When I was a kid I liked to play cops and robbers; I always ended up being one of the robbers and my big sister would be one of the cops. That way she could guarantee that she was the goodie and would of course ultimately triumph. We played cowboys and indians a bit too but she didn’t like that so much because as the elder sibling she needed a clear cut way to show that she was the goodie and I was the baddie and the line was not so clear in cowboys and indians. On the one hand the cowboys are gun toting bullies who are stealing the land of the noble indiginous people but on the other hand the cowboys were americans who were taming the wild west while being attacked by murderous savages. As it was the game taught us that sometimes it’s hard to tell if you are on the side of the right or the wrong: cops and robbers can very easily be transformed into Robin Hood and the nasty Sheriff and suddenly it’s the robbers who are the goodies and the cops who are the baddies.
During the second world war it was easy to tell that we were indeed on the right side, on the one hand we had the murdering nazis who were recklessly invading countries, persecuting their own citizens and generally being quite beastly. The stiff upper lipped brits could take a stand and later on once the beastly Japanese had executed their cowardly raid on Pearl Harbour it was the duty of every follower of Uncle Sam to help put a stop to this evil menace. Then along came the cold war and the west, with their freedoms and democracy, were ever vigilant against the threat of the mighty warmongering red storm. Stories about the treatment of political disidents showed us that we were resisting a threat which would take away our freedom and our trust in the state to protect us. While the two ideologies were incompatible there was still a fairly clear arguement that we were in the right, even if the opposition were not that far in the wrong (because they were not murdering people or invading much).
Roll on to ‘nam and it gets even more cloudy. Within vietnam there were those who were in favour of communism and those who were in favour of the US intervening. The numbers in favour of the US intervening were not that big but the US thought it prudent to save them anyway.
Then we had a reprieve when Gulf War 1 started. We were clearly the good guys because we were rescuing the peaceful and extremely rich nation of Kuwait from being annexed by the nasty big bully that was Iraq. We rolled in there and fired up our shit and then once we had liberated Kuwait we stopped at the border and didn’t lower ourselves to Iraqi standards by invading anywhere.
It all seemed to change on 11/9/2001 when a bunch of freedom fighters pulled off a death star scale attack on the US and global financialism in general. On the face of it we must be the goodies because the attack killed so many people yet that is not a measure of who is right and who is wrong because the US killed many tens of thousands of Iraqis in GW1. The first battle was to get in to the obvious target. Having spent a lot of time fighting the Russians when they were baddies; the Afghani people were clearly goodies so the Taliban had to be named and shamed as the vicious fundamentalist thugs that they were. The fact that they were effectively put into power by CIA meddling during the ’80s was glossed over but let’s not get ourselves all in a toot about that.
Once we had kicked the evil Taliban boogeyman out of power in Afghanistan the battle there was reduced to resistance fighters taking on the evil invading armies and that is why the coverage has dropped a fair bit since 2002.
Then it was time to get on to making those pesky evil Iraqi folk pay for their threatening behaviour. The US does not like anyone getting into their exclusive nukes club because then they have fewer bargaining chips and can’t invade whenever they like. It’s a bit like how they did not want the indians getting guns in the wild west because it was not that sporting if they shot back. The illusion of a threat of WMDs was created and it was all systems full ahead for an invasion and occupation of the country that has around a third of the worlds oil.
During this time the US has also been busy on the home front conducting torture, detention without trial and finding loopholes for any of the conventions that it has pushed for, signed and then not ratified. US soldiers were held by Iraqi forces in clear contravention of treaties of the Hague that Iraq did not sign and this was plastered all over the media as further evidence that they were the baddies yet the propaganda failed to mention that the US is not bound by such treaties either because they did not rattify them and so that means that the treaties are invalid in that conflict. In the last few year a nation has victimised their own citizens for political dissent and had a corrupt and unelected leader in charge. That nation has threatened to use WMDs while developing new ones. The nation I am talking about also refuses to be open with the UN about what chemical and biological weapons technology it has. The warmongering country has invaded and occupied countries and supported the invasion of Palestine by Israel. In fact if this was a war movie the country I am describing would have an army staffed by serious looking men in black uniforms; and yes, it’s the United States.
I don’t mean that the soldiers on the front line are evil. I also don’t mean that the average person at home in Wyoming is evil, or any more evil than a mother in Fallujah who sends her boys off to fight for freedom from the invading hoardes is. The soldiers are just kids doing a tough job for what they have been brought up to believe is right but it’s the political puppet masters that are out of check.
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