What An Invisible War Can Teach Us About the Russia War in Ukraine, and Ourselves
On February 24th, Russia violently invaded Ukraine, attacking both military and civilian targets, sparking a conflict that Western countries have unanimously determined to be a war of aggression. Already, thousands of people have been killed, thousands more have been wounded, and more than 1m Ukrainians have been driven from their homes. We are witnessing the biggest refugee crisis on the European continent since WWII.
The global reaction to this war has been equally unprecedented. 141 countries voted to condemn Russia’s invasion and called for immediate withdrawal from Ukraine. The U.S., European Union, and their allies, including Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK have joined forces in an attempt to cut Russia off from the global economy. Their sweeping set of collective sanctions have embargoed most trade with Russia, cut 7 Russian banks out of the SWIFT transaction network, and frozen the assets of financial institutions and oligarchs connected to Russia.
The US raised the bar on anti-Russia sanctions, prohibiting Russian oil from entering U.S. markets, as well as banning Russia’s largest financial institution, Sberbank.
"We will limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds, and yen," US President Joe Biden said on day 1 of the war, "We're going to stop the ability to finance and grow the Russian military. We're going to impair their ability to compete in a high-tech 21st-century economy."
At least 300 US-based corporations followed suit. Companies like Disney, Apple, McDonalds, Starbucks, Coke, Pepsi, Hilton, and even Goldman Sachs have stopped doing business in Russia. They cited moral reasons but of course this was largely a fait accompli. For all US businesses, except media companies protected by the Berman amendment, business in Russia was no longer legal, or viable, due to the sweeping set of OFAC sanctions.
This speed and scale of this economic untangling of Russia from the West is like nothing we’ve ever witnessed in human history.
It is entirely reasonable to argue that these multilateral, coordinated economic salvos being lobbied against Russia are justified given the level of human suffering we’ve already witnessed in Ukraine. Sanctions, like war, are a tool of diplomacy. They do not always lead to the desired political change (ie. Iran, Iraq, Cuba) and when effective can take many years (ie. South Africa). That said, there is a sound logic that these measures will weaken Russia’s economy and therefore mitigate Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine, sparing countless lives and protecting the sovereignty of an independent, democratic nation.
What makes less sense is why the West has unleashed such outrage and condemnation against Russia, in support of the Ukrainian people, while an equally heinous war in a different part of the world received virtually no Western condemnation, and on the contrary - received plenty of Western support.
This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, pitted a strong, energy rich country armed to the teeth against a considerably weaker, poorer neighboring country.
This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, was a war of aggression designed to meddle in and influence the internal politics of a sovereign country.
This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, featured an aggressor that was willing to win by any means necessary, including by targeting innocent civilians and children.
This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, was led by a regime that regularly violates the rights of citizens, imprisons and murders political opponents, dissidents, and journalists.
This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, was partly paid for by you and me, with every trip to the gas station, or cheap flight, or Amazon purchase that indirectly funnels money to the OPEC cartel.
This war, like Russia’s war against Ukraine, directly benefited U.S. weapons manufacturers, by deploying U.S. made weapons and military equipment in the battlefield, leading to lucrative, new purchase orders.
The war is, of course, the Saudi-led war against Yemen, which started in 2015, and has continued for more than 7 years, through early 2022. The exact numbers are hard to come by, due to the lack of coverage or focus on this war, but a U.N. panel presenting to the Human Rights Council estimated that the Saudis have killed or wounded more than 18,000 civilians in Yemen since March 2015. Notably, half of all civilian casualties in this war were children. According to the UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, 1 in 8 Yemenis have been displaced by the war. That’s more than 3 million people.
Notably, the U.S. and UK’s reaction to this war was completely different from their reaction to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. No sanctions were leveled against Saudi Arabia. No freezing of Saudi assets. No moral outrage from politicians or corporations.
On the contrary, the U.S. and UK both supported the war effort by providing arms and critical intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition that regularly murdered children using American or British made bombs and drones. We know, that in August 2018, a laser-guided Mark 82 bomb sold by the U.S. and built by Lockheed Martin was used in the Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a school bus in Yemen, which killed 51 people, including 40 children. In another incident resembling the recent Russian strike on the maternity hospital in Mariopol Ukraine, which killed 3 people, the Saudis bombed the Abs hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, which killed at least 15 people and destroyed the only modern health care facility in Northern Yemen.
