2022-03-23

TomDispatch | retired Air Force Lt. Col. and historian William Astore

(2) TomDispatch | Facebook:

Given Ukraine, it's a good moment to recall, as retired Air Force Lt. Col. and historian William Astore does at his Bracing Views blog, that the Russians have hardly been alone on this planet in the armed mistreatment of other peoples -- we've played quite a Putinesque role on this planet ourselves as in -- Astore's point -- Iraq. Tom
===
"Readers, my memory here is a bit fuzzy, so please bear with me.
When I was at the Air Force Academy in the late 1990s, a British diplomat came to speak on Anglo-American policies and activities in the Middle East. A controversial subject was the “No-Fly” zone enforced by the U.S. Air Force as well as sanctions against Iraq, with the stated goal of encouraging the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That overthrow never happened; instead, the U.S. military had to invade in 2003 with “shock and awe,” leading to war, insurgency, and torture that truly was shocking and awful.
I recall asking a question of the diplomat, a younger guy, slick and polished, probably a product of Oxbridge (and I had recently earned my D.Phil. from Oxford, so I knew the type). The gist of my question was this: Why are we continuing with sanctions when they appear not to be hurting Saddam but only ordinary people in Iraq?
The diplomat smoothly ignored the tenor of my question and instead praised Anglo-American resolve and cooperation in the struggle against Saddam and similar bad actors in the Middle East. I was nonplussed but I didn’t push the matter. I was in a classroom with a couple of dozen other AF officers and we were all supposed to be on the same team.
This all came back to me today as I listened to Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor at The Gray Zone. He recalled a British major asking similar questions of similar diplomats, but the British major went much further than I had in challenging the BS he was being fed. COL Macgregor quotes this major as saying the following in response:
If our cause is just, why do we have to lie about it?
Those words should be seared in the minds of all Americans at this perilous moment. I wish I’d had the clarity of mind and the confidence to say something similar, but I recall thinking that maybe I just didn’t know enough about what was going on in Iraq.
Of course, Madeleine Albright, asked on “60 Minutes” if the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children due to sanctions was a price worth paying for Saddam’s eventual downfall, readily replied that yes, she believed this price was worth paying.
Her sociopathic calculation didn’t even work; only a massive U.S. invasion finally toppled Saddam, leading to yet more chaos and mass death in Iraq.
We need to stop lying to ourselves that America’s policies are generally noble and just or even morally defensible or forced upon us by a harsh and cruel world. In fact, perhaps that harsh and cruel world is exactly the one we’ve created for ourselves — and for so many others as well."
A Just Cause? Why Lie?
BRACINGVIEWS.COM
A Just Cause? Why Lie?
W.J. Astore Readers, my memory here is a bit fuzzy, so please bear with me. When I was at the Air Force Academy in the late 1990s, a British diplomat came to speak on Anglo-American policies and ac…
59
10 comments
10 shares
Like
Comment
Share

10 comments

Most relevant

  • Author
    TomDispatch
    Thanks, all, for contributing here.
  • Rikki Ferguson
    The Military Industrial Complex is a powerful and obstinate bully, it can make up the story as it goes along, atrocities conducted in the past with paper thin justification in no way allow Russia to act in Ukraine with impunity. Lavrov's remarkable memory for details of pitiful bad judgement in Iraq, does not permit him to suggest Russia is within the realms of reasonable in Ukraine. Especially when there is a total independent media blackout in Russia, and "Fake" law can jail protestors for calling the war in Ukraine a war. American people were allowed to watch every grotesque detail of the Iraq slaughter, in real time....
    4
    2 replies
  • Richard Mynick
    We have far, far outdone anything “Putin” has done. Are you kidding? The Vietnam War alone was thousands of times worse than anything Russia has done, and added to that are our outrageous criminal aggressive wars in Iraq and Libya, etc etc. And even this Ukraine situation is our fault, because we engineered the 2014 Kiev coup, then pushed NATO right to Russia’s borders. We have no moral leg to stand on, to criticize Russia.
    7
    2 replies
  • Jennifer Nouri
    Halifax announced a new dedicated satellite system for Ukrainian military strategic use today.
  • Top fan
    Tulio Sanchez
    Madeleine Albright's words reminded me of Hillary Clinton talking about the death of Muammar Al-Quadhdafi: ''We came, we saw, he died.''
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)