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China 1945-49: Intervened in a civil
war, taking the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the communists, even though
the latter had been a much closer ally of the United States in the world
war. The U.S. used defeated Japanese soldiers to fight for its side. The
communists forced Chiang to flee to Taiwan in 1949.
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Italy 1947-48: Using every trick in
the book, the U.S. interfered in the elections to prevent the Communist
Party from coming to power legally and fairly. This perversion of democracy
was done in the name of "saving democracy" in Italy. The Communists lost.
For the next few decades, the CIA, along with American corporations, continued
to intervene in Italian elections, pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars
and much psychological warfare to block the specter that was haunting Europe.
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Greece 1947-49: Intervened in a civil
war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left which had
fought the Nazis courageously. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly
brutal regime, for which the CIA created a new internal security agency,
KYP. Before long, KYP was carrying out all the endearing practices of secret
police everywhere, including systematic torture.
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Philippines 1945-53: U.S. military
fought against leftist forces (Huks) even while the Huks were still fighting
against the Japanese invaders. After the war, the U.S. continued its fight
against the Huks, defeating them, and then installing a series of puppets
as president, culminating in the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.
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South Korea 1945-53: After World War
II, the United States suppressed the popular progressive forces in favor
of the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. This led to
a long era of corrupt, reactionary, and brutal governments.
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Albania 1949-53: U.S. and Britain tried
unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist government and install a new
one that would have been pro-Western and composed largely of monarchists
and collaborators with Italian fascists and Nazis.
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Germany 1950s: The CIA orchestrated
a wide-ranging campaign of sabotage, terrorism, dirty tricks, and psychological
warfare against East Germany. This was one of the factors which led to
the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
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Iran 1953: Prime Minister Mossadegh
was overthrown in a joint U.S. and British operation. Mossadegh had been
elected to his position by a large majority of parliament, but he had made
the fateful mistake of spearheading the movement to nationalize a British-owned
oil company, the sole oil company operating in Iran. The coup restored
the Shah to absolute power and began a period of 25 years of repression
and torture, with the oil industry being restored to foreign ownership,
as follows: Britain and the U.S., each 40 percent, other nations 20 percent.
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Guatemala 1953-1990: A CIA-organized
coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of
Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of death-squads, torture, disappearances,
mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling well over 100,000 victims
-- indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century. Arbenz
had nationalized the U.S. firm, United Fruit Company, which had extremely
close ties to the American power elite. As justification for the coup,
Washington declared that Guatemala had been on the verge of a Soviet takeover,
when in fact the Russians had so little interest in the country that it
didn't even maintain diplomatic relations. The real problem in the eyes
of Washington, in addition to United Fruit, was the danger of Guatemala's
social democracy spreading to other countries in Latin America.
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Middle East 1956-58: The Eisenhower
Doctrine stated that the United States "is prepared to use armed forces
to assist" any Middle East country "requesting assistance against armed
aggression from any country controlled by international communism." The
English translation of this was that no one would be allowed to dominate,
or have excessive influence over, the middle east and its oil fields except
the United States, and that anyone who tried would be, by definition, "communist."
In keeping with this policy, the United States twice attempted to overthrow
the Syrian government, staged several shows-of-force in the Mediterranean
to intimidate movements opposed to U.S.-sported governments in Jordan and
Lebanon, landed 14,000 troops in Lebanon, and conspired to overthrow or
assassinate Nasser of Egypt and his troublesome middle-east nationalism.
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Indonesia 1957-58: Sukarno, like Nasser,
was the kind of Third World leader the United States could not abide by.
He took neutralism in the cold war seriously, making trips to the Soviet
Union and China (though to the White House as well). He nationalized many
private holdings of the Dutch, the former colonial power. And he refused
to crack down on the Indonesian Communist Party, which was walking the
legal, peaceful road and making impressive gains electorally. Such policies
could easily give other Third World leaders "wrong ideas." Thus it was
that the CIA began throwing money into the elections, plotted Sukarno's
assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phoney sex film, and joined
forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against
the government. Sukarno survived it all.
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British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64: For
11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and
the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected
leader from occupying his office. Cheddi Jagan was another Third World
leader who tried to remain neutral and independent. He was elected three
times. Although a leftist -- more so than Sukarno or Arbenz -- his policies
in office were not revolutionary. But he was still a marked man, for he
represented Washington's greatest fear: building a society that might be
a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model. Using a
wide variety of tactics -- from general strikes and disinformation to terrorism
and British legalisms, the U.S. and Britain finally forced Jagan out in
1964. John F. Kennedy had given a direct order for his ouster, as, presumably,
had Eisenhower.
One of the better-off countries in the
region under Jagan, Guyana, by the 1980s, was one of the poorest. Its principal
export became people.
