Masters of War

Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire

Carl Boggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415944984
• eBook ISBN: 9781136727924
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

Few United States citizens conceive of their country as an empire, but, as the contributors to Masters of War convincingly argue, the U.S. legacy of military power runs long and deep. Often mobilized in the name of spreading democracy, maintaining international order, and creating the conditions for economic self-determination, constantly expanding global U.S. military power is difficult to characterize as anything but an imperialism bent on global domination. However, at the same time that the U.S. government hawks rhetoric of human rights and national sovereignty, its dominion has begun breeding widespread resistance and opposition likely to make the twenty-first century an era marked by sustained, and generally unanticipated, blowback. Presenting a wide range of essays by some of the anti-war movement's most vocal and incisive critics, Masters of War reminds us that worldwide economic and military dominance has its price, both globally and domestically.

PART

I

The Expanding U.S. Imperial Domain

CHAPTER

1

The Logic of U.S. Intervention

MICHAEL PARENTI

Human motives are impossible to observe in any direct empirical way. We can view behavior and listen to utterances but we cannot observe the actual intent that is attributed to such things. People may profess all sorts of intentions, but they are also capable of outrageous deception, including self-deception. How then can we determine what their actual motives might be? The problem becomes crucial when attempting to divine the intent of political leaders, many of whom make a regular practice of lying about their actions. Some of us maintain that the overriding purpose of U.S. global interventionism is to promote the interests of transnational corporations and make the world safe for free-market capitalism and imperialism.¹ Washington policymakers claim that intervention is propelled by an intent to bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, protect weaker nations from aggressors, defend U.S. national security, fight terrorism, protect human rights, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, and the like. Are we to accept these claims uncritically? If not, how can we demonstrate that they are often false or incomplete, and that the intent we ascribe is the real agenda? How can we determine that U.S. interventionism is engendered by imperialist concerns rather than, say, humanitarian ones?

A Global Military Empire

If U.S. policy is respectful of other nations' sovereignty and other peoples' needs, then we might wonder why U.S. leaders engage in a relentless push for global military domination. The United States presides over an armed planetary force of a magnitude never before seen in human history. It includes about a half-million troops stationed at over 395 major bases and hundreds of minor installations in thirty-five foreign countries; more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 22,000 tactical ones; a naval strike force greater in total tonnage and firepower than all the other navies of the world combined, consisting of missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and destroyers that sail every ocean and make port at every continent. With only five percent of the earth's population, the United States expends more military funds than all the other major powers combined.

U.S. bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can reach any target, delivering enough explosive force to destroy the infrastructures of entire coun-tries—as demonstrated against Iraq in 1990–91 and Yugoslavia in 1999. U.S. rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly superior to that of any other nation. U.S. satellites and spy planes conduct surveillance over the entire planet. And today the United States is developing a capacity to conduct war from outer space.

Worldwide U.S. arms sales to cooperative capitalist nations rose to $36.9 billion in 2000, up from $34 billion in 1999. In addition to sales, since World War II, the U.S. government has given some $240 billion in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize some 2.3 million troops and internal security forces in more than eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend these nations from outside invasion but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anti-capitalist insurgency.

How can we determine that? By observing that (a) with few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various regimes have ever been threatened by attack from neighboring countries; (b) just about all these “friendly” regimes have supported economic systems that are subserviently integrated into a global system of transnational corporate domination, open to foreign penetration on terms that are singularly favorable to transnational investors; (c) there is a great deal of evidence showing that U.S.-supported military and security forces and death squads in these various countries have been repeatedly used to destroy popular reformist movements and insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics within their own countries.²

For decades we were told that a huge U.S. military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world Communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European Communist nations, Washington made no move to dismantle its costly and dangerous global military apparatus. All Cold War weapons programs continued in full force, with new ones being added all the time, including plans to militarize outer space. Immediately the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies—for some unexplained reason previously overlooked—who menace the United States, including “dangerous rogue states” like Libya with its ragtag army of 50,000. The elder George Bush, as Richard Barnet noted, even “proclaimed the new American enemy to be ‘instability,’ a vague but ominous political science metaphor.”³ These claims were swiftly and uncritically embraced by defense establishment academics and media pundits who pretend to an expertise on foreign affairs.

Supporting the Right

The intent of U.S. national security state leaders⁴ can be revealed in part by noting whom they assist and whom they attack. U.S. leaders have consistently supported rightist regimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones. The terms “Right” and “Left” are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators—and with good reason. To explicate the politico-eco-nomic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egali-tarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them. The “Left,” as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that advocate egalitarian redistributive policies benefiting the common people and infringing upon the privileged interests of the wealthy propertied classes.

