Humanitarianism as Weapon

From Air America to Saudi’s Yemen aid to Samantha Power moping in front of TV cameras at the Gaza border—our media refuses to connect the dots between conspicuous US charity and dropping bombs.

A new USAID Inspector General report released yesterday lays out what has been long obvious: The so-called “humanitarian pier” in Gaza made no practical sense and served no purpose other than generating positive headlines stateside. President Biden pursued the construction of the pier, the report found, despite officials’ concerns about difficult weather in the Mediterranean sea and security challenges in a war zone, as well as worries that it would undermine pushes to reopen land crossings. “Due to structural damage caused by rough weather and high seas, the pier operated for only 20 days and was decommissioned on July 17,” the report states.

The absurdity of the move was obvious since inception: Why would the US build a pier to get around its own military blockade? Why not compel Israel to simply open up aid lines by ground, which is an exceedingly more efficient means of distributing aid? The most likely motive for a so-called “humanitarian pier” in Gaza? It seems, for the most part, so the Biden White House could say they were building a humanitarian pier in Gaza for PR reasons and, to a lesser extent, as a means for testing out new weapons systems. It was a textbook case of Humanitarianism as Weapon, using humanitarianism to provide cover for bombing, sieging, starving, and occupying. 

As I noted in March, the pier stunt is consistent with the broader approach of the Biden administration, which it sees Gaza not a humanitarian crisis to end, but a PR headache to manage. From equally ineffective aid airdrops (that killed several Palestinians) to bogus “ceasefire talks” to non-stop leaked stories about Biden fuming at Netanyahu to first ballot moral phony Samantha Power doing photo ops in front of bags of grain, the White House’s approach has been motivated by ass covering and perception management. 

This PR-focused busy work is part of a broader trend that dates back decades. The US has long presented itself as the firefighter for its own acts of arson, along with its close allies.

For eight years, Saudi Arabia bombed and starved Yemen with US support and, as stifling restrictions continue, is still starving the poorest country in the Middle East. This military campaign released untold suffering: 150,000 people were directly killed, but this number soars to 377,000 when considering hunger, disease, and war’s other indirect killers. Save the Children estimated, conservatively, that 85,000 children starved to death since the war started. The phrase that Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis was repeated so frequently, it has almost reached the status of cliche. The Saudi-led coalition (including the UAE, US, UK, and other countries) bears the vast majority of responsibility for this suffering, as it is by far the superior air power, and consistently bombed hospitals, school children, weddings, factories, and other places of civilian life and infrastructure. 

Yet, as the Saudi-led coalition inflicted these hellish conditions, Saudi Arabia was, perversely, praised for sending in aid. On June 2, 2020, Saudi Arabia co-hosted with the UN a virtual pledging summit, with the goal of raising money for humanitarian assistance to Yemen, then in the grips of a Covid crisis. “I thank the Government of Saudi Arabia for co-hosting this pledging event, and for your continued commitment to humanitarian aid to the people of Yemen,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his opening statement. Saudi Arabia ended up being the biggest pledger, coming in at a $500 million commitment, the same amount Prince Mohammed bin Salman spent on his personal yacht, as The Column’s Sarah Lazare noted at the time.

In other words, Saudi Arabia has used its aid to extort the UN into muzzling any criticism of the country as it bombed and killed civilians. This is an impressive P.R. coup, allowing Saudi Arabia to garner headlines about its aid pledges, even while the war was largely ignored in the American press, despite the role of the US in providing arms, intelligence, training, and political cover.

Not to be outdone, the US ran a similar PR effort in parallel, climaxing with one particularly gross 60 Minutes segment celebrating the US role in providing food to Yemen without once mentioning that the US was supplying the bombs, fuel and military support so Saudi Arabia could cause the famine the US was supposedly alleviating. This came after years of Western media ignoring the US’s central role in creating famine in Yemen while presenting the US as a humanitarian savior in publications ranging from CBS News to AP to The Guardian. 

Sometimes the Humanitarianism as Weapon double game goes beyond just PR, and involves more direct links between the facilitation of humanitarian aid and military support. During the early years of the US war against leftist movements in Indochina in the early 1960s,  Humanitarianism as Weapon was employed by the CIA, which used its shell “civilian” airline company, Air America, to send alleged food shipments to anti-communist rebels in Laos that were really crates of munitions and weapons. As the Los Angeles Times noted in their report on the covert operation in 2007, “[Air America] pilots developed code words for their cargo: ‘Soft rice’ meant food and ‘hard rice’ meant arms.”

