Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
Author's Note
The first edition of this book was written during 1999-2000 and published
in 2000. It was inspired by the brutal US bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring
of 1999. For this 2005 edition, most chapters as well as the Introduction,
have been revised and updated to reflect many of the events since 2000. However,
several sections of the book still reflect the fact that they were first
written during the Clinton administration and its bombing of Yugoslavia because
the text is as applicable today as it was then.
INTRODUCTION
This book could be entitled: Serial chain-saw baby killers
and the women who love them.
The women don't really believe that their beloved would
do such a thing, even if they're shown a severed limb or a headless torso.
Or if they believe it, they know down to their bone marrow that lover-boy
really had the best of intentions; it must have been some kind of very
unfortunate accident, a well-meaning blunder; in fact, even more likely,
it was an act of humanitarianism.
For more than 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that
there was an international conspiracy out there. An International Communist
Conspiracy, seeking no less than control over the entire planet, for
purposes which had no socially redeeming values. And the world was made to
believe that it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist
darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our military and
our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over
who your leaders will be, and we'll protect you."
It was the cleverest protection racket since men convinced
women that they needed men to protect them, for if all the men vanished
overnight, how many women would be afraid to walk the streets?
And if the people of any foreign land were benighted
enough to not realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to appreciate
the underlying nobility of American motives, they were warned that they would
burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA facsimile thereof. And they would be saved
nonetheless.
More than 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another.
The scorecard reads as follows: Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has
attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, and to crush more
than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes.
In the process, the US has caused the end of life for several million people,
and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.
In April 1999 the United States was busy saving Yugoslavia, bombing a modern,
sophisticated society back to a near-third-world level. And The Great American
Public, in its infinite wisdom, was convinced that its government was motivated
by "humanitarian" impulses.
At that time Washington was awash with foreign dignitaries
come to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization;
three days of unprecedented pomp and circumstance. The prime-ministers,
presidents and foreign ministers, despite their rank, were delighted to be
included amongst the close friends of the world's only superpower. Private
corporations funded the opulent weekend; a dozen of them paying $250,000
apiece to have one of their executives serve as a director on the NATO Summit's
host committee. Many of the same firms lobbied hard to expand NATO by adding
the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, each of which would be purchasing
plentiful quantities of military hardware from these companies.
This marriage of NATO and the transnationals was the
foundation of the New World Order, the name George Bush, Sr. gave to the
American Empire. The credibility of the New World Order depended upon the
world believing that the new world would be a better one for the multitude
of humanity, not just for those for whom too much is not enough; and believing
that the leader of the New World Order, the United States, meant well for
the planet and its people.
Let's have a short look at some modern American history,
which may be instructive in this regard. A report of the US congress in 1994
informed us that:
Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as human subjects in the 1940s to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite [blister gas]. Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical followup after their participation in the research. Additionally, some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents, and family doctors. For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research had taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many veterans who became ill after the secret testing.
In the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, we find a remarkable variety
of government programs, either formally, or in effect, using soldiers as
guinea pigs -- marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots then sent
through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and biological weapons
experiments; radiation experiments; behavior modification experiments that
washed their brains with LSD; exposure to the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea
and Vietnam ... the list goes on ... literally millions of experimental subjects,
seldom given a choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects
to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or
even monitoring.
Proceeding now to the 1990s: Many thousands of American
soldiers came home from the Gulf War with unusual, debilitating ailments.
Exposure to harmful chemical or biological agents was suspected, but the
Pentagon denied that this had occurred. Years went by while the GIs suffered
terribly: neurological problems, chronic fatigue, skin problems, scarred
lungs, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, personality
changes, passing out, and much more. Eventually, the Pentagon, inch by inch,
was forced to move away from its denials and admit that, yes, chemical weapon
depots had been bombed; then, yes, there probably were releases of the deadly
poisons; then, yes, American soldiers were indeed in the vicinity of these
poisonous releases, 400 soldiers; then, it might have been 5,000; then, "a
very large number", probably more than 15,000; then, finally, a precise number
-- 20,867; then, "The Pentagon announced that a long-awaited computer model
estimates that nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers could have been exposed to trace
amounts of sarin gas."
Soldiers were also forced to take vaccines against anthrax
and nerve gas not approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and punished,
sometimes treated like criminals, if they refused. (During World War II,
US soldiers were forced to take a yellow fever vaccine, with the result that
some 330,000 of them were infected with the hepatitis B virus.) Finally,
in late 1999, almost nine years after the Gulf War's end, the Defense Department
announced that a drug given to soldiers to protect them against a particular
nerve gas, "cannot be ruled out" as a cause of lingering illnesses in some
veterans.
The Pentagon brass, moreover, did not warn American soldiers
of the grave danger of being in close proximity to expended depleted uranium
weapons on the battlefield. Depleted uranium is a radioactive metal associated
with a long list of rare and gruesome illnesses and birth defects.
