Why US Leaders Intervene Everywhere
by Michael Parenti
Chapter 5 of The Terrorism Trap (City Lights, 2002)
Washington Policymakers claim that US intervention is motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, defend our national security, protect weaker nations from aggressors, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, and the like. But if US leaders have only the best intentions when they intervene in other lands, why has the United States become the most hated nation in the terrorist's pantheon of demons? And not only Muslim zealots but people from all walks of life around the world denounce the US government as the prime purveyor of violence and imperialist exploitation. {75} Do they see something that most Americans have not been allowed to see?
Supporting the Right
Since World War II, the US government has given some $240 billion in military aid to build up the military and internal security forces of more than eighty other nations. The purpose of this enormous effort has been not to defend these nations from invasion by foreign aggressors but to protect their various ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. That is what some of us have been arguing. But how can we determine that? By observing that (a) with few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various regimes have ever been threatened by attack from neighboring countries; (b) just about all these "friendly" regimes have supported economic systems that are integrated into a global system of corporate domination, open to foreign penetration on terms that are singularly favorable to transnational investors; (c) there is a great deal of evidence that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in these various countries have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labor unions, peasant organizations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics forthemselves. {76}
For decades we were told that a huge US military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world Communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations in 1989-1991, Washington made no move to dismantle its costly and dangerous global military apparatus. All Cold War weapons programs continued in full force, with new ones being added all the time, including the outer-space National Missile Defense and other projects to militarize outer space. Immediately the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies - for some unexplained reason previously overlooked - who menace the United States, including "dangerous rogue states" like Libya with its ragtag army of 50,000 and North Korea with its economy on the brink of collapse.
The real intentions of US national security state leaders can be revealed in part by noting whom they assist and whom they attack. US leaders have consistently supported rightist regimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones. The terms "Right" and "Left" are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators - and with good reason. To explicate the politico-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them. The "Left", as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that oppose the privileged interests of wealthy propertied classes, while advocating egalitarian redistributive policies and a common development beneficial to the general populace.
The Right too is involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning and investing classes. In almost every country including our own, rightist groups, parties, or governments pursue tax and spending programs, wage and investment practices, methods of police and military control, and deregulation and privatization policies that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what defines and distinguishes the Right from the Left.
In just about every instance, rightist forces are deemed by US opinion makers to be "friendly to the West", a coded term for "pro-capitalist". Conversely, leftist ones are labeled as "anti-democratic", "anti-American" and "anti-West", when actually what they are against is global capitalism.
While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious rightwing autocracies in history, governments that have tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), and Portugal (under Salazar).
Washington also assists counterrevolutionary groups that have perpetrated some of the most brutal bloodletting against civilian populations in leftist countries: Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the mujahideen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the rightwing drug-dealing KLA terrorists in Kosovo. All this is a matter of public record although seldom if ever treated in the US media.
Washington's support has extended to the extreme rightist reaches of the political spectrum. Thus, after World War II US leaders and their Western capitalist allies did nothing to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for prosecuting some top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. In short time, former Nazis and their collaborators were back in the saddle in Germany. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States and Latin America, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War. {77}
In France, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. "No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps". {78} US military authorities also restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation force were used after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China. {79}
In Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures. {80} In the three decades after the war, US government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy. From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the "strategy of tension", involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombing massacres directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left. In 1995, a deeply implicated CIA, refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating this terrorist campaign. {81}
In the 1980s, scores of people were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by rightwing terrorists in the service of state security agencies. As with the earlier "strategy of tension" in Italy, the attacks attempted to create enough popular fear and uncertainty to undermine the existing social democracies. The US corporate-owned media largely ignored these events.
Attacking the Left
We can grasp the real intentions of US leaders by looking at who they target for attack, specifically just about all leftist governments, movements, and popular insurgencies. The methods used include (a) financing, infiltrating, and coopting their military, and their internal security units and intelligence agencies, providing them with police-state technology including instruments of torture; (b) imposing crippling economic sanctions and IMF austerity programs; (c) bribing political leaders, military leaders, and other key players; (d) inciting retrograde ethnic separatists and supremacists within the country; (e) subverting their democratic and popular organizations; (f) rigging their elections; and (g) financing collaborationist political parties, labor unions, academic researchers, journalists, religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, and various media.
US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments - "guilty" of introducing egalitarian redistributive economic programs in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other nations - were overthrown by their respective military forces funded and advised by the US national security state. The intent behind Washington's policy is seen in what the US-sponsored military rulers do when they come to power. They roll back any reforms and open their countries all the wider to foreign corporate investors on terms completely favorable to the investors.
The US national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against reformist or revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, Egypt, Cambodia, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In many cases the attacks were terroristic in kind, directed at "soft targets" such as schools, farm cooperatives, health clinics, and whole villages. These wars of attrition extracted a grisly toll on human life and frequently forced the reformist or revolutionary government to discard its programs and submit to IMF dictates, after which the US-propelled terrorist attacks ceased.
Since World War II, US forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and most recently Afghanistan - a record of direct military aggression unmatched by any communist government in history. US/NATO forces delivered round-the-clock terror bombings on Yugoslavia for two and a half months in 1999, targeting housing projects, private homes, hospitals, schools, state-owned factories, radio and television stations, government owned hotels, municipal power stations, water supply systems, and bridges, along with hundreds of other nonmilitary targets at great loss to civilian life. In some instances, neoimperialism has been replaced with an old-fashioned direct colonialist occupation, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia where US troops are stationed, and more recently in Afghanistan.
