Full text of "William Blum Rogue State [2002]"

Rogue State A Guide to the World's Only Superpower William Blum Zed Books - London Spearhead - South Africa Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower was first published in the United Kingdom by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK. First published in the United States by Common Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951 in 2000. New updated edition, 2002 This edition published in South Africa by Spearhead, a division of New Africa Books, PO Box 23408, Claremont 7735. Copyright © William Blum, 2001, 2002 Cover design by Andrew Corbett, Cambridge Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Cox and Wyman, Reading The right of the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 84277 220 1 hb ISBN 184277 221 Xpb In South Africa ISBN 0 86486 543 0 Pb "Critics will call this a one-sided book. But it is an invaluable correc-tive to the establishment portrait of America as ’the world's greatest force for peace.' Even confirmed opponents of U.S. interventionism can find much in this important book that will both educate and shock them." — Peter Dale Scott, fonner professor at U.C. Berkeley, poet, and author of Deep Politics and The Death of JFK "Whatever we think we know about U.S. foreign policy, Rogue State makes it clear that we don’t know nearly enough. This book's grisly content may seem to require a strong stomach, but reading its words is nothing compared to what has been done — and keeps being done — with our tax dollars and in our names. Whether we read Rogue State as a historical narrative or use it as a reference book, William Blum has put together a horrifying and infuriating piece of work. The footnoted information between these covers is enough to make any awake reader want to scream with rage. This is a truly subversive book because it demolishes the foundations of basic illusions about the United States of America as a world power." — Norman Solomon, author of The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media and winner of the George Orwell Award Never before in modem history has a country dominated the earth so totally as the United States does today... America is now the Schwarzenegger of international politics: showing off muscles, obtrusive, intimidating. ..The Americans, in the absence of limits put to them by anybody or anything, act as if they own a kind of blank check in their "McWorld." Der Spiegel, Gennany's leading news magazine, 1997 1 The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere. Madeleine Albright, 1999 2 A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right. George Bush, 1992 3 How can they have the arrogance to dictate to us where we should go or which countries should be our friends? Gadhafi is my friend. He supported us when we were alone and when those who tried to prevent my visit here today were our enemies. They have no morals. We cannot accept that a state assumes the role of the world's policeman. Nelson Mandela, 1997 4 When I came into office, I was determined that our country would go into the 21st century still the world's greatest farce for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity. Bill Clinton, 1996 5 Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, kitted or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame. Amnesty International, 1996 6 Contents Author's Foreword: Concerning September 11, 2001 viii Introduction 1 Ours and Theirs: Washington's Love/Hate Relationship with Terrorists and Human-Rights Violators 1. Why Do Terrorists Keep Picking on the United States? 29 2. America's Gift to the World — the Afghan Terrorist Alumni 33 3. Assassinations 38 4. Excerpts from US Army and CIA Training Manuals 43 5. Torture 49 6. The Unsavories 58 7. Training New Unsavories 61 8. War Criminals: Theirs and Ours 68 9. Haven for Terrorists 79 10. Supporting Pol Pot 87 United States Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction 1 1 . Bombings 92 12. Depleted Uranium 96 13. Cluster Bombs 100 14. United States Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons Abroad 103 15. United States Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons at Home 113 16. Encouragement of the Use of CBW by Other Nations 120 A Rogue State versus the World 17. A Concise History of United States Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present 125 18. Perverting Elections 168 19. Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy 179 20. The US versus the World at the United Nations 184 2 1 . Eavesdropping on the Planet 200 22. Kidnapping and Looting 210 23. How the CIA Sent Nelson Mandela to Prison for 28 Years 215 24. The CIA and Drugs: Just Say "Why Not?" 218 25. Being the World's Only Superpower Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry 227 26. The United States Invades, Bombs and Kills for It. ..but Do Americans Really Believe in Free Enterprise? 236 27. A Day in the Life of a Free Country 243 Notes 274 Index 305 About the Author 310 Author's Foreword: Concerning September 11, 2001 and the Bombing of Afghanistan Shortly after the publication of this book, the momentous events of September 11, 2001 occurred. Four planes were hijacked in the United States and terrorists proceeded to carry out the most devastating attack on American soil in the history of the country. The physical destruction and personal suffering caused by the attacks was immense. In addition to punishing the perpetrators who were still alive, the most pressing mission facing the United States was — or should have been — to not allow what happened to pass without deriving important lessons from it to prevent its recurrence. Clearly, the most meaningful of these lessons was the answer to the question "Why?" It happens that the first chapter in this book is entitled "Why Do Terrorists Keep Picking on the United States?". It argues that terrorists — whatever else they might be — might also be rational human beings, which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States. The chapter contains a lengthy list of such US actions in the Middle East, which have taken many lives, from the bombing of Lebanon and Libya to the sinking of an Iranian ship; from the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane and the unending bombing of the Iraqi people to the support of despotic Middle Eastern regimes and the massive military aid to Israel despite the devastation and routine torture that the country inflicts upon the Palestinian people. As retribution for decades of military, economic and political oppression imposed upon the Middle East and the mainly Muslim population who live there by the American Empire, the buildings targeted by the terrorists were not chosen at random. The Pentagon and World Trade Center represented the military and economic might of the United States, while the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania may well have been on its way to the political wing, the White House. Perspective can be everything. If what the hijackers did is inexcusable, it is by no means inexplicable. It's not just people in the Middle East who have good reason for hating what the US government does. The United States has created huge numbers of potential terrorists all over Latin America during a half-century of American actions far worse than those perpetrated in the Middle East. If Latin Americans shared the belief of many Muslims that they will go directly to paradise for martyring themselves by killing the Great Satan, by now we might have had decades of repeated terrorist horror coming from south of the US-Mexican border. As it is, over the years the region has produced numerous attacks on American embassies, diplomats, US Infonnation Agency offices, and the like. There are also the people of Asia and Africa. Much the same thing applies. The magnitude of the September 1 1 attack was such that the American media — the serious or passably serious segments — were obliged to delve into areas they normally do not visit. A number of mainstream newspapers, magazines and radio stations, in their quest to understand "Why?", suddenly — or so it seemed — discovered that the United States had been engaged in actions like the ones listed above and countless other interventions in foreign lands over the decades that could indeed produce a great degree of anti-American feeling. This was one positive outcome of the tragedy. This "revelation", however, appeared to escape the mass of the American people, the great majority of whom get their snatches of foreign news from tabloid newspapers, lowest-common-denominator radio programs, and laughably superficial TV newscasts. Thus it was that instead of an outpouring of reflection upon what the United States does to the world to make it so hated, there was an outpouring of patriotism of the narrowest kind: Congress members stood on the steps of the Capitol and sang "God Bless America", stores quickly sold out their stocks of American flags, which fluttered high and low in whatever direction one looked, callers to radio shows spat out venom and bloodlust, at entertainment and sporting events it became de rigueur to begin with a military and/or patriotic ceremony, one could scarcely pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio or TV without some tribute to American courage, and everyone and his cousin were made into "heroes". This phenomenon continued, hardly abated, into the year 2002. And the serious American media soon returned to nonnal mode; i.e., one could regularly find more significant and revealing informa-tion concerning US foreign policy in the London papers, the Guardian and the Independent, than in the New York Times and Washington Post. Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington's policies abroad. They believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its wealth. The Bush administration, like its predecessors following other terrorist acts, has pushed this as the official line ever since the attacks. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative watchdog group founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice- president, and Senator Joseph Lieberman, announced in November the formation of the Defense of Civilization Fund, declaring that "It was not only America that was attacked on September 11, but civilization. We were attacked not for our vices, but for our virtues." 1 But government officials know better. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded that: "Historical data show a strong correla-tion between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States, "2 Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the White House, was unambiguous in his agreement with this: We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers — women and children and farmers and housewives — in those villages around Beirut... As a result of that... we became kind of a Satan in tbe minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages [in Iran] and that is wbat has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks — which were totally unjustified and criminal.3 The terrorists responsible for the original bombing of the World Trade Center back in 1993 sent a letter to the New York Times which stated, in part: "We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region. "4 Further evidence of government and media awareness of the connection between anti-US terrorism and American policies is offered in chapter one of this book. The perpetrators For two and a half months following September 1 1 the most powerful nation in history rained down a daily storm of missiles upon Afghanistan, one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world. Eventually, this question pressed itself onto the world's stage: Who killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on September 1 1 with their flying bombs? Or the Americans in Afghanistan with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130 missiles, their 15,000-pound "daisy cutter" bombs, their depleted uranium and their cluster bombs? By year's end, the count of the terrorists' victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania stood at about 3,000. The total count of civilian dead in Afghanistan as a result of American bombing was essentially ignored by US officials and just about everyone else, but a painstaking compilation of numerous individual reports from the American and international media and human rights organizations by an American professor arrived at considerably more than 3,500 Afghan dead through early December, and still counting. 5 This figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries, or those who died from cold and hunger due to their homes being destroyed by bombs, or the deaths from exposure or hunger among the hundreds of thousands of internal refugees fleeing the bombing. Neither does it include the thousands of "military" deaths or the hundreds of prisoners who were executed or otherwise slaughtered by Washington's new "freedom fighter" allies in conjunction with American military and intelligence operatives. In the final analysis, the body count will also be missing the inevitable victims of cluster bombs-turned-landmines and those who perish more slowly from depleted-uranium- caused sicknesses. There will be no minutes of silence for the Afghan dead, no memorial services attended by high American officials and entertain-ment celebrities, no messages of condolence sent by heads of state, no millions of dollars raised for the victims' families. Yet, all in all, it was a bloodbath that more than rivals that of September 1 1 . And of the thousands dead in Afghanistan, how many, can it be said with any certainty, had played a conscious role in the American catastrophe? According to the video of Osama bin Laden presented to the world by the US government, he himself didn’t find out the exact date of the terrorist act until five days before it took place, and most of the hijackers did not know they were part of a suicide mission until they prepared to board the planes. (The FBI reportedly came to the latter conclusion long before the video was made public. 6) Given that, it appears eminently safe to say that exceedingly few other people in the world were knowingly in on the plot, perhaps a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Consequently, if the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan was designed to kill the actual perpetrators, it was a fool's mission; a violent fool. If Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the terrible bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, had not been quickly caught, would the United States have bombed the state of Michigan or any of the other places he called home? No, they would have instituted a mammoth manhunt until they found him and punished him. But in Afghanistan, the United States proceeded virtually on the assumption that everyone who supported the Taliban government, native or foreigner, was 1) a "terrorist" and 2) morally, if not legally, stained with the blood of September 1 1 — or perhaps one or another anti-US terrorist action of the past — and was thus fair game. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, even American officials can perceive which is the honorable path to walk. Speaking of Russia's problem with Chechnya in 1999, the US State Department's second in command, Strobe Talbott, urged Moscow to show "restraint and wisdom". Restraint, he said, "means taking action against real ter-rorists, but not using indiscriminate force that endangers innocents. "7 Suggesting a moral equivalency between the United States and terrorists (or, during the cold war, with communists) never fails to inflame American anger. The terrorists purposely aimed to kill civil-ians, we are told, while any non-combatant victims of the American bombings were completely accidental. Whenever the United States goes into one of its periodic bombing frenzies and its missiles take the lives of numerous civilians, this is called "collateral damage" — inflicted by the Fates of War — for the real targets, we are invariably told, were military. But if day after day, in one country after another, the same scenario takes place — dropping prodigious quantities of powerfully lethal ordnance from very high altitudes with the full knowledge that large numbers of civilians will perish or be maimed, even without missiles going "astray" — what can one say about the intentions of the American military? The best, the most charitable, thing that can be said is that they simply don't care. They want to bomb and destroy for certain political ends and they don’t particularly care if the civilian population suffers grievously. In Afghanistan, when, on successive days in October, US gun-ships machine-gunned and cannoned the remote farming village of Chowkar-Karez, killing as many as 93 civilians, a Pentagon official was moved to respond at one point: "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead", while US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented: "I cannot deal with that particular village. "8 Often, the United States actually does want to cause the suffering, hoping that it will lead people to turn against the government. This was a recurrent feature of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. As will be seen in the "War Criminals" chapter in the present volume, US/NATO officials — in their consummate arrogance — freely admitted this again and again. And in Afghanistan we have the example of the chief of the British Defense Staff, Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, declaring that the bombing will continue "until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed. "9 Such a policy fits very well into the FBI definition of international terrorism, which speaks of the use of force or violence against persons or property "to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives." Speak no evil, so Americans will see no evil In reaction to a number of gruesome images of Afghan bombing victims, and expressed European and Middle Eastern concern about civilian casualties, the American media strove to downplay the significance of such deaths. The chairman of Cable News Network (CNN) advised the news staff that it "seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan." 10 A Fox Network report on the war wondered why journalists should bother covering civilian deaths at all. "The question I have," said the host, "is civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they've been?" His guest from National Public Radio replied: "No. Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable." Another guest, a columnist from the national magazine U.S. News & World Report, concurred: "Civilian casualties are not... news. The fact is that they accompany wars. "11 But if in fact the September 1 1 attacks were an act of war, as the world has been told repeatedly by George W. Bush and his minions, then the casualties of the World Trade Center were clearly civilian war casualties. Why then have the media devoted so much time to their deaths? These were of course the only kind of deaths Americans wanted to hear about, and they could actually become furious when told of Afghan deaths. A memo circulated at the Panama City, Florida News Herald warned editors: "DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like." 12 The American powers-that-be can indeed count on support for their wars from the American people and the corporate media. It would take an exemplary research effort to uncover a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US bombing of Afghanistan. Or a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia two years earlier. Or a single American daily newspaper that unequivocally opposed the US bombing of Iraq in 1991. Is this not remarkable? In a supposedly free society, with a suppos-edly free press, and almost 1,500 daily newspapers, the odds should be decidedly against this being the case. But that's the way it is. The Mecca of hypocrisy After the terrorist attacks in the United States, Secretary of State Cohn Powell condemned "people who believe with the destruction of buildings, with the murder of people, they can somehow achieve a political purpose. "13 Does that not precisely describe what the United States did in 1999 when it bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights? And is this not the same Colin Powell who directed the horrific bombings of Panama and Iraq? Do American leaders think that no one has any memory? Or do they simply not care what people think? More hypocrisy of a breathtaking kind: President Bush and other officials have routinely and angrily declared that it's not only terrorists that the US is going to be waging war against, it's any nation which harbors terrorists. However, in the chapter "Haven for Terrorists", the reader will see that there are few, if any, nations that harbor more terrorists than the United States. Winning Afghan hearts and minds Bombs were not all that fell from the sky from American airplanes. There were also food packages. Was it not something inordinately strange for the United States to be dropping both bombs and food on the people of Afghanistan at the same time? If the Japanese had dropped some nice packages of teriyaki along with the bombs at Pearl Harbor, would Americans and the world have looked more kindly on the Japanese? Perhaps if the September 1 1 terrorists had dropped some hot pastrami sandwiches on downtown Manhattan before their hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center... But these things work, of course. Millions of Americans felt a rush of pride about their country's magnanimity. The United States, the inventor and perfecter of modern advertising and public relations, had done it again. And in the same vein, there were the many flyers dropped on the people of Afghanistan. Here's one dropped around October 20: Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site? Do you want a regime that is turning Afghanistan into the Stone Age and giving Islam a bad name? Are you proud to live under a government that harbors terrorists? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by extreme fundamentalists? The Taliban have robbed your country of your culture and heritage. They have destroyed your national monuments, and cultural artifacts. They rule by force, violence, and fear based on the advice of foreigners. They insist that their form of Islam is the one and only form, the true form, the divine form. They see themselves as religious experts, even though they are ignorant. They kill, commit injustice, keep you in poverty and claim it is in the name of God. In the same spirit, the following flyer might be dropped over the United States: Do you enjoy being ruled by the Republican-Democratic Party? Are you proud to live a life of fear, insecurity and panic? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations taken away by a bank? Do you want a regime that is turning the United States into a police state and giving Christianity a bad name? Are you proud to live under a government that harbors hundreds of terrorists in Miami.? Are you proud to live in a nation ruled by extreme capitalists and religious conservatives? The capitalists have robbed your country of your equality and justice. They have destroyed your national parks and rivers and corrupted your media, your elections and your personal relations. They rule by threat of unemployment, hunger, and homelessness based on the advice of a god called the market. They insist that their form of organizing a society and remaking the world is the one and only form, the true fonn, the divine fonn. They see themselves as morality experts, even though they are ignorant. They bomb, invade, assassinate, torture, overthrow, commit injustice, keep you and the world in poverty and claim it is in the name of God. Rebuilding Afghanistan? "U.S. Meeting Envisions Rebuilding Afghanistan" read the headline in the Washington Post of November 21. After a one-day meeting in Washington of leaders from two dozen nations and international organizations, US and Japanese officials said they had developed an "action program" for the long-term rebuilding of the war-ravaged country. This well may have thrown another log on the feel-good-about-America fire that has been warming the frazzled citizenry since September 1 1 . But like much of that fuel, there was likely a lot more propaganda here than substance. It's a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn’t kill. And afterward doing nothing to repair the damage. Though it was promised in writing that the US would pursue its "traditional policy" of "postwar reconstruction", no compensation was given to Vietnam after a decade of devastation. During the same war, Laos and Cambodia were equally wasted by US bombing. They, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of Washington’s "traditional policy" of zero reconstruction. Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not- tongue-in-cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got nothing, as did the people of Grenada. It was Iraq's turn next, in 1991 : 40 days and nights of relentless bombing; destruction of power, water and sanitation systems and everything else that goes into the making of a modem society. Everyone knows how much the United States has done to help rebuild Iraq. In 1999 we had the case of Yugoslavia: 78 days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced industrial state into virtually a third world country; the reconstruction needs were awesome. Two years later, June 2001, after the Serbs had obediently followed Washington's wishes to oust Slobodan Milosevic and turn him over to the international court in the Hague, a "donors' conference" was convened by the European Commission and the World Bank, supposedly concerned with Yugoslavia's reconstruction. It turned out to be a conference concerned with Yugoslavia's debts more than anything else. Serbian premier Zoran Djindjic, regarded as highly pro-Western, said, in a July interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, that he felt betrayed by the West, declaring: It would have been better if the donors' conference had not taken place and instead we had been given 50 million DM in cash. ..In August we should be getting the first instalment, 300 million Euro. Suddenly we are being told that 225 million Euro will be withheld for the repayment of old debts which in part were accumulated during Tito’s time. Two-thirds of that sum are fines and interest, accrued because Milosevic refused for ten years to pay back these credits. We shall get the remaining 75 million Euro in November at the earliest. Such are the principles in the West, we are being told. This means a seriously ill person is to be given medicine after he is dead. Our critical months will be July, August and September. 