The WikiLeaks Files

The World According to US Empire

WikiLeaks

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781781688755
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Corrupción política y mala conducta

WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 with the release of 251, 287 top-secret State Department cables, which revealed to the world what the US government really thinks about national leaders, friendly dictators, and supposed allies. It brought to the surface the dark truths of crimes committed in our name: human rights violations, covert operations, and cover-ups. The WikiLeaks Files exposes the machinations of the United States as it imposes a new form of imperialism on the world, one founded on tactics from torture to military action, to trade deals and "soft power, " in the perpetual pursuit of expanding influence. The book also includes an introduction by Julian Assange examining the ongoing debates about freedom of information, international surveillance, and justice. An introduction by Julian Assange-writing on the subject for the first time-exposes the ongoing debates about freedom of information, international surveillance, and justice.

Part I

1. America and the Dictators*

WHAT IS IT WITH AMERICA AND DICTATORSHIPS?

The United States government very publicly and valiantly denounces autocratic regimes all the time: currently the targets of Washington’s ire include North Korea, Iran, and Syria. At the same time it selectively wages war on autocratic regimes, from Panama to Iraq, as the situation requires. In private, the WikiLeaks cables, gathered since 2009, show that US diplomats are often very scathing about foreign leaders and overseas governments. And yet, the US has maintained networks of sympathetic authoritarian regimes in large parts of the world where it wields influence. The very same regimes it goes to war with have, at some point, once been American allies. This is an irony that can hardly have been lost on Noriega or Saddam Hussein as they were ousted and tried in kangaroo courts for crimes carried out with US support.

In contrast, Washington stands by other regimes to the bitter end. Consider the relatively minor example of Turkmenistan. In 2009, a cable sent from the US embassy in Ashgabat contained a poison-pen thumbnail description of the country’s dictator, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. Written by the US chargé d’affaires, it acidly depicted the dictator as “vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, very conservative, a practiced liar, ‘a good actor,’ and vindictive.” Perhaps most damning was the observation that, apart from being a vicious tinpot dictator, he was “not a very bright guy.”¹

None of this was exactly news. Berdimuhamedow had continued the despotic pattern established by his predecessor, the former Communist Party leader Saparmyrat Niyazov, when he had taken control in 2006. The US certainly knew all his methods before he was allowed to take command. But Turkmenistan provided a crucial corridor of access to Afghanistan for the US, as well as being strategically central to an energy-rich area circling the Caspian Sea.

So, if chargé d’affaires Curran’s report was intended to make officials think twice about dealing with the dictator, it did not work. Hillary Clinton stopped in for a photo op with the dictator in the year the cable was sent, at which it was reported that human rights was not very high on the agenda. The next year, US military aid to the dictatorship increased from $150,000 to $2 million.² This aid, it should be noted, is being put to sterling work funding the regime’s military exercises in the region. Berdimuhamedow was “re-elected” with 97 percent of the vote in 2012, and the US continues its warm relationship with the regime.

And there it is in black and white. The planners and strategists in Washington, DC—leaders of the Free World, as they once fondly styled themselves—think the blood-caked dictator of Turkmenistan is not just nasty but an utter dolt, and yet this personality flaw is offset by the observation that if he is good enough to sustain America’s war, he is good enough for Turkmenistan, and well worth a couple of million dollars.

This kind of realpolitik looks bad for the US, but support for this cynical axis of repression is far down the list of such instances catalogued in the WikiLeaks documents. From east to central Asia to the Middle East to Latin America, the US has cultivated, funded, armed, and coddled authoritarian states in both hemispheres. Nonetheless, if this behavior seems staggeringly at odds with the spaniel-eyed, apple-pie rhetoric of the Obama administration, it is clear that there is more to this posture than rhetoric.

At the heart of postwar US policy-making is the doctrine of liberal internationalism. Pioneered by Woodrow Wilson, and embellished by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, this doctrine is generally understood as the justification of military and other interventions by the US if they help produce a liberal world order: a global system consisting of liberal-democratic nation-states, connected by more or less free markets and ruled by international law. In this world-view, the goal of achieving a liberal world system trumps the commitment to state sovereignty. The US sees itself as the natural vanguard of such a global order, as well as the chief bearer of any right to suppress state sovereignty in the pursuit of liberal goals.

