A brief history of US intevention around the world

Robert Walker writes

"BLOODY TYRANTS WE HAVE KNOWN
(AND A FEW WE’VE EVEN LOVED)

For more than one hundred years US foreign policy has employed armed intervention in countries around the globe as a way to further US commercial interests and expand our sphere of influence. We have installed, supported and shored up a long list of dictators and tyrants in order to get what we want. The effects of our policies on the fate of peoples ruled by “our” despots have never been of concern to American policy makers. In the aftermath of his betrayal of Iraqi Kurds in the 1970s, Henry Kissinger made the cynical observation: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."

In recent months the Bush administration has dished out to the American public multiple justifications for the US invasion of Iraq. What the president calls “regime change” is just the current spin given to the long and sordid American tradition of unilateral intervention in the affairs of other nations. The latest claim, that we are invading Iraq in order to liberate its people and promote democracy and human rights, is simply a lie. The history of American foreign policy proves otherwise. Saddam Hussein is but one in a long line of corrupt and murderous leaders who have governed with our blessings (and our foreign and military aid)—until we no longer need them. We have promoted a succession of such men in countries on every continent, then forced them out or removed them when their usefulness expired. Some of these sanguinary tyrants or their appointed successors remained in power for decades, and their rule was inevitably accompanied by a denial of basic human rights and widespread poverty. Washington didn’t mind.

Nor have we been reluctant to overthrow governments not to our liking, or defy sovereign national boundaries when it benefits us. Between 1918 and 1922, for example, as part of a coalition of US, British, and French (yes French) forces, the US invaded Russia on five different occasions to assist the White Army in their war against the Bolsheviks and the new revolutionary government. These coalition efforts were abortive and futile.
In 1903, thwarted by Colombia’s rejection of a treaty that would pave the way for building a canal across the isthmus of Panama (then part of Colombia), a petulant Theodore Roosevelt fomented a rebellion in Colon with bribes and gunboats and created the breakaway republic of Panama. The US built the canal, then annexed a ten-mile wide strip of this new nation to create the Canal Zone for ourselves.

Our military adventurism and clandestine activities have taken us repeatedly into South American, Central American and the Caribbean republics, where occupying US forces have suppressed popular movements for land and political reform, influenced elections, and overthrown democratically elected governments slow to conform to our dictates that their resources remain open to US exploitation.

The list of fascist dictators we have liked includes, but sadly is not limited to, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Duvalier in Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua, and a long list of military officers in Guatemala who first came to power in 1954 following the overthrow of the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz had the audacity to institute agrarian reform, thereby angering the United Fruit Company. His overthrow was one of the first “regime changes” pulled off by a fledgling CIA. In thirty-two years of military dictatorship, 140, 000 Guatemalans died or disappeared.
In the early Fifties, the CIA worked to remove the duly elected Mossadeq government of Iran, which wanted to nationalize oil production. Instead, Operation Ajax installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled with an iron fist and the SAVAK secret police until he was overthrown by the mullahs in 1979. Under the Shah we got lots of cheap oil, pumped out by the Anglo-American Oil Company. This made the Shah acceptable to those in Washington who knew or who even cared about the state terror Iranians had to endure. Torture during the Shah’s regime was called “caressing.” More than 200, 000 were imprisoned for political “crimes.”

In 1964, the military in Brazil toppled the democratically elected President Goulart and seized power using US-made tanks and weapons, “a conspiracy in which the US Embassy was intimately involved,” according to William Blum in his book Killing Hope. The infamous CCC death squads murdered 70, 000 Brazilians during twenty-one years of dictadura. The military’s torture victims included men, women, children, and infants. But the generals re-assured Washington that they stood squarely with the US on international matters, and they opened the country to greater American investment. That was what mattered.

In 1976 the generals who seized power in Argentina were all right with us too. The unholy troika of two generals and one admiral waged a dirty little war against their own people, using torture, assassination and “disappearances”, without reproach from Washington. At least 30, 000 Argentines disappeared. And of course the singularly reprehensible General Pinochet of Chile goes on the list of military dictators who have tortured, murdered and “disappeared” their citizens. Pinochet’s military deposed a constitutionally elected president who had vowed to undertake a program of economic reform and nationalization of major industries. Once again, Henry Kissinger, that arch-criminal of realpolitik, had his bloody hands in the doings in Chile, as did the CIA, acting at the behest of US copper interests and other corporations. An estimated 20, 000 Chileans died between 1973 and 1990, with nary a word of condemnation by the US State Department. The freedom and human rights of Chileans was not our concern. We never threatened invasion, nor asked Pinochet to please leave.