In 2000-2001, US leaders were involved in a counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrilla movements in Colombia. They also were preparing the public for moves against Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, is engaged in developing a popular movement and reforms that favor the poor. Stories appearing in the US press tell us that Chavez is emotionally unstable, autocratic, and bringing his country to ruin, the same kind of media hit pieces that demonized the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, Allende in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Qaddafi in Libya, Milosevic in Yugoslavia, and Aristide in Haiti, to name some of the countries that were subsequently attacked by US forces or surrogate mercenary units.
Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence, or apply some significant portion of their budgets to not-for-profit public services, are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of US intervention. The designated "enemy" can be (a) a populist military government as in Panama under Omar Torrijos (and even under Manuel Noriega), Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, Peru under Juan Velasco, Portugal under the leftist military officers in the MFA, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez; (b) a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; (c) a social democracy as in Chile under Salvador Allende, Jamaica under Michael Manley, Greece under Andreas Papandreou, Cyprus under Mihail Makarios, and the Dominican Republic under Juan Bosch; (d) an anti-colonialist reform government as in the Congo under Patrice Lumumba; (e) a Marxist-Leninist government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; (f) an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Omar Qaddafi; or even (g) a conservative militarist regime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein if it should attempt an independent course on oil quotas and national development.
The goal of US global policy is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, well-organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or medical plans or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profits.
While described as "anti-West" and "anti-American", just about all leftist governments - from Cuba to Vietnam to the late Soviet Union - have made friendly overtures and shown a willingness to establish normal diplomatic and economic relations with the United States. It was not their hostility toward the United States that caused conflict but Washington's intolerance of the alternative class systems they represented.
In the post-World War II era, US policymakers sent assistance to Third World nations, and put forth a Marshall plan, grudgingly accepting reforms that produced marginal benefits for the working classes of Western Europe and elsewhere. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of Communist parties in Western European countries. {82} But today there is no competing lure; hence, Third World peoples (and working populations everywhere) are given little consideration in the ongoing campaigns to rollback the politico-economic democratic gains won by working people in various countries.
After the Counter-Revolution
One can judge the intentions of policymakers by the policies they pursue in countries that have been successfully drawn back into the Western orbit. Consider Grenada. In 1983, US forces invaded the tiny and relatively defenseless sovereign nation of Grenada (population 110,000) in blatant violation of international law. The Reagan administration justified the assault by claiming it was a rescue operation on behalf of American students whose safety was being threatened at the Saint George medical school. The White House also asserted that the New jewel revolutionary government had allowed the island to become a Soviet-Cuban training camp, harboring a large contingent of Cuban troops and "deadly armaments" "to export terror and undermine democracy". It was further charged that the New Jewel government was planning to build a Soviet submarine base and Soviet military air base that would use Grenada to control crucial "choke points" along oil tanker lanes that came to the United States, thereby bringing us to our knees. {83} When these charges proved to be without foundation, {84} some critics concluded that White House policy toward Grenada therefore had been unduly alarmist and misguided. But the fact that officials offer alarmist and misleading rationales is no reason to conclude ipso facto that they are themselves misled. It may be that they have other motives which they prefer not to enunciate.
Under the Grenadian revolutionary government, free milk and other foodstuffs were being distributed to the needy, as were materials for home improvement. Grade school and secondary education were free for everyone for the first time. Free health clinics were opened in the countryside, thanks mostly to assistance rendered by Cuban doctors. Measures were taken in support of equal pay and legal status for women. Unused land was leased to establish farm cooperatives and turned agriculture away from cash-crop exports and more toward self-sufficient food production. {85}
The US invasion and. occupation put an end to almost all these programs. Under US hegemony, unemployment in Grenada reached new heights and poverty new depths. Domestic cooperatives were suppressed or starved out. Farm families were displaced to make way for golf courses, and the corporate controlled tourist industry boomed. Grenada was once more firmly bound to the privatized free-market world, once again safely Third Worldized.
The same process occurred after the US invaded Panama in December 1989, supposedly to bring Manuel Noriega, described as a drug-dealing dictator, to justice. With Noriega and his leftist military deposed and the US military firmly in control, conditions in Panama deteriorated sharply. Unemployment, already high because of the US embargo, climbed to 35 percent as drastic layoffs were imposed on the public sector. US occupation authorities eliminated pension rights and other work benefits, ended public sector subsidies, privatized public services, shut down publicly owned media, and jailed a number of Panamanian editors and reporters critical of the invasion. The US military arrested labor union leaders and removed some 150 local labor leaders from their elected positions within their unions. Crime, poverty, drug trafficking, and homelessness increased dramatically. {86} Free-market Third Worldization was firmly reinstated in Panama under the banner of "democracy".
The same reactionary pattern was discernible in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. For decades we were told by US leaders, media commentators, and academic policy experts that the Cold War was a struggle against an expansionist world communism, with nothing said about the expansionist interests of world capitalism. But immediately after communism was overthrown in the USSR in 1991, US leaders began intimating that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former "captive nations" - namely free markets. Getting rid of communism, it became clear, meant getting rid of public ownership of the means of production. Of what use was political democracy, they seemed to be saying, if it allowed the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? So the kind of polity seemed to weigh less than the kind of economy. The goal was, and continues to be, totally privatized economies that favor rich investor interests at the expense of the people in these countries.
