FOREIGN AFFAIRS: THE EMPIRE THAT MISTOOK IMPUNITY FOR IMMORTALITY
By Tebbit Scorchwillow, Editor-in-Chief
Foreign Affairs, Fires, and Other Things the Gods Forgot
WASHINGTON/THE REST OF THE PLANET — There is a peculiar disease that afflicts powerful countries.
At first, they believe they are strong.
Then they believe they are indispensable.
Eventually, after several aircraft carriers, a generous defence budget and enough think tanks to sink a moderately sized continent, they conclude that cause and effect have been suspended specifically on their behalf.
This is known as exceptionalism.
Its principal symptom is the conviction that when we interfere in another country’s affairs, it is foreign policy.
When they interfere in ours, it is an attack on democracy.
When we overthrow a government, we are protecting stability.
When they overthrow one, they are destabilising the international order.
When we train armed groups inside somebody else’s territorial dispute, we support freedom.
When they do it, they sponsor terrorism.
When we bomb an embassy, it is a tragic error.
When they bomb ours, it is an act of war.
When we kill civilians, the situation was regrettably complex.
When they kill civilians, morality suddenly becomes available in paperback.
It is an extraordinarily convenient philosophy.
It has only one flaw.
Other people eventually learn to read.
IRAN, 1953: EVEN THE PRESIDENT KEPT A DIARY
The problem with covert operations is that eventually someone writes something down.
In August 1953, the governments of the United States and Britain helped overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after his government nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
For decades one could dress this in suitable Cold War clothing.
Then came the documents.
Then came the archives.
And, rather inconveniently, there was Dwight Eisenhower’s diary.
On 8 October 1953, the American president privately acknowledged that the United States had helped restore the Shah and remove Mosaddegh. Eisenhower described what had been done as “covert” and worried that public knowledge would embarrass Washington and make similar operations more difficult in the future. He praised CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt’s role in reversing the situation after the original coup attempt faltered.
This is wonderfully instructive.
The concern was not:
Good heavens, have we interfered with another country’s political future?
The concern was:
Good heavens, what if people find out?
Exceptionalism is often less a belief that nothing happened than a belief that only certain people are entitled to object when it does.
Now perform the traditional diplomatic thought experiment.
Suppose Iranian intelligence financed political operations inside the United States.
Suppose it helped manipulate public opinion.
Suppose it worked to remove an American administration whose economic policy threatened Iranian interests.
Suppose Tehran’s leadership then privately congratulated its intelligence officers while worrying that public knowledge might make future coups more difficult.
Would Washington call this:
“A complex episode in Iranian-American relations”?
Would cable television invite several historians to discuss the legitimate strategic anxieties of Tehran?
Would Congress sigh philosophically about the regrettable realities of international politics?
Or would somebody locate an aircraft carrier before breakfast?
One suspects the aircraft carrier.
CONGO: APPARENTLY RESPONSIBILITY ENDS AT THE TRIGGER FINGER
Then there was Patrice Lumumba.
Here the paperwork becomes positively enthusiastic.
The CIA plotted to assassinate the first prime minister of independent Congo.
American records show that a CIA scientist was instructed to take toxic material to Congo for an assassination operation. Planning included infiltrating Lumumba’s entourage and exploring ways of poisoning him through food or similar access. The CIA’s Congo station was told that Lumumba’s “disposition” remained a high priority, while other communications discussed removing him from the political scene as quickly as possible.
The poison was not sulfuric acid.
That particular horror came later.
Lumumba escaped confinement in November 1960 and was recaptured by Mobutu’s forces. On 17 January 1961 he was transferred to Katanga.
After being beaten and tortured, Lumumba and two companions were taken out at night and executed by a firing squad involving Congolese soldiers under Belgian supervision or command. His body was subsequently exhumed. Belgian officer Gérard Soete later described helping cut the remains apart and dissolve them in sulfuric acid. A tooth survived as a grotesque souvenir and was eventually returned to Lumumba’s family decades later.
Pause there.
A man was removed from power.
A foreign intelligence service plotted his assassination.
Poison was sent to the country.
The station discussed ways to eliminate him.
The political forces aligned against him strengthened.
He was captured.
Transferred into the hands of enemies.
Tortured.
Shot.
Cut into pieces.
Dissolved in acid.
And for decades an enormous amount of official attention centred upon the reassuring question:
Did an American personally fire the final bullet?
Splendid.
By this reasoning, if one holds the victim down while another man cuts his throat, the critical moral inquiry is apparently whose fingerprints are on the knife.
This is not historical analysis.
It is responsibility being put through a washing machine.
Belgium itself eventually acknowledged responsibility of a kind, while a Belgian parliamentary investigation examined the role of Belgian officials. More than six decades later, the legal and historical reckoning remains unfinished.
The archive remembers.
