THE US has been good to the Irish people. From the huddled masses arriving on coffin ships in the nineteenth century, to support of the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, to giant companies like Apple and Google helping the South of Ireland to accumulate unprecedented wealth, the US has been a massive support to Ireland.
But if we see the good things about the US, integrity demands that we see the ungood things as well.
On August 6, 1945, during World War II, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, as if to ram the point home, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb, this one on the city of Nagasaki. It's estimated that up to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and up to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation.
From 1955 to 1975, the US waged war in Vietnam, killing well over a million Vietnamese. In South America, the US was central to ‘regime change’ or attempted regime change in country after country, from Argentina in1976 to Venezuela in 2019. In 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan and killed up to 360,000 people; in 2003 it invaded Iraq and killed over 200,000.
Some see that as the US doing its duty – acting as the world’s policeman. Others, more sane, see it as the actions of an American empire using soft but more often hard power to run the affairs of other countries.
At this moment, there are two areas of the world, both thousands of miles from the US, in which the US is deeply involved. We’re told no US troops have been committed to either area, but cash and massive amounts of military hardware have been dispensed.
The area we see on our screens every day is the Middle East, specifically Gaza, where Israel is engaged in meting out destruction and death to Palestinians. Hospitals are bombed, refugee centres are bombed, doctors and journalists and aid workers are killed. These deaths are made possible because the US channels huge amounts of military hardware to Israel. When the UN declared the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and issued a warrant for his arrest, American President Joe Biden declared the warrant “outrageous”. It’s safe to say that most Irish people think the actions of Israel and the US are where the outrageous part begins and ends.
The other major trouble-spot in the world is, of course, Ukraine. It has been invaded by Russia, and again the US keeps feeding bigger and more lethal weaponry to the Ukrainians. People all over the world – including Ireland – have opened their homes to Ukrainian refugees. Clearly most people believe that the US is right to support Ukraine from invasion by a hostile Russia.
So how could the US be so wrong in its foreign policy in terms of Israel and so right in foreign policy towards Ukraine? For that we have to push back a bit.
In 2014 there was a coup by far-right extremists in Ukraine, backed or even engineered by the US State Department. Russia sees its next-door neighbour applying for membership of the EU and NATO and feels exposed. And so it invades.
Both the US and Russia believe in having ‘spheres of influence’ in countries near them (or even far away, in the case of the US). This doesn’t mean that Ukraine isn’t entitled to its sovereignty. But while Russia invaded Ukraine a couple of years ago, the US has been interfering in Ukrainian affairs for many years.
Irish people have largely accepted the propaganda of black hat Russia and white hat US. Which is a pity, given the distorted picture of our own Troubles that was presented to the world for decades.
If the goodies appear too good to be true and the baddies too bad to be true, they probably are.
