Criminalizing self-defense, whitewashing aggression | what's left 8/24/15, 9:16 PM

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Criminalizing self-defense, whitewashing aggression

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By Stephen Gowans

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Washington replied by launching the Gulf War to reverse the
invasion and punish Baghdad for its serial aggressions. Or so Washington said. Iraq was indeed a
serial aggressor, having attacked and waged a long war with Iran in the 1980s, followed by an
invasion of Kuwait. What Washington and the compliant US media minimized was that the US had
prodded Iraq to attack Iran, soon after the country sloughed off US domination by toppling the
Pahlavi regime through which US influence in the country was exercised. With prodding came
military aid to Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction that Washington would later use as the basis
for a murderous sanctions regime that killed over one million Iraqis, many of them children. In 1989,
when Iraq sounded out the US ambassador, April Glaspie, about a possible invasion of Kuwait, she
raised no objection. How odd it must have seemed to Iraq, then, that after fighting one war with US
prodding, and launching another with what seemed like implicit US support, that Washington
should point to Iraq’s serial aggressions as a pretext for launching its own string of anti-Iraq
aggressions beginning in 1990 and lasting to the current day.

The US itself is no stranger to serial aggressions, having intervened militarily in countless countries,
often without provocation and with the sole objective of enforcing US domination. Whereas the
Nazi’s serial aggressions were limited to Europe (and direct military assistance to their Italian allies in
northern Africa), those of the US have been carried out on a global scale. The tenth anniversary of one
such US-inspired aggression, the 78-day Nato terror bombing of Yugoslavia, has recently passed,
without the fanfare usually associated with the exercise of US military power. Where were the media
retrospectives, the self-adulation commending the West for its humanitarian intervention? If any
mainstream news organization ran a story on how much better off Serbia is 10 years after Nato’s
humanitarian bombing, I haven’t seen it. Perhaps the absence is due to the reality that anyone setting
foot in Belgrade today would be forced to confront what Serbia has become – a state dismembered
from a multicultural federation whose once publically- and socially-owned assets have been sold off
to investors and corporations from the same countries that sent their air forces to drop ordnance on
schools, factories, bridges, a radio-TV building, the Chinese embassy, and civilians.

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Perhaps it is because the US has woven a long string of aggressions into its history that its media are
inclined to ignore the aggressions of Uncle Sam’s extension in the Middle East, Israel. When they’re
not ignoring them, they’re excusing them. It is a matter of some astonishment that Israel can launch
attack after attack outside its ceaselessly expanding and amorphous borders and it hardly registers on
the consciousness of North Americans, whose media hide these aggressions in plain view.

Israeli warplanes violated Sudanese airspace in January, on a mission to destroy a convoy of trucks
said to be carrying arms to be smuggled to resistance fighters in Gaza. While Iranian warplanes
bombing a convoy of trucks in Iraq would be met by howls of outrage by the White House and State
Department, Israel’s bombing raid in Sudan was sanitized, even celebrated, in The New York Times,
as a “daring military operation,” and then quickly forgotten. Official enemies launch illegal attacks;
allies carry out daring military operations.

The bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 was another of Israel’s vaunted military
operations. This illegal act remains accepted in Western media discourse as a legitimate operation,
justified as a preventive measure against Iraq acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to official
doctrine, it was only a matter of time before Saddam Hussein acquired the means to send a nuclear
warhead hurtling toward Tel Aviv. What makes this scenario implausible is that such a temerarious
act would trigger an obliterating counter-strike by the United States. Unless you believe the Iraqi
president was insane or had a death wish, neither of which propositions rest on the slightest
evidence, this is pure political fantasy.

Iraq may indeed have intended to develop nuclear weapons, but its reasons for doing so probably (if
indeed it was heading in this direction) had much to do with the reality that Israel, a country with no
shortage of aggressive military operations under it belt, has an estimated 200 nuclear weapons,
receives $3 billion annually in military aid from Uncle Sam, and has a penchant for sending its troops
and warplanes into battle.