Unfortunately, it also notices who was allowed to write the first draft.
THOMAS SANKARA: THE DRAWERS THAT ARE STILL LOCKED
Thomas Sankara is where responsible history must resist two temptations simultaneously.
The first is pretending nothing suspicious happened.
The second is confidently filling gaps in the evidence with whatever villain best suits one’s politics.
Sankara, president of Burkina Faso and one of Africa’s most prominent anti-colonial and Pan-African leaders, was assassinated with twelve others on 15 October 1987.
In 2022, a Burkinabè court convicted former president Blaise Compaoré, Gilbert Diendéré and Hyacinthe Kafando, among others, in connection with Sankara’s killing; the three principal defendants received life sentences.
That establishes something important.
It does not establish everything.
For decades there have been allegations and suspicions regarding wider foreign involvement—including possible connections involving Côte d’Ivoire, Liberian actors and France.
Prince Johnson, the former Liberian warlord, publicly alleged that Compaoré sought assistance in removing Sankara, and he implicated regional actors. Other testimony and investigative reporting have explored possible Liberian connections.
Questions about France have persisted as well.
France eventually transferred three batches of declassified archival material to Burkina Faso as part of the judicial investigation. But serious investigative work by RFI concluded that, despite testimony and enduring suspicions, there was not yet definitive proof establishing direct French participation in Sankara’s assassination.
And I have not found sufficient evidence to state that the United States ordered or participated in Sankara’s assassination.
This is what intellectual honesty looks like when it is being inconvenient to everyone.
Say what is known.
Say what is alleged.
Say what remains hidden.
Say who refuses to open the drawers.
And keep asking.
The absence of proof is not proof of innocence.
It is also not permission to manufacture proof.
An empire’s archive is evidence.
It is not Scripture.
TIBET: FREEDOM FIGHTERS, DEPENDING ON WHOSE AIRCRAFT DELIVERS THEM
American exceptionalism becomes particularly entertaining when separatism enters the room.
The United States today regularly condemns governments that arm or train insurgents operating against states it supports.
During the Cold War, however, the CIA ran a covert Tibetan program involving political action, propaganda, intelligence and paramilitary operations against Chinese rule.
A 1968 U.S. government memorandum openly described CIA support for Tibetan political and paramilitary activity and recorded repeated approvals for covert support to the Tibetan resistance and the training of guerrilla forces. Another U.S. record described a paramilitary force of approximately 2,000 men, hundreds of whom had been armed by airdrop.
The CIA itself now publicly acknowledges that from 1958 to 1964 it covertly trained almost 300 Tibetan fighters at Camp Hale in Colorado before many returned to participate in resistance operations.
One may sympathise deeply with Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule.
One may condemn Chinese repression.
One may defend Tibetan autonomy or independence.
All perfectly legitimate arguments.
But the geopolitical rule remains fascinating:
When Washington secretly trains guerrillas against Beijing, this belongs to the noble history of resistance.
Should Beijing train armed separatists inside territory claimed by a Western ally, dictionaries would immediately run short of the word terrorism.
The activity has not changed.
Only the owner of the training camp.
HIROSHIMA AND THE MIRACLE OF RETROSPECTIVE PRECISION
Then there is Hiroshima.
For decades the reassuring sentence was available:
Hiroshima was an important military target.
It had military installations.
It contained soldiers.
True.
It also contained an overwhelmingly civilian urban population.
And the target-selection documents are rather less soothing than the public mythology.
The Manhattan Project Target Committee considered large urban areas and explicitly discussed the psychological dimension of the attack. Candidate cities were deliberately preserved from ordinary bombing so that the effect of the atomic weapon could be properly assessed.
Historical research published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has examined casualty estimates showing that the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians; another peer-reviewed Bulletin analysis concluded that less than ten percent of those killed on 6 August were Japanese military personnel.
Now imagine Tehran issuing the following statement:
New York contains military facilities.
Its financial institutions support American national power.
Military personnel live and work there.
Its destruction would have immense psychological impact.
Therefore we consider the city an appropriate target.
Americans would recognise this instantly as monstrous reasoning.
They would be correct.
The intellectually interesting question is why the morality is expected to change when the aircraft has a white star painted on it.
BELGRADE: WE ARE TERRIBLY SORRY ABOUT YOUR EMBASSY
On 7 May 1999, during NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, American bombs struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Three Chinese citizens were killed.
Others were injured.
The embassy was badly damaged.
The United States and NATO said it was a mistake resulting from targeting and intelligence failures. NATO publicly expressed regret; an international tribunal review recorded the U.S. explanation that the wrong building had been identified as a Yugoslav military procurement facility.
China did not regard the matter quite so casually.
The Chinese government condemned the bombing as a serious violation of sovereignty and international law. Compensation arrangements eventually included payments concerning deaths, injuries and embassy property.
