Patrick Lawrence: Late-Imperial Duplicities
As I was saying to Diocletian over Prosecco just last week, it is hard to run an empire these days. You have to lie to people more or less incessantly to keep the troops minding the perimeter in supplies. No falsehood is too preposterous to gain the public’s acquiescence. At times you have to deceive even the Senate.
“Ah, yes, the solons,” the old persecutor replied. “It is mere ceremony with them. You can keep the senators in the dark if protecting the arcana imperii requires it. They usually prefer this, indeed. As for the vox populi, one must occasionally feign to hear it, but there is no need to pay any attention.”
“Son of a bitch,” I exclaimed, quoting the current guardian of America’s imperial secrets. “You’ve got the Biden regime to a ‘T.’”
Did he ever, the crafty autocrat.
There is nothing new about lying to Americans to get the empire’s business done. It was 76 years ago last week that President Truman won public acceptance for Washington’s endless postwar interventions in his famous “scare hell out of the American people” speech to Congress. It was 60 years ago this August that President Johnson faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify sending ground troops to Vietnam. As for cutting the dolts on Capitol Hill out of the loop, we have been talking about the imperial presidency since Arthur Schlesinger coined the term in the latter days of the Nixon administration.
Three-quarters of a century later, Joe “New Ideas” Biden has altered course not one minute on the policy cliques’ compass.
It has been objectionable enough in many quarters that the Biden White House has sent two on-the-record shipments of weapons to Israel for use in its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza since the Israel Occupation Forces—we’re renaming these barbarians—began their siege last autumn. These were for $106 million and $147.5 million; in each case the administration invoked emergency authority to bypass the mandated congressional approval.
At this point, a decisive majority of Americans want President Biden to force Israel to declare a ceasefire—which, as everyone knows, he could do in a trice. In a poll conducted Feb, 27 to Mar. 1 for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than half of those surveyed thought the U.S. should stop all arms shipments to Israel—“no more U.S. money for the Netanyahu war machine,” as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, put it.
But never mind the populus and never mind Congress. The former are to be ignored and there are various ways to circumvent the latter. The Washington Post reported in its Mar. 6 editions that, as arms sales to the apartheid state grew more politically perilous, Biden’s policy people have covertly authorized more than 100 separate, under-the-radar shipments. We do not know the value of these, but each has been small enough to require no legislative authorization.
No debate, no disclosure. We know about these transfers now only because regime officials told Congress about them in “a recent classified briefing.” Before that, Congress didn’t know anything about the shipments, either—although this seems highly unlikely. I do not see how Capitol Hill could be unaware of an op of this magnitude. My surmise is that legislators were perfectly happy once again to surrender their responsibilities to the imperial presidency. That recent classified briefing made page one of The Post because this is the national security state’s way of easing the public into the picture.
These shipments are obviously counter to the spirit of the law, if not its letter. But no one in the administration has felt compelled to offer an explanation since The Post’s piece appeared, to say nothing of an apology for deceiving a public increasingly critical of the regime’s Israel policy. Congress has raised not the slightest objection—Congress, as in the 435 representatives and 50 senators elected and paid to represent your interests and mine.
Cut to historical flashback.
Diocletian’s reign, from 284 to 305 C.E., was noted for a few things. He executed thousands of Christians and burned a lot of churches while also seeing to numerous constitutional and administrative reforms intended to make the imperial throne more imperial. The Roman Senate continued to convene in a building Diocletian fashioned for the purpose. But there were no more fictions or illusions attaching to its powers. One of his reforms was to make sure it had none in matters of state. The body once responsible for Roman law was down to housekeeping chores and sheer ritual.
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We do not yet have official permission to conclude publicly that Ukraine has lost America’s proxy war with Russia—that remains among our Great Unsayables. But we are allowed—encouraged, indeed—to talk about how desperately the Kyiv regime needs more American guns if it is to stop Russian advances and—I love this part—reverse them and win the war.
In the Mar. 8 edition of Foreign Affairs, this headline: “Time is Running Out in Ukraine.” And this subhead, well-crafted to preserve the necessary degree of delusion: “Kyiv Cannot Capitalize on Russian Military Weakness Without U.S. Aid.” You can read the rest of Dara Massicot’s essay here if you insist, but the display language as just quoted is what Foreign Affairs wants you to know, or think you know: The $60.1 billion in additional support the Biden regime proposes will save the day and Congress must stop blocking it.
This has become something like the running theme on Ukraine since the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, announced it a couple of weeks back. It is now O.K. to suggest the conflict that has literally destroyed yet another nation and another people in the U.S. imperium’s cause has reached “a stalemate,” but only if it quickly follows that more weaponry is necessary to keep the thieves and neo–Nazis in Kyiv going. Stalemates can be overcome, you see. You only get to lose once, at which point you don’t need more guns.