When Words Speak Louder than Actions
It should not go unnoticed that US leaders occasionally do verbalize their dedication to making the world safe for the transnational corporate system. At such times words seem to speak louder than actions, for the words are an admission of the real intention behind the action. For example, as President Woodrow Wilson contemplated sending US troops as part of the expeditionary force of Western nations to overthrow the newly installed revolutionary socialist government in Russia in 1917, his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, recorded in a confidential memorandum the administration's class concerns. Lansing ignored all the blather that US leaders were publicly mouthing about Lenin and the Bolsheviks being German agents. Instead he perceived them to be revolutionary socialists who sought "to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth". The Bolsheviks wanted "to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country". Their appeal was to "a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than by individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order [that is, capitalism] in all countries." The danger was that it "may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors". {87} Almost four decades later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower uttered a forbidden truth in his State of the Union message: "A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for [private] investment in foreign nations". {88}
In 1982, the elder George Bush, then vice-president in the Reagan administration, announced, "We want to maintain a favorable climate for foreign investment in the Caribbean region, not merely to protect the existing US investment there, but to encourage new investment opportunities in stable, democratic, free-market oriented countries close to our shores". Not only close to our shores but everywhere else, as, General Gray, commandant of the US Marines, observed in 1990, saying that the United States must have "unimpeded access" to "established and developing economic markets throughout the world". {89}
President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: "Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world's community of market-based democracies". {90} And over the past decade US policymakers have repeatedly and explicitly demanded "free-market reforms" in one country after another in the former communist nations of Eastern Europe.
Far from being wedded to each other, as US leaders and opinion makers would have us believe, capitalism and democracy are often on a fatal collision course. US leaders find electoral democracy useful when it helps to destabilize one-party socialism and serves as a legitimating cloak for capitalist restoration. But when, it becomes a barrier to an untrammeled capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. This was demonstrated when the US national security state overthrew popular democratic governments in Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Greece in 1967, Indonesia in 1965, and a score of other countries.
The most recent example is Yugoslavia. Multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was once a regional industrial power and economic success, with a high annual growth rate, free medical care, a literacy rate over ninety percent, and a relatively equitable and prosperous economic life for its various peoples. While Yugoslavia was not, after the 1970s, a strictly socialist country, US policymakers knew that the economy was still 75 percent publicly owned and still had a large and egalitarian public service sector that was out of line with the push toward free-market Third Worldization.
As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued US National Security Decision Directive 133: "United States Policy towards Yugoslavia", labeled "secret sensitive". It followed closely the objectives laid out in an earlier directive aimed at Eastern Europe, one that called for a "quiet revolution" to overthrow Communist governments while "reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market" (that is, global capitalism). The economic "reforms" pressed upon Yugoslavia by the IMF and other foreign creditors mandated that all socially owned firms and all worker-managed production units be transformed into private capitalist enterprises. {91}
In February 1999, US officials at Rambouillet made their determined dedication to economic privatization perfectly clear. Chapter 4a, Article 1, of the Rambouillet "agreement", actually an ultimatum imposed upon what remained of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), stated in no uncertain terms: "The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles". There was to be no restriction on the movement of "goods, services, and capital to Kosovo", and all matters of trade, investment and corporate ownership were to be left to the private market. {92}
In 2000, the "Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe", called for "creating vibrant market economies" in the Balkans. It was hailed by the Clinton administration for offering "advice on investment" to all the countries of Southeast Europe. That same year, the Overseas Private . Investment Corporation (OPIC) inaugurated a fund to be managed by Soros Private Funds Management. Its purpose, as stated by the US embassy in Macedonia, is "to provide capital for new business development, expansion and privatization". {93} Meanwhile the Agency for International Development (USAID) announced its intention to undertake "assistance programs to support economic reform and restructuring the economy ... to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy". {94}
Along with the words came the actions. A decade of IMF restructuring, years of US-led, boycott, embargo, wars of secession, and weeks of massive bombing in 1999 left the Yugoslav economy in ruins. In April 2001, according to the London Financial Times, the newly installed "pro-West" rulers of Yugoslavia, beneficiaries of millions of dollars in US electoral funds, launched "a comprehensive privatization program as part of economic reforms introduced following the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milosevic". This included the sale of more than 7,000 publicly owned or worker controlled companies to private investors. {95}
"Conspiracy", "Incompetence", and "Inertia"
All of us are expected to make plans and intentionally pursue certain goals in life, and we recognize that throughout history other nations have defined objectives that they have carried through with resolve. But when one suggests that the US national security state operates with foreordained intent, mainstream social scientists and media pundits dismiss such a notion as "conspiracy theory". Policies that produce unfortunate effects on others are explained away as "unintended consequences". Of course, unintended consequences do arise, and upheavals do sometimes catch US leaders off guard, but there is no reason to reduce so much of policy outcome to stochasticism, to argue that things almost always occur by chance; stuff just happens, as innocently befuddled leaders grope about unburdened by any preconceived agenda.
To say, as I do, that US national security leaders know more, intend more, and do more than they let on is not to claim they are omnipotent or omnicompetent. It is to argue that US policy is not habitually misguided and bungling, although mistakes are made and indeterminancies certainly arise. Generally, US foreign policy is remarkably consistent and cohesive, a deadly success, given the interests it represents.
Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover. In 1986 it was discovered that the Reagan administration was running a covert operation to bypass Congress (and the law), using funds from secret arms sales to Iran to finance counterrevolutionary mercenaries (the "contras") in Nicaragua and probably GOP electoral campaigns at home. President Reagan admitted full knowledge of the arms sales, but claimed he had no idea what happened to the money. He was asking us to believe that these operations were being conducted by subordinates, including his very own National Security Advisor, without being cleared by him. Reagan publicly criticized himself for his slipshod managerial style and lack of administrative control over his staff. His admission of incompetence was eagerly embraced by various commentators who prefer to see their leaders as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than to see deliberate deception. Subsequent sworn testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had played a deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair. {96}
Throughout its history, the CIA and other agencies of the national security state have resorted to every conceivable crime and machination, using false propaganda, sabotage, bribery, rigged elections, collusion with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, death squads, terror bombings, torture, massacres, and wars of attrition. At the same time, US leaders have pretended to have had nothing to do with such things. No less a political personage than Henry Kissinger repeatedly pretended to ignorance and incompetence when confronted with the dirty role he and his cohorts played in East Timor, Indochina, Chile, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. Kissinger's writings and speeches are heavily larded with exhortations about the importance of maintaining the efficacy of US policy and the need to impress the world with the mettle of US resolve. "Yet in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in political crimes, he rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional servants, suggesting that they know little, care less, are poorly informed and easily rattled by the pace of events". {97}
Sometimes outcomes are explained away as the result of a disembodied organizational inertia. Interventions are said to occur because a national security agency wants to prove its usefulness or is simply carried along on its own organizational momentum, as supposedly happened with the CIA and Pentagon intervention in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. To be sure, organizational modes of operation do come into play, but to see them as the predominant force behind policies is like claiming that the horses are the cause of the horse race.
