America’s Moral Degeneracy

Paul Craig Roberts

It is not only foreign political regimes that are corrupted by Washington’s evil, but also Americans themselves.

On May 31, 2010, the Israeli right-wing government sent armed military troops to illegally board in international waters Gaza aid ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. The Israelis murdered 8 Turkish citizens and one US citizen in cold blood. Many others were wounded by the forces of “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Despite the murder of its citizen, Washington immediately took the side of the crazed Israeli government. The Turks had a different response. The prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, said that the next aid ships would be protected by the Turkish navy. But Washington got hold of its puppet and paid him to shut up. Once upon a time, the Turks were a fierce people. Today they are Washington’s puppets.


Understanding the U.S. Torture State

Anthony Gregory

The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse edited by Marjorie Cohn (New York University Press: 2011), 342 pages.

When I was a child in Reagan’s America, a common theme in Cold War rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained them without cause, extracted phony confessions through cruel violence, did the unspeakable to detainees who were helpless against the full, heartless weight of the communist state. It was torture as much as any evil that differentiated the bad guys, the commies, from the good guys, the American people and their government. However imperfect the U.S. system was, it had civilized standards rejected by the enemy.

In April 2004, the world was shocked to see photos exposing the torment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prisons, which was taken over and used by the United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Well, most of the world was shocked. Some, mostly conservative commentators, dismissed or defended the barbarity, even comparing it to frat-boy hazing. Others were disgusted but shrugged it off as the work of a few bad apples, not something that should draw judgment down on the whole of U.S. policy and the brave men and women in uniform. Still others of us were horrified but did not see the mistreatment as any sort of aberration — we expected such torture to occur in a war of aggression, figured we had not seen the worst of it, and even argued that what goes on in America’s domestic prisons easily compares with some of the milder photos dominating the nightly news.

A national debate arose out of that scandal. More than one question was pondered: Do these photos depict torture? Is this an anomaly or a systemic problem? Who should be held accountable? Should torture always be illegal?

Over the next few years, more torture controversies came up. The question of whether water-boarding actually constitutes torture was particularly disheartening. Some defenders of the U.S. government said the United States should not and does not torture, but waterboarding doesn’t count. Others said that even if the United States does torture, it is doing so in service of a greater good.

We have actually come to the point where the rhetoric of Reagan’s day no longer holds: American exceptionalists and conservatives no longer claim emphatically that the United States does not and never will torture, as they did before (however disingenuously). An AP poll in June 2009 found that 52 percent of Americans thought torture was justified in some situations — up from only 38 percent in 2005. In Obama’s America, torture is now normalized.


Worse Than a Third Bush Term?

Anthony Gregory
Antiwar

It would have been bad enough if, as some cynics warned, nothing changed in national-security policy with Obama in charge. But even that would be better than what we’ve seen.

If in 2008 someone had said that Obama’s war policy would be more belligerent and costlier than another round of Bush’s, nearly no one would have believed it. Bush started a preventive war in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands without any credible correlation to U.S. security, except perhaps a very negative one. He turned a hunt for bin Laden into an excuse to stumble around in Afghanistan at great cost without any clear idea of how the war and occupation were going to improve the situation there. He spent a trillion dollars, just in direct costs, and lost 4,000 American troops in these aggressive and endless wars.

Obama came along and promised to make it all better. Before he was a U.S. senator, he opposed the U.S. war in Iraq. As a presidential candidate, he vowed to exercise more restraint and wind down the U.S. presence in Iraq.

At the same time, Obama pledged to “refocus America on the greatest threat to our security—the resurgence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan” and to “deploy at least two additional combat brigades” to that theater of war. Some pro-peace Obama voters rationalized this one way or another, saying the Afghanistan war was less unreasonable than Iraq, or that Obama was just trying to get elected and would prove a more peaceful president overall than Bush (or McCain).

In my new Independent Institute policy report, “What Price War? Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict,” I assess the numbers and come to a disturbing conclusion: The heightened conflict in Afghanistan has in a sense offset the decline of hostilities in Iraq, a decline we could have expected anyway, and in all other areas of foreign policy and national security, Obama has essentially continued and expanded Bush-era policies.


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