The Right also is involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning and investing classes. In almost every country, including the U.S., rightist groups, parties, or governments pursue tax and spending programs, wage and investment practices, methods of police and military control, and deregulation and privatization policies that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what defines and distinguishes the Right from the Left. In just about each instance, rightist forces abroad are deemed by U.S. opinion makers to be “friendly to the West,” a coded term for “pro-free market” and “pro-capitalist.” Conversely, leftist ones are labeled as hostile,“anti-democratic,”“anti-American,” and “anti-West.”

While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, U.S. leaders have supported some of the most notorious right-wing autocracies in history, governments that have tortured, killed, or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), and Portugal (under Salazar). Assistance is also given to counterrevolutionary groups in leftist revolutionary countries. These groups have perpetrated some of the most brutal bloodletting against civilian populations, as have Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the Contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the counterinsurgency ethnic slaughter in Rwanda, the mujahideen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the right-wing Albanian separatist KLA in Kosovo.

U.S. support of right-wing conservatism has extended to the furthest reaches of the political spectrum. After World War II, U.S. leaders and their Western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for putting some of the top Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. In a short time, former Nazis and their collaborators were back in the saddle in Germany.⁵ Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by U.S. intelligence agencies during the Cold War.⁶

In France, too, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. As Herbert Lott-man writes, “No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps.”⁷ U.S. military authori-ties also restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, for instance, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation forces were used immediately after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China.⁸

In Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of Communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures.⁹ From 1945 to 1975, U.S. government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy, including some with close ties to the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups, embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the “strategy of tension,” involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombing massacres (i stragi), including an explosion that killed eighty-five people and injured some two hundred in the Bologna train station in August 1980. Fueled by international security agencies including the CIA, terrorism was directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left. The objective was to “combat by any means necessary the electoral gains of the Italian Communist Party” and create enough terror to destabilize the multiparty social democracy and replace it with an authoritarian “presidential republic,” or in any case “a stronger and more stable executive.” Implicated in this terrorist campaign, the CIA refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating i stragi in 1995.¹⁰

In the 1980s scores of people were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by extreme rightists in the service of state security agencies. As with the earlier strategy of tension in Italy, these attacks attempted to create enough popular fear and uncertainty to undermine the existing social democracies. The U.S. corporate-owned media largely ignored these acts of right-wing terrorism in Western Europe while giving prominent play to tiny and far less effective left terrorist grouplets found in Italy and West Germany.

In Italy, as long as the Communist party had imposing strength in parlia-ment and the labor unions, U.S. policymakers worked with centrist alterna-tives such as the Christian Democrats and the anticommunist Italian Socialist Party. With Communism in decline by the 1990s, U.S. leaders began to lend more open encouragement to extreme rightist forces. In 1994 and again in 2001, national elections were won by the National Alliance, a coalition of neo-fascists, ultraconservatives, and northern separatists headed by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. The Alliance played on resentments over unemployment, taxes, and immigration. It attempted to convince people that government was the enemy—especially its social service sector. At the same time it worked to strengthen the repressive capacities of the state and divide the working class against itself by instigating antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants, all the while preaching the virtues of the free market and pursuing tax and spending measures that redistributed income upward. U.S. leaders have had not a harsh word to say about the Italian neofascists.

Opposing the Left

We can also infer intent by looking at who is targeted for attack by the U.S. national security state, specifically just about all leftist governments, movements, and popular insurgencies, either in direct military attacks by U.S. forces and surrogate mercenary forces such as the Contras in Nicaragua, or by subversion and destabilization from within. The U.S. has subverted reformist and leftist governments by financing and controlling their internal security units and intelligence agencies, providing them with counterinsurgency technology, including instruments of torture; imposing crippling economic sanctions through IMF austerity programs; bribing political leaders, military leaders, and other key players; inciting retrograde ethnic separatists and supremacists within the country; subverting their democratic and popular organizations; rigging their elections; and financing collaborationist political parties, labor unions, academic researchers, journalists, religious groups, nongovernmenta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Other New Political Science Readers
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Empire and Globalization
• Part I: The Expanding U.S. Imperial Domain
• Part II: Empire,Militarism, and Terrorism
• Part III: The Militarized Society
• Conclusion: The Real Axis of Evil
• Contributors
• Index