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Vietnam, 1950-73: The slippery slope
began with siding with the French, the former colonizers and collaborators
with the Japanese, against Ho Chi Minh and his followers who had worked
closely with the Allied war effort and admired all things American. Ho
Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of communist. He had written numerous
letters to President Truman and the State Department asking for America's
help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French and finding a peaceful
solution for his country. All his entreaties were ignored. For he was some
kind of communist. Ho Chi Minh modeled the new Vietnamese declaration of
independence on the American, beginning it with "All men are created equal.
They are endowed by their Creator with ... " But this would count for nothing
in Washington. Ho Chi Minh was some kind of communist.
-
Twenty-three years, and more than a million
dead, later, the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam.
Most people say that the U.S. lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to
its core, and poisoning the earth and the gene pool for generations, Washington
had in fact achieved its main purpose: preventing what might have been
the rise of a good development option for Asia. Ho Chi Minh was, after
all, some kind of communist.
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Cambodia 1955-73: Prince Sihanouk,
yet another leader who did not fancy being an American client. After many
years of hostility towards his regime, including assassination plots and
the infamous Nixon/Kissinger secret "carpet bombings" of 1969-70, Washington
finally overthrew Sihanouk in a coup in 1970. This was all that was needed
to impel Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to enter the fray. Five years
later, they took power. But five years of American bombing had caused Cambodia's
traditional economy to vanish. The old Cambodia had been destroyed forever.
Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict
even greater misery upon this unhappy land. To add to the irony, the United
States supported Pol Pot, militarily and diplomatically, after their subsequent
defeat by the Vietnamese.
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The Congo/Zaire 1960-65: In June 1960,
Patrice Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minister after independence
from Belgium. But Belgium retained its vast mineral wealth in Katanga province,
prominent Eisenhower administration officials had financial ties to the
same wealth, and Lumumba, at Independence Day ceremonies before a host
of foreign dignitaries, called for the nation's economic as well as its
political liberation, and recounted a list of injustices against the natives
by the white owners of the country. The poor man was obviously a "communist."
The poor man was obviously doomed.
Eleven days later, Katanga province seceded,
in September Lumumba was dismissed by the president at the instigation
of the United States, and in January 1961 he was assassinated at the express
request of Dwight Eisenhower. There followed several years of civil conflict
and chaos and the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger
to the CIA. Mobutu went on to rule the country for more than 30 years,
with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers.
The Zairian people lived in abject poverty despite the plentiful natural
wealth, while Mobutu became a multibillionaire.
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Brazil 1961-64: President Joao Goulart
was guilty of the usual crimes: He took an independent stand in foreign
policy, resuming relations with socialist countries and opposing sanctions
against Cuba; his administration passed a law limiting the amount of profits
multinationals could transmit outside the country; a subsidiary of ITT
was nationalized; he promoted economic and social reforms. And Attorney-General
Robert Kennedy was uneasy about Goulart allowing "communists" to hold positions
in government agencies. Yet the man was no radical. He was a millionaire
land-owner and a Catholic who wore a medal of the Virgin around his neck.
That, however, was not enough to save him. In 1964, he was overthrown in
a military coup which had deep, covert American involvement. The official
Washington line was ... yes, it's unfortunate that democracy has been overthrown
in Brazil ... but, still, the country has been saved from communism.
For the next 15 years, all the features
of military dictatorship which Latin America has come to know and love
were instituted: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced
to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for "political crimes" was suspended,
criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken
over by government interveners, mounting protests were met by police and
military firing into crowds, peasants' homes were burned down, priests
were brutalized ... disappearances, death squads, a remarkable degree and
depravity of torture ... the government had a name for its program: the
"moral rehabilitation" of Brazil.
Washington was very pleased. Brazil broke
relations with Cuba and became one of the United States' most reliable
allies in Latin America.
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Dominican Republic, 1963-66: In February
1963, Juan Bosch took office as the first democratically elected president
of the Dominican Republic since 1924. Here at last was John F. Kennedy's
liberal anti-communist, to counter the charge that the U.S. supported only
military dictatorships. Bosch's government was to be the long sought "showcase
of democracy" that would put the lie to Fidel Castro. He was given the
grand treatment in Washington shortly before he took office.
Bosch was true to his beliefs. He called
for land reform; low-rent housing; modest nationalization of business;
and foreign investment provided it was not excessively exploitative of
the country; and other policies making up the program of any liberal Third
World leader serious about social change. He was likewise serious about
the thing called civil liberties: Communists, or those labeled as such,
were not to be persecuted unless they actually violated the law.
A number of American officials and congressmen
expressed their discomfort with Bosch's plans, as well as his stance of
independence from the United States. Land reform and nationalization are
always touchy issues in Washington, the stuff that "creeping socialism"
is made of. In several quarters of the U.S. press Bosch was red-baited.