Now, mistakes happen in war.
That is true.
But exceptionalism has a useful exercise available here.
Reverse the aircraft.
Imagine Chinese bombers striking the American embassy in a third country.
Three Americans are dead.
Beijing explains that its intelligence service had the wrong address.
A delegation arrives with apologies.
China promises an internal investigation.
Everyone is terribly sorry.
Would Washington conclude:
Well, these things happen.
Or would several senators already be demanding retaliation while cable television attempted to determine whether Beijing’s error constituted an attack on Western civilisation?
When a superpower bombs your embassy, apparently the first duty of the victim is to wait politely while the superpower investigates itself.
IRAQ: THE EVIDENCE WILL BE READY SHORTLY AFTER THE INVASION
Exceptionalism has an unusual relationship with evidence.
The evidence is extremely urgent before the war.
It becomes considerably more nuanced afterward.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was publicly justified in substantial part through claims concerning weapons of mass destruction.
After the invasion, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that many major prewar intelligence judgments were overstated or unsupported by underlying intelligence and identified serious analytical failures and groupthink. The subsequent Iraq Survey Group investigation did not uncover the active WMD stockpiles that had formed such a central part of the public case for war.
An astonishing evidentiary system.
The accused country must prove it does not possess the weapons.
Immediately.
Under threat of invasion.
The invading country may discover that its evidence was wrong afterward.
By which time the tanks have already crossed the border.
There are warranties on kettles with stricter procedural safeguards.
Yet the person who says:
Perhaps we should examine the evidence before invading the next country
will inevitably be accused of being anti-American.
No.
The person asking questions before the bombing may care considerably more about American lives than the person selling the bombing.
THE PATRIOT AND THE FLATTERER
There are two people standing beside a powerful nation.
The first says:
You are exceptional.
Your intentions are uniquely pure.
Your enemies hate you because you are free.
Every intervention was necessary.
Every failure was unforeseeable.
Every victim misunderstood you.
Every coup prevented something worse.
Every bomb saved lives.
Continue.
The second says:
Stop.
Look behind you.
Those people remember the coup.
Their parents remember the occupation.
Their grandparents remember the dictator you supported.
Their children remember the bomb.
They may not possess your aircraft today.
They may not possess your wealth today.
They may not possess your diplomatic influence today.
Today is carrying an extraordinary amount of weight in those sentences.
Which one is the friend?
The flatterer assuring the empire that consequences have been abolished?
Or the irritating bastard pointing toward the cliff?
A friend who warns you that your conduct is creating enemies may care more about your survival than the flatterer who keeps telling you that your power makes consequences impossible.
That is not anti-American.
In many circumstances, it may be considerably more pro-American than exceptionalism is.
SILENCE IS NOT FORGIVENESS
Powerful governments frequently mistake silence for consent.
A smaller country does not retaliate.
Therefore it agrees.
A government does not condemn you publicly.
Therefore it approves.
A population cannot remove an occupier.
Therefore occupation has become normal.
A country under sanctions survives.
Therefore sanctions are working.
A foreign president smiles beside you at a summit.
Therefore everyone has moved on.
No.
Sometimes people are silent because the alternative is annihilation.
Sometimes governments remain quiet because their economies depend upon the country they despise.
Sometimes military weakness looks remarkably similar to diplomatic acceptance.
Sometimes grievances simply go into storage.
History has magnificent storage facilities.
Eventually somebody loses the key.
THE WHEEL
This is where exceptionalism stops being merely immoral and becomes strategically idiotic.
If you establish that a powerful country may violate another country’s sovereignty when sufficiently frightened, irritated or interested in its resources, somebody else may eventually adopt the lesson.
If you establish that psychological impact can help justify destroying a city, somebody else may eventually discover psychology.
If assassination becomes an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, do not act astonished when foreign intelligence services begin studying your leadership.
If you arm insurgents abroad while defining armed resistance against your allies as terrorism, other governments will notice the vocabulary problem.
If your bombs can accidentally hit embassies without starting a war, do not assume everyone will forever accept that the privilege belongs exclusively to you.
The standard defence is always:
Our circumstances were different.
Of course.
Every empire in history has discovered circumstances.
Exceptionalism produces them industrially.
But the wheel turns.
Slowly, sometimes.
Painfully slowly.
Long enough for a great power to mistake postponed consequences for cancelled consequences.
Long enough for the architects of policy to retire.
Long enough for presidents to build libraries.
Long enough for intelligence officers to write memoirs.
Long enough for the people who suffered the policy to teach their children what happened.
The wheel has no filing deadline.
And consequences postponed have an unpleasant habit of accumulating interest.
THIS IS NOT ANTI-AMERICAN
Criticise American foreign policy and someone eventually asks why you hate America.
A fascinating definition of friendship.