It gets worse.
The Saudis have used highly controversial weapons that are banned by most countries in the world, but are made in the U.S. and sold to the Saudis. They used American-made cluster bombs at least twice, harming civilians. Photographs from the scenes of these attacks show that they were CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapons, manufactured by the Textron Systems Corporation in the United States. Additionally, the Washington Post reported that Saudi Arabia used American-supplied white phosphorus on Yemen in 2016, though it is unclear whether they used it against civilians.
It gets even worse.
Since the Saudis controlled the Yemeni government and central bank, they were able to print hundreds of millions of Yemeni rial, effectively devaluing the currency and wiping out the savings of the Yemeni middle class in one fell swoop. They then blockaded the entire country from receiving food and medicine, leading to a food crisis and a cholera outbreak. The Saudi blockade on Yemen, already one of the poorest countries on earth, pushed more than ten million innocent Yemenis to the brink of famine, causing 85,000 Yemeni children under age 5 to starve to death between 2015 and 2018.
The volume and severity of the war crimes committed by the Saudis - aided and abetted by the US and UK - over the course of their 7+ year campaign in Yemen should be crystal clear.
Why then would the Americans and British actively support one morally heinous war and condemn another ?
The answer is as complex as war itself. It's important to note that no two wars are the same, and we have no idea what will happen in Russia and Ukraine over the next few months or years.
The purpose of analyzing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen is not to draw a perfect comparison or model, but rather to use it as a prism to reveal some fundamental truths about how foreign policy decisions get made and the nature of our biases.
To that end, let's examine some of the reasons why the West, and the US and UK in particular, have had such polar opposite political reactions to these two wars.
Russia is more than simply a U.S. competitor, but, we have been conditioned to believe, a beast we should fear. American foreign policy wonks referred to Russia during the post Cold War glasnost era as a sleeping bear. This time of Western optimism about Russia, which in theory would lead to the building of open and transparent democratic institutions after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, did not go according to plan. Under the former Soviet KGB boss Vladimir Putin, Russia moved farther and farther away from democracy. And that “sleeping bear” is now awake and angry, with a large arsenal of nuclear weapons embedded in its claws.
Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is a curiosity, a desert kingdom of nomadic Bedouins that had the blessing (or curse) of settling on top of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. Saudi Arabia has since become one of the most important business clients for large American companies, who sell the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American made military vehicles, weapons and spy craft lessons from the NSA. The United States is the largest exporter of weapons in the world, with the largest weapons manufacturing industry in the world, and Saudi Arabia is typically the U.S.’s biggest client.
Saudi Arabia is also, of course, a vendor in its own right, selling approximately 555,000 barrels per day to the United States, about the same as Russia. In recent years the U.S. drastically reduced dependencies on Saudi and Russian oil, getting most of its oil from Canada and from domestic production, so this is likely less of a factor.
The state department and the foreign policy blob’s justification for our involvement in Saudi Arabia is that the U.S. needs to support the Saudis because they are a counterbalance against Iran. The trouble with that argument is that we’ve seen some strong evidence that the Houthi rebels fighting Saudi Arabia are not actually an Iranian proxy. There is no evidence to suggest that this war in Yemen hurt Iran.
This leads us back to the main driving force behind our differing position on these two
countries: Money. The US values Saudi money far more than it values anything Russia can produce. Additionally, Russia, as the #2 arms dealer in the world, is a top U.S. competitor for future arms deals.
Realpolitik, the idea that nations will always prioritize their own narrow interests rather than ideologies like humanitarianism, has shaped American foreign policy since at least WWII. America’s version of realpolitik has been driven less by territorial ambitions than by commercial ones. As long as the United States functions as a military with a government attached to it (see pie chart below), we will see the military and its network of contractors and subcontractors, with disproportionate control over U.S. foreign policy.
Supporting U.S. corporate interests with ethically questionable arms deals is a unifying principle for both Republicans and Democrats.