In September, the military boots marched.
Bosch was out. The United States, which could discourage a military coup
in Latin America with a frown, did nothing.
Nineteen months later, a revolt broke out
which promised to put the exiled Bosch back into power. The United States
sent 23,000 troops to help crush it.
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Cuba 1959 to present: Fidel Castro
came to power at the beginning of 1959. A U.S. National Security Council
meeting of 10 March 1959 included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing
"another government to power in Cuba." There followed 40 years of terrorist
attacks, bombings, full-scale military invasion, sanctions, embargos, isolation,
assassinations ... Cuba had carried out The Unforgivable Revolution, a
very serious threat of setting a "good example" in Latin America.
The saddest part of this is that the world
will never know what kind of society Cuba could have produced if left alone,
if not constantly under the gun and the threat of invasion, if allowed
to relax its control at home. The idealism, the vision, the talent, the
internationalism were all there. But we'll never know. And that of course
was the idea.
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Indonesia 1965: A complex series of
events, involving a supposed coup attempt, a counter-coup, and perhaps
a counter-counter-coup, with American fingerprints apparent at various
points, resulted in the ouster from power of Sukarno and his replacement
by a military coup led by General Suharto. The massacre that began immediately
-- of communists, communists sympathizers, suspected communists, suspected
communist sympathizers, and none of the above -- was called by the New
York Times "one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history."
The estimates of the number killed in the course of a few years begin at
half a million and go above a million.
-
It was later learned that the U.S. embassy
had compiled lists of "communist" operatives, >from top echelons down to
village cadres, as many as 5,000 names, and turned them over to the army,
which then hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would
then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. "It
really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people,
and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands," said one U.S. diplomat.
"But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at
a decisive moment."
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Chile, 1964-73: Salvador Allende was
the worst possible scenario for a Washington imperialist. He could imagine
only one thing worse than a Marxist in power -- an elected Marxist in power,
who honored the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook
the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower was built:
the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can
take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that
power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.
After sabotaging Allende's electoral endeavor
in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the
CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned
in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three
years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally,
in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying
in the process.
Thus it was that they closed the country
to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers
broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the
bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture
centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown to the bonfires;
soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that "In Chile women
wear dresses!"; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of
the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened
up their check-books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands
more tortured or disappeared.
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Greece 1964-74: The military coup took
place in April 1967, just two days before the campaign for national elections
was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal
leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected
in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern
Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately,
a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American
military and CIA stationed in Greece. The 1967 coup was followed immediately
by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture,
and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This
was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all
being done to save the nation from a "communist takeover." Corrupting and
subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were
miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the
young would be compulsory.
It was torture, however, which most indelibly
marked the seven-year Greek nightmare. James Becket, an American attorney
sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that "a
conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand" the number
of people tortured, usually in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment
supplied by the United States.
Becket reported the following:
Hundreds of prisoners have listened to
the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his
desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American
aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance:
"You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world
is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side
the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we?
Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is
NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans."
George Papandreou was not any kind of radical.
He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent,
while only a little to the left of his father had not disguised his wish
to take Greece out of the cold war, and had questioned remaining in NATO,
or at least as a satellite of the United States.
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East Timor, 1975 to present: In December
1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the
Indonesian archipelago, and which had proclaimed its independence after
Portugal had relinquished control of it. The invasion was launched the
day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
had left Indonesia after giving Suharto permission to use American arms,
which, under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Indonesia was
Washington's most valuable tool in Southeast Asia.
Amnesty International estimated that by
1989, Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor,
had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000.
The United States consistently supported Indonesia's claim to East Timor
(unlike the UN and the EU), and downplayed the slaughter to a remarkable
degree, at the same time supplying Indonesia with all the military hardware
and training it needed to carry out the job.
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Nicaragua 1978-89: When the Sandinistas
overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1978, it was clear to Washington that
they might well be that long-dreaded beast -- "another Cuba." Under President
Carter, attempts to sabotage the revolution took diplomatic and economic
forms. Under Reagan, violence was the method of choice. For eight terribly
long years, the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Washington's proxy
army, the Contras, formed from Somoza's vicious National Guardsmen and
other supporters of the dictator. It was all-out war, aiming to destroy
the progressive social and economic programs of the government, burning
down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing
and strafing. These were Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters." There would
be no revolution in Nicaragua.
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Grenada 1979-84: What would drive the
most powerful nation in the world to invade a country of 110 thousand?
Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in a 1979 coup, and though
their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castro's, Washington
was again driven by its fear of "another Cuba," particularly when public
appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met
with great enthusiasm.