Let’s consider Israel’s serial aggressions, all of which have been motivated by the desire to acquire
territory to expand the borders of the Jewish colonial state, or to defend itself against the backlash its
expansionist aggressions provoke. We can begin with the 80 percent of Palestinian territory Zionist
forces seized by force in 1948, after the UN allocated 56 percent to a Jewish state, a more than
generous allotment, considering that Jews made up only one-third of the population, owned less than
10 percent of the land, and were favored by the UN with the fertile coastal areas. There was nothing
fair or legitimate about the UN offer. It was carried out over the objections of the majority, but even
this corruption of justice was not enough to satisfy the Zionist craving for other people’s land.

In 1956, Israel struck a deal with France and Britain to invade Egypt. France was irritated by Egyptian
President Gamal Nasser’s support for the national liberation movement in Algeria, and Britain
wanted the return of the recently nationalized Suez Canal to the hands of British capital. In exchange
for marching on the Suez Canal, France would transfer nuclear technology to Israel, providing the

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Zionist state with the basis for its nuclear arsenal. The operation proved to be a contretemps, with the
US ordering the conspirators to withdraw. But it did demonstrate to Washington that Israel could be a
useful tool in enforcing US foreign policy in the region.

In 1967, Israel seized Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Later, it launched a series of operations in Lebanon beginning with Operation Litani in 1978, aimed at
driving the PLO north of the Litani River. This culminated in an occupation of southern Lebanon that
lasted 18 years, from 1982 to 2000, followed by yet another attack in the summer of 2006. Lebanon
today has the highest per capita debt in the world, largely thanks to the costs of rebuilding
infrastructure Israel destroyed. (1)

Added to Israel’s aggressions are its amply documented violations of the laws of war. Israeli war
crimes are a delicate matter in North America, where politicians and the media either steer clear of
mentioning them, or step nimbly around them, seeking to avoid the inevitable backlash against
anyone who suggests that Israel may not be the shining beacon of democracy in what’s calumniated
as the otherwise benighted Middle East. The British press, The Guardian in particular, show fewer
reservations. Condemnatory reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Israel’s
January 2009 assault on Gaza barely received any attention in the North American media, in stark
contrast to the high profile that similarly condemnatory reports receive when they’re aimed at official
enemies. By comparison, The Guardian covered a February 23, 2009 Amnesty International report
that called on the US to cut off military aid to Israel, because “as a major supplier of weapons to
Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of
the laws of war and human rights.” (2) Last week, The Guardian reported on a Human Rights Watch
investigation that found that Israel had repeatedly and indiscriminately fired white phosphorus over
crowded areas of Gaza, killing and injuring civilians, a war crime. White phosphorus burns through
tissue and can’t be extinguished. It must burn itself out, a process that may take days. In a 71-page
report, the rights group concluded that Israel’s “repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery
shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental.” (3) Significantly, Israel initially
denied it had used white phosphorus. When the evidence became overwhelming, it admitted it had,
but countered that its use was fully in accord with international law. When that was disproved, Israel
announced it would launch its own investigation.

In a move that would be considered foolishly gutsy in the United States, The Guardian undertook its
own investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, concluding that Israel violated the laws of war. (4)
The conclusions drawn by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and The Guardian were
corroborated by Israeli soldiers themselves. An Israeli squad commander said,

“What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can
simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I
looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are
always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a
lot of thirst for blood.” (5)

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Worse than being brutally indifferent to Palestinians, Israeli soldiers are completely morally
calloused, wearing t-shirts bearing messages that evince absolute contempt for Arabs. “A shirt
designed for the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion” depicted “a pregnant Palestinian women with a
bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.’” (6)

While the utter brutality of Israeli troops was being laid bare in the pages of The Guardian, across the
Atlantic, Israeli war crimes were being minimized in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of
record. Foreign correspondent Patrick Martin wrote that the failure to distinguish between
combatants and civilians “is found in almost every military force (think Serbs in Bosnia, Americans at
Abu Ghraib and Canadians in Somali) and has existed as long as there has been war.” (7) What
Martin didn’t point out was that Serbs were prosecuted by Nato’s Hague Tribunal for failures to
distinguish civilians from combatants, but that US and Canadian atrocities – including those in
connection with the terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 — have gone unpunished. Martin also
failed to mention the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for the arrest of Sudanese
President Omar al-Bashir. Omar, too, is accused of war crimes, but unlike those committed by
Americans, Canadians and Israelis, his have become the subject of prosecution by an international
court, one that has yet to issue indictments against anyone but Africans. The court will never
prosecute Americans, Russians, and Chinese, who have chosen not to be bound by the court and are
able, by virtue of being permanent members of the UN Security Council, to veto any Security Council
resolution ordering the court to undertake an inquiry. Likewise, these countries can veto court
inquiries into crimes committed by nationals of allied countries, like Israel, which have also rejected
the court’s authority. War crimes, it seems, are intolerable when committed by countries the West
seeks a pretext to dominate, but when the same crimes are committed by Americans, Canadians and
Israelis, the “everyone is doing it” defense applies.

