The Real Importance of the WikiLeaks Release

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – Winston Smith, 1984

In the weeks since WikiLeaks released its treasure trove of Afghan War documents – over 90,000 in all – the reaction can best be summarized as a collective yawn. While the three newspapers publishing the material – The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel – have billed the leak as this generation’s Pentagon Papers, analysts were quick to point out that there is virtually nothing from the leaked documents that has not already been reported. In its broad outlines, the released material hardly seems to qualify as newsworthy; after years of reading about U.S. forces bombing civilians and assassinating people, the latest round of breathless headlines fail to shock. Despite this, however, the material remains of vital importance for a number of reasons.

There is no single “big lie” exposed by the leak – no discussion of oil interests in the region, for example, that would shed light on the U.S. motivation for the war. It is instead a chronicle of smaller deceptions, the countless everyday cover-ups and whitewashes that accompany an occupation force into the field. The strength of the material lies not in its groundbreaking revelations but in the sheer number of incidents it documents, all in chillingly sterile prose: the murdered civilians, callously referred to here as “NC KIA,” or non-combatants killed in action; the falsified press releases, downplaying civilian casualties while inflating the number of enemy dead; the pathetic attempts to compensate the families of the slain; the emphasis on “talking points” and following the official line.

While the clinical language of the after-action reports is horrifying, never acknowledging that the people being killed are anything more than numbers on a page, one experiences a special kind of horror when the military jargon is translated into plain speech. From The Guardian’s account of the bombing of the village of Laswanday:

“The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 U.S. wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.”

Reflect on that for a moment. Six innocent people killed, three children wounded, the statistics rattled off alongside a number of dead animals. And that damning conclusion, which in a few short words illustrates the wanton destruction of modern war: “no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.” But here even those termed the “enemy” are guilty only of defending their homeland from invaders, as we ourselves would do.

Will pages and pages of such accounts turn people against the war? Those who have been cheerleading the bloodshed will continue to do so; those who denounce it will find all the more reason to continue their protests. The leaked material will not convince anyone, in and of itself, that the war is a criminal act of aggression and must be stopped. But that was never where its true potential rested. For those wavering in the middle, who agreed with the war’s original goals but have become disillusioned by the cost, this exhaustive record of death and deception may be enough to push them firmly into the antiwar camp.

But all of these considerations are dwarfed in importance by one simple fact: that the documents were released at all. Whether they are used to make a case against the war or for it, whether the public recognizes the horror contained within those thousands of pages or chooses to look away, the information is now out there. Despite the howls of “national security” from the White House and the Pentagon, and in open defiance of a government that has declared it has the right to assassinate anyone in the world for national security reasons, WikiLeaks went ahead with the release anyway. Those involved in the decision are already paying a steep price. Founder Julian Assange cannot return to the U.S. for fear of arrest. Another WikiLeaks employee was detained for several hours and questioned upon entry. And Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old private accused of leaking the documents, now faces over fifty years in prison for disclosing sensitive information.

George Orwell once wrote, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” This is such a time, and the WikiLeaks documents present such a truth. It may be a truth we already knew, but it is nonetheless heartening to hear that truth repeated in the face of constant, countless lies. In their rush to dismiss the war logs as old news, the analysts missed the point. More important than what the documents actually reveal is the message implicit in their delivery: that citizens have a right to know what their government is doing, even when that government insists on keeping it from them – especially when that government insists on keeping it from them. Orwell was right. In times of universal deceit, the stubborn insistence that two plus two makes four, despite all propaganda to the contrary, remains nothing short of revolutionary.

---

Note: Since this piece was written, allegations have surfaced that WikiLeaks failed to redact the names of Afghan informants working for the U.S. occupation forces, thus opening them up to insurgency reprisals. Assange is surely correct in noting the supreme hypocrisy of the military command’s sudden concern for civilians. He is likewise correct in asserting that many informants have provided intelligence leading to air strikes and assassinations, and thus hardly qualify as innocent parties. But it is impossible to know how many of those exposed informants have blood on their hands and how many only delivered trivial, harmless information in order to ensure their family’s personal security or to curry favor with the occupation forces. A better redaction process must be found – and used – if Assange and his team at WikiLeaks hope to retain their moral authority.