President George W. Bush sold $20B worth of American weapons to Saudi Arabia, but this was a drop in the bucket compared to domestic weapon purchases during his presidency. Bush’s “war on terror” was a boon for weapons orders and military equipment paid for and used by the U.S. government, which funneled tens of billions of dollars into the balance sheets of Carlyle Group, Halliburton (former company of VP Dick Cheney), Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others, to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2016, President Obama approved the most lucrative arms deal in US history with Saudi Arabia, worth $115B, in weapons, military equipment, and equipment, presumably used for the war in Yemen. Obama, of course, deployed his own weapons on Yemen too, with no approval from Congress. Obama ordered countless drone attacks on the country, supposedly targeting Al-Qaeda terrorists but in many cases, killing innocent civilians. In what is now seen as one of the first indicators of a new Cold War, Obama armed the Syrian rebels who were fighting against the Russians directly, in a failed effort to depose Bashar Al Assad.
Not to be outdone by Obama, on his first trip abroad as President, Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia to lock in his own $350b arms deal, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia had just murdered the journalist Jamal Khashogghi. In typical Trump fashion, after the murder, he refuted the findings of a CIA report and defended Mohammed Bin Salman, shaking hands with the murderer during their next meeting. He later bragged to Bob Woodward that he “saved MBS’s ass”.
By the time Biden took office, the CIA declassified the Khashogghi file and the Saudis began winding down their brutal war in Yemen.
Interestingly, while campaigning for President, Biden blamed MBS directly for the murder of Khashoggi, calling the Saudis a “pariah” with “no redeeming social value.” These statements scored political points from liberals, but ultimately were just political rhetoric. In his first true foreign policy test as President, he made the same decision as his predecessor, President Trump -- to let MBS off scot free. For the crime of bone sawing and dismembering a prominent member of the American press corp, MBS did not get even a slap on the wrist from an American president.
Joe Biden eventually went on the record saying that would be stopping U.S aid to Saudi Arabia for their war in Yemen, banning “offensive” weapons deals. It was a convenient thing to say during a ceasefire, supposedly due to COVID.
But now the war is picking up again, with devastating airstrikes in January 2022 on a Sanaa detention center that killed 90 more people. Last year, Biden appeared to go back on his word, approving a $500m deal for Chinook, Blackhawks and Apache helicopters, including 2 years of training from 350 U.S. contractors to advise the Kingdom on how to use them. Will the US actually turn down another $100B+ deal to Saudi Arabia should the war pick up again ?
We shall see.
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Since it began, the Russian war in Ukraine has been dominating the airwaves and newsmedia. In this sense, the contrast to the Saudi war in Yemen, labeled the “Forgotten War” by Amnesty International, could not be starker. The idea that this was a “Forgotten War” is a misnomer. You can’t forget something you never knew about in the first place.
This war was more like “The Invisible War” in how it played out in the West.
It was very real, but the corporate media essentially acted as if it was not happening. Even the most popular liberal cable news network, MSNBC, according to an analysis on media bias by FAIR, only mentioned the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen once in the entire year of 2017. It failed to mention even a single time Yemen’s cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.
So why is Russia's invasion of Ukraine such a massive story in the West while the brutal 6-year Saudi war in Yemen barely got any coverage?
It’s an important question, but tricky to answer.
In its coverage of Russia, some members of the corporate media have provided some helpful context for understanding the discrepancy.
CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv Charlie D’Agata said in the early days of the war: “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
This is essentially a nice, liberal person’s smug way of talking about “shithole countries.” He was essentially saying that in the Middle East, mass murder is a feature, not a bug, whereas in civilized Europe, it's the inverse. It’s not necessarily a racist comment, but is rooted in a very backwards, short sighted understanding of history. Remember, it was Europe, not the Middle East that earned the 21st century the ignominious title of “bloodiest century in human history.”
He later apologized after getting skewered on Twitter.
In another interview, Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, said on the BBC:
“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his rockets,” Sakvarelidze said.
The BBC presenter responded: “I understand and of course respect the emotion.”
This tacit acceptance by a state broadcaster of the idea that non-blonde haired, blue eyed European people are somehow more acceptable to be killed is chilling and as racist as it comes.
Clearly, for some Western journalists and pundits, white, Christian kids getting murdered in Europe is a surprising, gripping story. Whereas brown skinned, Muslim kids getting murdered in the Middle East is a mundane non-story.
There is a colonel of truth about the implicit biases in the Western media stemming from pure and utter racism.
But is this abundance of coverage and attention for Ukraine just racially motivated ?
