Aggression, then and now--a blast from the past

[eridani]

http://zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/18081

A recent book by Michael Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, dramatizes once again the fantastic double standard that operates in cases of cross-border attacks by the weak, and U.S. targets, and the strong, especially the United States. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, quickly defeating the Khmer Rouge and pushing its remnant forces into Thailand. Vietnam did this under considerable provocation, as the Pol Pot regime was extremely hostile to Vietnam, carried out a major ethnic cleansing of Vietnamese within Cambodia, and mounted a series of cross-border attacks that cost many Vietnamese lives. Vietnam's invasion was therefore based on, and a response to, serious Cambodian provocations. By contrast, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not based on actions by Saddam Hussein injurious to the United States. The Bush administration was obliged to construct a series of lies to justify the attack and occupation of a distant country, lies that had been crudely (and obviously) fabricated before the attack, which were decisively confirmed as lies in its aftermath.

Of course, both before and after the invasion of Iraq it had been alleged that as Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator ousting him was desirable and therefore in itself justified the invasion. But the same argument would justify the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, as Pol Pot had been furiously assailed as a mass killer and "another Hitler." In a politically neutral world his ouster by the Vietnamese would have been treated at least equally as a liberation and part of that "responsibility to protect" that has become a favorite of contemporary interventionists—in fact more so, as in the late 1970s Pol Pot ranked higher than Saddam as a killer.

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A second problem for Western interventionism was that Vietnam gradually withdrew its military forces from Cambodia and had them all out by 1989, in keeping with Vietnam's promises and contrary to Western assurances that Vietnam intended a permanent stay. This suggested that the Cambodian government no longer needed the Vietnamese military presence to govern and in another political context it might have ra

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In the case of the U.S. invasion-occupation of Iraq, all the principles that affected Vietnam and Cambodia are stood on their head.

(1) Although in contrast with the Vietnam-Cambodia case the U.S. invasion was based on no provocation by the distant victim state, no sanctions were imposed on the U.S. by the UN or international community, and although "humanitarian interventionists" proclaim a newly accepted "responsibility to protect," no protection was offered the Iraqis from March 2003 to the present.

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(4) In the decisions on "surges" and debates about how long the United States will stay in Iraq, neither the conditions of true independence, nor the demands of international law, nor the desires of the Iraqi people, enter the discussion. (Polls there have regularly shown that the Iraqis, as well the U.S. public want us out.) These are decisions for the U.S. ruling elite, grounded in U.S. aggression rights and the cowardice and lack of moral force of the international community.