Meanwhile, as nuclear-armed Israel adds to its string of outrages on the sovereignty of neighboring
countries with its bombing raid into Sudan, the Western media spotlight shines on north Korea, the
northern half of a peninsula whose division was imposed by outsiders, and has never attacked
another country. While official doctrine holds that north Korea invaded south Korea in 1950, it’s
hardly possible for Koreans to have invaded Korea. What’s more, the question of who started the war
– both sides clashed on and off for up to a year before major hostilities broke out – remains murky.
Deciding on what event precipitated the war is like deciding when a hill becomes a mountain. Any
attempt to abstract a discrete event from a complex of richly interconnected events as the cause of the
war is to play with arbitrariness. Even deciding when the war began and ended (has it ended?)
involves an arbitrary demarcation. Hugh Deane argued that the war began in 1945, the moment the
US army arrived and suppressed the national liberation People’s Committees. Conceived as a
struggle to free the peninsula from foreign domination, the war has never ended, and has lasted 99
years.

Korea, it should be recalled, was colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945. No sooner had Koreans
declared their independence, did US military forces arrive to establish a military government, shot
through with former Japanese collaborators. While the Soviets, who agreed to the division of the
peninsula, occupied the north, they withdrew their forces in 1948 and allowed the maximal guerrilla

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leader, Kim Il Sung, to rise to power, rather than imposing their own man, as the United States was to
do in the south, when it brought the anti-communist Sygman Rhee, a long-time US resident, to Korea.
US troops remain on Korean soil to this day.

The reason the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, (DPRK is the north’s official name), is
receiving considerable Western media attention is because it plans to launch a satellite. The
launching, it is said by US officials, and repeated uncritically by the US media, is a cover for testing
an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear payload as far away as the shores of
Alaska. In case north Korea’s launching a satellite strikes anyone as being far from belligerent –
certainly not in the same league as flying bombers into another country to destroy its nuclear facilities
(as Israel did in Iraq and threatens to do in Iran) the new US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton,
assures us that, appearances aside, the launching is “a provocative act.” This is duly reported, but
nobody asks why. Why should the launching of a satellite, even if the rocket technology is dual-
purpose (it can be used to launch satellites and warheads) be provocative? Doesn’t the United States
have rockets, satellites and warheads in abundance? The cause for alarm certainly can’t be because
the DPRK has launched aggressions against other countries. It hasn’t. On the other hand, the United
States and Japan, both with notorious records of employing military force to violate other conutries’
sovereignty, are sounding the alarm. The real reason the DPRK’s satellite launching is depicted as
provocative is the same reason its nuclear test was depicted as provocative. Having nuclear warheads
and the technology to deliver them expresses the threat of potential self-defense.

So it is that the North American media, playing its accustomed role as private propagandist for US
foreign policy, has striven to elevate north Korea’s satellite launching to the provocative act Clinton
says it is. The launching of a satellite has become, in The New York Times’ headlines, a missile
launching (8), inducing the Japanese to ready their missile interceptors. (9) The Washington Post does
The New York Times one better by calling the launching a nuclear test. (10) Even if the DPRK is
testing rocket technology that could be used to deploy a nuclear warhead, is this any more reason to
be alarmed than the reality that Israel can annihilate its neighbors with nuclear weaponry in numbers
and sophistication far greater than north Korea can ever hope to match? The idea that Israel is a
responsible country committed to the stability of the Middle East is a fiction; Israel is the main source
of instability in the Middle East and has been since 1948. Had Zionists not arrived in Palestine to
displace an Arab majority that had lived peacefully with Jews and Christians for centuries, there
never would have been an armed struggle waged by the PLO, or an Islamic Jihad and Hamas to carry
it on once the PLO’s dominant party, Fatah, faltered with a series of capitulations. Nor would there
have been an Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon aimed at destroying the PLO, and
therefore no basis for the rise of Hezbollah. As for the idea that Israeli leaders are level headed, look
at the carnage Israel visited upon Gaza, ostensibly to deter rocket attacks that have killed 20 people in
the last eight years. (11) Or consider this:

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“The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell
rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more
ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. ‘This rabbi comes to us and
says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,’ a reserve sergeant
said, recalling a training camp encounter. ‘His message was clear: ‘This is a war against an entire
people, not against specific terrorists.’ The whole thing was turned into something very religious
and messianic.’” (12)

Lebensraum comes to mind.