The "Other Variables" Argument
US leaders may be motivated by all sorts of concerns such as advancing their nation's prestige, maintaining national security against potentially competing capitalist nations, developing strategic military superiority, distracting the American public from, domestic problems and scandals, advancing the heroic macho image of the president, and the like. But these purposes almost always dovetail with dominant capitalist interests, or certainly do not challenge those interests in any serious way. Thus, while a US president might be interested in promoting his macho image, he would never think of doing so by supporting the cause of socialist reformation in this or any other country.
That officeholders seek to achieve many other purposes, Ralph Miliband once noted, "should not obscure the fact that in the service of these purposes, they become the dedicated servants of their business and investing classes". {98} The point is not that nations act imperialistically for purely material motives but that in addition to other considerations, policymakers will not move against the system-sustaining material interests of the dominant corporate class.
In sum, when trying to understand the events of September 11 we need to remember that US politico-corporate elites have resorted to every conceivable subterfuge, coercion, and act of terrorist violence in their struggle to make the world safe for transnational corporate capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labor of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist regimes that challenge this arrangement by seeking to build alternative productive systems. The goal is to create a world populated by client states and compliant populations open to transnational corporate penetration on terms that are completely favorable to the penetrators. It is not too much to conclude that such a consistent and ruthless policy of global hegemony is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious design.
Notes
75 "Imperialism" is a term not normally applied by mainstream commentators and academics to anything that US leaders do. So perhaps it needs a definition: imperialism, as used here, is the process whereby the rulers of one country use economic and military power to expropriate the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of another country in order to attain ever greater capital accumulations on behalf of wealthy interests at home and abroad.
76 For evidence in support of this see Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995); Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, 2nd edition (New York: Saint Martin's, 1993); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (New York: Black Rose Books, 1998); and the writings of James Petras, Morris Morely, Edward Herman, and various others. For Petras's latest treatment of imperialism and capitalism, see his "Neo Mercantilist Empire in Latin America: Bush, ALCA and Plan Colombia" (unpublished monograph, 2001).
77 See Ingo Muller, Hitler's Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), part 3, "The Aftermath"; and Jon Wiener, "Bringing Nazi Sympathizers to the US", Nation, March 6 1989, 306-309. Nazi war criminals have been aided by Western intelligence agencies, business interests, the military, and even the Vatican. In October 1944, German paratroop commander Major Walter Reder, slaughtered 1,836 defenseless civilians in a village near Bologna, Italy as a reprisal against Italian partisan activities. He was released from prison in 1985, after Pope John Paul II, among others, made an appeal on his behalf-over the strenuous protests of families of the victims.
78 Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 290.
79 Hugh Deane, "Korea, China and the United Sates: A Look Back", Monthly Review, February 1995, 20 and 23.
80 Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), passim.
81 La Repubblica, April 9 1995; Corriere della Sera, March 27 and 28 1995, April 12 1995, and May 29 1995.
82 Peter Gowan, "The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy", New Left Review, March-April 1999, 103-104.
83 Network news reports, October 27 to November 4 1983; New York Times, November 6 to 20, 1983; John Judis, "Grenadian Documents Do Not Show What Reagan Claims", and Daniel Lazare, "Reagan's Seven Big Lies about Grenada", both in In These Times, November 6 1983.
84 See the discussion of Grenada in my Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, 2nd edition (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1993 - now available through Wadsworth), 148-151.
85 "A Tottering Structure of Lies", Sojourner, December 1983, 4 5; and Michael Massing, "Grenada Before and After", Atlantic Monthly, February 1984, 79-80.
86 See "Special Report", Labor Action (publication of the Labor Coalition on Central America, Washington, DC), July/August 1990; Clarence Lusane, "Aftermath of the US Invasion", CovertAction Information Bulletin, Spring 1991, 61-63.
87 Quoted in William Appleman Williams, "American Intervention in Russia: 1917-1920", in David Horowitz (editor), Containment and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 36, 38.
88 New York Times, February 3 1953.
89 Quoted in Richard Barnet, "The Uses of Force", New Yorker, April 29 1991, 90.
90 When the text of Clinton's speech was printed the next day in the New York Times, the sentence quoted above was omitted. Observers who heard the speech reported the disparity.
91 Sean Gervasi, "Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis", CovertAction Quarterly, winter 1992-93, 41-42. Michel Chossudovsky, "Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia", CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1996; and Chossudovsky's "Banking on the Balkans", THIS, July-August 1999.
92 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo (the "Rambouillet Agreement"), February 23, 1999, reproduced in full in full in The Kosovo Dossier, 2nd edition (London: Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 1999).
93 Gregory Elich, "The CIAs Covert War", CovertAction Quarterly, April-June 2001, 35-36.
94 Elich, "The CIAs Covert War", 38-39.
95 Financial Times, April 11 2001; and a communication to me from Barry Lituchy, editor of Eastern European Review.
96 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scoti, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston: South End, 1988); Report of the Congressional Committee Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987).
97 Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London & New York: Verso, 2001), 98-99.
98 Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 84 (italics in the original).
