The West's Propaganda Machine Has Overplayed Its Hand in Ukraine | Opinion

The English poet Robert Graves fought in France during the First World War and later wrote, "It never occurred to me that newspapers and statesmen would lie. I gave up my pacifism and was ready to believe the worst of the Germans." If you were looking for proof that some of our own politicians and pundits are likewise pushing us ever closer towards a war with Russia, you found it last week when the destruction of an American drone and an arrest warrant issued for Russia's president were both presented as irrefutable grounds for increasing military assistance to Ukraine.

The coverage of these events was, to say the least, one sided and unfortunately it is not hard to find historic precedents for this sort of pro-war propaganda blitz. In May 1915, the British ocean liner Lusitania set sail from New York for Liverpool. Onboard were 2,000 passengers and over 10 tons of munitions for the British army. The German Embassy in Washington issued a press statement and distributed notices warning travelers that Germany and Britain were at war and that the ship was a target. The statement read in part "Americans sailing onboard British ships do so at their own risk." The Lusitania was torpedoed off the Irish cost and sank rapidly. More than half of those onboard perished.

The British government quickly turned this tragedy into a propaganda coup. It furnished photographs of bodies washed ashore and families searching for loved ones that dominated American newspapers for days. While President Woodrow Wilson remained quiet, former President Theodore Roosevelt called it "warfare against innocent women and children" adding that "it seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter." The sinking of the Lusitania helped ignite a public reaction that would eventually lead the United States into World War I.

For more than a year it has been an open secret that NATO is supplying Ukraine with valuable military intelligence Kyiv could not have obtained on its own. This intelligence enabled Ukraine to destroy Russian warships, target senior Russian officers, and kill more than a few Russian soldiers. It should hardly come as a surprise that the Russians eventually destroyed one of the drones spying on them. They will no doubt retaliate again if NATO continues to arm, train, and advise a nation at war with Russia. Yet the news coverage of this event, like the sinking of the Lusitania, was largely designed to fuel outrage that somehow American honor had been challenged.

Five days after the Lusitania went down, the British Government issued the Bryce Report, which its office responsible for wartime propaganda and misinformation had commissioned to investigate German war crimes in Belgium. The report contained dozens of stories of alleged executions, torture, rape, and mutilation of Belgian women and children with particular emphasis on the mistreatment of virgins, babies, the elderly, and priests. All of the witnesses to these events remained anonymous for their own protection.

The German army was guilty of many crimes in Belgium, but there were few instances of the perversions American newspaper readers were led to believe in. Even at the time, the Bryce Report's more grisly stories were questioned. The famous American attorney Clarence Darrow offered a reward o $1,000 to anyone who could produce a Belgian child whose hands had been cut off by the Germans, as the report alleged. None ever came forward, yet the lurid tales in the Bryce Report played an important role in convincing the American public that Germany must be struck off the list of civilized nations.

In recent weeks, Russia has also been accused of murder, torture, rape, and crimes against humanity. These charges were amplified last week when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. The president of Russia is now accused of forcibly abducting thousands of Ukrainian children. The Canadian foreign minister has openly called for regime change in Moscow.

We have no way of judging the validity of the charges against Putin. Yet to paraphrase George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, what purpose does it serve to call Putin a war criminal who must be tried for his crimes and removed from office? Only the purpose of making serious negotiations impossible. What incentive is there to make peace if what is on offer from the West is a prison cell?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is often compared to Winston Churchill and, in at least one respect, this comparison is surely accurate. As first lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, and again as prime minister during the Second World War, Churchill did his utmost to entangle the United States in a war his own nation was not winning. Commenting on how the incident had influenced American opinion, Churchill wrote "In spite of its horrors, we must regard the sinking of the Lusitania as an event most favorable to the allied cause." Like Churchill, Zelensky has waged a relentless public relations campaign designed to convince potential allies that his cause is just, his nation can win and his opponent has violated the norms of civilized behavior. But is any of this correct?

Twenty years ago this month we were led into a war with Iraq by many of the very same individuals and institutions that are today promoting more direct confrontation with Russia. Saddam Hussein was the new Adolf Hitler. Failure to topple his regime was spineless appeasement. After all, Saddam was building a nuclear bomb and had ties to Osama Bin Ladin. None of this turned out to be true, but thousands of American and tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives nevertheless. Today, these same voices proclaim that " This time it is different!" and in one sense they too are certainly correct. Unlike Iraq, Russia has a nuclear arsenal at least as large as our own.

David H. Rundell is a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia and the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served for 15 years in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.