While US officials may contrive to regard north Korea’s satellite launching as provocative, it pales in
comparison to the provocation of the United States and south Korea holding annual war games
exercises along north Korea’s borders, this year larger than ever, and after the new government in
Seoul of Lee Myung Bak has departed from the conciliatory line of the previous government,
adopting a decidedly hostile posture.

Lest anyone think that north Korea’s impending satellite launching amounts to even a slight threat,
consider the testimony of US Navy Admiral Timothy J. Keating before the Senate Armed Services
Committee on March 19, 2009. Keating said he does not regard the planned north Korean launching
as a threat. “’It is a normal notification process, which they didn’t do in 2006, when they attempted a
launch from the same facility,’ Keating said. Keating added that U.S. intelligence cannot yet say
whether the launch will be of a communications satellite, as North Korea has asserted, or of a missile
with intercontinental range. But he and two other commanders said they think it will be a satellite
launch because of the public announcements from Pyongyang, including coordinates of the ocean
area where the booster rocket is likely to fall.” (13)

Nuclear armed Israel carries out a massacre in Gaza, backed by a rabbinate echoing the Nazi’s
rationale for territorial expansion, while Israeli soldiers wear t-shirts depicting Palestinians as vermin
to be exterminated, and Israeli warplanes violate the sovereign airspace of Sudan. Soon after, the
hostile Lee Myung Bak government of south Korea, more interested in picking fights with the north
than seeking peaceful reunification, escalates the country’s annual war games with the United States,
aimed at intimidating the north. These aggressive and provocative acts are minimized by the North
American media – either barely acknowledged, sanitized or celebrated. In the meantime, north
Korea’s planned satellite launching is depicted as a provocation meriting stepped up sanctions and
escalated efforts to bring down the government in Pyongyang. It can be hardly doubted that the
North American media are an apparatus of public persuasion in the service of US foreign policy. In its
hands black becomes white, the oppressed become oppressor, serial aggressors become keepers of the
peace, and self-defense becomes provocation.

1. Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, Princeton University Press, 2007.
2. Rory McCarthy, “Amnesty calls on US to suspend arms sales to Israel,” The Guardian (UK),
February 23, 2009.
3. Rory McCarthy, “Israel accused of indiscriminate phosphorus use in Gaza,” The Guardian (UK),

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March 25, 2009.

4. Clancy Chassay and Julian Borger, “Guardian investigation uncovers evidence of alleged Israel war
crimes in Gaza,” The Guardian (UK), March 24, 2009.
5. Ethan Bronner, “Soldiers’ accounts of Gaza killings raise furor in Israel,” The New York Times,
March 20, 2009.
6. Peter Beaumont, “Gaza war crime claims gather pace as more troops speak out,” The Observer
(UK), March 22, 2009.
7. Patrick Martin, “Israel’s principle of purity of arms sacrificed in Gaza, soldiers say,” The Globe and
Mail (Toronto), March 20, 2009​.
8. “N. Korean missile reportedly in place,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.
9. “Japan readies missile interceptor” New York Times, March 29, 2009.
10. “North Korean nuclear test a growing possibility,” The Washington Post, March 27, 2009.
11. Rory McCarthy, “Amid the ruins, a fragile truce and a fragile future for Gaza,” The Guardian
(UK), January 18, 2009.
12. Richard Boudreaux, “Israeli army rabbis criticized for stance on Gaza assault,” The Los Angeles
Times, March 25, 2009.
13. “US could hit N. Korean missile, says commander,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2009.

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Written by what's left

March 29, 2009 at 10:53 pm

Posted in ICC, Imperialism, Iran, Iraq, Israel, north Korea, Palestine

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