Por Melvin Goodman
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| Photo by John Warg |
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 is the best example of the triumphal portrayal of American history, portraying the bombs as necessary to ending the war and saving American lives by preventing a costly land invasion. Sadly, the dropping of the bombs on Japanese cities—and not military targets per se—conforms to the definition of terrorism. Such a definition states that targeting civilians in order to place pressure on governments and governing leaders is a form of terrorism and constitutes a war crime.
On the 50th anniversary of the bombing campaign, the National Air and Space Museum tried to present an exhibit of the first use of an atomic weapon by featuring the fuselage of the Enola Gay. The exhibit was designed to explain the weapon that brought peace and victory to the Pacific as well as to show the destruction and fear that was created. The criticism of this two-fold approach from the Air Force Association and other military lobbying groups forced the museum to cancel the historical narrative and to introduce a bland and upbeat description of the Enola Gay.
The past 80 years have witnessed numerous examples of the use of force that found the initial critics pushed to the sidelines and dismissed as contrarians. The wars against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, against Iraq in 2003, and the war against Iran were justified by deception and outright lies to gain the support of the American people. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1965 to justify the troop buildup in Vietnam was based on the false notion of a Vietnamese naval attack against the U.S. Navy. The resolution gave Presidents Johnson and Nixon open-ended blank checks to wage war in Vietnam, where 58,000 U.S. military members and more than two million Vietnamese were killed.
The lies that accompanied the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had an impact on the entire national security community, particularly the intelligence community. Just as American journalists initially defended the war in Vietnam, the journalist community bought into the accusation that Iraq had nuclear weaponry and that Saddam Hussein was linked in some way to Osama bin Laden. Neither accusation was true, and I did my best to inform journalists of the disinformation that was being circulated. More than 4,000 U.S. military members and several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians died in the war. No evidence of a nuclear weapons program or a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were ever found.
Although the United States is not directly engaged in the war between Russia and Ukraine, U.S. policy toward East Europe, including Ukraine, played a role in President Putin’s decision to invade in 2002. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations that conducted the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is one of the “roots” of the war that Russian leaders cite. The expansion of NATO repudiated the guarantees that President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker gave to their Russian counterparts to abstain from incorporating former member states of the Warsaw Pact into NATO.
In the 1990s, I was one of the contrarians who argued that Russian leaders would not accept the continued absorption of former Soviet client states into a political and military alliance such as NATO. And now, Putin or any likely successor will demand security guarantees as part of any settlement with Ukraine. The conventional wisdom, however, is that Putin is preparing for additional military activity in Eastern Europe in the wake of any settlement with Ukraine.
Americans generally assume that there is a purity of purpose to U.S. use of force, but the picture is far more complicated than that. Criticism of the use of force should not be considered marginal or inconvenient. Until we understand the nature and risks of our military actions, there will be more setbacks and losses than are necessary.
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.
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