14 By the end of 2001 it was 2 Vi years since Yugoslavian bridges had fallen into the Danube, the country's factories and homes destroyed, its transportation torn apart. Yet Yugoslavia has still not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States. Whoever winds up ruling Afghanistan will find it conspicuously difficult to block the US military from building what it wants to build there for its own purposes. As for the United States doing some building for the Afghan people, they may have a long wait. In marked contrast to the Washington Post headline of November 21 noted above was the report in the same newspaper five weeks later: "The Bush administration has made clear that because it has paid for most of the military campaign that made the new government possible, it expects other countries, especially Japan and European nations, to lead the way in rebuilding the country. "15 As if the American bombing campaign had been carried out at the request of, or for the benefit of, Japan and Europe, and not for Washington's own interests! Following their bombing of Iraq, the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf region. Following their bombing of Yugoslavia, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia. Following their bombing of Afghanistan, the United States appears on course to wind up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and perhaps elsewhere in the area. The bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were conducted — apart from the primitive lashing out in blind revenge against... somebody — primarily for the purpose of ensuring the installation of a new government that would be sufficiently amenable to Washington’s international objectives, including the siting of bases and electronic communications intercept stations and the running of oil and gas pipelines through the country from the Caspian Sea region. The welfare of the people of Afghanistan, by contrast, can have counted for little, considering that the elements put in power by US military might are largely those whose earlier rule before the Taliban was so depraved that many Afghans welcomed the accession of the Taliban to power; their newest atrocities, carried out under cover of American firepower, show they haven’t lost their touch. The prime minister of the interim government, Hamid Karzai, though himself not seeming too villainous, may have a credibility problem, given his long close contact with the US State Department, National Security Council, Congress, and other pillars of the American foreign policy establishment. 16 Yet the connection may work only one way, for when leaders of the interim government asked the United States to halt its bombing in December because of the frequent deaths of innocent people, Washington refused, saying it had its own timeline. This does not bode well for the future Afghan government and society; neither does Karzai's appointment of General Rashid Dostum as deputy defense minister, a man amongst whose channs is the habit of punishing his soldiers by tying them to tank tracks and then driving the tanks around his barracks' square to turn them into mincemeat. 17 Terrorist scares In the Introduction which follows, written in 1999, the point is made that the specter of dangerous and threatening enemies of one kind or another has been highly exaggerated for decades in order to intimidate the American public into accepting the national security state, that was all the while being molded, and to persuade the citizenry to surrender their power to the authorities who can save them from what they have been manipulated into fearing. The national security state, with its accompanying immense budgets, multiple benefits for its managers, and justification for increased police powers to keep the doubters in line is a state of affairs much desired by the elites. In light of what happened on September 11, 2001 it may appear to some that the threat was not in fact exaggerated, but rather very real. But the Introduction to this book does not imply that there will never be a major attack on the United States for which a certain level of military and other preparedness is necessary. Given the constant belligerence and destructiveness of US foreign policy, retaliation has to be expected, at one time or another, somewhere. For close on fifty 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, for obvious reasons of self-preservation. Then, with the demise of the Soviet Union, multiple new "enemy" countries were found, along with the drug threat and the terrorist threat. The very occasional terrorist attacks on the United States, almost always abroad and in response to Washington's policies, were used to fan fears and expand budgets. The attack of September does not justify more than fifty years of lies. Indeed, what has taken place in the United States since the attack lends great credence to the proposition that the purpose of all the fear-mongering was what its critics always charged — in fact, understated. After the attack it was Christmas every day for the national security establishment and its corporate cohorts. All their wish lists were fulfilled, and then some. In short order, they massively increased defense spending; shamelessly stifled social spending; pro-moted obscenely extensive tax breaks for the largest corporations; greatly increased surveillance and prosecutory powers over the citi-zenry, including license to enter their homes virtually at will, to an extent a dictatorship might envy; tore up the Bill of Rights for non- citizens, including legal residents; created a new Office of Homeland Security; launched efforts to cut back on environmental legislation; unilaterally abrogated a leading arms control treaty; announced plans to expand the American Empire, under the rubric of an "anti-terrorism crusade", to Iraq, Somalia, North Korea, and Sudan, amongst others; and a great deal more. Many critics of the bombing campaign, who were in vulnerable positions, suffered consequences: a number of university teachers who had spoken out against the war lost their positions or were publicly rebuked by school officials, high-school students were suspended for the same reason, the only member of Congress who voted against the "Authorization for Use of Military Force" received innumerable threats and hate mail; and so it went. The fruit of the foregoing is a police state, not the worst police state in the world to be sure, but a police state nonetheless; the War on Drugs had made it such even before September 1 1 . One of the prime motivations behind this assault on civil liberties is very likely the elite's deep-seated desire to rid themselves of the scourge of the anti-globalization movement. In the new anti-terrorism law (the "USA PATRIOT Act") — rushed through the legislative process before almost any member of Congress could even read the lengthy text — acts that appear to be intended "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion" can be categorized as "terrorism"; with great danger not only to the individual arrested, but also to his or her group and to those who have contributed to the group. All will be under serious threat of having their worldly assets confiscated, at a minimum. How many young people are going to put their future at such great risk? How many organizations are going to risk losing everything? Who knew what when? Unsurprisingly, numerous reports have surfaced since September 1 1 which raise questions about the official version of events; reports concerning the CIA meeting with Osama bin Laden in July 2001 in a Dubai hospital; Israel's Mossad being behind it all or at least having had intelligence about the attacks in advance and not sharing it, so that Americans could see what Israel goes through with terrorists; the failure of air safety and air defense systems to carry out long-standing, well-practiced, routine procedures and shoot down the second and third planes, perhaps deliberately choosing not to do so; substantial insider trading shortly before the attacks based on the expectation that the stocks of American and United Airlines would plunge along with their planes; US covert meetings with and support of the Taliban for years; the ties between the Bush family and the bin Ladens; and much more. 18 There's enough there to feed researchers and publishers for years to come. But it is beyond the capacity of this essay to explore the questions raised in anything approaching the depth some of them deserve. I can only add my own speculative analysis to the already weighty pile. It strains credulity to believe that the FBI, CIA, NSA, et al. were unaware, at least in some detail, that a significant terrorist operation in the United States was in the offing; and as wild as that operation turned out to be, its nature could not have been unthinkable by these agencies, for in February 2000, in Israel, at the First International Conference on Defense Against Suicide Attacks, the CIA had received specific warnings that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols in the United States. 