The U.S. Aggression Process and Its Collaborators

From Guatemala (1950-1954) to Iran (2002-)

We are living in a very dangerous period in which a predatory superpower has embarked on a series of aggressive wars in rapid succession—three on two different continents during the past decade alone. Not only have these wars violated the UN Charter, and constituted what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson declared at Nuremberg to be „the supreme international crime;“ not only has it gotten away with its wars, despite their increasingly destructive and murderous nature; but in waging them, the United States has been able to enlist leaders of the „international community“ and United Nations in support of its assaults on distant lands. As the world’s preeminent multilateral organization, the central purpose of which was purportedly to save humankind from the scourge of war, and to ensure that armed force not be used except for the common defense, we find the UN’s role here to be troubling indeed.

This superpower’s wars are opposed by a majority of the world’s population, and often even by a majority of the heavily propagandized citizens of its own country. But popular opinion and voter preferences, even when manifested in national elections, as in November 2006, do not determine policy in the United States. Freed at last from any deterrent of the kind the Soviet Union exercised until its demise, and the kind posed for a more abbreviated period by the civil protests that confronted it on its own streets between 1965 and 1974, the U.S. program of „power projection“ proceeds apace. Now it sets its sights on Iran, likely to produce a much wider war and one that quite possibly could involve the use of nuclear weapons.

U.S. wars of aggression are certainly not new, nor is its leaders’ brazen disregard for international law. Greece, Guatemala, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama—these do not exhaust the list of U.S. victims since World War II. What is more, the assumption that international law does not apply to the United States is longstanding. The „propriety of the Cuba quarantine is not a legal issue,“ former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained in reference to Kennedy’s naval blockade of Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. „The power, position and prestige of the United States had been challenged by another state; and law simply does not deal with such questions of ultimate power.“ For Acheson, any U.S. action to counter alleged threats trumps international law, and law cannot be allowed to interfere with the exercise of the „pre-eminent power“ of this country. The belief that although law should apply to others, it never applies to the United States, was internalized long before Acheson’s day; and it reaches straight through to the present, widely accepted abroad because the scale of U.S. power permits its leaders to ignore the law with complete impunity.

But the aggression pace and scale has been stepped up in recent years, based on a number of factors: The collapse of the containing power, the vested interests in U.S. power projection in the Middle East—the Israeli lobby, oil interests, the military-industrial-complex—and the ideology and politics of a militarized capitalist state.

The aggression process has always involved demonization of the target, with the establishment media regularly carrying out their propaganda service in ways that match anything achievable in a totalitarian state. In the case of the joint U.S-proxy army attack on Guatemala in 1954, the New York Times swallowed and disseminated the lie that the Reds had taken over that country (e.g., Sidney Gruson, „How Communists Won Control of Guatemala,“ March 1, 1953), just as the paper swallowed and disseminated the official line in 2002-3 that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Equally important in both cases was the suppressed context: In the case of Guatemala, the vested interests of United Fruit Company in the ouster of the elected government, the ties of high U.S. officials to that company (including Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles), and the fact that Guatemala was virtually unarmed and posed not the slightest threat to the security of the United States or Guatemala’s small neighbors. In the case of Iraq, major suppressions included the facts that the United States had actually supplied Saddam with „weapons of mass destruction“ when he was attacking Iran, and that he failed to use such weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War because he recognized that the United States could retaliate in kind with overwhelming force—the disclosure of which would weaken the case that his possession of such weapons in 2002-3 posed any threat to this country or Israel, except that of self-defense.