As we see from the cables, this doctrine is taken seriously by state personnel of every hue. Their criticisms of undemocratic regimes, nepotism, and human rights abuses make no sense otherwise. However, there is an aspect of liberal internationalism that is not typically explicated by its adherents, but which is visible both in its origins and its practice.

As Domenico Losurdo, the eminent historian, has written, liberalism in this broad sense has historically been subject to a series of exclusions—working-class people, women, black people, and colonial subjects have all at various points been excluded from the citizenship rights, such as voting, granted to white, propertied men.³ The logic of such exclusions in the international system is visible in the colonial origin of international law, which initially ratified the behavior of colonial states while leaving colonial peoples without rights in the emerging world system.⁴

The right of self-determination in the form of statehood was thus, for a long time, a right reserved by the overwhelmingly white citizens of Euro-American states—a fact that would become a source of anticolonial rebellion in the early twentieth century. As the American empire rose to world dominance, it met this state of affairs with a mixture of caution and sympathy for the colonial powers. Even as it gradually worked out a strategic perspective according to which territorial control was no longer an advantage, it was reluctant to see this crucial right extended to non-white peoples.

Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1912 to 1920, was the austere poster boy for liberal internationalism, and the first president seriously to confront the dilemmas posed by the new anticolonial movements. Having championed American efforts to get in on the imperial racket, he witnessed the difficulties that US colonial policy experienced in the Philippines, while at the same time observing with horror the rise of global anticolonial movements. By breaking his 1916 electoral promise and leading the US into World War I, he facilitated a first attempt to construct a new world order.

Wilson did not eschew the occupation of foreign territories when it suited US interests; he was not only a champion of the US occupation of the Philippines, but himself sent troops into Haiti (1915), Nicaragua (1912), and Cuba (1912), as well as intervening in the Mexican Revolution (1914). Nonetheless, the scale of the Great War acted as a warning against unnecessary military campaigns. In addition, there was a growing idea among US planners suggesting that territorial control was less important than the control of markets in capital, labor, and resources.

In a global market dominated by the US, supporting national governments in place that were open to US investment was more important than becoming a colonial overlord. Profits could flow back to Wall Street without the debilitating costs of occupation. To achieve this world order, however, the US would need to prize open the colonial empires. One manifestation of this new strategic perspective was the Wilson administration’s discovery of the language of “national self-determination.” This has assumed a central place in the mythology of liberal internationalism, even though Wilson at first purloined the language from the Bolsheviks, the better to steal their thunder. He certainly had no intention of fulfilling the implied promise to anticolonial movements, which he regarded as having no capacity for self-government. Thus, while US propagandists enlisted the support of anticolonial forces in India for the Entente powers in World War I on the basis of Wilsonian doctrine, the ensuing negotiations at Versailles saw the US oppose a “racial equality” motion, and “self-determination” was denied to colonized nations. The result was that the anticolonial movements gravitated to the Left, with many looking to Russia as a model of successful modernization.⁵

Later, the US took the opportunity of World War II to relieve Britain of many of its colonial possessions in exchange for participation in the war on the Allied side. However, in the immediate aftermath, the US declined to push its tremendous strategic advantage home at the expense of the former colonial powers. The British were left with strategic control of South Asia, and the French maintained sovereignty in Indochina, while appeals for recognition from Sukarno in Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam were ignored. In general, the US only lent its tacit support to anticolonial ruptures—such as the Nasserite revolt in Egypt—where there was little risk of conflict.

The chief concern of US officials during this period was that “premature independence” might lead to a new freedom for people as yet unfit to govern themselves. Given this unfitness, they might not commit to building liberal capitalist states integrated into a US-led world market, instead preferring politically immature “populist” or radical solutions. They might even, in some cases, “go communist.”

As a leading American expert on African politics, William J. Foltz, wrote in 1966, it would take more than a few generations to teach the majority of black Africans “the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics.”⁶ Therefore, if a further period of tutelage at the hands of white colonial masters was not possible, the “modernization theory” of US state mandarins held that these people would require a period of authoritarian rule under enlightened military regimes.⁷

The US thus responded to independence in the Congo by engineering the imposition of the kleptocratic Mobutu regime to prevent radicalism. The same policy supported a succession of dictators in South Vietnam to avert Viet Minh rule, and drove an extraordinarily bloody war to defend an allied dictatorship in South Korea. It supported the overthrow of Sukarno by the Indonesian general Suharto in a coup that killed up to a million people, but subsequently opened up the country’s markets and resources to US investors.

