The Liberal Embrace of War
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
18 May 19
American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the debate.
Now everyone is for regime change
The United States has just suspended flights to Venezuela. Per the New York
Times:
CARACAS The United States banned all air transport with Venezuela on
Wednesday over security concerns, further isolating the troubled South
American nation
A disinterested historian Herodotus raised from the dead would see this
as just the latest volley in a siege tale. America has been trying for ages
to topple the regime of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying for years to
do the same to his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
The new play in the Trump era involves recognizing Juan Guaidó as president
and starving and sanctioning the country. Maduro, encircled, has been
resisting.
The American commercial news landscape, in schism on domestic issues, is in
lockstep here. Every article is seen from one angle: Venezuelans under the
heel of a dictator who caused the crisis, with the only hope a
humanitarian intervention by the United States.
There is no other perspective. Media watchdog FAIR just released results of
a study of three months of American opinion pieces. Out of 76 editorials in
the New York Times, Washington Post, the big three Sunday morning talk
shows or PBS News Hour, zero came out against the removal of Maduro. They
wrote:
Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale
marketing campaign for regime change.
Allowable opinion on Venezuela ranges from support for military invasion to
the extreme pacifist end of the spectrum, as expressed in a February op-ed
by Dr. Francisco Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sachs called An Urgent Call for
Compromise in Venezuela:
We strongly urge
a peaceful and negotiated transition of power rather than
a winner-take-all game of chicken
So we should either remove Maduro by force, or he should leave peaceably,
via negotiation. These are the options.
After the disaster of Vietnam eons ago, American thought leaders became
convinced we lost in Indochina because of get this bad PR.
The real lesson in Vietnam should have been that people would pay any price
to overthrow a hated occupying force. American think-tankers and analysts
however somehow became convinced (and amazingly still are) that the problem
was Walter Cronkite and the networks giving up on the war effort.
Quietly then, over the course of decades, lobbyists pushed for changes. In
the next big war, there would be no gruesome pictures of soldiers dying, no
photos of coffins coming home, no pictures of civilian massacres (enforced
more easily with new embedding rules), and no Cronkite-ian defeatism.
They got all of that by the time we went into Iraq. The TV landscape by then
was almost completely sterilized. Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue were pulled
from MSNBC because they opposed invasion. Networks agreed not to film
coffins or death scenes.
Yet the invasion of Iraq was a failure for the same reason Vietnam was a
failure, and Libya was a failure, and Afghanistan is a failure, and
Venezuela or Syria or Iran will be failures, if we get around to toppling
regimes in those countries: America is incapable of understanding or
respecting foreigners instinct for self-rule.
The pattern in American interventions has been the same for ages. We are for
self-determination everywhere, until such self-determination clashes with a
commercial or security objective.
A common triggering event for American-backed overthrows is a leader trying
to nationalize the countrys resources. This is why we ended up replacing
democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadeq with the Shah in Iran, for
instance.
Disrupting trade is also a frequent theme in these ploys, with a
late-Fifties coup attempt in Indonesia or our various Cuban embargoes key
examples. The plan often involves stimulating economic and political unrest
in target nations as a precursor for American intervention.
We inevitably end up propping up dictators of our own, and the too-frequent
pattern now vividly demonstrated in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan is
puppet states collapsing and giving way to power vacuums and cycles of
sectarian violence. Thanks, America!
Opposing such policies used to be a central goal of American liberalism. No
more. Since 2016, its been stunning to watch the purging and/or conversion
of what used to be antiwar voices, to the point where Orwellian flip-flops
are now routine.
Earlier this month, onetime fierce Iraq war opponent Rachel Maddow went on
TV to embrace John Bolton in a diatribe about how the poor National Security
Adviser has been thwarted by Trump in efforts to topple Maduro.
Regardless of what you thought about John Bolton before this, his career,
his track record, Maddow said. Just think about John Bolton as a human
being.
The telecast was surreal. It was like watching Dick Cheney sing Give Peace
a Chance.
Bolton stood out as a bomb-humping nut even among the Bush-era functionaries
who pushed us into Iraq. Hes the living embodiment of benevolent
hegemony, an imperial plan first articulated in the nineties by
neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.
It involves forcefully overturning any regime that resisted us, to spread
the wonders of the American way to, as Norman Podhoretz once put it, as
many others as have the will and the ability to enjoy them.
When Bush gave his famed Axis of Evil speech about Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea, Bolton prophetically, it seemed gave a speech called Beyond the
Axis of Evil, adding Cuba, Syria and Libya to the list.
Bolton, of course, is also on board with regime change in Venezuela, saying
this is our hemisphere. Echoing the sentiment, Alabama Democratic Senator
Doug Jones said Maduro, and his allies in Russia, need to vacate our part
of the world.
This has all been cast as opposition to Russian support of Maduro. Maddow
was ostensibly reacting to triggering news that Trump was stepping back on
Venezuelan action after a chat with Vladimir Putin.
This isnt about Russia, however. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the
Washington Post were open cheering sections even when it came to endorsing
Trumps original decision to recognize Guaidó. Its been much the same
script with Syria, too, where even the faintest hint of discomfort with the
idea of regime change has been excised from public view.
The social media era has made it much easier to keep pundits in line.
Propaganda is effective when its relentless, personal, attacking, and
one-sided. The idea isnt to debate people, but to create an ick factor
around certain ideas, so debate is pre-empted.
Dont want to invade Syria? Get ready to be denounced as an Assadist. Feel
ambivalent about regime change in Venezuela? You must love Putin and Maduro.
People end up either reflexively believing these things, or afraid to deal
with vitriol theyll get if they say something off-narrative. In the media
world, its understood that stepping out of line on Venezuela or Syria will
result in being removed from TV guest lists, loss of speaking income, and
other problems.
This has effectively made intellectual objections to regime change obsolete.
In the Trump era, things that not long ago aroused widespread horror from
torture to drone assassination to rendition to illegal surveillance to
extrajudicial detention in brutal secret prisons around the world inspire
crickets now.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an exposé about Guantanamo Bay that
should have been a devastating piece of journalism. It showed site officials
building a hospice, because prisoners are expected to grow old and die
rather than ever sniff release. One prisoner was depicted sitting gingerly
in court because of chronic rectal pain from being routinely sodomized in
CIA prisons.
Ten years ago, Americans would have been deeply ashamed of such stories.
Now, even liberals dont care. The cause of empire has been cleverly
re-packaged as part of #Resistance to Trump, when in fact its just the same
old arrogance, destined to lead to the same catastrophes. Bad policy doesnt
get better just because you dont let people talk about it.
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