On Mar. 14 The New York Times published “America Pulls Back from Ukraine” in its daily feature called The Morning. “What the war may look like if Ukraine does not receive more U.S. support,” is the subhead this time. Same story: All will be lost if the U.S. does not send Ukraine more war matériel tout de suite. All can be gained if it does.
You know, it is one thing for a Dara Massicot to go on about the desperate need for the U.S. to ship Kyiv more weapons. That is her job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and we can leave Ms. Massicot to her war-is-peace paradox. It is entirely another for a New York desk reporter at The Times to do the same. As you read German Lopez’s “report,” keep in mind: You are not reading journalism. You are reading a clerk for the policy cliques normalizing the latter’s desire to resupply Ukraine as our incontrovertible reality.
Sound journalism must have multiple sources, as any first-year J–school student can tell you. Lopez’s is a one-source story allowing of no other perspective on the war other than the official perspective as the Biden regime tries to shake loose the dough from Congress. What is vastly worse, the one source Lopez quotes is not even the usual administration official who cannot be named because of the “sensitivity” of something or other. No, the source is “my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers the war.”
Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wait. First, Julian Barnes does not cover the war. From The Times’s Washington bureau he covers what the regime wants the public to think about the war, full stop. Second, where do The Times’s editors get off having one reporter quote another reporter as the authority in a story when the quoted reporter is lock-and-stock repeating—uncritically, without qualification, in roughly the same language—what the administration declares at every press conference concerning the Ukraine war and in every public statement?
“With an aid package, the Ukrainians will have a much better chance of solidifying their defenses, holding the line. And in some places, they may be able to retake territory,” Barnes tells Lopez. “So it falls on the U.S. to supply Ukraine.”
He’s an original thinker, our Julian. You have to give him this.
I have long speculated that the many Massicots, Barneses, and Lopezes among us may get dressed every morning in the same locker room, so similar are the things they say. I wondered this again when, a day after The Times piece appeared, The Washington Post published “U.S. anticipates grim course for Ukraine if aid bill dies in Congress.” I tell you, if you switched the bylines on The Times and Post pieces not even the reporters would notice.
These people are doing not more, not less than getting the imperium’s lying done for it. Three cases in point:
One, if U.S. weaponry is so critical to the war as is proclaimed, this is no longer Ukraine’s war, if ever it was. It is America’s, yours and mine.
Two, Ukraine has not stalemated the Russians. If Kyiv has not already lost Washington’s proxy war—my assessment—it is losing it in slow motion with no prospect of reversing this outcome.
Three, we have a lie of omission. The Biden regime has already allocated an all-in total of roughly $75 billion for the Kyiv regime’s war effort, according to figures Foreign Affairs published recently. This equals Russia’s 2022 defense budget and compares with the $84 billion in Moscow’s 2023 budget—this before the $60.1 billion Biden now wants.
Given that the reported record indicates more than half of what the U.S. has already sent appears to have been either stolen or black-marketed, I have questions for Messrs. Barnes and Lopez and the squad of reporters the Washington Post bylined. Where is the analysis here, if crooked pols and military officers are stealing aid Kyiv says it needs to fight Russian forces? Where is even a mention of this obvious factor in the course of the war? Where are the editors in New York and Washington who should insist their reporters address this question? And if they can report that theft is not such a factor, where is your story telling us why all the thievery has not mattered?
There is one assertion in these pieces—finally, something—that distinguishes one from the others. The Post story, taking things further than The Times or Foreign Affairs, reports that “absent more American military support, ‘countless lives’ will be lost this year as Kyiv struggles to stave off collapse.” This comes from the usual unnamed “senior official,” who tells The Post, “Here’s the bottom line: Even if Ukraine holds on, what we really are saying is that we are going to leverage countless lives in order to do that.”
Do we all understand? Ending support for a war that is already lost or is ineluctably headed that way will not save lives: It will cost lives. The interior logic here is that it is out of the question for Kyiv to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Moscow, as the Kremlin has proposed on numerous occasions. This has long been advanced as another “normalized” reality. It is, once again, one thing for an administration official to make this repellent case and entirely another for reporters to repeat it uncritically.
The Biden regime is stuck this time having to deal with lawmakers tired of sending money to crooks. And the media clerks who are supposed to cover it are stuck lying to the public in the service of the regime’s case. Are we surprised to read, here and there, that the policy cliques are already considering ways to circumvent Congress once again?
I am not.