If your friend is drunk, armed and driving toward a cliff, apparently the patriotic response is to compliment the vehicle.
Taking away the keys is anti-American.
Pointing at the cliff is anti-American.
Mentioning gravity is probably foreign propaganda.
Nonsense.
Ordinary Americans have more reason than almost anyone to demand restraint from their government.
Presidents have bunkers.
Generals have secure command centres.
Senior intelligence officials acquire consulting contracts.
Think-tank strategists migrate peacefully between television studios.
The person waiting for a subway does not have missile defence.
The child sleeping in an apartment did not author the coup plan.
The nurse at the hospital did not select the bombing target.
The family buying groceries did not attend the National Security Council meeting.
If decades of accumulated intervention eventually produce catastrophic blowback, it will not necessarily be the architects of the intervention who pay first.
This is why warning America about exceptionalism may be profoundly pro-American.
The objective is not to watch the wheel crush somebody.
The objective is to point out that there is a bloody wheel.
A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR AN EXCEPTIONAL COUNTRY
Perhaps the United States should attempt something genuinely exceptional.
Not exceptional immunity.
Exceptional accountability.
Imagine a powerful country capable of saying:
We were wrong.
Without waiting fifty years for declassification.
Imagine being powerful enough to compensate people you harmed before the grandchildren begin litigation.
Powerful enough to obey international rules when nobody could physically force you.
Powerful enough to recognise the sovereignty of countries without first checking their mineral reserves.
Powerful enough to understand that Iranian democracy matters when Iranians choose it.
That Congolese leadership belongs to Congolese people.
That African political independence is not a Cold War inconvenience.
That Chinese sovereignty cannot be simultaneously sacred when Beijing acts and irrelevant when Washington acts.
That a Japanese civilian does not become a military installation because an army headquarters exists elsewhere in the city.
That an Iraqi family does not owe its destroyed country to an intelligence assessment later found wanting.
Powerful enough to accept that an Iranian life, a Congolese life, a Burkinabè life, a Tibetan life, a Chinese life, an Iraqi life, a Japanese life and an American life arrive at the moral ledger worth precisely the same amount.
Now that would be exceptional.
Unfortunately, there appears to be considerably less money in it.
TEBBIT’S MEMORANDUM TO THE GODS
Dear Gods,
The humans have invented another empire.
Yes, again.
No, this one insists it is not an empire.
Yes.
Exactly like the previous ones.
It says its soldiers overseas maintain stability.
Other people’s soldiers overseas threaten stability.
Its covert operations promote democracy.
Other people’s covert operations undermine democracy.
Its assassinations are regrettable historical allegations.
Other people’s assassination plots are terrorism.
Its bombs make mistakes.
Other people’s bombs reveal their true nature.
I requested clarification.
They sent a policy paper.
I have set it on fire.
The strategic error remains unchanged:
Power can postpone consequences.
It cannot repeal them.
A country may be too powerful to challenge today.
Too wealthy to sanction.
Too influential to isolate.
Too heavily armed to confront.
But no balance of power is permanent.
No empire remains indispensable forever.
No population forgets everything.
And no government should build its national security strategy upon the assumption that everyone it has injured will remain weaker for eternity.
That is not strategy.
That is gambling with grandchildren.
So to the Americans who point this out and are called unpatriotic:
Carry on.
The person shouting “Bridge out!” is not attacking the train.
He may be the only bastard on the platform trying to save it.
Let the gods file their own paperwork.
The rest of us should check whether the brakes work.
—Tebbit Scorchwillow
Editor-in-Chief
Foreign Affairs, Fires, and Other Things the Gods Forgot
The Clacks Leak
Selected References
Iran, 1953: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, including Eisenhower’s October 8, 1953 diary entry acknowledging the covert American role in Mosaddegh’s removal.
Patrice Lumumba and Congo: U.S. State Department FRUS records on CIA assassination planning and toxic material; National Security Archive Church Committee materials; United Nations investigation into Lumumba’s death; subsequent reporting and historical research on the Belgian role and destruction of Lumumba’s remains.
Thomas Sankara: Burkinabè government records concerning French archival transfers; reporting and historical investigation by RFI; records of the 2022 convictions of Blaise Compaoré and other defendants.
CIA operations involving Tibet: U.S. State Department FRUS records describing political, propaganda, intelligence and paramilitary programs; CIA’s own account of training Tibetan fighters at Camp Hale.
Hiroshima: National Security Archive reproduction of Manhattan Project Target Committee records concerning large urban targets and psychological effects; historical casualty research published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Chinese Embassy bombing, Belgrade: NATO statement; ICTY review of the NATO bombing campaign; Chinese Foreign Ministry account of the bombing and compensation arrangements.
Iraq: U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence findings concerning prewar WMD intelligence and the Iraq Survey Group’s Duelfer Report.
This publication is a work of satire and political commentary.
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