In the Middle East, the US took over the British role, particularly after the latter’s “East of Suez” commitments were finally abandoned in 1971. US administrators and oilmen had already co-engineered the rule of the House of Saud by this point. The CIA had helped overthrow the Iran’s Mossadegh government in 1953, replacing it with the hated shah, and later played a role in supporting the Ba’athist coup in Iraq as part of its general offensive against radical Arab nationalism. Israel—neither strictly a dictatorship nor a normal democracy—had become the major US regional client, particularly after the 1967 war, in which it had dealt a lethal blow to Arab nationalism. Later, with the Camp David accords securing peace with Israel, the Egyptian dictatorship became the second major regional client. All the while, of course, the US supported a network of right-wing dictatorships in its “backyard”—Latin America—with the aim of suppressing leftist movements hostile to American business.

The traditional Cold War justification for these imperial interventions was that it was a nasty, brutal old world out there, and that, to protect freedom against a totalitarian menace, certain unpleasant things had to be tolerated. Perhaps the most eloquent exponent of this idea was the neoconservative guru Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would become Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick argued forcefully in defense of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, on the grounds that the workers, peasants, and nuns they were slaughtering represented a form of totalitarianism that was far worse than authoritarianism. Kirkpatrick also offered a defense of the US alliance with El Salvador’s death squads, writing for the hallowed papers of the American Enterprise Institute that these institutions were authentically rooted organizations of the Salvadoran people, representing the organized self-defense of civil society against communism, and would be much more civilized if harnessed to legitimate state power.⁸

By this point, however, Kirkpatrick was already swimming against the tide. In the post-Vietnam era, US state elites began to articulate their policy goals much more in terms of human rights and democracy. Kirkpatrick mocked the Carter administration for its human rights rhetoric, but even during Reagan’s proxy battles with “communism” in Central America, the old anticommunist battle wagons were being carefully spruced up and re-sold as vehicles for progressive, democratic change, albeit within terms favorable to long-term US interests.

As a result, an apparatus of “democracy promotion” sprang up, linked to the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and a series of institutions through which funding could be allocated to support US-aligned civil society forces in various countries.⁹ As a Reaganera official put it:

The incoming Reagan administration sought to turn the clock back on US foreign policy to the pre-Vietnam era, to an old-fashioned cold war approach in which the United States would accept the need to support unsavory dictators as an inevitable component of the global struggle against Soviet communism. The Reagan administration discovered fairly quickly, however, that it was not possible to forge a bipartisan foreign policy on this basis; a concern for human rights and democracy also had to be factored into the policy.¹⁰

In fact, the “concern” was hypocritical. The US was not doing anything very new. Allen Weinstein, a founder and first acting president of the NED, observed in 1991 that its existence meant that activities the CIA had performed covertly twenty-five years before could now be performed openly.¹¹ Nor did it signal a change of policy priorities. In El Salvador, for instance, the US was fully aware that the country’s ruling class was engaged in a bitter war of annihilation against leftist peasants and workers, and was disposed toward a genocidal solution, favoring the “cleansing” of up to half a million people. And while the CIA continued to train Salvadoran death squads, and US money continued to pour in, the United States began to prepare a series of “democracy promotion” programs that in fact bolstered civil society forces close to the ruling ARENA party.¹²

This pattern continues. In recent years the NED has been directly involved in funding groups and individuals involved in the coup against Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004, and several of those involved in the attempted coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in 2002. In short, while the language of cynical anticommunist realpolitik was being replaced with a focus on human rights, the apparatus of “human rights” was still being deployed against America’s leftist enemies. In Egypt, the United States allocated an average of $20 million per year to “democracy assistance” in the years running up to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak—while supporting the regime itself to the tune of $2 billion per year.¹³

But the advantage of the “human rights” policy was clear. While the United States could continue to rely on a series of dictatorships where it did not trust democracies to produces pro-US policies, it could simultaneously foster a pro-US bulwark in the opposition by funding and building relations with groups it trusted.

This was more than just hypocrisy. US elites may not have much sympathy for the poor and oppressed of the global South, but dictatorships lack legitimacy and have a worr...