If the Pentagon had been much more forthcoming from the
outset about what it knew all along about these various substances and weapons,
the soldiers might have had a proper diagnosis early on and received appropriate
care sooner. The cost in terms of human suffering was incalculable. One gauge
of that cost may lie in the estimate that one-third of the homeless in America
are military veterans.
This scenario is in danger of being repeated to a distressing
degree for the veterans of the invasion of Afghanistan beginning in 2001
and Iraq two years later. Depleted uranium, for example, has again been widely
used by the United States in both countries. (See chapter 12.)
Soldiers serving in Iraq or their families have reported
purchasing with their own funds bullet-proof vests, better armor for their
vehicles, medical supplies, and global positioning devices, all for their
own safety, which were not provided to them by the army.
And throughout all these years, and all these wars, the
numerous complaints by servicewomen of sexual assault and rape at the hands
of their male counterparts were routinely played down or ignored by the military
brass ... "boys will be boys".
The moral of this little slice of history is simple:
If the United States government does not care about the health and welfare
of its own soldiers, if American leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain
and suffering of the wretched warriors they enlist to fight the empire's
wars, how can it be argued, how can it be believed, that they care about
foreign peoples? At all.
When the Dalai Lama was asked by a CIA officer in 1995:
"Did we do a good or bad thing in providing this support [to the Tibetans]?",
the Tibetan spiritual leader replied that though it helped the morale of
those resisting the Chinese, "thousands of lives were lost in the resistance"
and that "the U.S. Government had involved itself in his country's affairs
not to help Tibet but only as a Cold War tactic to challenge the Chinese."
"Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. "They are
different from you and me."
So are American leaders.
Consider Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor
to Jimmy Carter. In a 1998 interview he admitted that the official story
that the US gave military aid to the Afghanistan opposition only after the
Soviet invasion in 1979 was a lie. The truth was, he said, that the US began
aiding the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen six months before
the Russians made their move, even though he believed -- and told this to
Carter, who acted on it -- that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military
intervention".
Brzezinski was asked whether he regretted this decision.
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Besides the fact that there is no demonstrable connection
between the Afghanistan war and the breakup of the Soviet empire, we are
faced with the consequences of that war: the defeat of a government committed
to bringing the extraordinarily backward nation into the 20th century; the
breathtaking carnage; moujahedeen torture that even US government
officials called "indescribable horror"; half the population either dead,
disabled or refugees; the spawning of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist
terrorists who have unleashed atrocities in numerous countries; and the
astounding repression of women in Afghanistan, instituted by America's wartime
allies.
And for playing a key role in causing all this, Zbigniew
Brzezinski has no regrets. Regrets? The man is downright proud of it! The
kindest thing one can say about such a person -- as about a sociopath --
is that he's amoral. At least in his public incarnation, which is all we're
concerned with here. In medieval times he would have been known as Zbigniew
the Terrible.
In the now-famous exchange on TV between Madeleine Albright
and reporter Lesley Stahl, the latter was speaking of US sanctions against
Iraq, and asked the then-US ambassador to the UN: "We have heard that a half
million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And -- and you know, is the price worth it?"
Replied Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice,
but the price -- we think the price is worth it."
One can give Albright the absolute full benefit of any
doubt and say that she had no choice but to defend administration policy.
But what kind of person is it that takes a job appointment knowing full well
that she will be an integral part of such ongoing policies and will be expected
to defend them without apology? It is a person who expects to be rewarded
for such unquestioning loyalty. Not long afterwards, Albright was appointed
Secretary of State.
Lawrence Summers, currently the president of Harvard,
is another case in point. In December 1991, while chief economist for the
World Bank, he wrote an internal memo saying that the Bank should encourage
migration of "the dirty industries" to the less-developed countries because,
amongst other reasons, health-impairing and death-causing pollution costs
would be lower. Inasmuch as these costs are based on the lost earnings of
the affected workers, in a country of very low wages the computed costs would
be much lower. "I think," he wrote, "the economic logic behind dumping a
load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should
face up to that." Despite this memo receiving wide distribution and condemnation,
in 1993 the Clinton administration appointed Summers Undersecretary of the
Treasury, for international affairs no less, and then Secretary of the Treasury.
There's also President Clinton himself, who on day 33
of the aerial devastation of Yugoslavia -- 33 days and nights of destroying
villages, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, the ecology, separating
people from their limbs, from their eyesight, spilling their intestines,
traumatizing children for the rest of their days ... destroying a life the
Serbians may never know again -- on day 33 William Jefferson Clinton, cautioning
against judging the bombing policy prematurely, saw fit to declare: "This
may seem like a long time. [But] I don't think that this air campaign has
been going on a particularly long time." And then the man continued it for
another 45 days.