99 Lawrence Korb, "Perfect Time to Cut Military Spending", San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2001.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html
Chapter 5 of The Terrorism Trap (City Lights, 2002)
Washington Policymakers claim that US intervention is motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, defend our national security, protect weaker nations from aggressors, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, and the like. But if US leaders have only the best intentions when they intervene in other lands, why has the United States become the most hated nation in the terrorist's pantheon of demons? And not only Muslim zealots but people from all walks of life around the world denounce the US government as the prime purveyor of violence and imperialist exploitation. {75} Do they see something that most Americans have not been allowed to see?
Supporting the Right
Since World War II, the US government has given some $240 billion in military aid to build up the military and internal security forces of more than eighty other nations. The purpose of this enormous effort has been not to defend these nations from invasion by foreign aggressors but to protect their various ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. That is what some of us have been arguing. But how can we determine that? By observing that (a) with few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various regimes have ever been threatened by attack from neighboring countries; (b) just about all these "friendly" regimes have supported economic systems that are integrated into a global system of corporate domination, open to foreign penetration on terms that are singularly favorable to transnational investors; (c) there is a great deal of evidence that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in these various countries have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labor unions, peasant organizations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics forthemselves. {76}
For decades we were told that a huge US military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world Communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations in 1989-1991, Washington made no move to dismantle its costly and dangerous global military apparatus. All Cold War weapons programs continued in full force, with new ones being added all the time, including the outer-space National Missile Defense and other projects to militarize outer space. Immediately the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies - for some unexplained reason previously overlooked - who menace the United States, including "dangerous rogue states" like Libya with its ragtag army of 50,000 and North Korea with its economy on the brink of collapse.
The real intentions of US national security state leaders can be revealed in part by noting whom they assist and whom they attack. US leaders have consistently supported rightist regimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones. The terms "Right" and "Left" are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators - and with good reason. To explicate the politico-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them. The "Left", as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that oppose the privileged interests of wealthy propertied classes, while advocating egalitarian redistributive policies and a common development beneficial to the general populace.
The Right too is involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning and investing classes. In almost every country including our own, rightist groups, parties, or governments pursue tax and spending programs, wage and investment practices, methods of police and military control, and deregulation and privatization policies that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what defines and distinguishes the Right from the Left.
In just about every instance, rightist forces are deemed by US opinion makers to be "friendly to the West", a coded term for "pro-capitalist". Conversely, leftist ones are labeled as "anti-democratic", "anti-American" and "anti-West", when actually what they are against is global capitalism.
While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious rightwing autocracies in history, governments that have tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), and Portugal (under Salazar).
Washington also assists counterrevolutionary groups that have perpetrated some of the most brutal bloodletting against civilian populations in leftist countries: Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the mujahideen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the rightwing drug-dealing KLA terrorists in Kosovo. All this is a matter of public record although seldom if ever treated in the US media.
Washington's support has extended to the extreme rightist reaches of the political spectrum. Thus, after World War II US leaders and their Western capitalist allies did nothing to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for prosecuting some top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. In short time, former Nazis and their collaborators were back in the saddle in Germany. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States and Latin America, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War. {77}
In France, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. "No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps". {78} US military authorities also restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation force were used after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China. {79}
In Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures. {80} In the three decades after the war, US government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy. From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the "strategy of tension", involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombing massacres directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left. In 1995, a deeply implicated CIA, refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating this terrorist campaign. {81}
In the 1980s, scores of people were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by rightwing terrorists in the service of state security agencies. As with the earlier "strategy of tension" in Italy, the attacks attempted to create enough popular fear and uncertainty to undermine the existing social democracies. The US corporate-owned media largely ignored these events.
Attacking the Left
We can grasp the real intentions of US leaders by looking at who they target for attack, specifically just about all leftist governments, movements, and popular insurgencies. The methods used include (a) financing, infiltrating, and coopting their military, and their internal security units and intelligence agencies, providing them with police-state technology including instruments of torture; (b) imposing crippling economic sanctions and IMF austerity programs; (c) bribing political leaders, military leaders, and other key players; (d) inciting retrograde ethnic separatists and supremacists within the country; (e) subverting their democratic and popular organizations; (f) rigging their elections; and (g) financing collaborationist political parties, labor unions, academic researchers, journalists, religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, and various media.
US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments - "guilty" of introducing egalitarian redistributive economic programs in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other nations - were overthrown by their respective military forces funded and advised by the US national security state. The intent behind Washington's policy is seen in what the US-sponsored military rulers do when they come to power. They roll back any reforms and open their countries all the wider to foreign corporate investors on terms completely favorable to the investors.
The US national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against reformist or revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, Egypt, Cambodia, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In many cases the attacks were terroristic in kind, directed at "soft targets" such as schools, farm cooperatives, health clinics, and whole villages. These wars of attrition extracted a grisly toll on human life and frequently forced the reformist or revolutionary government to discard its programs and submit to IMF dictates, after which the US-propelled terrorist attacks ceased.
Since World War II, US forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and most recently Afghanistan - a record of direct military aggression unmatched by any communist government in history. US/NATO forces delivered round-the-clock terror bombings on Yugoslavia for two and a half months in 1999, targeting housing projects, private homes, hospitals, schools, state-owned factories, radio and television stations, government owned hotels, municipal power stations, water supply systems, and bridges, along with hundreds of other nonmilitary targets at great loss to civilian life. In some instances, neoimperialism has been replaced with an old-fashioned direct colonialist occupation, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia where US troops are stationed, and more recently in Afghanistan.