The aggression process not only depends on the domestic media following the official line, marginalizing dissent, and causing the public to believe in the mythical threat posed by the target, it also requires neutralization of any international response that might protect the prospective victim. In the case of Guatemala, its leaders did appeal to the UN in June 1954 for protection against an already-in-process U.S.-organized attack. But with the U.S.’s (and United Fruit investor and former spokesperson) Henry Cabot Lodge president of the Security Council, and the United States exerting intense pressure on its voting members and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, the Security Council refused to consider Guatemala’s case. Hammarskjold, who felt that the issue was precisely what the UN was formed to deal with, considered the U.S. effort „the most serious blow so far aimed at the Organization.“

The decade-long U.S. effort at „regime change“ in Nicaragua during the 1980s involved a boycott, the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, and sponsorship and active support of a terrorist army on its borders, in violation not only of the UN Charter but also the Organization of American States Charter and the Rio Treaty, the latter two quite clear on the illegality of the cross-border use of military force, „directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever“ (OAS), and with proper authorization or „self defense“ the only bases for an exception (Rio). Nicaragua brought these violations to the UN and World Court, but the United States vetoed a Security Council condemnation and ignored several adverse World Court decisions against its „unlawful use of force.“ The Reagan administration could get away with this in part because the establishment media accepted its aggression and violation of international law, encapsulated in the New York Times’s editorial that dismissed the World Court as a „hostile forum“ („America’s Guilt—or Default,“ July 1, 1986)—a lie, but demonstrating that the editors’ principles do not extend to universality of application and that they will apologize for blatant illegality and even aggression by their own state.

U.S. Aggression After the Soviet Collapse

The collapse of the Soviet bloc in late 1989 was greeted in the West by the U.S. invasion of Panama, which received the New York Times’s immediate approval—although the Times did acknowledge that it „fueled enduring Latin suspicions about Washington’s selective respect for sovereignty,“ and expressed the concern that this kind of precedent might be used by less worthy powers to achieve the same effect („Why the Invasion Was Justified,“ December 21, 1989).

But it is with Iraq (1990-), Yugoslavia (1991-1995; and 1999 to today), Afghanistan (2001-), and Iraq again (2003-) that we move into the definitive post-Soviet era, when the international community becomes a more active participant in the aggression process, and the global aggressor is either appeased, abetted—or both.

In the case of Yugoslavia, the U.S.-led NATO bombing war of 1999, assaulting Serbia and Kosovo, was preceded four years earlier by gradually escalating bombing attacks in Bosnia to support Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces, all in violation of the spirit of the UN Charter, but approved by UN secretary-generals and the Security Council. Also notable was the Security Council’s 1993 creation of an ad hoc Tribunal supposedly to bring „justice“ as well as peace to Yugoslavia, but in reality a political and public relations arm of NATO, that functioned to prevent peace in pursuit of U.S. and NATO aims there. It also provided a legal and public relations cover for NATO’s own crimes, most notoriously in its bringing an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic in May 1999, just as NATO was coming under attack for extending its bombing to Serb civilian facilities. This diversionary PR operation was quickly used by the U.S. Secretary of State and her spokesperson to justify NATO war crimes. It goes almost without saying that the UN Security Council failed to question the U.S.-NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia, although it was in violation of the UN Charter and followed a peace conference in France designed to fail and permit the U.S.-NATO attack to proceed.

The war on Afghanistan was launched by the U.S. and U.K. purportedly as an international police action and a reprisal raid against al-Qaeda targets in the aftermath of 9/11, but it also removed the Taliban regime in Kabul and carried the war to the Taliban’s allies in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world. From the outset, Washington defined Afghanistan as a theater in its new global „War on Terror,“ a Cold-War-like framework projected to stretch indefinitely into the future, and useful to the warrior states for disguising their actions in this era of global warlordism. Although the war never received Security Council authorization, it has been prosecuted with UN support from the very start. In the week that preceded this war, the UN joined the cause with a „counter-terrorism“ resolution and a hastily organized conference „to fight the scourge of terrorism“ (Kofi Annan), with terrorism elevated to a „threat to international peace and security, as well as a crime against humanity“ (General Assembly President Han Seung-soo of South Korea). Four days before the war, in clear anticipation of the event, Annan even reappointed Lakhdar Brahimi his Special Representative to Afghanistan; Brahimi’s assignment was to „initiate preparations for the development of plans for the rehabilitation of that shattered country“—not one word warning about the war or taking issue with its illegality. Within the Council itself, a Counter-Terrorism Committee was established; it is now a permanent feature of Council activities. Sentiments to the effect that „armed non-State networks“ such as al-Qaeda „pose a universal threat to the membership of the United Nations and the United Nations itself“ are now commonplace; and efforts to combat such non-state actors have been placed at the top of the UN’s agenda ever since.