19 Moreover, a terrorist arrested in the Philippines in 1995 revealed his group's plan to hijack small planes, fill them with explosives, and crash them into the CIA and other US government targets. 20 Two or three of the hijackers were on an FBI watch list. According to FBI sources, in virtually every case in which the FBI has prevented a terrorist attack, success depended on long-tenn investigations, whose hallmarks were patience and letting terrorist plots go forward. "You obviously want to play things out so you can fully identify the breadth and scope of the conspiracy. Obviously, the most efficient and effective way to do that is to bring it down to the last stage. "21 They may have waited one stage too long. Although there's very little that one should rule out as being morally beyond the American powers-that-be, I don’t think they would have allowed what happened to happen if they had known exactly what and when it was going to be. Certainly, the Pentagon would not have permitted its own home and personnel to be so savagely violated. It remains inevitable, however, that the fact of so much of the elites' wish lists being fulfilled in the wake of September 1 1 is guaranteed to fuel further conspiracy theories. Is this any way to end terrorism? The American bombing of Afghanistan may well turn out to be a political train wreck. Can it be doubted that thousands throughout the Muslim world were emotionally and spiritually recruited to the cause of the next Osama bin Laden by the awful ruination? That is to say, the next generation of terrorists. Indeed, in December, while the American bombs were still falling on Afghanistan, a man — British citizen Richard Reid, who was a convert to Islam — tried to blow up an American Airlines plane en route to the United States with explosives hidden in his shoes. At the London mosque that Reid had attended, the cleric in charge warned that extremists were enlisting other young men like Reid and that agents aligned with radical Muslim figures had stepped up recruiting efforts since September 11. The cleric said that he knew of "hundreds of Richard Reids" recruited in Britain. Reid, described in the press as a "drifter", reportedly traveled to Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Belgium before arriving in Paris and boarding the American Airlines plane. 22 This raises the question of who was financing him. It seems that the recent freezing of numerous bank accounts of alleged terrorist groups throughout the world by the United States may have rather limited effect. Americans do not feel any more secure in their places of work, in their places of leisure, or in their travels than they did the day before their government's bombings began. Has the power elite learned anything? Here's James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, speaking in December in Washington, advocating an invasion of Iraq and unconcerned about the response of the Arab world: the silence of the Arab public in the wake of America's victories in Afghanistan, he said, proves that "only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S."23 What, then, can the United States do to end terrorism directed against it? The answer lies in removing the anti-American motiva-tions of the terrorists. To achieve this, American foreign policy will have to undergo a profound metamorphosis, as the contents of this book testify. If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every comer of the world, that America's global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 5 1st state of the USA but henceforth — oddly enough — a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year's military budget of $330 billion is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated. Washington, DC, January 2002 Notes 1 Guardian (London), December 19, 2001, article by Duncan Campbell 2 US Department of Defense, Defense Science Board, The Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DOD Responses to Transnational Threats, October 1997, Final Report, Vol. 1, can be found in full at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/trans.pdf. The part quoted is on page 15 of the report (page 3 1 of the pdf online version) 3 New York Times, March 26,1989, p. 16 4 Jim Dwyer et al., Two Seconds Under the World (New York, 1994), p. 196 5 Marc W. Herold, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting", at: http://www.media-alliance.org/medialile/20-5/casualtiesl2-10.html 6 David Rose, "Attackers did not know they were to die", Observer (London) October 14, 2001 7 Washington Post, October 2,1999 8 First quote: Guardian (London), December 20, 2001, p. 16; second quote: US Defense Department briefing, November 1, 2001 9 New York Times, October 28, 2001, p.Bl 10 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 31, 2001, p. 10A 11 Fox network: "Special Report with Brit Hume", November 5, 2001 12 Washington Post, November 12, 2001, p.Cl 13 Miami Herald, September 12, 2001, p.23 14 The Der Spiegel interview was translated by Jost Lang and can be found in full at the Emperors Clothes website: http://emperors-clodies.com/docs/ warn.htm 15 Washington Post, December 26, 2001, p.16 16 Ibid., December 22, 2001, p.16 17 Independent (London), November 14, 2001, article by Robert Fisk 18 See, for example: Emperor's Clothes website at http://emperors-clothes.com and http://www.copvcia.com 19 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt, Germany), September 14, 2001 20 Washington Post Magazine, December 30, 2001, p.27. The terrorist was part of a group which had already planted a bomb aboard a Philippine Airlines flight; the bomb exploded, killing one passenger and forcing the plane to make an emergency landing 21 Washington Post, November 28, 2001, p.14 22 The Times (London), December 27, 2001, p.l; Washington Post, December 28,2001,p.8 23 Washington Post, December 27, 2001, p.C2 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 a humanitarian act. For 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 — 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. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair. As I write this in Washington, DC, in April 1999, the United States is busy saving Yugoslavia. Bombing a modern, sophisticated society back to a pre-industrial age. And The Great American Public, in its infinite wisdom, is convinced that its government is motivated by "humanitarian" impulses. Washington is awash with foreign dignitaries here 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, are delighted to be included amongst the schoolyard bully's close friends. Private corporations are funding 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 will be purchasing plentiful quantities of military hardware from these companies. This marriage of NATO and the transnationals is the foundation of the New World Order, the name George Bush gave to the American Empire. The credibility of the New World Order depends upon the world believing that the new world will 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, means well. Let's have a short look at some modem American history, which may be instructive. A congressional report of 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. 1 Now let's skip ahead to the 1990s. Many thousands of American soldiers came home from the Gulf War with unusual, debilitating ailments. Exposure to hannful 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 servicemen 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. .."2 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. 3) 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. 4 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. 