Citing “race” as the only, or even primary, reason would be too simplistic an interpretation.
Again, examining these two wars in parallel can help.
Do Americans feel the need to defend Ukraine more than Yemen because it is more democratic ? Maybe. There is no question that shared norms could be a factor.
This is true for cultural ties like Christianity as well.
What about the economic integration factor? Do Americans care more about Ukraine because we have more trading relationships with Ukraine than Yemen? The U.S. buys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of iron and steel from Ukraine every year. Ukrainian software engineers develop some of our favorite apps. Certainly business relationships compel countries to pay attention when their suppliers or vendors are under attack. This is another compelling factor.
Is Zelensky more marketable than Yemeni Houthi rebel leader Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi? No doubt. There will certainly be some “Great Man” theories to follow this war should David continue to upset Goliath.
Another factor to consider is that foreign journalism is hard, and expensive. Foreign bureaus shut down all over the world in the early aughts, leaving networks of freelancers to pick up the slack. Mechanically, producing news in these places has still proved difficult, particularly in chaotic war zones like Yemen. Ukraine is a much easier place for journalists to parachute into.
Timing is another consideration. During the Yemen war, the U.S. was distracted by fighting in not one or two, but three wars in the same region at the same time, thousands of miles from the United States, packaged as “nation building exercises” in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
Who had the bandwidth to even think about a 4th war in the Middle East? Yemen was that 4th war.
There is also the question of Saudi influence over U.S. media. The Saudi Kingdom had a significant ownership stake in Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp from 1987-2015. One can only imagine what that meant in terms of Fox news coverage of significant Saudi events like 9/11 leading all the way until the Yemen War. Years later, two Twitter employees were caught spying for Saudi Arabia, which has a significant ownership stake in the company.
As Afrah Nasser, an independent Yemeni journalist, told DW,
“Yemenis' blood means nothing when Saudi's cash is on the table and if you're a foreign journalist, some big media outlets won't buy your story because they don't want to annoy the Saudis."
There could be some truth to this given the corroding influence of money on all things, including journalism.
The media business is still a business at the end of the day. Just as Trump brings in controversy, eyeballs, and revenue, so does Russia. In that same year of 2017, when Yemen did not get mentioned more than once, MSNBC, the same network analyzed by FAIR, was caught up in Donald Trump impeachment fervor. Since Russia was a protagonist in this drama, it was a ratings bonanza. We know that MSNBC mentioned Russia or Russians, 1385 times in 2017
Let’s face it. Dead, brown kids in far away countries don’t sell papers like stories of celebrity presidents being extorted with pee pee tapes by the Russians.
To say that the mainstream media has failed in its most fundamental mission is a gross understatement. Even if there is a strong bias in society towards Europe in American society, shouldn’t media organizations whose missions are purportedly to tell the truth actually do so?
And now, these same media executives are chomping at the bit to bring us a war they know people will pay to see and understand.
For US media executives, Russia and the prospects of a second Cold War has the potential to be very profitable. Putin’s war is kind of like the return of Darth Vader in Star Wars. It’s a familiar trope that is known to bring drama and suspense to the masses. The characters and plot are essentially the same. The story is the same. The weapons and technology are more advanced. Substitute Putin for Gorbachev, Biden for Reagan, introduce a new David-like figure in Volodymir Zelensky, fighting the Russian Goliath, and we’ve got ourselves quite a sequel.
Joe Biden, who has been unable to rally Americans for the first two years as president, has finally found a bipartisan theme to potentially bolster his presidency. If we can’t fight a new war ourselves, then let's at least unite around our hatred and fear of Putin and Russia. Oddly, the Ukrainian flag is bringing Americans together in a way nothing else has in recent memory. Biden is ready to play his role. He will use the corporate media to position the U.S. as a humanitarian force for good, casting himself as the archetypal Hans Solo character doing what he can to save Ukraine.
Regardless of the packaging of this effort and the true motivations of the US foreign policy machine, in this war at least, the U.S. is on the right side of history for staunchly opposing this violent, Russian invasion.
But as the world realigns in its wake, with the US and Europe on one side, and Russia and China, presumably, on the other side, it is critical that US citizens, and everyone in the world for that matter, see US foreign policy actions and media bias for what it is.
The Saudi-Yemen war should serve as a reminder that even in the 21st century, human rights abuses can be committed in plain sight by Western superpowers with no mention of them in the nightly news.
