From Tim Weiner, commenting in the New York Times on the CIAâ€™s new crud dump of past stupidities and crimes, which is plainly intended to distract attention from the agencyâ€™s present stupidities and crimes:

A footnote: the man who wrote the manifesto for the overseas training mission â€” â€œa democratic, unselfish, often unconditional approach to helping other countries to help themselvesâ€ â€” was the C.I.A.â€™s own Al Haney, the Florida-based field commander for Operation Success, the 1954 C.I.A. covert action that overthrew Guatemala. â€œThere have been charges that it is morally wrong for the U.S. to aid undemocratic regimes to strengthen their security systems, thereby serving to entrench them in power,â€ Haney argued 50 years ago. But â€œthe U.S. cannot afford the moral luxury of helping only those regimes in the free world that meet our ideals of self-government. Eliminate all the absolute monarchies, dictatorships and juntas from the free world and count those that are left and it should be readily apparent that the U.S. would be well on its way to isolation.â€

This states exactly our present policy toward Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, and on and on.

We are not alone in this cold, Kisssingerian approach: like any other nation the United States has no friends; nations, as Charles de Gaulle said, have only interests. What, then, are our interests?

During the last half century Americaâ€™s foreign policy makers of both parties have demonstrated a near-total inability to identify and pursue our real self interests.

Time after time we embraced such self-inflated toads as Saddam Hussein, Noriega, Osama bin Laden, Batista, the Shah of Iran, the Greek colonels, Pinochet, Savimbi, Mobutu, the junta in Argentina, and the butchers of El Salvador. And time after time these creatures blow up in our hands, soiling us for generations to come.

It never occurs to patriots like â€œthe C.I.A.â€™s own Al Haneyâ€ that for the suffering citizenry there is no real difference between a dictatorship of the right and one of the left. Thus the true self-interest of a confident, mature democracy lies not in choosing between two repulsive alternatives, but in rejecting both.

Rejection, though, ought not to mean war, whether open or secret. The resort to war would indeed â€” Haney was right about that â€” lead us into endless bloodbaths all over the world. And in fact it has.

And in fact it is doing so today, although only a fool would argue that Bushâ€™s war actually grew out of a passion to set the world free. He may have convinced himself of that by now, but the rest of the world is not so credulous. Our childish belief that democracy and American hegemony are synonymous is not widely shared abroad.

Democracy is best spread by example and by commerce, both economic and intellectual. Our own preferred method â€” to beat another nation to the ground and ram democracy into it â€” is not an act of love. It is rape.

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Jerome Doolittle

Bad Attitudes

http://badattitudes.com/MT/



About author Jerome Doolittle blogs at Jerome Doolittle blogs at Bad Attitudes . Former newspaperman and diplomat; speechwriter for President Carter; author of the Tom Bethany mystery series.