The United States, Afghanistan, and the Doctrinal Boundaries of Permissible Reflection

"One of the doctrinal principles behind U.S. corporate-imperial news coverage and commentary and mainstream US politics is that the United States is a fundamentally benevolent force for good facing difficulties created by evil others and challenging situations not of Washington’s own making. Debate is permissible on immediate strategy and tactics but is not allowed on these core American Exceptionalist positions.

Hence, while there is contestation in U.S. media and political culture over how to respond to the flood of migrants seeking entrance to the United States on the nation’s southern border, there is little if any serious mainstream media discussion and critique of the long and many-sided role that U.S. capitalist imperialism has played in imposing abject misery on millions of people across Central America and Mexico.

The US invasion of Vietnam (and Cambodia) and Iraq could be criticized in dominant US media as bad strategy, as mistakes, but never as monumentally mass-murderous, racist, and imperialist war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The assumption that the United States has the right to invade, attack, and occupy other nations is taken for granted in mainstream US media and politics. “The American people,” candidate Obama sanctimoniously told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 2006, “have seen their sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah.” The most remarkable thing about this comment wasn’t just that Obama left out the American Empire’s savage decimation of that key Iraqi city, replete with the use of radioactive munitions that sparked an epidemic of child leukemias, but that Obama just normatively assumed that American troops had any right to be patrolling the streets of a major Iraq metropolis!"

read article by PAUL STREET 

The United States, Afghanistan, and the Doctrinal Boundaries of Permissible Reflection - CounterPunch.org