US War Crimes or ‘Normalized Deviance’
By Nicolas J S Davies
EXTRACTS:
”…The normalization of deviance from
the rules and standards that formally govern U.S. foreign policy has been quite
radical. And yet, as in other cases, this has gradually been accepted as
a normal state of affairs, first within the corridors of power, then by the
corporate media and eventually by much of the public at large.
Within the high priesthood that now manages U.S. foreign policy,
advancement and success are based on conformity with this elastic culture of
normalized deviance. Whistle-blowers are punished or even prosecuted, and
people who question the prevailing deviant culture are routinely and
efficiently marginalized, not promoted to decision-making positions.
For example, once U.S.
officials had accepted the Orwellian “doublethink” that “targeted killings,” or
“manhunts” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
called them, do not violate long-standing prohibitions against
assassination, even a new administration could not walk that decision back
without forcing a deviant culture to confront the wrong-headedness and
illegality of its original decision.
Then, once the Obama administration had massively
escalated the CIA’s drone
program as an alternative to kidnapping and indefinite detention at
Guantanamo, it became even harder to acknowledge that this is a policy of
cold-blooded murder that provokes widespread anger and hostility
and is counter-productive to legitimate
counterterrorism goals – or to admit that it violates the U.N.
Charter’s prohibition on the use of force, as
U.N. special rapporteurs on extrajudicial killings have warned.
Underlying such decisions is the role of U.S. government lawyers
who provide legal cover for them, but who are themselves shielded from
accountability by U.S. non-recognition of international courts and the
extraordinary deference of U.S. courts to the Executive Branch on matters of
“national security.” These lawyers enjoy a privilege that is unique in
their profession, issuing legal opinions that they will never have to defend
before impartial courts to provide legal fig-leaves for war crimes…
Let’s take a brief look at how
the normalization of deviance undermines two of the most critical
standards that formally define and legitimize U.S. foreign policy: the U.N.
Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
The U.N. Charter prohibits the
threat or use of force in international relations… No U.S. leader has proposed
abolishing or amending the U.N. Charter to permit aggression by the U.S. or any
other country.
And yet the U.S. is currently conducting ground
operations, air strikes or drone strikes in at least seven countries:
Afghanistan; Pakistan; Iraq; Syria; Yemen; Somalia; and Libya. U.S.
“special operations forces” conduct secret operations in a
hundred more. U.S. leaders still openly threaten Iran, despite a
diplomatic breakthrough that was supposed to peacefully settle bilateral
differences.
President-in-waiting Hillary
Clinton still believes in
backing U.S. demands on other countries with illegal threats of force, even
though every threat she has backed in the past has only served to create a
pretext for war, from Yugoslavia to Iraq to Libya. But the U.N. Charter
prohibits the threat as well as the use of force precisely because the one so
regularly leads to the other.
The only justifications for the use of force permitted under the
U.N. Charter are proportionate and necessary self-defense or an emergency
request by the U.N. Security Council for military action “to restore peace and
security.” But no other country has attacked the United States, nor has
the Security Council asked the U.S. to bomb or invade any of the countries
where we are now at war.
The wars we have launched since
2001 have killed
about 2 million people, of whom nearly all were completely innocent of
involvement in the crimes of 9/11. Instead of “restoring peace and
security,” U.S. wars have only plunged country after country into unending
violence and chaos. The U.N. Charter is still in force, in black and
white, for anyone in the world to read. But the normalization of
deviance has replaced its nominally binding rules with
looser, vaguer ones that the world’s governments and people have
neither debated, negotiated nor agreed to…
Courts martial and
investigations by officials and human rights groups have exposed “rules of
engagement” issued to U.S. forces that flagrantly violate the Geneva
Conventions and the protections they provide to wounded combatants, prisoners
of war and civilians in war-torn countries…
U.S. rules of engagement in
Iraq and Afghanistan have included: systematic,
theater-wide use of torture; orders to “dead-check” or kill wounded enemy combatants;
orders to “kill
all military-age males” during
certain operations; and “weapons-free” zones that mirror Vietnam-era
“free-fire” zones.
