Just as hawks in Washington were about to slip loose the dogs of war on Syria last Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised many here in the United States by having a letter to the American people published in the New York Times. It is an important missive, but more because of how we as Americans have reacted to it than for what it actually says.
In it, as all should know by now, the Russian president cautioned against unwise U.S. military action against the wayward Russian ally and urged Washington to abide by the decisions of the United Nations Security Council – on which Russia coincidently wields a veto power. Curiously, the bit of Putin’s letter to the nation that raised the most hackles was a near throw-away paragraph tacked on to the end of the letter that admonished President Obama for referring to the United States and its policies as exceptional.
“It is,” wrote the Russian president, “extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
Aside from the novelty of a Russian de facto autocrat invoking God, democracy, and equality in a public statement, there would seem to be little here to get angry about. After all, for those in the know President Putin is really talking about the dangers of unrequited nationalism – something Russia, in its various geopolitical incarnations over the centuries, has suffered mightily from.
Popular sovereignty’s evil twin
For Americans who believe in the virgin-birth theory of the U.S. constitution and American history, however, ethnocentric nationalism – the evil twin of popular sovereignty – undergoes a form of political transubstantiation wherein it becomes sanitized for public consumption. Thus, instead of nationalism, we here in the States get something called “exceptionalism” – a public relations buzzword that helps pop historians and foreign policy talking heads sell books by telling Americans exactly what they want to hear about themselves, e.g. that the U.S. is a good, possibly holy, force in the world and nothing it can do can ever, ipso facto, be wrong.
As such, American Exceptionalism is more than merely a ten-syllable way to say “my country, right or wrong,” which at least would be forgivable. Humans are a tribal species, after all, and Americans are as patriotic as anyone else. Here, as everywhere, the ‘My-tribe-yay; your-tribe-boo!’ mentality trumps such niceties as facts, reason and who is actually in the right or wrong on any given particular case, including this one. But at least the right-or-wrong dichotomy admits the possibility of a tribe or country being in the wrong – it’s just that our attachment to our father, mother, or homeland so often trumps morality that we disregard it.
Twisted logic
No, American Exceptionalism is much more than this. It is an ideology that does not even admit the possibility of America being in the wrong because, as a moral force for good in the world, anything the United States does is, by the fact of it being U.S., good – no matter the motivation, outcome or ultimate consequences. Much as how President Nixon once sidestepped issues of constitutional legality during Watergate by arguing that whatever the president does is by definition constitutional and legal, the doctrine of American Exceptionalism posits that since the U.S. is a uniquely good force for liberty and freedom in the world, whatever it does – no matter how grotesquely evil on the face of it– is, in fact, morally acceptable.
It is through this twisted logic that any number of sins in the name of freedom and democracy can and have been committed. Given the use of chemical weapons in Syria is what prompted Putin’s letter to begin with, consider how U.S. qualms about the use of chemical arms during wartime have shifted over time. It wasn’t so long ago, for example, that the use of chemical weapons – even by our own forces – wasn’t deemed evil at all.
During the Vietnam War, for instance, the U.S. military indiscriminately sprayed Agent Orange all over the South Vietnamese countryside in an attempt to defoliate the rural areas communist guerillas hid in and used as base areas. Wide swathes of South Vietnam were sprayed, causing untold agricultural losses in a deliberate attempt to starve out communist-dominated peasant communities and so force their migration to U.S.-dominated South Vietnamese cities – a war crime by any definition. Furthermore, the effect on the long-term health of the Vietnamese people has been devastating, with some 500,000 adults killed from long-term exposure to Agent Orange and over 400,000 children born with birth defects due to exposure to the dioxin-ridden chemical. Assad’s use of nerve agents, while despicable, pales in comparison to the ecological damage and human carnage we wreaked with Agent Orange in Southeast Asia.
Then, of course, there is Iraq, where during its war with Iran in the 1980s the United States actively aided the regime led by Saddam Hussein in its use of chemical weapons against both the Iranian military and its own people. As Foreign Policy recently reported this past August, even though the U.S. Government has long denied knowing about Iraqi intentions to use nerve gas against its foes, U.S. intelligence understood and reported to its civilian leaders exactly that — repeatedly. As one U.S. military attaché to Baghdad in the 1980s put it, “the Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew.”
Knew, moreover, and didn’t care. Indeed, we actively assisted the Iraqis in their use of chemical arms like that recently used by the Assad regime in Syria through intelligence collaboration – so Saddam’s regime could better target its enemies — as well as economic credits and import-export loan guarantees so Saddam could import and build up the infrastructure and technology necessary to keep his poison gas supply flowing. None of this would excuse the use of nerve agents by Damascus, of course, but it points to a distinctly flexible set of moral sensibilities on the use of chemical arms held by those in Washington D.C.
It’s OK because America
In short, if you are a friend of the U.S. then chemical arms are no big deal. If you are an enemy – or at least in the way U.S. interests – the use of chemical arms makes you evil incarnate. Moreover, what goes for chemical arms goes for other less-than-savory, strong-arm tactics commonly used by despots around the world. Human rights abuses? Evil if you are Russia or China, ignored if you are Saudi Arabia or junta-ruled Argentina. Lack of democracy? Satanic if you are Cuba, quietly looked past if you are Bahrain. Nuclear arms? Condemned if you are North Korea, accepted as a “fact of life” that is never mentioned if you are Israel. Genocide? Fine if you are anti-communist Indonesia, certainly not if you are communist Cambodia.
The list could go on, but doing so would be beating a dead horse. The point is that America and many Americans have a slippery notion of what is and isn’t morally acceptable that depends almost exclusively on whether said practice furthers U.S. interests. This is not unusual – rare is the country and its people that does not succumb to simple-minded jingoism most of the time – but what is exceptional about us is our tendency to resort to a certain type of moral certainty when papering over and forgetting about these past discrepancies. We did it not just because, in the end, it was ‘us versus them,’ but according to the doctrine of American Exceptionalism – because it was actually good for them since our ultimate goal was so self-evidently noble.
Calling into question this purity of intentions is thus the major sin that Putin committed in his letter to the American people. The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, but rarely are those in the midst of constructing said road willing to listen to reason – so intent are they on the goodness of their cause. The letter reminds us that a people who really do believe they are exceptional can and often do engage in terrible things precisely because they believe they are so privileged. Self-interest can lead to murder, sure – and Putin’s hand are not clean in this regard – but it takes a special sort of ideological narcissism to believe that destroying a village – as in Vietnam many times over – in order to save it is in fact a moral good.
Hence the anger here in America over Putin’s letter. How dare he, an outsider and a Russian no less, judge such a moral country as America? That we commonly do so to others in our dealings with the rest of the world, with so often such catastrophic consequences, is beside the point – and to Hell with the fact that it was the one Putin was making. We may all be equal in the eyes of God, as President Putin says, but according to the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, some are nonetheless more equal than others – and don’t you ever forget it.