In 2000-2001, US leaders were involved in a counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrilla movements in Colombia. They also were preparing the public for moves against Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, is engaged in developing a popular movement and reforms that favor the poor. Stories appearing in the US press tell us that Chavez is emotionally unstable, autocratic, and bringing his country to ruin, the same kind of media hit pieces that demonized the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, Allende in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Qaddafi in Libya, Milosevic in Yugoslavia, and Aristide in Haiti, to name some of the countries that were subsequently attacked by US forces or surrogate mercenary units.
Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence, or apply some significant portion of their budgets to not-for-profit public services, are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of US intervention. The designated "enemy" can be (a) a populist military government as in Panama under Omar Torrijos (and even under Manuel Noriega), Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, Peru under Juan Velasco, Portugal under the leftist military officers in the MFA, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez; (b) a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; (c) a social democracy as in Chile under Salvador Allende, Jamaica under Michael Manley, Greece under Andreas Papandreou, Cyprus under Mihail Makarios, and the Dominican Republic under Juan Bosch; (d) an anti-colonialist reform government as in the Congo under Patrice Lumumba; (e) a Marxist-Leninist government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; (f) an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Omar Qaddafi; or even (g) a conservative militarist regime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein if it should attempt an independent course on oil quotas and national development.
The goal of US global policy is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, well-organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or medical plans or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profits.
While described as "anti-West" and "anti-American", just about all leftist governments - from Cuba to Vietnam to the late Soviet Union - have made friendly overtures and shown a willingness to establish normal diplomatic and economic relations with the United States. It was not their hostility toward the United States that caused conflict but Washington's intolerance of the alternative class systems they represented.
In the post-World War II era, US policymakers sent assistance to Third World nations, and put forth a Marshall plan, grudgingly accepting reforms that produced marginal benefits for the working classes of Western Europe and elsewhere. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of Communist parties in Western European countries. {82} But today there is no competing lure; hence, Third World peoples (and working populations everywhere) are given little consideration in the ongoing campaigns to rollback the politico-economic democratic gains won by working people in various countries.
After the Counter-Revolution
One can judge the intentions of policymakers by the policies they pursue in countries that have been successfully drawn back into the Western orbit. Consider Grenada. In 1983, US forces invaded the tiny and relatively defenseless sovereign nation of Grenada (population 110,000) in blatant violation of international law. The Reagan administration justified the assault by claiming it was a rescue operation on behalf of American students whose safety was being threatened at the Saint George medical school. The White House also asserted that the New jewel revolutionary government had allowed the island to become a Soviet-Cuban training camp, harboring a large contingent of Cuban troops and "deadly armaments" "to export terror and undermine democracy". It was further charged that the New Jewel government was planning to build a Soviet submarine base and Soviet military air base that would use Grenada to control crucial "choke points" along oil tanker lanes that came to the United States, thereby bringing us to our knees. {83} When these charges proved to be without foundation, {84} some critics concluded that White House policy toward Grenada therefore had been unduly alarmist and misguided. But the fact that officials offer alarmist and misleading rationales is no reason to conclude ipso facto that they are themselves misled. It may be that they have other motives which they prefer not to enunciate.
Under the Grenadian revolutionary government, free milk and other foodstuffs were being distributed to the needy, as were materials for home improvement. Grade school and secondary education were free for everyone for the first time. Free health clinics were opened in the countryside, thanks mostly to assistance rendered by Cuban doctors. Measures were taken in support of equal pay and legal status for women. Unused land was leased to establish farm cooperatives and turned agriculture away from cash-crop exports and more toward self-sufficient food production. {85}
The US invasion and. occupation put an end to almost all these programs. Under US hegemony, unemployment in Grenada reached new heights and poverty new depths. Domestic cooperatives were suppressed or starved out. Farm families were displaced to make way for golf courses, and the corporate controlled tourist industry boomed. Grenada was once more firmly bound to the privatized free-market world, once again safely Third Worldized.
The same process occurred after the US invaded Panama in December 1989, supposedly to bring Manuel Noriega, described as a drug-dealing dictator, to justice. With Noriega and his leftist military deposed and the US military firmly in control, conditions in Panama deteriorated sharply. Unemployment, already high because of the US embargo, climbed to 35 percent as drastic layoffs were imposed on the public sector. US occupation authorities eliminated pension rights and other work benefits, ended public sector subsidies, privatized public services, shut down publicly owned media, and jailed a number of Panamanian editors and reporters critical of the invasion. The US military arrested labor union leaders and removed some 150 local labor leaders from their elected positions within their unions. Crime, poverty, drug trafficking, and homelessness increased dramatically. {86} Free-market Third Worldization was firmly reinstated in Panama under the banner of "democracy".
The same reactionary pattern was discernible in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. For decades we were told by US leaders, media commentators, and academic policy experts that the Cold War was a struggle against an expansionist world communism, with nothing said about the expansionist interests of world capitalism. But immediately after communism was overthrown in the USSR in 1991, US leaders began intimating that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former "captive nations" - namely free markets. Getting rid of communism, it became clear, meant getting rid of public ownership of the means of production. Of what use was political democracy, they seemed to be saying, if it allowed the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? So the kind of polity seemed to weigh less than the kind of economy. The goal was, and continues to be, totally privatized economies that favor rich investor interests at the expense of the people in these countries.
