Good
Guys and Bad Guys
An Essay by
Paul Adams
This is an essay I wrote for my final year of college.
Throughout history, the tendency for humanity to cast
themselves as the “good guys” and those who oppose them as the “bad guys” is
possibly as old as humanity itself. Of course, the logical explanation to this
is that it’s easier to confront a problem when cast in a two-dimensional
black-and-white viewpoint than to try to understand all the thousands of layers
of complexity that make up reality. For better or for worse, this tendency has
been a staple of human interaction for millenia, most notable in recent
centuries through American politics, entertainment, and culture. “Hollywood,”
for instance, “has long since mastered the art of interpreting history in ways
that express the popular mood of the moment. Especially when it comes to war,
the packaging typically involves putting the United States at center stage,
while marginalizing or distorting the role of others and ignoring details that
don’t fit into an America-centric narrative.”[1]
Author Andrew J. Bacevich tackles this issue frequently
in his book America’s War for the Greater
Middle East: A Military History. “Time and again,” he says, “when
confronting situations of daunting political complexity, the United States has
personalized the issue.”[2]
The United States, like so many before, continually falls into the same trap of
simplifying complex situations into “Good vs. Evil” scenarios to justify
getting involved. In this essay, I will examine the various methods and ways
the United States purports these images throughout their various wars involving
various Middle Eastern countries.
During the events of World War II, the man known as Adolf
Hitler led Germany through a hate-filled and bloody reign of terror, declaring
war on many of the largest world powers of the day and committing one of the
most heinous acts of genocide in recent memory. In the decades since the war,
Hitler’s actions have made him the ultimate example of evil throughout the
world, a secular stand-in for Satan, if you will. As such, many opponents to
America will inevitably be cast as “the next Hitler,” alongside basically every
President since he lived, according to their political opponents. Trump is
Hitler, Obama was Hitler, Bush was Hitler, and so on.
According to Bacevich, “On the long list of Hitlers with
whom the United States has contended since the demise of the genuine article
back in 1945, Saddam Hussein certainly ranks at or near the very top.”[3] If
any opposing leader in the last fifty years has come closest to fitting the
bill for Hitler 2.0, Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein certainly got very close. He
ran a cruel dictatorship, he fought against America on multiple accounts, he
even sported an easily recognizable mustache. These parallels were drawn most
heavily during the era of Desert Storm in the late 80’s and early 90’s.
President George H.W. Bush often “urged the Iraqi people to rid themselves of
Saddam, whom he described as ‘Hitler revisited.’”[4]
In short, when an opposing nation has a
less-than-beneficent leader at its head, casting them as the next Hitler makes
it easy for the United States to justify going to war with said leader’s
country. Who’s going to argue against the U.S. taking out a Bond villain
sitting up in his lair of doom, laughing evilly and wearing a red cape,
watching his people suffer down below? Soon, the idea spread quickly that
“‘quarrels in [a] region were not really about age-old religious differences
but rather the result of many unscrupulous and manipulative leaders seeking
their own power and wealth at the expense of ordinary people.’ By implication,
removing or at least intimidating unscrupulous leaders offered the most direct
path to giving ordinary people the justice they deserved.”[5]
Many started to hold the viewpoint that it
should be the military’s main goal to strike at that specific leader, that “second
Hitler,” and take them down. Then all the problems in the country would be
resolved. However, according to Bacevich, “When put to the test, this logic
proved defective on two counts. First, few leaders are actually irreplaceable.
Get rid of one, and another appears: ‘The cemeteries are filled with
indispensable men,’ briefly mourned and soon forgotten. Second, the peremptory
removal of those few possessing some approximation of indispensability leaves a
void, new problems taking the place of those magically solved by getting rid of
the villain at the top.”[6]
Ultimately, “Decapitation was to prove a poor substitute for strategy. Whatever
problems the United States was facing in the Greater Middle East, they went
much deeper than the actions of a few evildoers.”[7]
The label of “terrorist” is also a common
justification for United States involvement. In 2001, the United States
suffered a devastating blow at the hands of the Al Qaeda movement orchestrated
by Osama bin Laden. During said attack, four U.S. planes were hijacked and
forced to crash, two of which into the World Trade Center, with casualties
ranking in the thousands. Naturally, this prompted the George W. Bush administration
into immediate action against the man responsible, deploying troops immediately
into Afghanistan.
“Terrorism” soon became a byword in line
with “the next Hitler.” “In the presidential lexicon,” says Bacevich,
“terrorism was interchangeable with evil, so a war to destroy terrorism, as
Bush vowed to do, necessarily became a war to destroy evil.”[8]
Even after much of the work in Afghanistan was over, Bush pressed forward,
declaring war on all deemed to be terrorists. “More work remained to be done,”
Bacevich tells us, “but not in Afghanistan. Bush vowed to turn next on what he called
an ‘axis of evil’ consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.”[9]
“‘We have seen their kind before,’ Bush said of America’s new enemy. ‘They are
the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By
sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions . . . they follow in the
path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism.”[10]
Once again, Hitler found his way into the
narrative, the byword which had become synonymous with all evil in the world.