War Crimes and The Wall Street Journal

While Warren Kozak’s op-ed in last Friday’s WSJ is not quite as offensive as the misleading, sensationalist headline on newser.com would lead one to believe (“Japan Should Apologize For Hiroshima”), it still comes remarkably close. Questioning the wisdom of the Obama Administration’s decision to send an envoy to the memorial ceremony at Hiroshima, Kozak criticizes the Japanese government for refusing to acknowledge its blood-soaked World War II record, and rightly so. Ironically, however, as he criticizes the Japanese for failing to come to terms with their own crimes, he simultaneously whitewashes the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result is a disturbing mix of historical revisionism and nationalist excuse-making. To wit:

“It should be noted that when President Harry Truman was considering whether to invade Japan instead of dropping the bombs, his advisers estimated that an invasion would result in one million American casualties and at least two million Japanese deaths. In the strange calculus of war, the bombs actually saved Japanese lives.”

This statement is categorically and demonstrably false, as was discussed in the previous post. The military’s casualty estimates were actually far, far lower; only after the bombs were dropped did Truman start citing the million-man statistic. As a result, Kozak’s claim that the atomic bombings saved Japanese lives and were therefore not only justified, but humane – America’s first atomic-age “humanitarian intervention,” if you will – is a gross distortion of the facts. Perhaps sensing the unconvincing nature of this argument, Kozak attempts to bolster his case by making a number of sweeping generalizations:

“Focusing on the atomic bombs paints the Japanese as victims, like other participants in World War II. They were not. The Japanese, like their German allies, were bent on global conquest and the destruction of other people who did not fit their bizarre racial theories.”

This is truly an astounding statement, staggering in its implications. Are we really expected to believe that all of the women and children and old men obliterated by the bombs were “bent on global conquest” or fervent believers in “bizarre racial theories”? By painting “the Japanese” as a monolithic aggressor, Kozak conveniently denies any distinction between ordinary citizens trapped under totalitarian rule and their militarist leaders. But to Kozak and fellow advocates of total war, there are no distinctions – there is only the Enemy, and the Enemy must be destroyed, by any means necessary.

Kozak goes even further, likening the U.S. envoy’s presence at the Hiroshima memorial to President Reagan’s paying of respects to SS troops interred in a German cemetery – equating the countless thousands killed in the atomic blasts to Hitler’s infamous personal guard. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of those killed by the atomic bombs were civilians, a far cry from the “demented murderers” of the SS that Kozak rightfully castigates. But to acknowledge any dissimilarity between these two radically different groups is a sign of weakness as far as Kozak is concerned:

“Young people today may have a hard time understanding that point because of the moral equivalence and political correctness that have taken over our society, our media and especially our universities. It teaches our children that all countries have good and bad elements within them — something so obvious that it's trite. But this lesson has become so powerful that it is not out of the norm for young people today to believe that, while World War II was certainly horrible, all sides share some blame.”

What other lesson is there to draw from the deadliest war in world history, one from which none of the combatants emerged with clean hands? Atrocities were committed on all sides. Responsibility for those atrocities should be doled out accordingly. Kozak derides this notion as “moral equivalence.” But what else would he have us make of acts that are, at base, morally equivalent? Rather than acknowledge that “all sides share some blame,” Kozak seems to want to persist in the fantasy that the U.S. and its allies were uniquely blameless, that the other side “forced” them to commit this or that atrocity, and their hands remain clean in spite of the innocent blood shed.

This is not unfamiliar territory for Kozak, however. His byline mentions that he has authored a biography of General Curtis LeMay, architect of the Tokyo firebombing, who once admitted he would have been tried as a war criminal if the Japanese had won the war. And a quick perusing of Kozak’s work for the Journal turns up last December’s op-ed “The Real Rules of War,” the sub-headline of which reads: “Sometimes the good guys do commit ‘war crimes.’” The scare quotes around “war crimes” are the least of the problems with that article, which contains this gem:

“Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone's behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won't ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?”

In other words: the Geneva Conventions are nice guidelines, but if they get broken, no big deal. And if they are broken, who has the right to judge, anyway? Stripped of its pathos-laden depictions of the trials and tribulations of war, Kozak’s point is simple: if one does not have military experience, one cannot question, much less criticize, the actions of soldiers on the battlefield. The brilliance of this sort of logic is that it essentially demands that war critics shut up, while a convenient loophole allows armchair generals like Kozak and the rest of the Journal op-ed hawks to continue spouting their pro-war rhetoric. They may not have fought on the battlefield. But then they’re not questioning – or criticizing.