Before the end of 2001, the invading military forces had gotten the United Nations to sponsor the Bonn Agreement through which they installed an Interim Authority in Kabul, with Hamid Karzai as its chairman; now six years later, Karzai is the president, having won elections staged by the UN in October 2004. But as with any country in a state of perpetual war, real power within Afghanistan resides with the 40,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-bloc’s second out-of-area operation in the past decade, the first having been Kosovo. The occupation has failed to dismantle the power of the warlords, with whom the United States collaborated in the initial war effort; it has failed to do any substantial rebuilding of this „shattered country;“ and its military focus and civilian-costly methods of warfare have caused substantial losses of life and helped the resurgence of the Taliban. Still, the UN has stood firm as a supporter of the occupation; and as with Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, treats Afghanistan like a laboratory for neocolonial nation-building, helping the occupiers at every turn „to deny the power which they wield and to evade accountability for its exercise.“

The aggression process involving Iraq that began in 1990 was simplified at that time by the fact that Iraq had committed an act of aggression itself in invading and taking over Kuwait in early August of that year. This gave the United States the opportunity to mobilize the UN and international community to oppose an aggression which it disapproved. (Although poor Saddam Hussein might have been misled by the earlier U.S. support of his aggression against Iran, and by U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie’s reassuring him one week before his Kuwait adventure that the United States had „no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.“) But with the actual Iraq aggression the United States quickly got UN and international support for ousting Saddam from Kuwait. Even here, however, there is solid evidence that the United States would not let Saddam escape via a negotiated settlement, but instead forced a war, which means that even in their „legitimate“ case this country’s leaders acted in violation of the UN Charter, which calls for all states to „bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes“ (Article I). There were also serious law violations in both the slaughter of helpless Iraqi soldiers, the use of illegal weaponry, and the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities, knowing that this would take a heavy civilian toll (and would be in violation of the laws of war).

Following the end of the Persian Gulf War in late February 1991, the UN, under U.S.-U.K. pressure, installed a very severe sanctions regime that greatly limited Iraq’s imports and its export of oil. This prevented or greatly hindered the repair of the damaged water and sanitation facilities as well as its electrical plants and grid, irrigation systems, factories, schools and hospitals. This resulted in huge casualties, mainly from disease, poor nutrition and limited health care, especially among children, whose estimated 500,000 deaths from the „sanctions of mass destruction,“ was a price in human lives that Madeleine Albright famously declared on national TV in 1996 to have been „worth it.“ All of this was done under UN authority, although the U.S. and U.K. were the aggressive sponsors of these genocidal sanctions.

With the Bush administration having decided to „go massive“ after the events of 9/11, to „sweep it all up, things related and not“ (Donald Rumsfeld), and to invade and occupy Iraq as well as Afghanistan, it faced the small problem that what it intended to do would be a major violation of the UN Charter, as Iraq had neither attacked nor threatened the United States, so any non-risible self-defense justification was out. The U.S. and U.K., while still making extremely implausible claims about an Iraq threat („mushroom clouds“ over American cities, hidden WMD programs, chemical and biological weapons 45-minutes from launch) and providing a stream of false claims about Iraq’s weapons programs, eventually fell back on Iraq’s resistance to UN inspections. An attack on Iraq would be based on and justified by Iraq’s defiance of UN authority! After all, we cannot dispense with the rule of law!