Clinton's vice president, Albert Gore, did not break
new ground in moral leadership in 1999 when he played a leading role in putting
great pressure on the South African government by threatening them with trade
sanctions if they didn't cancel plans to produce or buy affordable generic
AIDS drugs, which would cut into US companies' sales. South Africa, it should
be noted, at the time had an estimated six million HIV-positive persons among
its largely impoverished population. When Gore, who at the time had significant
ties to the drug industry, was heckled for what he had done during a speech
in New York, he declined to respond in substance, but instead called out:
"I love this country. I love the First Amendment."
Which brings us to the Bush administration: President
George W., Vice-president Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and others of the imperial mafia, supporting,
legalizing, covering up, and untroubled by, a hundred kinds of torture,
brutality, and humiliation inflicted upon thousands of poor souls in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Guantánamo Base in Cuba; hundreds more taken by the CIA
to other countries to be tortured.
Yes, American leaders are different from you and me.
No, the lesson here is not that power corrupts and
dehumanizes.
Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because
American leaders are cruel.
It's that these leaders are cruel because only those
willing and able to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions
of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written
into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure
of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers -- let alone
American soldiers -- do not become president of the United States, or vice
president, or secretary of state, or secretary of defense, or national security
advisor, or attorney general, or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they
particularly want to.
There's a sort of Peter Principle at work here. Laurence
Peter wrote that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level
of incompetence. Perhaps we can postulate that in a foreign policy establishment
committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend
to rise to the level of cruelty they can't live with.
A few days after the bombing of Yugoslavia had ended, the New York Times
published as its lead article in the Sunday Week in Review a piece by Michael
Wines, which declared that "Human rights had been elevated to a military
priority and a pre-eminent Western value. ... The war only underscored the
deep ideological divide between an idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity
and an Old World equally fatalistic about unending conflict. ... there is
also a yawning gap between the West and much of the world on the value of
a single life."
And so on. A paean to the innate goodness of the West,
an ethos unfortunately not shared by much of the rest of the world, who,
Wines lamented, "just don't buy into Western notions of rights and
responsibilities." The Times fed us this morality tale after "the
West" had just completed the most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation
in the history of the planet, a small portion of whose dreadful consequences
are referred to above.
During the American bombing of Iraq in 1991, the previous
record for sustained ferociousness, a civilian air raid shelter was destroyed
by a depleted-uranium projectile, incinerating to charred blackness many
hundreds of people, a great number of them women and children. White House
spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, reiterating US military statements that the shelter
had been a command-and-control center, said: "We don't know why civilians
were at that location, but we do know that Saddam Hussein does not share
our value for the sanctity of human life."
Similarly, during the Vietnam War, President Johnson
and other government officials assured us that Asians don't have the same
high regard for human life as Americans do. We were told this, of course,
as American bombs, napalm, Agent Orange, and helicopter gunships were
disintegrating the Vietnamese and their highly valued lives.
And at the same time, on a day in February 1966, David
Lawrence, the editor of US News & World Report, was moved to put
the following words to paper: "What the United States is doing in Vietnam
is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to
another that we have witnessed in our times."
I sent Mr. Lawrence a copy of a well-done pamphlet entitled
American Atrocities in Vietnam, which gave graphic detail of its subject.
To this I attached a note which first repeated Lawrence's quotation with
his name below it, then added: "One of us is crazy.", followed by
my name.
Lawrence responded with a full page letter, at the heart
of which was: "I think a careful reading of it [the pamphlet] will prove
the point I was trying to make -- namely that primitive peoples with savagery
in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized
existence."
The American mind -- as exemplified by that of Michael
Wines and David Lawrence -- is, politically, so deeply formed that to liberate
it would involve uncommon, and as yet perhaps undiscovered, philosophical
and surgical skill. The great majority of Americans, even the most cynical
-- who need no convincing that the words that come out of a politician's
mouth are a blend of mis-, dis- and non-information, and should always carry
a veracity health warning -- appear to lose their critical faculties when
confronted by "our boys who are risking their lives". If love is blind,
patriotism has lost all five senses.
To the extent that the cynicism of these Americans --
and their counterparts in the media -- is directed toward their government's
habitual foreign adventures, it's to question whether the administration's
stated interpretation of a situation is valid, whether the stated goals are
worthwhile, and whether the stated goals can be achieved -- but not
to question the government's motivation. It is assumed a priori
that their leaders mean well by the foreign people involved -- no
matter how much death, destruction and suffering their policies objectively
result in.
Congressman Otis Pike (R.-NY) headed a committee in
1975 which uncovered a number of dark covert actions of US foreign policy,
many of which were leaked to the public, while others remained secret. In
an interview he stated that any member of Congress could see the entire report
if he agreed not to reveal anything that was in it. "But not many want to
read it," he added.
"Why?" asked his interviewer.
"Oh, they think it is better not to know," Pike replied.
"There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. You see,
this country went through an awful trauma with Watergate. But even then,
all they were asked to believe was that their president had been a bad person.
In this new situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe
that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that."
This can be compared to going to a counselor because
your child is behaving strangely, and being told, "You have a problem of
incest in your family." People can't hear that. They go to a different counselor.
They grab at any other explanation. It's too painful.