American Exceptionalism and the A-Bomb

One of the more sickening rituals of the American mainstream media rolls around every August, when the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are observed. Today, as they do every year, newspapers across the nation will gravely remind us that another year has passed since the bombing of Hiroshima. Much will be made of the fact that today marks the 65th anniversary of the bombing – the media likes anniversaries that end in fives or zeroes – and the fact that, for the first time, an American delegation is scheduled to attend a memorial ceremony in the Japanese city. The actual attack of August 6, 1945 will be relegated to a brief summary, ending with the solemn reassurance that, whatever unpleasantness resulted, the bomb “ended the war quickly” and may have “saved up to a million American lives.” It’s almost enough to make one forget that it also killed 140,000 men, women, and children, some incinerated in the initial blast, others blinded and horrifically burned, left to die from radiation poisoning. Then the U.S. did it all over again three days later, killing 80,000 more in Nagasaki.

If those last sentences sound harsh, it is only because it is rare to read the human toll of the atomic bombings acknowledged starkly, without excuses or a qualifying statement of some sort. It’s always “Hundreds of thousands died, but we saved millions more.” Or: “Hundreds of thousands died, but we had to end the war quickly.” Or: “Hundreds of thousands died, but the Japanese were going to fight to the death. There was no other way.” While that may be a comforting thought, a look at scholarship on the subject demonstrates that there were most definitely other ways. They simply weren’t tried.

The scenario facing America’s wartime leaders during the summer of 1945 has been pitched as a choice between dropping the atomic bombs or launching a full-scale invasion of Japan. While that sort of impossible decision may be appealing from a public relations standpoint, making the destruction wreaked by the bombs more palatable to the American public, these were not the only options available. Indeed, the much-dreaded invasion of Japan was not inevitable and may not have even been necessary.

As Howard Zinn revealed in his A People’s History of the United States, the U.S. leadership was highly aware that – far from fighting to the last man – Japan’s surrender was imminent. Blockaded, its navy and air force decimated, its army forced to conscript civilians into irregular units, there was no way out for Japan’s militarist leaders, and they knew it. The U.S. government knew it, too. The Americans had been intercepting and decoding Japanese messages, and were aware that Japan had sought help from the Soviet Union to mediate a negotiated peace with the Allies. But the U.S. insisted on an “unconditional surrender,” and there would be no negotiations.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, cited by Zinn, makes the situation abundantly clear. Commissioned to assess the effectiveness of the military’s bombing campaigns, the Survey released shortly after the war a report on the atomic attacks, which read in part:

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, who served as Chief of Staff under President Truman, later wrote in his memoirs, I Was There:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

The oft-repeated claim that an invasion of Japan would have cost between half a million and one million American lives has likewise been debunked. Professor Barton J. Bernstein of Stanford University, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, drew attention to the fact that it wasn’t until after the war that government officials started producing such large casualty figures. In his article A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved, Bernstein points out that during the war, U.S. military strategists openly rejected those projected losses: “In fact, in early June 1945, when a layman suggested such a high number as a half million dead, army planners bluntly replied in a secret report: ‘[such an] estimated loss . . . is entirely too high.’”

The Joint War Plans Committee, charged with drawing up invasion plans, estimated between 25,000 and 46,000 U.S. deaths depending on the particular invasion scenario – at its high end still not even a tenth of the 500,000 American lives that Truman would later claim to have saved, and nowhere near the one million that would soon enter the popular lexicon. Why the discrepancy? In his article, Bernstein postulated why the figures grew so inflated in the years after the bombings:

“Perhaps in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman developed a need to exaggerate the number of U.S. lives that the bombs might have saved by possibly helping render the invasions unnecessary. It is probably true, as he contended repeatedly, that he never lost any sleep over his decision. Believing ultimately in the myth of 500,000 lives saved may have been a way of concealing ambivalence, even from himself. The myth also helped deter Americans from asking troubling questions about the use of the atomic bombs.”

Bernstein’s last statement makes clear why we do not often hear about the contents of these military reports, which strike down the foundational myths of the pro-bomb crowd: that Japan was not willing to surrender, that an invasion was necessary to compel that surrender, and that the human costs of such an invasion would have been in the millions. When these myths are shattered, the case for the bomb crumbles.

There are some who, totally convinced of the righteousness of the atomic slaughter, will blissfully disregard such information. Rather than acknowledge the truth, they will reassure themselves that war is hell, that civilian casualties are inevitable, and that the bombings cut short a terrible war and ultimately saved more lives in the long run. One can only ask of such people, at what price? If one can justify the incineration of two hundred thousand innocent people on the grounds of winning a war quickly, what then cannot be justified? Where does one draw the line?