When Words Speak Louder than Actions
It should not go unnoticed that US leaders occasionally do verbalize their dedication to making the world safe for the transnational corporate system. At such times words seem to speak louder than actions, for the words are an admission of the real intention behind the action. For example, as President Woodrow Wilson contemplated sending US troops as part of the expeditionary force of Western nations to overthrow the newly installed revolutionary socialist government in Russia in 1917, his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, recorded in a confidential memorandum the administration's class concerns. Lansing ignored all the blather that US leaders were publicly mouthing about Lenin and the Bolsheviks being German agents. Instead he perceived them to be revolutionary socialists who sought "to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth". The Bolsheviks wanted "to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country". Their appeal was to "a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than by individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order [that is, capitalism] in all countries." The danger was that it "may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors". {87} Almost four decades later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower uttered a forbidden truth in his State of the Union message: "A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for [private] investment in foreign nations". {88}
In 1982, the elder George Bush, then vice-president in the Reagan administration, announced, "We want to maintain a favorable climate for foreign investment in the Caribbean region, not merely to protect the existing US investment there, but to encourage new investment opportunities in stable, democratic, free-market oriented countries close to our shores". Not only close to our shores but everywhere else, as, General Gray, commandant of the US Marines, observed in 1990, saying that the United States must have "unimpeded access" to "established and developing economic markets throughout the world". {89}
President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: "Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world's community of market-based democracies". {90} And over the past decade US policymakers have repeatedly and explicitly demanded "free-market reforms" in one country after another in the former communist nations of Eastern Europe.
Far from being wedded to each other, as US leaders and opinion makers would have us believe, capitalism and democracy are often on a fatal collision course. US leaders find electoral democracy useful when it helps to destabilize one-party socialism and serves as a legitimating cloak for capitalist restoration. But when, it becomes a barrier to an untrammeled capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. This was demonstrated when the US national security state overthrew popular democratic governments in Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Greece in 1967, Indonesia in 1965, and a score of other countries.
The most recent example is Yugoslavia. Multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was once a regional industrial power and economic success, with a high annual growth rate, free medical care, a literacy rate over ninety percent, and a relatively equitable and prosperous economic life for its various peoples. While Yugoslavia was not, after the 1970s, a strictly socialist country, US policymakers knew that the economy was still 75 percent publicly owned and still had a large and egalitarian public service sector that was out of line with the push toward free-market Third Worldization.
As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued US National Security Decision Directive 133: "United States Policy towards Yugoslavia", labeled "secret sensitive". It followed closely the objectives laid out in an earlier directive aimed at Eastern Europe, one that called for a "quiet revolution" to overthrow Communist governments while "reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market" (that is, global capitalism). The economic "reforms" pressed upon Yugoslavia by the IMF and other foreign creditors mandated that all socially owned firms and all worker-managed production units be transformed into private capitalist enterprises. {91}
In February 1999, US officials at Rambouillet made their determined dedication to economic privatization perfectly clear. Chapter 4a, Article 1, of the Rambouillet "agreement", actually an ultimatum imposed upon what remained of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), stated in no uncertain terms: "The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles". There was to be no restriction on the movement of "goods, services, and capital to Kosovo", and all matters of trade, investment and corporate ownership were to be left to the private market. {92}
In 2000, the "Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe", called for "creating vibrant market economies" in the Balkans. It was hailed by the Clinton administration for offering "advice on investment" to all the countries of Southeast Europe. That same year, the Overseas Private . Investment Corporation (OPIC) inaugurated a fund to be managed by Soros Private Funds Management. Its purpose, as stated by the US embassy in Macedonia, is "to provide capital for new business development, expansion and privatization". {93} Meanwhile the Agency for International Development (USAID) announced its intention to undertake "assistance programs to support economic reform and restructuring the economy ... to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy". {94}
Along with the words came the actions. A decade of IMF restructuring, years of US-led, boycott, embargo, wars of secession, and weeks of massive bombing in 1999 left the Yugoslav economy in ruins. In April 2001, according to the London Financial Times, the newly installed "pro-West" rulers of Yugoslavia, beneficiaries of millions of dollars in US electoral funds, launched "a comprehensive privatization program as part of economic reforms introduced following the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milosevic". This included the sale of more than 7,000 publicly owned or worker controlled companies to private investors. {95}
"Conspiracy", "Incompetence", and "Inertia"
All of us are expected to make plans and intentionally pursue certain goals in life, and we recognize that throughout history other nations have defined objectives that they have carried through with resolve. But when one suggests that the US national security state operates with foreordained intent, mainstream social scientists and media pundits dismiss such a notion as "conspiracy theory". Policies that produce unfortunate effects on others are explained away as "unintended consequences". Of course, unintended consequences do arise, and upheavals do sometimes catch US leaders off guard, but there is no reason to reduce so much of policy outcome to stochasticism, to argue that things almost always occur by chance; stuff just happens, as innocently befuddled leaders grope about unburdened by any preconceived agenda.
To say, as I do, that US national security leaders know more, intend more, and do more than they let on is not to claim they are omnipotent or omnicompetent. It is to argue that US policy is not habitually misguided and bungling, although mistakes are made and indeterminancies certainly arise. Generally, US foreign policy is remarkably consistent and cohesive, a deadly success, given the interests it represents.
Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover. In 1986 it was discovered that the Reagan administration was running a covert operation to bypass Congress (and the law), using funds from secret arms sales to Iran to finance counterrevolutionary mercenaries (the "contras") in Nicaragua and probably GOP electoral campaigns at home. President Reagan admitted full knowledge of the arms sales, but claimed he had no idea what happened to the money. He was asking us to believe that these operations were being conducted by subordinates, including his very own National Security Advisor, without being cleared by him. Reagan publicly criticized himself for his slipshod managerial style and lack of administrative control over his staff. His admission of incompetence was eagerly embraced by various commentators who prefer to see their leaders as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than to see deliberate deception. Subsequent sworn testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had played a deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair. {96}
Throughout its history, the CIA and other agencies of the national security state have resorted to every conceivable crime and machination, using false propaganda, sabotage, bribery, rigged elections, collusion with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, death squads, terror bombings, torture, massacres, and wars of attrition. At the same time, US leaders have pretended to have had nothing to do with such things. No less a political personage than Henry Kissinger repeatedly pretended to ignorance and incompetence when confronted with the dirty role he and his cohorts played in East Timor, Indochina, Chile, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. Kissinger's writings and speeches are heavily larded with exhortations about the importance of maintaining the efficacy of US policy and the need to impress the world with the mettle of US resolve. "Yet in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in political crimes, he rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional servants, suggesting that they know little, care less, are poorly informed and easily rattled by the pace of events". {97}
Sometimes outcomes are explained away as the result of a disembodied organizational inertia. Interventions are said to occur because a national security agency wants to prove its usefulness or is simply carried along on its own organizational momentum, as supposedly happened with the CIA and Pentagon intervention in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. To be sure, organizational modes of operation do come into play, but to see them as the predominant force behind policies is like claiming that the horses are the cause of the horse race.