An American education
In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, speaking of the
practice of plundering villages, the main source of a warrior's livelihood,
tells us that "no disgrace was yet attached to such an achievement, but rather
credit".
Almost all of us grew up in an environment in which
we learned that thou shalt not murder, rape, rob, probably not pay off a
public official or cheat on your taxes -- but not that there was anything
wrong with toppling foreign governments, quashing revolutions, or dropping
powerful bombs on foreign people, if it somehow served America's "national
security". Let us look at some of
our teachers. During the bombing of Yugoslavia, the esteemed (= famous) CBS
News reporter, Dan Rather, declared: "I'm an American, and I'm an American
reporter. And yes, when there's combat involving Americans, you can criticize
me if you must, damn me if you must, but I'm always pulling for us to win."
(During the Cold War, US journalists were quick to criticize their Soviet
counterparts for speaking in behalf of the State.)
What does this mean? That he's going to support any
war effort by the United States no matter the legal or moral justification?
No matter the effect on democracy, freedom or self-determination? No matter
the degree of horror produced? No matter anything? Many other American
journalists have similarly paraded themselves as cheerleaders in modern times
in the midst of one of the Pentagon's frequent marches down the warpath,
serving a function "more akin to stenography than journalism". During these
wars, much of the media, led by CNN, appear to have had a serious missile
fetish, enough so to suggest a need for counseling.
The president of National Public Radio (NPR), Kevin
Klose, is the former head of all the major, worldwide US government broadcast
propaganda outlets, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio
Liberty, and the anti-Castro Radio Marti, which broadcasts into Cuba from
Florida. NPR, it can be said, has never met an American war it didn't like.
It was inspired to describe the war against Yugoslavia as Clinton's "most
significant foreign policy success."
And Robert Coonrod -- from 1997-2004 the head of the
congressionally-created Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds
over 1,000 public television and radio stations nationwide -- has a
résumé remarkably similar to that of Klose, from Voice of America
to Radio Marti.
Is it any wonder that during America's wars NPR has
one military officer after another on the air offering commentary but virtually
never anyone unambiguously opposed to the war? Moreover, is it any wonder
that countless Americans, bearing psyches no less malleable than those of
other members of the species, are only dimly conscious of the fact that they
even have the right to be unequivocally against a war effort and to
question the government's real intentions for carrying it out, without thinking
of themselves as (horror of horrors) "unpatriotic"? Propaganda is to a democracy
what violence is to a dictatorship.
In Spain, in the 16th century, the best minds were busy
at work devising rationalizations for the cruelty its conquistadors were
inflicting upon the Indians of the New World. It was decided, and commonly
accepted, that the Indians were "natural slaves", created by God to serve
the conquistadors.
Twentieth-century America took this a step further.
The best and the brightest have assured the public that United States
interventions -- albeit rather violent at times -- are not only in the natural
order of things, but they're actually for the good of the natives.
The media and the public do in fact relish catching
politicians' lies, but these are typically the small lies -- lies about money,
sex, drug use, and other peccadillos, and the ritual doubletalk of campaignspeak.
A certain Mr. A. Hitler, originally of Austria, though often castigated,
actually arrived at a number of very perceptive insights into how the world
worked. One of them was this:
The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil ... therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.
The big lies tend to elude exposure. How many Americans, for example, doubt the official rationale for dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- to obviate the need for a land invasion of Japan, thus saving thousands of American lives? However, it's been known for years that the Japanese had been trying for many months to surrender and that the US had consistently ignored these overtures. The bombs were dropped, not to intimidate the Japanese, but to put the fear of the American god into the Russians. The dropping of the A-bomb, it has been said, was not the last shot of World War II, but the first shot of the Cold War.
Altruistic America
The "humanitarian" bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which even many on the
left swallowed without gagging, or the "liberation" of Iraq in 2003, which
most on the left saw through, but most Americans did not at first, are two
recent examples of the idea of United States "altruism", which has been a
recurrent feature of America's love affair with itself. From 1918 to 1920,
the United States was a major part of a Western invasion of the infant Soviet
Union, an invasion that endeavored to "strangle at its birth", as Winston
Churchill put it, the Russian Revolution, which had effectively removed one-sixth
of the world's land surface from private capitalist development. A nation
still recovering from a horrendous world war, in extreme chaos from a fundamental
social revolution, and in the throes of a famine that was to leave many millions
dead, was mercilessly devastated yet further by the invaders, without any
provocation, aiming to put the "White Russians" in power in place of the
Red ones.
When the smoke had cleared, the US Army Chief
of Staff put out a report on the undertaking which said: "This expedition
affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings
... to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new liberty."
Seventy years later, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was moved to tell an audience in
California that the United States has "so many friends" in the Pacific because
of "our values, our economic system, and our altruism". He made these remarks
shortly after directing the slaughter by bombing of a multitude of Panamanian
innocents.