A U.S. Marine corporal told a court martial that “Marines consider
all Iraqi men part of the insurgency”, nullifying the critical distinction
between combatants and civilians that is the very basis of the Fourth
Geneva Convention.
When junior officers or
enlisted troops have been charged with war crimes, they have been exonerated or
given light sentences because courts have found that they were acting on orders
from more senior officers. But the senior officers implicated in these crimes
have been allowed to testify in secret or not to appear in court at all, and no
senior officer has been convicted of a war crime…
U.S. rules of engagement
already permit routine
targeting of civilians based
only on cell-phone records or “guilt by proximity” to other people targeted for
assassination. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has determined that only
4 percent of thousands of drone victims in Pakistan have
been positively identified as Al Qaeda members, the nominal targets of the
CIA’s drone campaign…
Although the U.S. government
would not dare to formally renounce the Geneva Conventions, the normalization
of deviance has effectively replaced them with elastic standards of behavior
and accountability whose main purpose is to shield senior U.S. military
officers and civilian officials from accountability for war crimes.
The normalization of deviance
in U.S. foreign policy is a byproduct of the disproportionate economic,
diplomatic and military power of the United States since 1945. No other
country could have got away with such flagrant and systematic violations of
international law…
…as
US General Dwight Eisenhower later warned, the Cold War soon gave rise to
a “military-industrial
complex” that may be the case par
excellence of a highly complex
tangle of institutions whose social culture is supremely
prone to the normalization of deviance…
Advising the President on these
matters are the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the
Director of National Intelligence, several generals and admirals and the chairs
of powerful Congressional committees. Nearly all these officials’ careers
represent some version of the “revolving door” between the military and
“intelligence” bureaucracy, the executive and legislative branches of
government, and top jobs with military contractors and lobbying firms.
Each of the close advisers who have the President’s ear on these
most critical issues is in turn advised by others who are just as deeply
embedded in the military-industrial complex, from think-tanks
funded by weapons manufacturers to
Members of Congress with military bases or missile plants in their
districts to journalists and commentators who market fear, war and
militarism to the public.
With the rise of sanctions and financial warfare as a tool of U.S.
power, Wall Street and the Treasury and Commerce Departments are also increasingly entangled in
this web of military-industrial interests.
The incentives driving the creeping, gradual normalization of
deviance throughout the ever-growing U.S. military-industrial complex have been
powerful and mutually reinforcing for over 70 years, exactly as Eisenhower
warned.
Richard Barnet explored the
deviant culture of Vietnam-era U.S. war leaders in his 1972 book Roots Of
War. But there are particular reasons why the
normalization of deviance in U.S. foreign policy has become even more
dangerous since the end of the Cold War.
In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. and U.K. installed
allied governments in Western and Southern Europe, restored Western colonies in
Asia and militarily
occupied South Korea.
The divisions of Korea and Vietnam into north and south were justified
as temporary, but the governments in the south were U.S. creations imposed
to prevent reunification under governments allied with the U.S.S.R. or China.
U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam were then justified, legally and
politically, as military assistance to allied governments fighting wars of
self-defense.
The U.S. role in anti-democratic coups in Iran, Guatemala, the
Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Ghana, Chile and other countries was veiled
behind thick layers of secrecy and propaganda. A veneer of legitimacy
was still considered vital to U.S. policy, even as a culture of deviance was
being normalized and institutionalized beneath the surface.
It was not until the 1980s that
the U.S. ran seriously afoul of the post-1945 international legal framework it
had helped to build. When the U.S. set out to destroy the revolutionary Sandinista
government of Nicaragua by
mining its harbors and dispatching a mercenary army to terrorize its people,
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) convicted the U.S. of aggression and
ordered it to pay war reparations.