When the Sandinista revolution toppled the brutal Somoza dictatorship in 1979, the US responded with a mercenary army trained across the border in Honduras and commanded by the CIA in order to bring down the popular Sandinista government. About the same time, in El Salvador, the US helped train and equip the infamous Orden death squads that were in the business of killing popular leaders, including Archbishop Romero, who espoused economic and social change. Orden goons also murdered five American nuns. The Reagan administration officially didn’t mind. A guns-for-drugs scheme run out of the White House by Col. North funded the whole filthy enterprise of murder and destabilization in Central America, but no leader of El Salvador or Honduras was told to step aside.
In 1965, the CIA aided and abetted a clique of rightist generals in the Indonesian military in planning a coup to oust President Sukarno. General Suharto, who replaced him, began a brutal crack down against popular democratic movements. Within seven months approximately one million Indonesians were slaughtered. This bloodbath went virtually unreported by Western news media. Again there was no public outcry from Washington, though privately, so many deaths was to some US officials, regrettable. The victims—farmers, workers, union leaders, teachers—were said to be communists, so this justified the massacre. In 1975 President Ford dispatched Mr. Kissinger to Jakarta, this time to assure General Suharto that his plans to seize neighboring East Timor would be well-regarded in Washington. Two hundred thirty thousand Timorese died in the fighting and from starvation and disease following the invasion. In both of these atrocities, the US provided millions of dollars in clandestine military aid to Indonesian armed forces, then looked the other way while murder was done on a genocidal scale.

In the Asian theatre of dirty dealings, we must include South Vietnam, where the US military and the CIA placed a puppet dictator in power—Ngo Dinh Diem—then had him assassinated when the job went to his head and he started to think he could go it alone. (Does this sound familiar? Think Noriega, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein. The shelf life of tyrants is uncertain.) The longest war in US history followed. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and 2 million Vietnamese were killed.

This is an abbreviated account of only a few of the sociopaths in our employ. It omits various strong men and the odd little junta here and there whose regimes we have found useful for the purposes of empire. Some have been worse than Saddam, a dubious distinction, yet they were not deposed nor their countries invaded as long as they followed Washington’s orders. For millions of people around the world, the history of US intervention, whether direct or covert, is a history of oppression, deprivation, pain, and death. Individual memory may grow dim, but there is a collective remembering that transcends time. Resentment builds exponentially. We delude ourselves in thinking that today mere envy causes religious fanatics to hate and attack us.
Millions around the world have felt the sting of repression in order that Americans may live a life of plenty. We are disliked and mistrusted because the aggressive manner in which we exercise our foreign policy brings pain, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly--as when despots in our employ oppress and terrorize their own people. We created the Taliban to fight the Soviets. We created Saddam Hussein to trouble Iran, and Pinochet to keep Chilean copper in US hands, and all the generals and military despots in country after country we created, to stifle democracy and freedom and real economic growth, so that US interests could have a favorable climate for investment and exploitation.

Those who have survived our actions toward the rest of the world have grievances that are sometimes generations old, but they are legitimate. Unless we acknowledge this we will fight endless wars to no avail. We will find that more and more people don’t like us and will never like us as long as we regard them as a means to our selfish materialist objectives.

To live a life of undisciplined materialism and greed is to sanction dictatorships, violence, repression, social tensions, and political instabilities worldwide. In short, it is to condone the suffering of others for our sake. Every despot who rules with Washington’s consent (always provisional, as we have seen) is a guard dog watching over distant resources (today oil, tomorrow water): pipelines, military bases, commercial outposts of doubtful progress, or perhaps merely a geographical location that could someday be of strategic importance to the New American Empire. This is Rottweiler diplomacy. It is foreign policy without a conscience. Almost forty years ago, Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, declared that morality had no place in the conduct of foreign affairs. Today we are forced to gnaw on the bitter fruit of that reckless and callous policy.

###

Robert Walker is a writer and photographer. He has worked and traveled in South and Central America and the Caribbean."