In his inauguration speech of January 2005, which
lasted 21 minutes, President George W. Bush used the word "liberty" 15 times
and the word "freedom" 27 times; that's one or the other word casually dropped
exactly once every 30 seconds, as he assured the world that America's
interventions were fueled only by the deeply-felt desire to bring these blessings
to one country after another.
Author Garry Wills has commented on this American
benevolence toward foreigners: "We believe we can literally ‘kill them
with kindness', moving our guns forward in a seizure of demented charity.
It is when America is in her most altruistic mood that other nations better
get behind their bunkers."
What is it, then, that I mean to say here -- that the
US government does not care a whit about human life, human rights,
humanity, and all those other wonderful human things?
No, I mean to say that doing the right thing is not
a principle of American foreign policy, not an ideal or a goal of
policy in and of itself. If it happens that doing the right thing coincides
with, or is irrelevant to, Washington's overriding international ambitions,
American officials have no problem walking the high moral ground. But this
is rarely the case. A study of the many US interventions detailed in the
"Interventions" chapter, shows clearly that the engine of American foreign
policy has typically been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality,
nor even simple decency, but rather by the necessity to serve other masters,
which can be broken down to three imperatives:
1) the care and feeding of American corporations: making
the world open and hospitable for neo-liberal globalization; enhancing the
financial statements of defense contractors who have contributed generously
to members of Congress and residents of the White House;
2) preventing the rise of any society that might serve
as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist
model;
3) expanding the empire: establishing political, economic
and military hegemony over as much of the globe as possible to facilitate
the first two imperatives, and to prevent the ascendancy of any regional
power that might challenge American supremacy.
To American policymakers, these ends have justified the
means, and all means have been available.
In the wake of the 1973 military coup in Chile, which
overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, the Assistant Secretary
of State for Inter-American Affairs, Jack Kubisch, was hard pressed to counter
charges that the United States had been involved. "It was not in our interest
to have the military take over in Chile," he insisted. "It would have been
better had Allende served his entire term, taking the nation and the Chilean
people into complete and total ruin. Only then would the full discrediting
of socialism have taken place. Only then would people have gotten the message
that socialism doesn't work. What has happened has confused this lesson."
Though based on a falsehood made up for the occasion
-- that Allende's polices were leading Chile to ruin -- Kubisch's remark
inadvertently expressed his government's strong fealty to the second imperative
stated above.
Enemies without number, threats without
end
During the Cold War, US foreign policy was carried out under the waving banner
of fighting a moral crusade against what cold warriors persuaded the American
people, most of the world, and perhaps themselves, was the existence of a
malevolent International Communist Conspiracy. But it was always a fraud;
there was never any such animal as the International Communist Conspiracy.
There were, as there still are, people living in misery, rising up in protest
against their condition, against an oppressive government, a government likely
supported by the United States. To Washington, this was proof that the Soviet
Union (or Cuba or Nicaragua, etc., functioning as Moscow's surrogate), or
China, was again acting as the proverbial "outside agitator".
In the final analysis, this must be wondered: What kind
of omnipresent, omnipotent, monolithic, evil international conspiracy bent
on world domination would allow its empire to completely fall apart, like
the classic house of cards, without bringing any military force to bear upon
its satellites to prevent their escaping? And without an invasion from abroad
holding a knife to the empire's throat?
It is now well known how during the Cold War the actual
level of Soviet military and economic strength was magnified by the CIA,
the Defense Department, the White House, et al., how data and events were
falsified to exaggerate the Russian threat, how worst-case scenarios were
put forth as if they were probable and imminent, even when they failed to
meet the demands of plausibility. One of the most enduring Soviet-threat
stories -- the alleged justification for the birth of NATO -- was the coming
Red invasion of Western Europe. If, by 1999, anyone still swore by this fairy
tale, they could have read a report in The Guardian of London on newly
declassified British government documents from 1968. Among the documents
was one based on an analysis by the Foreign Office joint intelligence committee,
which the newspaper summarized as follows:
The Soviet Union had no intention of launching
a military attack on the West at the height of the cold war, British military
and intelligence chiefs privately believed, in stark contrast to what Western
politicians and military leaders were saying in public about the
"Soviet threat".
"The Soviet Union will not deliberately start general
war or even limited war in Europe," a briefing for the British chiefs of
staff -- marked Top Secret, UK Eyes Only, and headed The Threat: Soviet Aims
and Intentions -- declared in June 1968.
"Soviet foreign policy had been cautious and realistic",
the department argued, and despite the Vietnam war, the Russians and their
allies had "continued to make contacts in all fields with the West and to
maintain a limited but increasing political dialogue with Nato
powers".