The U.S. response revealed how far the normalization of
deviance had already taken hold of its foreign policy. Instead
of accepting and complying with the court’s ruling, the U.S. announced its
withdrawal from the binding jurisdiction of the ICJ.
When Nicaragua asked the U.N. Security Council to enforce the
payment of reparations ordered by the court, the U.S. abused its position as a
Permanent Member of the Security Council to veto the resolution. Since the
1980s, the U.S.
has vetoed twice as many Security Council resolutions as the other Permanent Members
combined, and the U.N. General Assembly passed resolutions condemning the U.S.
invasions of Grenada (by 108 to 9) and Panama (by 75 to 20), calling the latter
“a flagrant violation of international law.”
President George H.W. Bush and
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher obtained U.N. authorization for the
First Gulf War and resisted calls to launch a war of regime change against Iraq
in violation of their U.N. mandate. Their forces massacred Iraqi forces fleeing Kuwait,
and a
U.N. report described how the
“near apocalyptic” U.S.-led bombardment of Iraq reduced what
“had been until January a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society” to “a
pre-industrial age nation.”
But new voices began to ask why the U.S. should not exploit its
unchallenged post-Cold War military superiority to use force with even less
restraint. During the Bush-Clinton transition, Madeleine Albright
confronted General Colin Powell over his “Powell doctrine” of limited war,
protesting, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always
talking about if we can’t use it?”
Public hopes for a “peace dividend” were ultimately trumped by a “power dividend” sought by military-industrial
interests.
The neoconservatives of the
Project for the New American Century led the push for war on Iraq,
while “humanitarian
interventionists” now use the
“soft power” of propaganda to selectively identify and demonize targets for
U.S.-led regime change and then justify war under the “responsibility to
protect” or other pretexts. U.S. allies (NATO, Israel, the Arab monarchies
et al) are exempt from such campaigns, safe within what Amnesty International
has labeled an “accountability-free
zone.”
Madeleine Albright and her colleagues branded Slobodan
Milosevic a “new Hitler” for trying to hold Yugoslavia together, even as they
ratcheted up their own genocidal
sanctions against Iraq. Ten years after Milosevic died in prison at the
Hague, he
was posthumously exonerated by
an international court.
In 1999, when U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Secretary of
State Albright the British government was having trouble “with its lawyers”
over NATO plans to attack Yugoslavia without U.N. authorization, Albright
told him he should “get
new lawyers.”…
The normalization of deviance
that promoted war and marginalized reason at that moment of national crisis was
not limited to Dick Cheney and his torture-happy acolytes, and so the
global war they unleashed in 2001 is still spinning out of control.
When President Obama was elected in 2008 and awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize, few people understood how many of the people and interests shaping
his policies were the same people and interests who had shaped President George
W. Bush’s, nor how deeply they were all steeped in the same deviant culture
that had unleashed war, systematic war crimes and intractable violence and
chaos upon the world…
A Sociopathic Culture
Until the American public, our political representatives and our
neighbors around the world can come to grips with the normalization of deviance
that is corrupting the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, the existential threats
of nuclear war and escalating conventional war will persist and spread.
This deviant culture is sociopathic in its disregard for the value
of human life and for the survival of human life on Earth. The only thing
“normal” about it is that it pervades the powerful, entangled institutions
that control U.S. foreign policy, rendering them impervious to
reason, public accountability or even catastrophic failure.
The normalization of deviance in U.S. foreign policy is driving a
self-fulfilling reduction of our miraculous multicultural world to a
“battlefield” or testing-ground for the latest U.S. weapons and geopolitical
strategies.
There is not yet any
countervailing movement powerful or united enough to restore reason,
humanity or the rule of law, domestically or internationally, although new
political movements in many countries offer viable alternatives to the path we
are on.
As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned when it advanced the hands of
the Doomsday Clock to 3 minutes to midnight in 2015, we are living at one of
the most dangerous times in human history. The normalization of deviance
in U.S. foreign policy lies at the very heart of our predicament.
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: the
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq". He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in
Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a
Progressive Leader.
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