Westerners today marvel at the fact that Russians inside Russia know so little about a war their country is waging. Yet, for 6 years, Americans knew practically nothing about a war in which the U.S. was actively engaged.
Which is why we need to question our media, our foreign policy decisions, our arms deals, everything.
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The shameful pattern of American fixation on European wars while ignoring atrocities elsewhere is not a new thing.
Look what happened under Bill Clinton’s watch. Two genocides that happened almost at the same time. One in Europe in 1995 and the other in Africa in 1994.
In Europe, President Clinton backed the first military operation in the history of NATO, launching aerial attacks and creating a no-fly-zone to stop the Serbian Army of Republika Srpska (VPS) from committing greater atrocities to the Bosnian Muslim population in the country formerly called Yugoslavia. In July, the VPS killed about 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica what is still considered the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust.
In Africa, over 100 days, armed Hutu militias killed more than half a million Tutsis in the former Belgian colony of Rwanda, mostly with daggers and swords. President Bill Clinton, and all other world leaders unanimously and infamously, ignored it.
Regardless of their rationales, American wars abroad and American hypocrisy about those wars are the stated reasons for the formation of Al Qaeda, as well as the justification used by Russian President Vladimir Putin when the U.S. publicly condemned his first invasion of Ukraine back in 2014.
In that year, after Obama spoke out against Russia’s violent conquering and annexation of Crimea, Putin responded by saying. "Our Western partners headed by the United States prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun."
Unfortunately, Putin’s use of the old “pot calling the kettle black” argument is hard to refute.
Gratuitous violence outside their borders has become the trademark for both of the world's two largest militaries, arms dealers, and on again, off again rivals. For the U.S. and Russia, the world is a battleground for business and geopolitical interests. Weapons need to get made, sold, and ultimately, deployed. Wars keep the revenue flowing and the cycle going. Despite the fact that the world is heating up to unsustainable levels, because of the burning of fossil fuels, Russia and the U.S. will wage war to protect their rights to burn them.
For the U.S., the cycle has been as vicious as it has been pointless. Looking back on the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and our support of the war in Yemen, what strategic goals did they actually achieve? It’s not clear.
Russia, on the other hand, has used force to successfully win territory in Georgia, Chechnya, and Crimea -- without paying much of a price militarily or politically -- which is likely why Putin felt that he would be successful again in Ukraine.
It appears Putin may have overplayed his hand militarily against a motivated and well armed Ukraine, locked and loaded with $1b worth of US made weapons. Ukrainians are pulverizing Russian tanks with Javelin anti-tank missiles, manufactured in the US by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies.. They are shooting Russian fighter jets out of the sky with US-made Raytheon’s anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. The US earmarked another $3.5b to Ukraine, with Zelensky going to Congress virtually to ask for more.
With Germany and just about every single European country about to go on a massive military shopping spree, the U.S. defense industry stands to be the biggest, and perhaps, only winner from the Russia-Ukraine war.
The question is how do we break the cycle.
The en vogue political dogma of “isolationism” didn’t translate into any meaningful changes in military spending or weapons trade abroad during the Trump or Biden administrations. Even in the unlikely event that “isolationism” will endure in a very tumultuous nation-state system with so many known fault lines, it is doubtful our weapons will ever be “isolated” in any sense of the word. While we may not send in our own troops to fight wars overseas, we are still more than happy to send our F-15’s and anti-aircraft weapons to the theater of war on our behalf.
The clear and obvious solution is that the American people should have oversight into where these weapons are sent and for what purpose. There needs to be a set of policies in place that creates qualifications for countries to be sold any kind of weapon, military hardware or software, including cyber weapons and surveillance tools.
Then if a country wants to buy some more weapons or surveillance software after a mass execution of 81 people, which happened on March 12, 2022 in Saudi Arabia, we should debate that rather than just letting DoD approve the deal with zero oversight. The end goal here is creating standards and a level of public oversight into our support of wars abroad. Perhaps the public will decide it’s important that military trading partners reflect a certain baseline set of American values. Perhaps not. The point is that just as the Constitution mandates that only Congress has the power to wage war, where we send our weapons of war should ideally be held to similar scrutiny. The powerful triumvirate of the defense lobby, large corporations, and the DoD, deciding in the shadows which wars the U.S. supports, is wholly un-democratic.