It is well known that the Bush administration only bothered with resort to the UN under British urging and in the interest of giving an aura of legitimacy to an attack already planned and one that had nothing to do with Iraq’s „non-compliance.“ The UN cooperated in this make-believe scenario with intensified inspections that found nothing but refused to stop looking, to the great annoyance of U.S. officials, whose 160,000 troops and naval armada were already positioned for an invasion and wanted the inspectors and Security Council to sanction war. When they couldn’t get this, they went to war anyway, once again in violation of the UN Charter. Once again also they were helped along by the establishment U.S. and U.K. media, whose members across the board quickly joined the war bandwagon, passing along WMD claims on a daily basis that were untrue or misleading, essentially blacking out dissident views and facts, mini-demonizing the French for their failure to get on board the bandwagon and Hans Blix and the inspectors for failing to produce evidence that didn’t exist.

Two months before the war, aggression-hawks Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk were given space in the New York Times to lament the UN „inspections trap“ that they alleged the Washington regime then found itself „firmly stuck in,“ and counseled that, instead of relying on a „futile hunt for a ‘smoking gun’,“ the world should simply accept that „Every inspection of an Iraqi site that finds nothing reinforces the misimpression that Iraq has complied.“ („How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap,“ January 27, 2003.). The day before the U.S. launched its war, Princeton University’s advocate for U.S. lawlessness Anne-Marie Slaughter invoked the precedent of the 1999 war over Kosovo, also launched without Security Council authorization, and noted that Washington’s imminent war over Iraq „could be called ‘illegal but legitimate’,“ just as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo had found with respect to Kosovo. („Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.,“ New York Times, March 18, 2003.) The same day, the Times itself editorialized that, „For Mr. Hussein, getting rid of weapons of mass destruction is no longer an option….Mr. Hussein must be disarmed.“ („War in the Ruins of Diplomacy,“ March 18, 2003.) This is war propaganda service that would be hard to surpass.

The UN of course never condemned the United States and Britain for this invasion in violation of the UN Charter, even though it was soon recognized in the mainstream to have been based on lies. Not only was there no condemnation, the UN Security Council quickly voted to validate the occupation and gave the aggressor the Security Council’s approval to stay in Iraq and try to bring stability to the victimized country. The UN even created the Assistance Mission for Iraq to help U.S. management there, resulting in the bombing death of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq, Sergio Viera de Mello, and 22 others, as the Iraqi resistance did not view the UN as a neutral party. Subsequently, the UN has done nothing to condemn or attempt to bring to a conclusion an invasion-occupation that has virtually destroyed Iraq, killed perhaps a million civilians, and driven in excess of 4 million Iraqis from their homes.[18] The contrast with the UN’s treatment of Yugoslavia and the U.S.-NATO targeting there of Serbia, could hardly be more dramatic.

The Iran Aggression Process

The current round of threatening Iran dates back to the summer of 2002, a year that opened with Bush labeling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the „axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.“ Already hot on the trail of the apocryphal Iraqi WMD, and proclaiming its new national security doctrine of „preemption“ (i.e., aggression by another name), the White House started floating allegations about a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program, and coupled these with statements of opposition to the „unelected people who are the real rulers of Iran,“ a stance that Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami immediately assailed as “ war-mongering“ and „open interference“ in Iran’s affairs.

The current U.S. preparation for an attack on Iran has many of the characteristics of earlier U.S. aggressions, and the responses of the UN, international community, humanitarian interventionists, and mass media have also been similar. The first striking similarity is the extent to which claims and tactics used earlier but eventually acknowledged to have been based on falsehoods designed to mislead and manipulate have been recycled yet again, with only marginal challenge as to their motive and accuracy. Another is how a double-standard can be applied so effectively that it passes almost without challenge: One standard for the U.S. target (Iran), the Security Council demanding that it surrender its „inalienable“ right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes; another standard for the United States and any country that has U.S. approval (the nuclear-weapon states of Israel, India, and Pakistan, for example; Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs in the 1980s, when he was serving U.S. interests; and even Iran’s nuclear energy program in the late 1970s, when controlled by the U.S.-client dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.).