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. And in the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, what do 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 infonnation, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring, 5 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 our leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain and suffering of the wretched warriors enlisted 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. "6 "Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote E Scott Fitzgerald. "They are different from you and me." So are our leaders. Consider Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser 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 — 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. 7 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"8; 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 unbelievable 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 kind-est 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 called Zbigniew the Terrible. And what does this tell us about Jimmy Carter, whom many people think of as perhaps the only halfway decent person to occupy the White House since Roosevelt? Or is it Lincoln? In 1977, when pressed by journalists about whether the US had a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, President Carter responded: "Well, the destruction was mutual. "9 (Perhaps when he observed the devastation of the South Bronx later that year, he was under the impression that it had been caused by Vietnamese bombing.) 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." 10 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 who 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? Not long afterwards, Albright was appointed Secretary of State. Lawrence Summers 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."ll Despite this memo receiving wide distribution and condemnation, Summers, in 1999, was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Clinton. This was a promotion from being Undersecretary of the Treasury — for international affairs. We also have 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 will 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. "12 And then the man continued it another 45 days. Clinton's vice president, Albert Gore, appeared eminently suitable to succeed him to the throne. In 1998, he put great pressure on South Africa, threatening trade sanctions if the government didn’t cancel plans to use much cheaper generic AIDS drugs, which would cut into US companies' sales. 13 South Africa, it should be noted, has about three million HIV-positive persons among its largely impoverished population. When Gore, who at the time had significant ties to the drug industry, 14 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." 15 It's interesting to note that when Madeleine Albright was heckled in Columbus, Ohio in February 1998, while defending the administration's Iraq policy, she yelled: "We are the greatest country in the world!" Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though Gore’s and Albright's words don’t quite have the ring of "Deutschland fiber alles" or "Rule Britannia". In 1985, Ronald Reagan, demonstrating the preeminent intellect for which he was esteemed, tried to show how totalitarian the Soviet Union was by declaring: "I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for 'freedom'." 16 In light of the above cast of characters and their declarations, can we ask if there's a word in American English for "embarrassment"? No, it is not simply that power corrupts and dehumanizes. Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our 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 national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they 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 estab-lishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can 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 preeminent 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. "17 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. "18 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 regarded 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 fonned 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 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 our 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." 19 This has been 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. 20 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 served America's "national security". Let us look at our teachers. During the bombing of Yugoslavia, CBS Evening News anchor 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. "21 (In the past, US journalists were quick to criticize their Soviet counterparts for speaking on 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-detennination? No matter the degree of horror produced? No matter anything?. Many other American journalists have similarly paraded themselves as cheerleaders in modem times in the midst of one of the Pentagon's frequent marches down the warpath, serving a function "more akin to stenography than journalism". 22 During the Gulf War, much of the media, led by CNN, appeared to have a serious missile fetish, enough to suggest a need for counseling. The CEO of National Public Radio, Kevin Klose, is the fonner head of all the major, worldwide US government broadcast propa-ganda outlets, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the anti-Castro Radio Marti, which broadcasts into Cuba from Florida. NPR, which can be thought of as the home service of the Voice of America, 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. "23 And the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Robert Coonrod, has a resume remarkably similar to that of Klose, from Voice of America to Radio Marti. 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 opposed to a war effort and to question the government's real reasons for carrying it out, without thinking of themselves as (horror of horrors) "unpatriotic"? Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship. During the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush administration conducted three briefings a day with such telegenic figures as generals Cohn Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. Marlin Fitzwater later recalled that when ABC-TV interviewed a group of Kansans around a kitchen table, "every answer at that table reflected one of the reasons we had given for going in."24 In Spain, in the sixteenth century, the best minds were busy at work devising rationalizations for the cruelty its conquistadors were inflicting on 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 us 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 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. 25 How many Americans, after all, 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 kn own 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.26 In 1964, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, when asked about US involvement in the overthrow of the government of Brazil, declared: "Well, there is just not one iota of truth in this. It’s just not so in any way, shape or form." Yet, the United States had been intimately involved in the coup, its role being literally indispensable. 27 In the 1980s, the Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Asia — the so-called "yellow rain" — and had caused thousands of deaths. So precise was Washington's information they could state at one point that in Afghanistan 3,042 had died in 47 separate incidents. President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union for these atrocities more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The "yellow rain", it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.28 These are three examples, chosen virtually at random. Numerous others could be given. But at the beginning of the 2 1 st century do the American people really need to be reminded that governments lie, that great powers lie greater, that the world's only superpower has the most to lie about, i.e., cover up? Do I have to descend to the banality of telling this to my readers? Apparently so, if we are to judge by all those who swallowed the "humanitarian" excuse for the bombing of Yugoslavia without gagging, including many on the left. The idea of "altruism" 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 investment. 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. 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. "29 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". 30 (This was shortly after Powell had directed the slaughter of the people of Panama.) Author Garry Wills has commented on this American benevo-lence 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 bu nk ers." What is it, then, that I mean to say here — that the US govern-ment does not care a whit about human life or human rights? 