When the U.S.S.R. disbanded, we had an opportunity to influence them in building democratic institutions. Those efforts failed, partly because a small group of oligarchs managed to seize massive wealth and industries essentially overnight. We failed, partly because we placated the oligarchs and welcomed their money despite the fact that many of them facilitated the gutting of the country’s institutions by a KGB spymaster named Putin.
This resurgent, dictatorial, repressive Russian regime, this new version of the bear, is proof that we lost the Cold War as well. A communist dictatorship has simply been replaced by a capitalistic one, with a deep pocketed client in China, and an EU too dependent on Russian oil to quit.
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All wars are wholly grotesque and shameful. If one is ever to be so unlucky as to experience a war firsthand, between the moments of terror, there is this feeling of how weird and wrong it is. There is a sense of shame that, for all we are able to accomplish as human beings, we still murder each other at scale for power or money - under the guise of some absurd cultural, national, or ethnically motivated rationale.
America was founded precisely as a protection against such absurdities. It was founded for religious freedom, and other basic freedoms, regardless of creed, race, or national origin.
We need to figure out a way for American ideals to once again permeate through our foreign policy. We must create a new process that would restrict our weapons manufacturers from dealing with countries who are likely to use those weapons to repress people, commit war crimes, or ethnically “cleanse”, regardless of the race, location, or rationale for such crimes. We must treat the instruments of war as we do our own soldiers' lives. A US-bomb can destroy thousands of lives in an instant. We should be very deliberate about who gets to purchase that kind of power.
If such a process were hypothetically in place today, I have no doubt that this very visible war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to continued military support for Ukraine. The question is what would happen to our other military trading partners, in situations where we have clear economic opportunities weighing against American values. This is the question that we never get the opportunity to debate. That must change. Voters should get the ultimate opportunity to decide if Saudi Arabia, who used US weapons to murder and exile entire families, at a scale that Russia hopefully never will reach, should receive more weapons. Debating these deals publicly would have another added benefit. They would bring even the least visible wars into the light of day.
Limited, congressional attempts to stop the war in Yemen have failed. A bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives for the third time in as many years, voted to end US support for the Saudi-led coalition through the National Defense Authorization Act—only to have the provision stripped out of the final bill. A new Yemen War Powers Resolution, sponsored by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, from Washington and Rep. Peter DeFazio, from Oregon, is getting pushed through the House again. Will the 4th time be a charm ? I doubt it.
There is still something exceptional about the idea of America. It is the thing that draws so many immigrants to our cities. It is the thing that Saudi Arabia and Russia and China do not have -- this idea that although we are far from perfect, we are in a shared struggle to build a more free and just society that is not under the thumb of a group of thugs.
But despite the lies we tell ourselves as Americans, any exceptionalism that we may have on the domestic level has been lost in our foreign policy. If we continue to go down the path of protecting only the interests of corporate arms dealers and their clients, we are perceived no differently from Russia, China, or any other country on Earth. Even though we may have different domestic values on the inside, our brand gets tarnished with each American made bomb that gets dropped on civilians.
The role of journalistic institutions in a democracy is to confront any hypocrisy between perceived values and actual policies. It is not a mirror reflecting back to us our own emotional landscape, biases, and comforting storylines. It is not an echo chamber for the deeply entrenched Machiavellian impulses of society. It is not entertainment.
On the contrary, the media must elevate the discourse through a dispassionate, honest search for information, particularly stories of human rights abuses, regardless of where they occur and who is responsible. It is the information itself, rather than the agreed upon narrative of the messengers of this information, that should play a role in training society about whom we should fear or love.
An aggressive, nuclear armed Russia on the doorstep of Europe certainly may indeed be something to fear. But the idea that millions of Americans can remain ignorant to the slaughtering of children using American weapons in some far, dark corner of the globe, seems like a far scarier notion.
In case it’s not clear, or you just skipped to this final paragraph, I’m not arguing here that the war in Ukraine should be less visible or demand a less severe international reaction. I’m arguing that it should be the benchmark. Race, geography, religion, cultural kinship, politics, and economics should not determine how the world responds to genocide or other atrocities. This is why we call them crimes against humanity. Humanity means all of us.