If one could draw reasonable parallels between Hitler and his Nazis and any
group or person you intend to fight, you can be sure of garnering support from
your people. Whether right or wrong, or whether the situation at hand is a bit
more complicated than that, if you can appear as the great and noble good guy
fighting against the next Hitler or the next Nazis, you have a good chance at
support. As Ronald Reagan put it, “‘Let no terrorist question our will . . . or
no tyrant doubt our resolve.’”[11]
Now, the tendency for humanity, and the
United States itself, to this kind of thinking has its upsides and its
downsides. If the opposing leader truly is a cruel and murderous tyrant in the
vein of Hitler, this view will ensure the support necessary to overthrow said
leader and free his people. If the opposing group truly are ruthless terrorists
bent on spreading fear and suffering in their wake, it is in the best interest
of everyone for the United States and other powerful nations to do something
about it. Even Bacevich admits that “Without doubt, efforts by U.S. and allied
forces saved many lives.”[12]
The trouble comes when the situation is not so black-and-white and much more
complexity is involved. That leader, while seeming a ruthless tyrant from an
American viewpoint, may actually have benefitted his nation in many ways. Those
murderous terrorists may look like heroic freedom fighters from a different
perspective. The alternatives that remain after those groups have been taken
out may end up being even worse. Talking about the situation in Bosnia in 1998
and their own “next Hitler” Slobodan Milošević, Bacevich
describes how “In place of serious engagement with the complexities inherent in
using force to move the Serbs out while keeping Kosovo in, Clark substituted
amateur psychologizing of Slobodan Milošević. When he got that wrong, nothing
remained but to improvise.”[13] Often,
the story is not as clear-cut as Hitler and his Nazis.
Another point of complexity comes in the
United States’ own agendas and perceptions. For instance, the U.S. Government’s
version of the narrative toward Iraq changed multiple times during the last few
decades. “When bolstering Iraqi military capabilities was the order of the
day,” Bacevich explains, “U.S. government representatives soft-pedaled any
criticism of Baghdad; when making the case that Iraq possessed altogether too much military power, they portrayed
that country’s behavior as utterly unconscionable.”[14] At
other times, “Preoccupation with settling past accounts occluded a clear
understanding of the situation at hand.”[15]
This kind of mentality can cause problems
on even the smaller interpersonal scale. For a nation with the kind of power
that the United States has enjoyed for the last century or so. Of course, it’s
natural that the United States would see its own necessity to get involved with
other nations’ affairs, after all, “The possession of matchless military
capabilities not only endowed the United States with the ability to right
wrongs and succor the afflicted, it also imposed an obligation to do just
that.”[16]
If the United States sat back and did nothing when these situations arose,
likely they would attract as much criticism as they do for getting involved.
So, with this responsibility and apparent
obligation to get involved in situations of potential terrorists or Hitlers,
the government needs support from its people and its allies if it hopes to
succeed in the endeavor. And when presenting a situation to the masses, it can
often be necessary to present it as simply as possible, the simplest, of
course, being the “black-and-white” image. When the United States went to war
briefly with Iraq in 1990, the government reminded the people of the failures
that occurred in Vietnam years before. “At home,” Bacevich says, “the narrative
of Desert Storm as Vietnam-done-right—‘a drama of dazzling display, brutal
crispness, and amazingly decisive outcome’—gathered momentum and became all but
irresistible.”[17] Likewise, they also used
communism, another byword for “evil” in the years following the Cold War, to
gain approval and support for their actions in Afghanistan. “Instead of seeing
the failure of the Soviet project in Afghanistan for what it was,” Bacevich
explains, “religious traditionalists emphatically rejecting secular
modernity—Washington chose to interpret it as a sign of vindication. If
collectivism had lost, democratic capitalism had won.”[18]
Ultimately, the issue of the “good guy vs.
bad guy” mentality is a complicated one. It is often a natural human response
when confronted with a complex issue with no clear solution. Casting one side
as good and the other as evil tends to simplify said situation and present it
nicely to the masses to gain support. So it’s too much to expect the mentality
to go away, but that mentality can often prove to be dangerous when used by a
major power like the United States or Russia. On the one hand, the mentality
can influence action when necessary, as congressman Stephen Solarz put it,
“‘The great lesson of our times is that evil still exists, and when evil is on
the march it must be confronted.”[19]
On the other hand, when the situation is not that simple, we may end up putting
power into the hands of the real “bad guys” or making further problems for
those who really weren’t the “bad guys.” Or we may simply make more problems to
replace the old ones. And as much as we try to place the blame for all the
problems on one person or group, we must remember that “Communism’s collapse
notwithstanding, history had all along remorselessly ground onward . . . just
as it now seems obvious that banishing slavery wasn’t of itself going to
produce racial harmony and destroying fascism was not going to kindle world
peace.”[20]
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[2]
Bacevich, America’s War, 2898.
[3] Ibid.,
1732.
[4] Ibid.,
2560.
[5] Ibid.,
3505.
[6] Ibid.,
2898.
[7] Ibid.,
3522.
[8] Ibid., 4121.
[9] Ibid.,
4352.
[10] Ibid.,
4132.
[11] Ibid.,
1497.
[12] Ibid.,
2660.
[13] Ibid.,
3738.
[14] Ibid.,
1826.
[15] Ibid.,
2330.
[16] Ibid.,
2759.
[17] Ibid.,
2506.
[18] Ibid.,
1188
[19]
Ibid., 2304.
[20] Ibid.,
1200.
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