After the Cold War, Washington spinmeisters could no longer cry "The Russians are coming, and they're ten feet tall!" as a pretext for intervention, so they have had to regularly come up with new enemies. America cherishes its enemies. Without enemies, it appears to be a nation without moral purpose and direction. The various managers of the National Security State need enemies to protect their jobs, to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to give themselves a mission in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, to send truckloads of taxpayer money to the corporations for whom the managers will go to work after leaving government service. And they understand the need for enemies only too well, even painfully. Presented here is US Col. Dennis Long, speaking in 1992, shortly after the end of the Cold War, when he was director of "total armor force readiness" at Fort Knox:
For 50 years, we equipped our football team, practiced five days a week and never played a game. We had a clear enemy with demonstrable qualities, and we had scouted them out. [Now] we will have to practice day in and day out without knowing anything about the other team. We won't have his playbook, we won't know where the stadium is, or how many guys he will have on the field. That is very distressing to the military establishment, especially when you are trying to justify the existence of your organization and your systems.
The United States had postponed such a distressing
situation for as long as it could. A series of Soviet requests during the
Cold War to establish a direct dialogue with senior NATO officials were rejected
as "inappropriate and potentially divisive". Longstanding and repeated Soviet
offers to dissolve the Warsaw Pact if the West would do the same with NATO
were ignored. After one such offer was spurned, the Los Angeles Times
commented that the offer "increases the difficulty faced by U.S. policy-makers
in persuading Western public opinion to continue expensive and often unpopular
military programs."
In 1991, Colin Powell touched upon the irony of
the profound world changes in cautioning his fellow military professionals:
"We must not ... hope that it [the changes] will disappear and let us return
to comforting thoughts about a resolute and evil enemy."
But the thoughts are indeed comforting to the military
professionals and their civilian counterparts. So since the end of the Cold
War, one month the new resolute and evil enemy has been North Korea, the
next month the big threat is Libya, then China, or Iraq, or Iran, or Sudan,
or Syria, or Afghanistan, or Serbia, or that old reliable demon, Cuba --
countries each led by the newest Hitler, or at least a madman or mad dog;
a degree of demonizing fit more for a theocratic society than a democratic
one.
And in place of the International Communist Conspiracy,
Washington has told the American people, on one day or another, that they're
threatened by drug trafficking, or military or industrial spying, or the
proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction", or organized crime, or, the
latest flavor of the month, terrorism.
Moreover, in August 1999, a National Security Council
global strategy paper for the next century declared that "the nation is facing
its biggest espionage threat in history."
A remarkable statement. What ever happened to the KGB?
Any Americans now past the age of 30 had it drilled into their heads from
the cradle on that there was a perpetual Soviet dagger aimed at their collective
heart in the hand of the spy next door. Thousands lost their jobs and careers
because of their alleged association to this threat, hundreds were imprisoned
or deported, two were executed. Surely Senator Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar
Hoover are turning over in their graves.
The whole aim of
practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous
to be led to safety) by an endless series of
hobgoblins, most of
them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken, 1920
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state
of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of
patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national
emergency. Always there has been some terrible
evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that
was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly
rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds
demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem
never to have happened, seem never to have been
quite real.
General
Douglas MacArthur, 1957
September 11, 2001
In light of what happened on this infamous date it may appear to some that
the threats to the United States claimed by Washington officials were not
in fact exaggerated, but rather were very real. But it is not the intention
of the above text to imply that there never was or never will be a serious
terrorist attack inside the United States. Given the constant belligerence
and destructiveness of US foreign policy, retaliation has to be expected,
at one time or another, at one place or another, in one form or another.
(Chapter one deals with precisely this cause and effect.) But with all the
scare talk issued by American administrations, what exactly has taken place
in the real world? According to the State Department, in the six-year period
of 1998-2003 the number of actual terrorist attacks by region was as
follows:
Latin America 692, Asia 468, Western Europe 222, Middle
East 208, Africa 174, Eurasia 93, North America 6.
For more than forty years the "imminent threat" of a
Soviet invasion of Western Europe or nuclear attack upon the United States
was drummed into the American consciousness. Nothing of the sort ever happened
of course. Nothing of the sort was ever seriously contemplated by the Soviets
of course, for obvious reasons of self-preservation if nothing else. Then,
with the demise of the Soviet Union, as elucidated above, multiple new "threats"
to American security were declared by officials, and echoed by the media,
to heighten the sense of danger and validate the replacement of the American
republic by the national security state.
The attack of September 11 does not justify a half century
of cynical propaganda.
After the attack it was Christmas every day for the
national security managers. All their wish lists were fulfilled, and then
some. In short order they massively increased the military budget; imposed
sharp cutbacks in social spending; promoted obscenely extensive tax breaks
for the wealthiest individuals and corporations; launched efforts to cut
back on environmental legislation; unilaterally abrogated a leading arms
control treaty; announced plans which would extend the reach of The American
Empire, under the rubric of an "anti-terrorism crusade", to Afghanistan,
Iraq, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere; created a
new Office of Homeland Security; greatly increased surveillance and prosecutory
powers over the American people, including license to enter their homes virtually
at will; rescinded virtually all legal rights for over a thousand people
who were incarcerated for weeks or months, even years, without being charged
with a crime; created an atmosphere in which many critics of the bombing
and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq suffered professional punishment and
were called upon to prove their loyalty; and so it went.
