Why US Leaders Intervene Everywhere
excerpted from the book
The Terrorism Trap
by Michael Parenti
City Lights Books, 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. 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 for themselves.
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 11 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.
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." 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.
ln 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. 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.
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
co-opting 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 11, 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
anticolonialist 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.
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...
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