by EDWARD S. HERMAN
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama gravely and indignantly warned Syria that its use of chemical weapons would be “totally unacceptable” (Obama), that it would “cross a red line and those responsible would be held accountable” (Clinton), and the New York Times and the Western establishment repeat this without comment, one marvels at the mind-boggling hypocrisy. After all, the United States has been the champion user of chemical weapons in modern times, has opposed international agreements to curb their use, and now regularly employs depleted uranium in its wars—a nuclear as well as chemical weapon that affects many people beyond the immediate targets. The U.S. use of Agent Orange on a massive scale in the Vietnam War is well- known, as is its deployment of white phosphorus munitions in Iraq. Could it be that Clinton, Obama, and mainstream media (MSM) journalists don’t know this? Or is it once again the simple arrogance of power and internalized belief that only when an enemy does something ugly does morality and international law begin to apply?
It may be a combination, as the power of self-deception along with internalized double standards is frequently remarkable. Possibly the classic case was that of the “yellow rain” of chemical poisons allegedly dropped by the Soviets on Laos in the early 1980s, based on extremely tenuous evidence, but effectively used by the Reagan administration to vilify the “evil empire.” The claims were eventually shown to be false by U.S. scientist Matthew Meselson (the yellow rain was actually bee feces), but they did their work well with the assistance of the Wall Street Journal and the MSM more broadly. Long after the campaign had been exposed as a fraud, WSJ publisher Peter Kann cited the “poisoned fields of Laos” to show “who were the good guys and who were the bad guys” in the world (“Clinton Ignores History’s Lessons In Vietnam,” WSJ, September 9, 1992). In other words, Kann completely blacked out the real, large-scale chemical warfare carried out by the United States in Vietnam while still putting forward the long discredited lies about Soviet yellow rain villainy. How is that for dishonesty or self-deception or the two combined? Interestingly, it was Kann’s own newspaper that reported in 1997 that some 500,000 Vietnamese children suffered abnormalities based on the policies of Kann’s “good guys.” (Peter Waldman, “Body Count: In Vietnam, the Agony Of Birth Defects Calls An Old War to Mind,” WSJ, December 12, 1997. )
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