Just five years ago, a similar, even more shameless wielding of Humanitarianism as Weapon was employed by the Trump administration. In early 2019, with the full backing of Center-Liberal media, seasoned Cold Warriors John Bolton and Elliott Abrams promoted a the manifestly silly idea that Trump—who infamously kicked off his run for the White House by calling Mexicans rapists, and subsequently, as president, left Puerto Rico for dead after Hurricane Maria—suddenly cared about the poor, starving people of Venezuela (a country whose economy they helped tank by ratcheting up brutal sanctions two years prior) and urgently needed to force in an aid convoy carrying medical supplies and food. 

The stunt involved using dopey celebrities, billionaire Richard Branson, and other supposed do-gooders to boost the idea that a “humanitarian aid convoy” simply had to be let into Venezuela by the Maduro government. While the humanitarian situation at the time was indeed dire, the stunt was obviously the pretext for a far-right, Trump-backed coup—a fact confirmed by Bloomberg a few weeks later (as “U.S. officials joined Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido near a bridge in Colombia to send desperately needed aid to the masses and challenge the rule of Nicolas Maduro, some 200 exiled soldiers were checking their weapons and planning to clear the way for the convoy.”), The New York Times four days after that (“The opposition itself, not Mr. Maduro’s men, appears to have set the [aid] cargo alight accidentally.”) and the US government’s own USAID internal report issued in 2021 (AP: “Watchdog: US aid to Venezuela driven by more than just need”. )

But one didn’t need any subsequent reports to know, at the time, this was the ulterior motive, because (1) actual aid groups like the Red Cross and United Nations rejected the plan outright and (2) the man leading the effort for the Trump White House, Elliott Abrams, had been accused of doing the exact same Humanitarianism as Weapon scheme in the 1980s, using “humanitarian flights” to run weapons to contra fighters, a far-right paramilitary group in Nicaragua responsible for countless human rights violations. As the New York Times reported in 1987

Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams has defended his role in authorizing the shipment of weapons on a humanitarian aid flight to Nicaraguan rebels, saying the operation was ''strictly by the book.'' 

This fairly important context was, of course, omitted from all the reporting of the alleged “aid convoy” at the time. Official Bad Countries’ motives are met with maximum skepticism. US motives are assumed, by default, to be pure of heart and concerned with human suffering—even by supposedly anti-Trump liberals. 

And this is the problem with our media credulously reporting on Biden’s “humanitarian pier” without any substantive criticism: It ignores the long history of Humanitarianism as Weapon. 

As I noted for The Real News in June, the pier was, in this sense—the only sense that matters—a stirring success. It generated the predicted positive headlines and gave the Biden White House much needed PR cover as protests around Gaza reached a fever pitch in the spring:

• Biden directs U.S. military to build temporary pier in Gaza for humanitarian aid – PBS (March 7)

• Biden to announce the setting up of a temporary Mediterranean port to deliver Gaza aid – NPR  (March 7)

• U.S. to Build Pier to Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea – The New York Times (March 7)

• Biden Seeks to Boost Emergency Aid to Gaza With Offshore Pier – The Wall Street Journal (March 7)

• How the U.S. military will use a floating pier to deliver Gaza aid – The Washington Post (March 8)

• US dispatches aid ship to Gaza after Biden vows to build pier  – Reuters (March 9)

• US Army boats head out on a mission to build a floating pier off Gaza’s shore for food deliveries – AP (March 12)

• US-built floating pier that will allow delivery of humanitarian aid has been anchored in Gaza – CNN (May 16)

• U.S. military anchors pier in Gaza for humanitarian aid – NBC News (May 17)

The default position of the media when it comes to conspicuous acts of charity in charged geopolitical arenas—especially ones where the US is an active hostile party—should be skepticism, not wide-eyed credulity. Indeed, when Russian state media announced in April 2022 that Russia “delivered nearly 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Ukraine,” no one in the Western media breathlessly reported on this fact like it was a magnanimous gesture. Instead it was, justifiably, ignored. In US media’s initial reports of Biden’s supposed “humanitarian pier,” the coverage was positive, shallow, and slack-jawed. Occasionally, buried on paragraph 12, there would be a quote from an actual humanitarian organization questioning the efficiency of the tactic. But the sheer absurdity of the US building infrastructure to circumvent a blockade that they, themselves, were helping maintain was largely ignored. Despite arming and militarily and diplomatically supporting the destruction of Gaza for months at that point, US media still indulged in a childlike belief that the White House was somehow motivated by humanitarian concerns, despite the glaring conflicts of interest and contradictions at the heart of the effort. 

Humanitarianism as Weapon is a well documented tactic. Perhaps the next time US officials claim they are coming to the rescue of a population they are currently besieging and waging war on, reporters and editors can look for another motive—any other motive—other than imperial beneficence.