Justifying War by Demonizing the Enemy.
Disregard for the lives of innocent people is not the only moral lapse exhibited by a nation that is willing to prosecute its "interests" in the world by any means necessary. Another is the inevitable demonizing of the leadership of nations that stand in the way.
Because the blood of its own young men is at stake, no government can start a war of choice with another nation without providing a moral cover that it believes will satisfy its own population. To the degree it can, it seeks to establish that cover first by an appeal to reason -- for instance, by arguing that a failure to use violence against a resisting foe would lead to disastrous consequences for the nation's safety or well-being. Thus, in justifying the war on Vietnam, the U.S. government argued the "domino theory," the notion that, if one state in Southeast Asia fell under the influence of communism, the countries surrounding it would also inevitably fall . In justifying the war on Iraq, the government argued that it was indisputable that Iraq had amassed weapons of mass destruction that could harm America in several ways: by disrupting our access to the economic lifeblood of Middle Eastern oil; by falling into the hands of international terrorists and posing a direct danger to American security; or by being used as a threat to bully our Middle Eastern allies.
When arguments ostensibly based on reason fail to be persuasive, however, the government does not hesitate to build popular support for war by an emotional appeal to the natural suspicions most humans have of the "other." It demonizes the leaders of countries who stand in its way, suggesting that they must be eradicated in order for good to triumph over evil.
In its recent history, the U.S. has demonized the leaders of such third-world or developing countries as North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Venezuela, Syria, and -- currently, and most ominously -- Iran. It has also demonized entire insurgent militias self-identified as freedom fighters, including the Viet Cong, the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
If my memory serves me well, of the nations whose regimes it has demonized, the U.S. has gone to war with North Korea, North Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. It has also sponsored a guerilla war in Nicaragua and an invasion of Cuba. Key stated objectives for these wars have included the arrest of Communist expansion, preventive disarming of a hostile regime, the liberation of subject populations from an evil leader, national liberation, and the freedom to pursue democracy. For the folks back home bearing the financial costs, the stated objectives have been to preserve American freedom and to "keep America safe." Naturally, our government has had nothing bad to say about the repressive regimes of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and of Egypt before the revolution, since the leaders of these countries have been all too glad, for the sake of their own enrichment and power, to serve American economic and strategic interests.
No doubt, many leaders of non-democratic countries are in fact tyrannical and ruthless. At the same time, however, it should not be forgotten that all of them are also human beings. On the one hand, they are motivated by the primal instinct to cling to power by whatever means their circumstances demand. On the other hand, they also seek to use their position to make a mark on history: to improve the lot of their people and to strengthen their own nation's strategic position in the world. Surely, such motivations apply equally to American politicians. Though, thankfully, they are in most cases neither tyrannical nor ruthless, they also combine a desire to meet the interests of constituents with an instinct for personal power.
A Demonization Case in Point: Ahmadinejad's Alleged Threat to Israel.
Amerca's alliance with Israel offers an interesting example of the useful, but dangerously distorting, role played by demonization in the pursuit of foreign policy objectives. It must be stated first that Israel has an understandable but, in all probability, unwarranted fear that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons to either attack Israel militarily or to intimidate it in furtherance of its own national ambitions. That fear has some in the Israeli government bristling for a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Further justification for such an action is often based on some inflammatory words attributed to Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is said that, in a 2005 speech, Ahmadinejad declared that, as President of Iran, he was committed to the destruction of Israel. Though th is notion has proved to be a canard, it is continually repeated as accepted fact both by Israeli and Western leaders, and has dangerously biased America's own relations with Iran and its foreign policy toward it.
Ahmadinejad has so far escaped villification as a blood-thirsty tyrant, but, based largely on the 2005 speech, he has been widely characterized by the U.S. and its allies as a madman, a buffoon, and, most pointedly, a bigoted and potentially genocidal anti-Semite. It is claimed that in his speech, Ahmadinejad declared, as translated from Farsi into English, that "Israel must be wiped off the map." There are several things wrong with this translation, however, that would seem to invalidate it and call for a rethinking of the highly dangerous political inferences that have been drawn from it.
In the first place, the hostile words are not Ahmadinejad's. They quote a statement by the late Ayatollah Khomeini which, though referenced by Ahmadinejad to affirm his own position on Zionism, represents a viewpoint that was already in place well before he took office. The words do not, therefore, represent an active policy objective put forward by the Ahmadinejad administration.
As first reported by The New York Times, Ahmadinejad is quoted as saying: "Our dear Imam [referring to Ayatollah Khomeini] said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map, and this was a very wise statement."
The New York Times later backed away from that translation -- and for good reason. There is in fact no idiomatic phrase in Farsi equivalent to the English "wipe off the map," which conveys the sense of physical annihilation. According to Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the British paper The Guardian, other translations produced by university professors, the BBC, The New York Times itself, and even pro-Israel news outlets have all replaced the phrase "must be wiped off the map" with "must vanish from the pages of time." Moreover, it should be stressed that the entity referenced by the words "must vanish from the pages of time" is not a geographical territory or its human population, but the Zionist regime running the country.
Arash Norouzi, co-founder of the Mossadegh Project, an Internet blog that traces Iran's brief period of governance under the leadership of its democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, offers this word-by-word translation of Ahmadinejad's controversial words: " Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from pages of time) mahv shavad (vanish from). The correct English translation of Ahmadinjad's controversial referencing of the words of Ayatollah Khomeini would therefore appear to be: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time [and this was a very wise statement]." No hostile military action is even hinted at. A fair reading is that Ahmadinejad is expressing his hope that the Zionist regime in Israel will fall of its own weight in the future, not that Iran wishes to physically destroy the country and/or eradicate its population. The statement is reminiscent of Marx's contention that capitalism bears the seeds of its own destruction, in terms of its internal contradictions.
This interpretation is seemingly reinforced later in the speech by Ahmadinejad's comparison of his hope for the demise of the Zionist regime with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran. The Guardian's Jonathan Steele points out that Ahmadinejad, as a schoolboy opponent to the Shah in the 1970s, would surely not have favored Iran's own removal "from the pages of time." He simply wanted the Shah out. For Steele, this makes it clear that the Iranian President is talking in his speech not about the end of Israel, but about a change of its regime.
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