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 — summarized numerically above, and detailed in the "Interventions" chapter — shows clearly that the engine of American foreign policy has 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 four imperatives: 1) making the world open and hospitable for — in current terminology — globalization, particularly American-based transnational corporations 2) enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of Congress and residents of the White House 3) preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model 4) extending political, economic and military hegemony over as much of the globe as possible, to prevent the rise of any regional power that might challenge American supremacy, and to create a world order in America's image, as befits the world's only superpower. To American policymakers, these ends have justified the means, and all means have been available. 31 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 tenn, taking the nation and the Chilean people into complete and total ruin. Only then would the full discrediting of socialism have taken place. The military takeover and bloodshed has confused the issue. "32 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 third imperative stated above. 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 usually 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) 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 proverbial 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? Enemies without number, threats without end Now, of course, Washington spinmeisters can't cry "The Russians are coming, and they're ten feet tall!" as a pretext for intervention, so they have to regularly come up with new enemies. America cherishes her enemies. Without enemies, she is a nation without purpose and direction. The various components of the National Security State need enemies to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to protect their jobs, to give themselves a mission in the aftermath of the Soviet Union; ultimately, to reinvent themselves. And they understand this only too well, even painfully. Presented here is Col. Dennis Long, speaking in 1992, two years 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. 33 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 NATO would do the same were ignored. After one such offer was spumed, 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. "34 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. "35 But the thoughts are indeed comforting to the military professionals and their civilian counterparts. So one month the new resolute and evil enemy is North Korea, the next month the big threat is Libya, then China, or Iraq, or Iran, or Sudan, or Afghanistan, or Serbia, or that old reliable demon, Cuba — countries each led by a Hitler-of-the -month, 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 now tells us, on one day or another, it's fighting a War Against Drugs, or military or industrial spying, or the proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction", or organized crime, or on behalf of human rights, or, most particularly, against terrorism. And they dearly want the American public to believe this. Here, for your terrorist- threat collection, are some of the headlines appearing in the Washington Post and New York Times in one 7-week period in early 1999: Jan. 22: "Clinton Describes Terrorism Threat for 21st Century" Jan. 23: "President Steps Up War on New Terrorism" Jan. 23: "Thwarting Tomorrow's Terrors" Jan. 29: "Anti-Terrorism Powers Grow" Feb. 1: "Pentagon Plans Domestic Terrorism Team" Feb. 1: "The Man Who Protects America From Terrorism" Feb. 2: "U.S. Targeting Terrorism With More Funds" Feb. 16: "Anti-Terrorism Military Drills Take Parts of Texas by Surprise" Feb. 17: "Has the U.S. Blunted Bin Laden?" Feb. 19: "Spending to Avert Embassy Attacks Assailed as Timid: Terrorist Threat Looms" Feb. 19: "Bangladesh: Bin Laden's Next Target?" Feb. 23: "Preparing for Invisible Killers" Mar. 7: "Muslim Militants Threaten American Lives" Mar. 8: "Reagan Building Vulnerable to Attack" Mar. 14: "2 Groups Appeal U.S. Designation as Terror Organizations" Mar. 16: "Clinton Plans Training for Firefighters on Terrorism" And on January 20, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen — a man who has written an ode to the F-15 fighter jet, literally36 — announced that $6.6 billion was to be spent on a national missile defense system, a revival of President Reagan's Star Wars system. In explaining this expenditure, Mr. Cohen cited only one threat — from North Korea. North Korea! A country that can’t feed its own people is going to wage a missile attack upon the United States? What possible reason — other than an overpowering, irresistible yearning for mass national suicide — could North Korea have for launching such an attack? Yet the average American, reading Cohen's announcement, must have found it very difficult to believe that one of their "leaders" could just step forward and publicly proclaim a crazy tale. They assume there must be something to what the man is saying. That's how the man gets away with it. Does the man believe it himself? No more likely than that President Clinton believes it. In 1993, while in South Korea, Clinton declared: "It is pointless for them [North Korea] to develop nuclear weapons. Because if they ever use them it would be the end of their country." This burst of honesty and common sense, which visits politicians occasionally, was prompted in this instance by a journalist's question about how likely it was that North Korea would comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 37 Oddly enough, less than a year later, a survey showed that six times as many young South Koreans feared the United States as feared North Korea. 38 Returning to 1999 and its new "threats" — in August a new National Security Council global strategy paper for the next century declared that "the nation is facing its biggest espionage threat in history. "39 A remarkable statement. Whatever happened to the KGB? Any Americans now past 30 had it drilled into their heads from the cradle on that there was a perpetual Soviet dagger aimed at our collective heart in the hand of the spy next door. Thousands lost their jobs and careers because of their alleged association with this threat, hundreds were imprisoned or deported, two were executed. Surely Senator Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are turning over in their graves. Meanwhile the drumbeat warnings of a possible chemical or biological attack upon the United States grow louder with each passing week. Police, fire and health agencies go through regular exercises with all manner of sophisticated equipment. Active-duty Army and Marine Corps personnel are engaged in the same. The FBI has an extensive hazardous materials unit ready to rush to the scene of an attack. And now the National Guard has joined the frenzy, outfitted in full-body protective suits with air tanks. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has argued that the National Guard units are redundant and their mission poorly defined. The Washington Post reported that "In fact, some critics regard the [Guard] teams largely as an effort to find a new mission for the Guard and help it avoid deeper budget cuts in the post-Cold War era. "40 As noted, the same can be said about other elements of the National Security State. In October 1999, ABC's "Nightline" program ran a five-part series in which it simulated a biological weapons attack on a large American city, featuring a squad of terrorists releasing anthrax spores into the subway system, complete with panic, death and rampant chaos. Ted Koppel made the explicit pronouncement that such an attack was bound to take place in the US at some future time. As one would expect, the programs were long on sensationalism and short on science. This was spelled out later by the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. 