One soon realizes that no such line exists. If the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be justified as a matter of necessity, then any atrocity can be justified, regardless of the scale of death and destruction involved, because those committing the atrocities invariably view themselves alone as exceptional and their actions as necessary. Defenders of the bomb would no doubt scoff at the prospect of comparing American atrocities to those committed by the Germans or Japanese – the perpetrators were Americans, after all, their country unique among the nations, and therefore inherently incapable of doing wrong. Yet the murder of innocent people remains an outrage, no matter the nationality of the murderers. Such atrocities cannot be justified; they can only be condemned. The only rational response is to denounce the murder of innocents on all sides. It is a universal standard, applicable to all peoples and nations – and America is no exception.

"A Sin and a Shame"

Bob Herbert proves once again why he’s arguably the only New York Times columnist worth reading, with this excellent analysis of how corporations used the recession as an excuse to lay off unnecessarily large numbers of workers and reap massive profits in the process.

Note how he tackles the same subject as Zakaria, but, unlike his reflexively pro-business counterpart, correctly diagnoses the problem – corporate greed – and calls it what it is: “a sin and a shame.” Rather than spinning the numbers into a free-market parable, Herbert addresses the ugly reality that Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, pointed out recently: “Higher corporate profits no longer lead to higher employment.”

That piece can be read here. But just another word on Herbert, who is far and away the best writer on the Times op-ed staff. While his critiques usually don’t stray too far left of the mainstream, he writes with a profound sense of common decency that is utterly lacking among fellow NYT columnists like Thomas Friedman (of “Suck on this, Iraq” infamy) and David Brooks, who memorably opined that Haitian culture, and not the island’s history of exploitation by colonial powers, was to blame for the country’s endemic poverty. Whether Herbert is lamenting the escalation in Afghanistan or defending the working class, his work marks a refreshing change from the pro-war, pro-corporate screeds that so often populate the Times. Good for him.

Newsweek's Economic Fix: Give Business More Power

U.S. corporations are still making a killing, recession be damned. And – shockingly – they’re not spreading the wealth. In his recent article “Obama’s CEO Problem,” Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek points out that “the Federal Reserve recently reported that America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash on their balance sheets.” This figure, he notes, “is higher than it has been in almost half a century.” But here’s the kicker: “And yet, most corporations are not spending this money on new plants, equipment, or workers.”

Could this be another reminder – as if we needed it – that the long-discredited theory of trickle-down economics doesn’t work? That rather than re-invest their riches to create working-class prosperity, Big Business tends to pocket the money, cut workers and costs, and jack their profit margins even higher, as happened during the Reagan years? Only to Establishment darling and self-proclaimed “centrist” Zakaria would this come as a shock.

But don’t take my word for it. Zakaria, in his infinite wisdom, has already foreseen this reaction and sagely warns that “the populist left will surely scream that the last thing we need to do is pander to business.” No, the real problem here, Zakaria writes, is that the private sector views President Obama as fundamentally “anti-business.” Why the distrust? Zakaria goes on to quote a handful of unnamed “business leaders,” who recite a litany of tragic wrongs done them by the Obama Administration. Among them are these grave injustices: “Obama had no businessmen or women in his cabinet” and “he rarely consulted with CEOs.”

Not to sound like a member of the screaming populist left, but does anyone apart from Zakaria’s nameless “business leaders” – and the most dedicated of Obama’s Kool-Aid drinkers – really believe that Big Business no longer has a voice in D.C.? The notion that Obama has miraculously banished lobbyists from the Beltway is ludicrous. Corporate influence is so strong that the line dividing the private and public sectors has all but disappeared (to the extent that there’s ever been a line, that is). And given the revelations that have surfaced since the Deepwater Horizon spill – which found that, in one case, an industry employee was sleeping with a federal regulator – is even more entanglement between business and government really the solution to our continuing economic woes?

But that’s not all. Of particular concern to Zakaria’s captains of industry is the “uncertainty surrounding regulations and taxes,” especially the havoc that “the myriad new laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington” will wreak upon corporate profits. One poor CEO lamented that “his company had lawyers working day and night trying to figure out the implications of all these new regulations.” The average American is expected to sympathize.

Zakaria attempts to temper these criticisms, stating that “most of the business leaders I spoke to had voted for Barack Obama.” While Zakaria clearly mentions this to prove his corporate contacts aren’t raving Tea Party fanatics, the line says more about Obama than it does any of Zakaria’s unattributed sources. Despite his “anti-business” label, Obama was during the election and remains today a creature of the Establishment. If there are any remaining doubts on that front – and by this point in the game, there should not be – that ringing endorsement by the American business community should put them to rest.