The nationally narcissistic and racist mindset of the American Empire has long found terrible expression in the mouths of executive branch Democrats. When informed of the criminal and unnecessary nuclear annihilation of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August of 1945, Democratic U.S. President Harry Truman referred to the event as “the greatest thing in history.”[1] The Truman administration dashed off a cold and vengeful press release that read as follows:
“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”
“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces.”[2]
The administration said nothing about the tens of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians whose lives were snuffed out in an instant or about the utter lack of “military necessity” behind the atom-bombing (repeated in the even more senseless nuking of Nagasaki) of already-defeated Japan.[3]
The future Republican President and then top U.S. military commander in Europe Dwight Eisenhower had a different take. As he recalled years later:
"I had been conscious of depression and so I voiced to (Secretary of War Stimson) my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary [emphasis added], and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' …..Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of 'face'. It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." [4]
“The Destruction Was Mutual”
Another great quotation in the Hall of Democratic Party Imperial Shame is Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s statement at a 1977 press conference that the United States owed no apology to Vietnam because “the destruction was mutual”[5] during “the Vietnam War.” Between 1962 and 1975 the world’s richest nation and powerful military state in history (the United States) launched a one-sided imperial assault that murdered 3 million Indochinese (including many Laotians and Cambodians as well as 2 million Vietnamese[6]) and turned vast swaths of Southeast Asia into a wasteland. Yes, the “war” killed tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in “combat” and had a traumatic effect on American life and politics, but Carter’s comment was like saying that “the destruction was mutual” between a homicidal maniac who butchered everyone in a small town and a resident of the town who succeeded before dying in cutting off one of the killer’s fingers in self-defense. “The Vietnam War” has always been a misleading description for what Noam Chomsky rightly described in the 1960s as “the [U.S.] crucifixion of Southeast Asia.”
“The Price is Worth it”: From Albright to Panetta
Who can ever forget the 1996 episode in which Democratic Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes about the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq” “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know,” Stahl asked, “is the price worth it?” Albright replied as follows: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” President Bill Clinton’s top diplomat didn’t even bother to dispute the number.[7] She immediately stated that 500,000 dead Iraqi children were a sacrifice worth making to advance U.S. global goals. As she explained three years later, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.” [8]
We have been given a chilling Albright flashback in an interesting comment on “the Iraq War” by Democratic President Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. A day after visiting Iraq last week, Panetta spoke to reporters in Turkey and said the following, according to a Pentagon newspaper and his department’s own Web site: “There is no question that the United States was divided going into that war But I think the United States is united coming out of that war. We all recognize the tremendous price that has been paid in lives, in blood. And yet I think we also recognize that those lives were not lost in vain. . . As difficult as [the Iraq war] was,” and despite the cost in both American and Iraqi lives, Panetta added, “I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”[9]
More Disastrous Than the Mongols
Let’s be clear about “the price” and who paid. The cost that Panetta believes is “worth it” includes millions of dead,[10] maimed, and displaced Iraqi civilians, a massive destruction of Iraqi infrastructure and public health capacity, an outward exodus of much of Iraq’s professional class, tens of thousands of American soldiers killed and/or injured, and, as left commentator Glen Greenwald notes, “at least $1 trillion spent, contributing to ‘austerity’ so severe that Panetta himself has been urging cuts to core social programs.”[11] According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of the mainstream journal Current History, “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.” [12] All of this happened because of a monumentally illegal and brazenly petro-imperialist U.S. invasion (launched with a spectacular bombing campaign shamelessly advertised by the Pentagon as an effort at Hiroshima-inspired “Shock and Awe”[13]) that was sold on thoroughly false pretenses – on the bogus claims: that Iraq had been involved in the 9/11 terror attacks, that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda, that Saddam’s government possessed a large stock of unconventional “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs), that Iraq posed a serious danger to people in the region and around the world, and (the main justification after the WMD pretext collapsed) that the U.S. sought to export democracy and self-determination to Iraq – a nation with vast petroleum resources Washington sought to control.
It was a blatant and completely unnecessary (to use Eisenhower’s phrase on the Hiroshima bombing) neocolonial war of aggression that Obama and numerous other top Democrats claimed to oppose[14] before its launching and in the elections of 2004, 2006, and 2008. None of the reporters questioning Panetta in Turkey followed up with what might seem an obvious question, asked later on Salon by Greenwald: “If the attack on Iraq was ‘worth it’ — meaning the benefits outweighed the costs — then doesn’t that mean that Democrats (including President Obama) owe George Bush, Dick Cheney and friends a sincere apology for all those attacks they voiced over the years about the war?”[15]
Meanwhile, if anyone cares, leading high-tech “defense” (empire) companies like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed-Martin made a profits killing from the military contracts taken out on the Iraqi people[16] – consistent with Noam Chomsky’s observation 43 years ago that the costs of empire are distributed over the entirety of American society but the gains “revert to a few within.”[17]
“Bugsplat”: “Unworthy Victims” Who “Cannot Be Perceived”
Reflecting on the parallels between Panetta’s “worth it” comment and Albright’s 16 years ago, Greenwald asks Americans to “consider how often U.S. officials announce to the Muslim world, either in essence or, as here, explicitly: yes, our actions extinguished the lives of hundreds of thousands of your innocent men, women and children, but we think it’s worth it. What,” Greenwald asks, “is the inevitable outcome of that message being sent over and over?” [18]
It’s a good question, but how often, really, do those officials explicitly acknowledge the unnecessary deaths of innocents on the wrong side of America’s imperial guns and policies? The more common practice is to simply ignore and delete these officially “unworthy victims,”[19] consistent with the name given to the Pentagon’s computer program for calculating civilian casualties in advance of the March 2003 Iraq invasion: bug-splat.[20] Before their deaths can be called “worth it” in some venues, most of America’s officially unworthy victims are sent down Orwell’s memory hole. They never died at Uncle Sam’s benevolent, blood-soaked hands in the first place. Their murders never happened,