41 Ironically, the fact that such a center exists is another sign of the ("threatening") times. Shortly after this the FBI announced that the Washington area had become "the number one target in the world" for possible terrorist attacks. How did they know? Well, "downtown Washington receives three to six suspicious packages a day". Anything actually terroristic in any of these packages? Apparently not.42 All this in response to actual chemical, biological or radiological weapon attacks of — at last count — zero. But there have been many false anthrax reports, no doubt largely inspired by all the scare talk; talk which never gives the public a clue to how extremely difficult and unpredictable it actually would be to create and deliver a serious anthrax attack, particularly over a wide area; scare talk that also makes more credible and acceptable the US 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant on the (false) grounds that it was making chemical and biological weapons. Air travel is another area where the "threat" mentality looms larger than life, and common sense. A flight from Atlanta to Turkey, August 4, 1999, that was about to take off was halted by the FBI; all 241 passengers were forced to leave the plane, some of them were questioned, one man was detained; all the luggage was unloaded and each piece painstakingly matched to a passenger; bomb-sniffing dogs and explosive experts were rushed in, and the flight was held up for more than four hours. The reason? The FBI had received word that one of the passengers might be "a potential threat to national security". And the reason for that? The man had paid for his ticket in cash.43 Three weeks later, at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a man was seen running the wrong way into a passageway normally used by those exiting the tenninal. He disappeared into the crowded concourse. Neither he nor anything suspicious was found. For all anyone knew, the man had simply forgotten something somewhere or had a very urgent need to get to what he thought was the closest bathroom. Whatever, as a result of this "threatening" situation, 6,000 passengers were evacuated, at least 120 flights were canceled, and air traffic was disrupted across the country for several hours.44 With all the scare talk, with all the "threats", what exactly has taken place in the real world? According to the State Department, in the period of 1993-1998 the number of actual terrorist attacks by region was as follows: Western Europe 766, Latin America 569, Middle East 374, Asia 158, Eurasia 101, Africa 84, North America 14 45 It is now well known how during the Cold War the actual level of Soviet military and economic strength was magnified by the CIA and Defense Department, 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. 46 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". 47 Subtlety is not the order of the day. In 1998, the Pentagon created a new bureaucracy: the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a budget already in the billions, personnel numbered in the thousands, and "made up primarily of agencies founded to reduce the threat posed by the Soviet Union". 48 It’s called recycling. The Soviet threat, the terrorist threat, the new enemies, the same old same old, feverishly fostered at home and abroad, the mentality that the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, et al. have had critical, life-saving, catastrophe-preventing missions thrust upon them, here, there, and everywhere, and we rein these saviors in on pain of national and world disaster., .working the old protection racket again. "I think we are already at war," CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate in 1997. "We have been on a war footing for a number of years now. "49 The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alanned (and hence, clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with 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.. .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, speaking of large Pentagon budgets, 1957 50 The political spectrum and conspiracies It's ironic, but the far right in the United States is more open to believing the worst about American foreign policy than are most liberals. This may be because those on the far right, being extremists themselves, do not instinctively shy away from believing that the government is capable of extreme behavior, at home or abroad. The radical left and right share a profound cynicism about their government's very intentions. But those in between the two poles do not naturally come by such views. To many of the latter, the statements here about the United States not meaning well may sound like an example of that frequent object of ridicule, the "conspiracy theory". They hear me saying (snicker) that our leaders have gotten together, covertly, in some secluded safe A house, to maliciously plan their next assault on everything holy, while throwing out signals intended to confuse and to obscure their real intentions. But if our leaders strive for unambiguous righteousness, is it not a conspiracy? Don't they meet to plan how they're going to do nice things? Or perhaps they don’t have to do this so formally because since they all mean nice to begin with, it thus happens quite automatically, naturally, built into the system — the government system, the corporate system, the military system, the intelligence system, the govemment-corporate-military- intelligence nexus. But why, then, wouldn’t it be the same with meaning bad? It's not that Americans can’t believe in any conspiracy theory. Witness the remarkably long shelf life of the International Communist Conspiracy. It's still a highly saleable commodity. "Conspiracy" researcher and author Jonathan Vankin has observed: Journalists like to think of themselves as a skeptical lot. This is a flawed self-image. The thickest pack of American journalists are all too credulous when dealing with government officials, technical experts, and other official sources. They save their vaunted "skepticism" for ideas that feel unfamiliar to them. Conspiracy theories are treated with the most rigorous skepticism. Conspiracy theories should be approached skeptically. But there's no fairness. Skepticism should apply equally to official and unofficial information. To explain American conspiracy theories... I've had to rectify this imbalance. I've opened myself to conspiracy theories, and applied total skepticism to official stories. 51 Like the cover up in Waco. In August 1999 we finally received official confirmation that the FBI had fired incendiary devices into the Branch Davidian sect compound in 1993, where 76 people died in a fire the same day. This, after six years of categorical official denials, while "conspiracy theorists" and "conspiracy nuts", who insisted otherwise, were ridiculed, or — the more usual case — met by the media's most effective weapon: silence. Can the truth about the "October Surprise", TWA800, Jonestown, and Mena, Arkansas under Governor Clinton be far behind? Yes, far behind. We’ll likely never hear an official admission about those events until well into the new century. The First Watergate Law of American Politics states: "No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine." The Second Watergate Law of American Politics states: "Don't believe anything until it's been officially denied." Both laws are still on the books. 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 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 administration's 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 Guantanamo base in Cuba, and for the first time bases in Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia... American armed forces and special operations forces, such as the Green Berets, 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 anned forces and police in the brutal arts, regardless of how brutal they already are... American nuclear bombs are still stored in seven European countries, if not else where... And American officials retain their unshakable belief that they have a god-given right to do whatever they want, for as long as they want, to whomever they want, wherever 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 communism after all; it was about American imperialism, with "communist" merely the name given to those who stood in its way. In sum total, all these post-Cold War non-changes engender a scenario out of the 1950s and 1960s. And the 1970s and 1980s. John Foster Dulles lives! Has Ronald Reagan been faking illness as he lurks behind the curtain of Oz? Why has all this continued into the 2 1 st century? American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take 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 or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the country's social services or 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 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. As Michael Parenti has observed: "It has been noted that the cost of apprehending a bank robber may occasionally exceed the sum that is stolen. But if robbers were allowed to go their way, this would encourage others to follow suit and would put the entire banking system in jeopardy. "52 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 Peru, El Salvador and Colombia 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 contention 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. "53 [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