The "Other Variables" Argument
US leaders may be motivated by all sorts of concerns such as advancing their nation's prestige, maintaining national security against potentially competing capitalist nations, developing strategic military superiority, distracting the American public from, domestic problems and scandals, advancing the heroic macho image of the president, and the like. But these purposes almost always dovetail with dominant capitalist interests, or certainly do not challenge those interests in any serious way. Thus, while a US president might be interested in promoting his macho image, he would never think of doing so by supporting the cause of socialist reformation in this or any other country.
That officeholders seek to achieve many other purposes, Ralph Miliband once noted, "should not obscure the fact that in the service of these purposes, they become the dedicated servants of their business and investing classes". {98} The point is not that nations act imperialistically for purely material motives but that in addition to other considerations, policymakers will not move against the system-sustaining material interests of the dominant corporate class.
In sum, when trying to understand the events of September 11 we need to remember that US politico-corporate elites have resorted to every conceivable subterfuge, coercion, and act of terrorist violence in their struggle to make the world safe for transnational corporate capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labor of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist regimes that challenge this arrangement by seeking to build alternative productive systems. The goal is to create a world populated by client states and compliant populations open to transnational corporate penetration on terms that are completely favorable to the penetrators. It is not too much to conclude that such a consistent and ruthless policy of global hegemony is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious design.
Notes
75 "Imperialism" is a term not normally applied by mainstream commentators and academics to anything that US leaders do. So perhaps it needs a definition: imperialism, as used here, is the process whereby the rulers of one country use economic and military power to expropriate the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of another country in order to attain ever greater capital accumulations on behalf of wealthy interests at home and abroad.
76 For evidence in support of this see Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995); Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, 2nd edition (New York: Saint Martin's, 1993); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (New York: Black Rose Books, 1998); and the writings of James Petras, Morris Morely, Edward Herman, and various others. For Petras's latest treatment of imperialism and capitalism, see his "Neo Mercantilist Empire in Latin America: Bush, ALCA and Plan Colombia" (unpublished monograph, 2001).
77 See Ingo Muller, Hitler's Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), part 3, "The Aftermath"; and Jon Wiener, "Bringing Nazi Sympathizers to the US", Nation, March 6 1989, 306-309. Nazi war criminals have been aided by Western intelligence agencies, business interests, the military, and even the Vatican. In October 1944, German paratroop commander Major Walter Reder, slaughtered 1,836 defenseless civilians in a village near Bologna, Italy as a reprisal against Italian partisan activities. He was released from prison in 1985, after Pope John Paul II, among others, made an appeal on his behalf-over the strenuous protests of families of the victims.
78 Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 290.
79 Hugh Deane, "Korea, China and the United Sates: A Look Back", Monthly Review, February 1995, 20 and 23.
80 Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), passim.
81 La Repubblica, April 9 1995; Corriere della Sera, March 27 and 28 1995, April 12 1995, and May 29 1995.
82 Peter Gowan, "The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy", New Left Review, March-April 1999, 103-104.
83 Network news reports, October 27 to November 4 1983; New York Times, November 6 to 20, 1983; John Judis, "Grenadian Documents Do Not Show What Reagan Claims", and Daniel Lazare, "Reagan's Seven Big Lies about Grenada", both in In These Times, November 6 1983.
84 See the discussion of Grenada in my Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, 2nd edition (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1993 - now available through Wadsworth), 148-151.
85 "A Tottering Structure of Lies", Sojourner, December 1983, 4 5; and Michael Massing, "Grenada Before and After", Atlantic Monthly, February 1984, 79-80.
86 See "Special Report", Labor Action (publication of the Labor Coalition on Central America, Washington, DC), July/August 1990; Clarence Lusane, "Aftermath of the US Invasion", CovertAction Information Bulletin, Spring 1991, 61-63.
87 Quoted in William Appleman Williams, "American Intervention in Russia: 1917-1920", in David Horowitz (editor), Containment and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 36, 38.
88 New York Times, February 3 1953.
89 Quoted in Richard Barnet, "The Uses of Force", New Yorker, April 29 1991, 90.
90 When the text of Clinton's speech was printed the next day in the New York Times, the sentence quoted above was omitted. Observers who heard the speech reported the disparity.
91 Sean Gervasi, "Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis", CovertAction Quarterly, winter 1992-93, 41-42. Michel Chossudovsky, "Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia", CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1996; and Chossudovsky's "Banking on the Balkans", THIS, July-August 1999.
92 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo (the "Rambouillet Agreement"), February 23, 1999, reproduced in full in full in The Kosovo Dossier, 2nd edition (London: Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 1999).
93 Gregory Elich, "The CIAs Covert War", CovertAction Quarterly, April-June 2001, 35-36.
94 Elich, "The CIAs Covert War", 38-39.
95 Financial Times, April 11 2001; and a communication to me from Barry Lituchy, editor of Eastern European Review.
96 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scoti, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston: South End, 1988); Report of the Congressional Committee Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987).
97 Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London & New York: Verso, 2001), 98-99.
98 Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 84 (italics in the original).
99 Lawrence Korb, "Perfect Time to Cut Military Spending", San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2001.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html
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