and opportunity in the world.”
In 2011, President Barack Obama stated, “America remains the one indispensable nation, and the world needs a strong America.… We’re a nation that brings our enemies to justice while adhering to the rule of law, and respecting the rights of all citizens. We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others.”
In 2013, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed her president: “We are the indispensable nation. We are the force for progress, prosperity, and peace.”
What if someone with a documented history of violence against others thought of himself as exceptional, chosen by destiny or God? People would rightfully reject this self-proclaimed greatness and justice toward others, and reasonably conclude that the person making such claims was dangerous or unstable. Many citizens, however, seem incapable of applying such common sense to this nation’s leaders.
The Actual History
Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, offers a reality check to the propaganda that the United States government is a benevolent and shining beacon for the world—with a focus on the recent past:
Well, let’s see: The United States led the world to the cliffs of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. The United States invaded one Latin American country after another, and subverted other governments there covertly. The United States helped overthrow governments in Ghana and the Congo, and supported racist forces in southern Africa. The United States plunged into the Korean War, and then supported one dictator after another in South Korea.… And the United States supported Suharto in Indonesia, who killed nearly a million people, some at the behest of the CIA, after taking power in 1965. The United States also supported Suharto’s invasion of East Timor ten years later, which took another 200,000 lives.… Obama can call that “global security” if he wants to, but it’s dripping red.… The United States has invaded or overthrown dozens of countries in the last six decades, and it doesn’t need to occupy them if it can install a puppet regime instead.2
Commenting on the commonsense view about Noble Cause claims, scholar and activist Robert Jensen questions the dominant story about the United States, “the model of, and the vehicle for, peace, freedom, and democracy in the world.” This story can only be believed, however, “by people sufficiently insulated from the reality of U.S. actions abroad to maintain such illusions.”3
The Vietnam veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich challenges the guiding premises of the Noble Cause principle in U.S. foreign policy, particularly the political leaders “who have demonstrated their intention [to] reshape the world in accordance with American interests and values.” He asserts that we “have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse represent universal truths, valid for all times.” In pursuing such policies the United States has “touted [its] status as God’s new Chosen People.… We acted at the behest of providential guidance or responded to the urgings of our ‘manifest destiny.’”4
The Noble Cause principle, promoted by presidents and other powerful government officials, the corporate mass media, influential intellectuals, and the educational system, is at the heart of the Commemoration of the American war. But it is long on passionate beliefs and empty on evidence. Its supporters, therefore, can only maintain their allegiance to American benevolence by omitting or rejecting the evidence, since the false story unravels from the start. According to historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz:
U.S. history cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the U.S. independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of U.S. Americans.
Essentially, she argues, the United States has been “fundamentally imperialist” from its origin, “rather than imperialism being a divergence from a well-intentioned path.”5
The European settlement in America in the Colonial period, writes historian Richard Drinnon, is based on the philosophy of “Indian-hating,” a form of “white hostility that for four centuries had exterminated ‘savages’ who stood in the path of Anglo-American expansion.” The massacres that were committed “in Vietnam’s ‘Indian country’ in the 1960s [at] My Lai and all the forgotten My Khes” followed logically from those committed against Native Americans here and against Filipinos in the early twentieth century. What has been referred to as “Indian removal,” therefore, is the foundation of ethnic cleansing upon which U.S. history is based. The atrocities that are part of this “defining and enabling experience” are not exceptions to an otherwise humane and Noble Cause history, they are essential to it.6
At the time of the U.S. War of Independence in the late 1770s, for example, aggression into what is now the northeast United States was blocked by the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Scholars have pointed out that the Confederacy’s democratic governance structure “not only predated the United States Constitution but also influenced the evolution and development of the ideas that shaped the document, as well as other fundamental expressions of the American character.” Evidence of this influence “is clearly present in the colonial, revolutionary, and early records of the United States and in the oral and written traditions of the Iroquois.”7
Despite this rich history and culture, General George Washington, in May 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack those nations of the Confederacy that sided with the British during the U.S. War of Independence—the Seneca and Mohawk, and those that tried to remain neutral, the Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga. Only “the Christianized Oneidas” supported the Colonial “separatist settlers.”8
Washington instructed Major General John Sullivan “to take [preemptive] action against” these nations. He told Sullivan
to lay waste to all the settlements around … that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.… You will not by any means listen to any overtures of peace before the total ruin of their settlements.… Our future security will be in their inability to injure us … and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.9
The immediate object is their total destruction and devastation and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.10
How many students, teachers, and citizens know about Washington’s scorched earth campaign against the Iroquois? Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson writes that Washington’s direct orders to General Sullivan “established imperial U.S. military principles for centuries to come.” They included “(1) total war/genocide targeting all inhabitants for elimination; (2) preventing peace; (3) pre-emptive war; (4) terror; (5) crime of self-defense; (6) revenge.” Willson points out that Sullivan’s campaign has been called “‘the most ruthless application of a scorched-earth policy’ in U.S. history,” on a par with Sherman’s March to the Sea in the Civil War, General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing of North Korea, and the American search-and-destroy missions in Vietnam.11
According to historian David Stannard, the aggression against Native Americans who lived in North America (excluding Mexico) was a genocidal assault without parallel in human history. From the first European arrival in North America to the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, “between 97 and 99 percent of North America’s native peoples were killed.” Most political leaders supported this horrific assault, but “few
