Who Rules the World? (5 page)

KILLING WITHOUT INTENT

Another allegation is that Mughniyeh “masterminded” the bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, which killed twenty-nine people, in response, as the
Financial Times
put it, to Israel’s “assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon.”
28
About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Musawi was murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel’s illegal “security zone” in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibchit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another imam murdered by Israeli forces; the helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year-old child. Israel then employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.
29

After the murder of the family, Hizbollah “changed the rules of the game,” Yitzhak Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset.
30
Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some five hundred thousand people out of their homes and killed well over a hundred. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.
31

In the south, 80 percent of the city of Tyre fled, and Nabatiye was left a “ghost town.”
32
The village of Jibchit was about 70 percent destroyed, according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was “to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shiite population of southern Lebanon.” The general goal was “to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them,” as a senior officer of the Israeli Northern Command described the operation.
33

Jibchit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier. Obeid’s home “received a direct hit from a missile,” British journalist Robert Fisk reported, “although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children.” Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the
Financial Times
, “because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets.” Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than ten rounds a minute at times.
34

All of these actions received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the “rules of the game.” And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and a man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and drugged roaches.

The world might find such facts of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Mughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.

Other charges include that Mughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of “the world.” The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel’s High Court of Justice when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence also water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized life).
35

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington’s past peccadilloes, like the missile attack that in 1998 destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
36
The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence it was not a crime on the order of intentional killing.

In other words, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza’s power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware (if we bother to think about it) that it is likely to happen, but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings are regarded rather differently.

If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are “wanted the world over.”

3

The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia

The torture memos released by the White House in 2008–9 elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable—particularly the testimony in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s desperation to find links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, links that were later concocted as justification for the invasion. Former army psychiatrist Major Charles Burney testified that “a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results”; that is, torture. McClatchy reported that a former senior intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue added that “the Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.… [Cheney and Rumsfeld] demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida–Iraq collaboration.… ‘There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder.’”
1

These were the most significant revelations from the Senate inquiry, and they were barely reported.

While such testimony about the viciousness and deceit of the administration should indeed be shocking, the surprise at the general picture revealed is nonetheless surprising. For one thing, even without inquiry it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law—a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration’s “black sites,” or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the “infant empire”—as George Washington called the new republic—extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what’s surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be “a nation of moral ideals” and that never before Bush “have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.”
2
To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.

Occasionally, the conflict between “what we stand for” and “what we do” has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Kennedy’s Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the United States has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.” But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that “transcendent purpose.”
3

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.” Reality is the unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.” What actually happened was merely the “abuse of reality.” To confound the abuse of reality with reality is akin to “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds”—an apt comparison.
4

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the
New York Times
, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book,
The Myth of American Exceptionalism
, by British journalist Godfrey Hodgson, who concluded that the United States is “just one great, but imperfect, country among others.” Cohen agreed that the evidence supports Hodgson’s judgment, but nonetheless regarded as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson’s failure to understand that “America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward.” The American idea is revealed in the country’s birth as a “city on a hill,” an “inspirational notion” that resides “deep in the American psyche,” and by “the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise” demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson’s error, it seems, is that he was keeping to “the distortions of the American idea in recent decades,” “the abuse of reality.”
5

Let us then turn to “reality itself”: the “idea” of America from its earliest days.

“COME OVER AND HELP US”

The inspirational phrase “city on a hill” was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, as he outlined the glorious future of a new nation “ordained by God.” One year earlier, his Massachusetts Bay Colony had created its Great Seal, which depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words “Come over and help us.” The British colonists were thus benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of “the idea of America” from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the American psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il Sung–style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a “shining city on the hill” while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of “humanitarian intervention,” to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, “humanitarian intervention” led to catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first U.S. secretary of war, General Henry Knox, described “the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union” by means “more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”
6

Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement.”
7
The “merciless and perfidious cruelty” continued until “the West was won.” Instead of God’s judgment, those heinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfillment of the “American idea.”
8

There was, to be sure, a more convenient and conventional version of the narrative, expressed, for example, by Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, who mused that “the wisdom of Providence” caused the natives to disappear like “the withered leaves of autumn” even though the colonists had “constantly respected” them.
9

The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed “individualism and enterprise”; settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the respected and influential senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record “of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century,” and urged that it is “not to be curbed now,” as the Cubans too were pleading with us, in the Great Seal’s words, to “come over and help us.”
10