What has taken place in the United States since the
attack is a state of affairs much desired by the political and corporate
elite. Indeed, it lends credence to the proposition that the purpose of all
the fear mongering was what critics had always charged: to facilitate fulfilling
wish lists.
Cold War continuum
Though the putative "communist threat" has disappeared, the taxpayers still
fill tractor-trailers to the bursting with cash and send them off to what
had once been known as the War Department, then humorously renamed the Defense
Department. ... That department's research into yet more futuristic weapons
of the chemical dust and better ways to kill people en masse proceeds unabated,
with nary a glance back at the body fragments littering the triumphant fields.
... Belief in an afterlife has been rekindled by the Clinton and Bush
administrations new missile defense system, after universal certainty that
Star Wars was dead and buried. ... NATO has also risen from the should-be-dead,
more almighty than ever. ... Many hundreds of US military installations,
serving a vast panoply of specialized warfaring needs, still dot the global
map, including many new ones in the territory of the former Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. ... Even as you read this, American armed forces and
special operations forces are being deployed in well over 100 countries in
every part of the world. ... Washington is supplying many of these nations
with sizeable amounts of highly lethal military equipment, and training their
armed forces and police in the brutal arts, regardless of how brutal they
already are. ... American nuclear bombs are still stored in a number of European
countries, if not elsewhere ... And American officials retain their unshakable
belief that they have a god-given right to do whatever they want, wherever
they want, to whomever they want, for as long as they want.
In other words, whatever the diplomats and policymakers
at the time thought they were doing, the Cold War skeptics have been vindicated
-- it was not about containing an evil, expansionist, communist Soviet Union
after all; it was about American imperialism, with "communist" merely the
name given to those who stood in its way.
American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a
government, or a movement on the verge of taking power, that will not lie
down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon
the free market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization"
as the summum bonum, that will not change its laws to favor foreign
investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment
upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export,
that will not allow asbestos, banned pesticides, and other products restricted
in the developed world to be dumped onto their people, that will not easily
tolerate the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the World Trade
Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the country's social
services and standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO
military installation upon its soil ... To the highly-sensitive nostrils
of Washington foreign-policy veterans, Yugoslavia in the 1990s smelled a
bit too much like one of these governments.
Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to
be reduced to basket cases; or, where feasible, simply overthrown, like Albania
and Bulgaria in the early 1990s; failing that, life has to be made impossible
for these renegades, as with Cuba, still.
And this was the foundation -- the sine qua non
-- of American foreign policy for the entire twentieth century, both before
and after the existence of the Soviet Union, from the Philippines, Panama
and the Dominican Republic in the first decade of the century, to El Salvador,
Nicaragua, and Yugoslavia in the last decade.
Can we in fact say that the Cold War has actually ended?
If the Cold War is defined as a worldwide struggle between the United States
and the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the Third World (for whatever
motives), then certainly it is over. But if the Cold War is seen not as an
East-West struggle, but rather a "North-South" struggle, as an American effort
-- as mentioned above -- to prevent the rise of any society that might serve
as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model, and to
prevent the rise of any regional power that might challenge American supremacy,
then that particular map with the pins stuck in it still hangs on the wall
in the Pentagon's War Room. (Said a Defense Department planning paper in
1992: "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival
... we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from
even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." [emphasis
added])
The current manifestation of this continuum, by whatever
name, can be viewed as yet another chapter in the never-ending saga of the
war of the rich upon the poor. And with the Soviet presence and influence
gone, American interventions are more trouble-free than ever. (Consider that
US friendliness toward Iraq and Yugoslavia lasted exactly as long as the
Soviet Union and its bloc existed.)
There's a word for such a continuum of policy. Empire.
The American Empire. An appellation that does not roll easily off an American
tongue. No American has any difficulty believing in the existence and driving
passion for expansion, power, glory, and wealth of the Roman Empire, the
Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the British Empire. It's
right there in their schoolbooks. But to the American mind, to American
schoolbooks, and to the American media, "The American Empire" is an oxymoron.
However, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the open threats made to several
other countries, and a hundred instances of shameless arrogance emanating
from the Bush administration has begun to make the label of "empire" more
plausible to the media; some Americans are becoming rather proud of the idea.
The Madman philosophy
In March 1998, an internal 1995 study, "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence",
by the US Strategic Command, the headquarters responsible for the US strategic
nuclear arsenal, was brought to light. The study stated:
Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control' can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.
The author of these words would have the world
believe that the United States has only been pretending to be "out of control"
or "irrational and vindictive". However, it can be argued -- based on the
objective facts of what Washington has inflicted upon the world, as described
in this book -- that for more than half a century American foreign policy
has, in actuality, been clinically mad.
