226, 259 and civilian casualties 52, 82
and weaponization of space 6, 114, and detainees 204, 217, 218, 222,
118, 124–5, 166–9, 246 227, 235
and WMD 15–16, 112, 114, 137–8, and perpetual war 110, 242, 244
145, 242 and U.S. WMD strategy 120, 133
biological weapons 134–7 and use of torture 20–1, 239
chemical weapons 126–33 war-crimes tribunals 176–206
nuclear weapons 15, 85–6, 114, and universality 177–8, 179, 180,
117–26, 141–2, 245 195, 205
WMD Commission options and victor’s justice 1, 9, 51–2, 160,
138–43 177, 178, 179, 184, 187, 190,
see also economic sanctions 191, 194
Universal Declaration of Human warfare
Rights (UDHR) 154, 157, 200, counterinsurgency 29, 52, 69, 94,
208–9, 220, 241 214, 215
Universal Jurisdiction 205 ‘good war’ 46, 53, 211
unlawful enemy combatants 204, 217 illegal 27
see also Iraq War (second),
Valentine, Douglas 55 illegality of
Van Auken , Bill 196 and international law 241
Veterans Administration 132 perpetual war 110–11
‘Vietnam Syndrome’ 161 and routinization of mass murder
Vietnam War 29–30, 55–7, 161, 202, 249–61
258, 259 see also rules of engagement;
aerial bombardment 69, 70 technowar
body counts 56, 76, 82, 250, 251, Washington Institute for Near East
253, 254, 258 Policy (WINEP) 104
effects of chemical weapons 128–9 Washita massacre 210
U.S. atrocities 56, 76–80, 212–14, water resources, bombing of 54, 60,
215, 252 68, 70, 135
Vinnell 235 Watson, Harlan 172
Vonnegut, Kurt 66–7 Weapons of Mass Destruction
Commission 241
Wall Street Journal 24, 239 proposals 138–43
Walsh, John 170 weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
Walt, Stephen 104–5, 106 7, 28, 112–43
war crimes 1, 50–1 definitions of 112, 113
aiding and abetting of 90–3 regulation 113, 114, 117–18,
assigning guilt 256–60 119–20, 121–2, 137
see also Abu Ghraib, responsibil- types of 114
ity of higher officers see also United States (U.S.), and
and ICC jurisdiction 197 WMD
punishment of 241 Weekly Standard 43
see also United States (U.S.), and West Bank 101, 110, 146, 158
war crimes; war-crimes tribunals Western Hemisphere Institute for
War Crimes Act 198–9, 221, 238 Security Cooperation 94
war criminals Westmoreland, General William 213,
ordinariness of 259–60 258
as psychopaths 260, 261 Wheaton, Philip 58
292 the crimes of empire
white phosphorous 61, 69, 86, 108, and crimes against peace 26, 44
114, 127, 130 and WMD 115
white-supremacist ideology 12–13 Wounded Knee, massacre at (1890) 13,
Williams, Paul 181 149, 150, 210, 251
Winter Soldier hearings 78–9, 87, 214
Wolfowitz, Paul 38, 202, 258 Yalu River (Korea) 135
Woo, John 20, 239 Yemen, CIA attack (2002) 33
Wood, Capt. Carolyn 231 Yoo, John 218
World Court 30, 96, 146, 192 Young, Marilyn 70
World Health Organization 147 Yugoslavia 22, 89, 90, 115, 144, 155
World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) 195 aid withdrawn 97
World War I 4, 49 economic sanctions 98
World War II 177, 211, 241 U.S./NATO bombings (1999) 71,
aerial bombardment 65–7 100, 182, 183, 185
atomic bomb used against Japan as U.S./NATO proxy war 97–100
117, 118–19 see also Balkans
see also Hiroshima and Nagasaki
atomic bombings Zinn, Howard 83–4, 149
and atrocities 211–12 Zionism 102, 109, 165
and civilian casualties 49–50, 53, Zionist Organization of America
64, 65–7, 178 (ZOA) 104