A third notable feature of the aggression process developing in regard to Iran is that another major violation of the UN Charter by the United States, another „supreme international crime,“ is not only taken as legally and politically unchallengeable by the UN and international community, but is also sanctioned and even given positive aid. It is true that Secretary-General Kofi Annan did plaintively point out on more than one occasion that the 2003 Iraq invasion was illegal—“not in conformity with the Charter,“ in the milquetoast phrase he preferred when dealing with U.S. crimes—but he didn’t suggest doing anything about it. In his first official statement after the start of the war, Annan expressed regret that „if we had persevered a little longer, Iraq could yet have been disarmed peacefully,“ thus repeating the disinformation that had been used by the states that launched their war in violation of the Charter under which he served.

Kofi Annan was very accommodating to U.S. demands, but his successor, Ban Ki-moon, is even more cooperative with the Supreme International Criminal. Not only has he failed to say a word about the U.S. threat to attack Iran, but with the United States now between its third (Iraq) and prospective fourth (Iran) supreme international crime, Ki-moon nevertheless has gone out of his way to claim that the „UN and the US have a shared objective of promoting human rights, democracy and freedom and peace and security,“ and to call for „a strong partnership between the United Nations and the United States.“ Like his predecessor, Ki-moon recognizes who is the boss, and shows no qualms over using his office to help the boss implement his UN Charter violations.

The Security Council also is cooperating with the U.S. process. Mainly it has done this by going along with the U.S. allegation that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to international peace and security, rather than recognizing that in threatening to take military action against Iran if it does not comply with U.S. demands, it is the U.S. that poses the grave threat, not Iran—a threat that would be actionable under Chapter VII of the Charter, were the Security Council able to live up to its legitimate functions and powers. This, too, is a rerun of the Security Council’s effort in late 2002 and early 2003, leading to the invasion of Iraq, when the Council went along with the United States’ alleged concern about Iraq’s noncompliance with the Council’s disarmament resolutions, and patiently voted for an „enhanced inspections regime“ instead of calling the supreme international criminal’s bluff and denouncing its plans for the already decided-upon invasion. Going along with these pressures and demands fed into the U.S. war-propaganda in 2002, just as it does the same today in the run-up to the planned attack on Iran.

Also helpful to the U.S. aggression process today is the work of the IAEA and Mohamed ElBaradei, which closely parallels the earlier efforts of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and its chairman, Hans Blix. The mere existence of an inspections program, and the fact that it can be dragged out for years—on-and-off for a total of eight years in Iraq, and since 2002 in Iran—permits the United States to create the impression that there really is a grave threat and to distract attention from the real threats that it poses, including its own contribution to the spread of nuclear weapons. The inspections regimes have provided the United States with platforms to spread false allegations against Iraq and Iran, the two states that it declared its main targets in early 2002. Just as it was impossible for Blix’s UNMOVIC to refute the U.S.-U.K. allegation that Iraq was „in material breach“ of its disarmament obligations, so, no matter how many times ElBaradei’s inspectors „verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran,“ they will never be able to refute the Alice-in-Wonderland allegation that they still cannot „provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities,“ and that a clandestine nuclear weapon program must be hidden somewhere.

In Iraq’s case, the United States made grandiose allegations before the Security Council that were soon thereafter proven false—but with no affect on its status within the UN, or on its right eventually to lead the Multinational Force there, or the believability of its sequel allegations against Iran.. The United States denounces first Blix and now ElBaradei for unwarranted foot-dragging and appeasement of the targeted states. And of course the establishment media cooperate in this process by treating hyperbolic allegations about the targeted states as no different than real news about them, refusing to give context and expose the real U.S. agenda, and failing to note that Iran’s case today is following the same script that in Iraq turned out to be false.

Among the aggression process’s many modalities, which combine the suppression of critical facts with the repetition of falsehoods, we note here the following:

1. That only rarely is mention made of the striking and ominous parallels between the utterly discredited U.S. and U.K. mobilization campaign in 2002-2003 to rid Iraq of its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and the ongoing U.S. and Israeli mobilization campaign from 2002 onward alleging that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.