On the other hand, the desire for world hegemony, per
se, is not necessarily irrational, whatever else one may think of it morally
or otherwise. Michael Parenti has pointed out that US foreign policy "may
seem stupid because the rationales offered in its support often sound
unconvincing, leaving us with the impression that policymakers are confused
or out of touch. But just because the public does not understand what they
are doing does not mean that national security leaders are themselves befuddled.
That they are fabricators does not mean they are fools."
A Truth Commission
Since the early 1990s the people of South Africa, Argentina, Guatemala, Chile
and El Salvador have held official Truth Commissions to look squarely in
the eyes of the crimes committed by their governments. There will never be
any such official body to investigate and document the wide body of Washington's
crimes, although several unofficial citizens' commissions have done so over
the years for specific interventions, such as in Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan,
and Iraq; their findings were of course totally ignored by the establishment
media (whose ideology is a belief that it doesn't have any ideology).
In the absence of an official Truth Commission in the
United States, this book is offered up as testimony.
Washington, DC
May 2005
NOTES 1. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, Is Military Research Hazardous to
Veterans' Health?
Lessons Spanning Half a Century, December 8, 1994, p.5 2. Ibid., passim. Also see chapter 15 in the present book. 3. Washington Post, October 2 and 23, 1996 and July 31, 1997 for the estimated
numbers of affected soldiers. 4. Journal of the American Medical Association, September 1, 1999, p.822. 5. Washington Post, October 19, 1999, p.3 6. John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War (New York, 1999), p.312. Knaus was
the CIA officer who spoke to the Dalai Lama. 7. Le Nouvel Observateur (France), January 15-21, 1998, p.76, translation from the
French by the author. There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the
perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United
States is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not
included in the shorter version. 8. Washington Post, January 13, 1985, p.30 9. "60 Minutes", May 12, 1996 10. For the full text of the relevant part of his memo, see The Economist (London),
February 8, 1992, p.66 (US edition) 11. Washington Post, April 25, 1999, p.28 12. John Judis, "K Street Gore", The American Prospect, July-August 1999, p.18-21;
Washington Post, June 18, 1999, December 4, 1999, p.18 13. New York Times, June 13, 1999 14. Ibid., February 14, 1991, p.16 15. U.S. News & World Report, February 21, 1966, p.112 16. "An Oriana Fallaci Interview: Otis Pike and the CIA", New Republic (Washington, DC),
April 3, 1976, p.10 17. Speaking at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, June 25, 1999. 18. Phrase borrowed from media critic Norman Solomon 19. NPR Morning edition, Mara Liasson, June 11, 1999 20. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1971; original version 1925)
Vol. 1, chapter 10, p.231 21. See essay by author on this subject at: http://members.aol.com/bblum6/abomb.htm 22. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1991, p.1 23. Vital Speeches of the Day, May 1, 1990, p.421, speech delivered March 23, 1990. 24. For excellent and concise summaries of how and why the United States planned and
achieved world domination, see Noam Chomsky,What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Odonian Press,
Berkeley, 1992) and Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1995) 25. Mark Falcoft, "Why Allende Fell", Commentary (New York), July 1976, p.42 26. See, e.g., Tim Weiner, "Military Accused of Lies Over Arms",New York Times,
June 28, 1993, p.10; Tim Weiner, Blank Check (New York, 1990), p.42-43, for CIA's
inflated figures re Soviets; Anne H. Cahn, "How We Got Oversold on Overkill",
Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1993, about a GAO study; Douglas Jehl & Michael Ross,
"CIA Nominee Faces Charges He Slanted Data", Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1991,
p.1; Arthur Macy Cox, "Why the U.S., Since 1977, Has Been Misperceiving Soviet
Military Strength", New York Times, October 20, 1980, p. 19 (Cox was formerly an
official with the State Department and the CIA) 27. The Guardian (London), January 1, 1999 28. New York Times, February 3, 1992, p.8 29. The Guardian (London), December 6, 1986 ("NATO rebuffs Russian approach";
includes the "inappropriate and potentially divisive" quote); Los Angeles Times,
March 10, 1989 (op-ed by John Tirman); Ibid., October 25, 1989 ("U.S. Rejects
Soviet Bid to Drop Alliances"); Ibid., October 26, 1989, p.7; TASS News Agency,
March 9, 2000; Associated Press, June 16, 2001 ("Putin Cites 1954 NATO Document") 30. New York Times, January 7, 1983, p.4; The Guardian (London), December 6, 1986
(first quote); Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1989, p.7 (second quote), and October 26. 31. AIR FORCE Magazine (Arlington, VA), March 1991, p.81 32. Washington Times, August 24, 1999, p.1; the words are those of the newspaper and
may be a paraphrase of the original. 33. In Defense of Women (1920) 34. Vorin Whan, ed. A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army
Douglas MacArthur (1965) 35. State Department, "Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2003", released April 2004, can
be read on their website. 36. "Pentagon's Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999", New York
Times, March 8, 1992, p.14 37. From the study's Introduction, p.8. The Boston Globe, March 2, 1998,
p.5 contains almost the entire passage. 38. Parenti, op. cit., p.80