U.S. destabilization tactics against the
Bishop government began soon after the coup and continued until 1983, featuring
numerous acts of disinformation and dirty tricks. The American invasion
in October 1983 met minimal resistance, although the U.S. suffered 135
killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84
Cubans, mainly construction workers. What conceivable human purpose these
people died for has not been revealed.
At the end of 1984, a questionable election
was held which was won by a man supported by the Reagan administration.
One year later, the human rights organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs,
reported that Grenada's new U.S.-trained police force and counter-insurgency
forces had acquired a reputation for brutality, arbitrary arrest, and abuse
of authority, and were eroding civil rights.
In April 1989, the government issued a
list of more than 80 books which were prohibited from being imported. Four
months later, the prime minister suspended parliament to forestall a threatened
no-confidence vote resulting from what his critics called "an increasingly
authoritarian style."
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Libya 1981-89: Libya refused to be
a proper Middle East client state of Washington. Its leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi,
was uppity. He would have to be punished. U.S. planes shot down two Libyan
planes in what Libya regarded as its air space. The U.S. also dropped bombs
on the country, killing at least 40 people, including Qaddafi's daughter.
There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow
him, a major disinformation campaign, economic sanctions, and blaming Libya
for being behind the Pan Am 103 bombing without any good evidence.
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Panama, 1989: Washington's mad bombers
strike again. December 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City wiped
out, 15,000 people left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting
against Panamanian forces, 500-something dead was the official body count,
what the U.S. and the new U.S.-installed Panamanian government admitted
to; other sources, with no less evidence, insisted that thousands had died;
3,000-something wounded. Twenty-three Americans dead, 324 wounded.
Question from reporter: "Was it really
worth it to send people to their death for this? To get Noriega?"
George Bush: "Every human life is precious,
and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it."
Manuel Noriega had been an American ally
and informant for years until he outlived his usefulness. But getting him
was not the only motive for the attack. Bush wanted to send a clear message
to the people of Nicaragua, who had an election scheduled in two months,
that this might be their fate if they reelected the Sandinistas. Bush also
wanted to flex some military muscle to illustrate to Congress the need
for a large combat-ready force even after the very recent dissolution of
the "Soviet threat." The official explanation for the American ouster was
Noriega's drug trafficking, which Washington had known about for years
and had not been at all bothered by.
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Iraq 1990s: Relentless bombing for
more than 40 days and nights, against one of the most advanced nations
in the Middle East, devastating its ancient and modern capital city; 177
million pounds of bombs falling on the people of Iraq, the most concentrated
aerial onslaught in the history of the world; depleted uranium weapons
incinerating people, causing cancer; blasting chemical and biological weapon
storages and oil facilities; poisoning the atmosphere to a degree perhaps
never matched anywhere; burying soldiers alive, deliberately; the infrastructure
destroyed, with a terrible effect on health; sanctions continued to this
day multiplying the health problems; perhaps a million children dead by
now from all of these things, even more adults.
Iraq was the strongest military power amongst
the Arab states. This may have been their crime. Noam Chomsky has written:
It's been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the
1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region
will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and,
crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have
a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price.
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Afghanistan 1979-92: Everyone knows
of the unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan, carried out by
Islamic fundamentalists, even before the Taliban. But how many people know
that during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, Afghanistan had a government
committed to bringing the incredibly backward nation into the 20th century,
including giving women equal rights? What happened, however, is that the
United States poured billions of dollars into waging a terrible war against
this government, simply because it was supported by the Soviet Union. Prior
to this, CIA operations had knowingly increased the probability of a Soviet
intervention, which is what occurred. In the end, the United States won,
and the women, and the rest of Afghanistan, lost. More than a million dead,
three million disabled, five million refugees, in total about half the
population.
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El Salvador, 1980-92: Salvador's dissidents
tried to work within the system. But with U.S. support, the government
made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds
of protestors and strikers. In 1980, the dissidents took to the gun, and
civil war.
-
Officially, the U.S. military presence in
El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military
and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis. About
20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while
flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable
evidence surfaced of a U.S. role in the ground fighting as well. The war
came to an official end in 1992; 75,000 civilian deaths and the U.S. Treasury
depleted by six billion dollars. Meaningful social change has been largely
thwarted. A handful of the wealthy still own the country, the poor remain
as ever, and dissidents still have to fear right-wing death squads.
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Haiti, 1987-94: The U.S. supported
the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years, then opposed the reformist
priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Meanwhile, the CIA was working intimately
with death squads, torturers and drug traffickers. With this as background,
the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having
to pretend -- because of all their rhetoric about "democracy" -- that they
supported Aristide's return to power in Haiti after he had been ousted
in a 1991 military coup. After delaying his return for more than two years,
Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only
after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor
at the expense of the rich, and that he would stick closely to free-market
economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant
of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving literally starvation
wages.
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Yugoslavia, 1999: The United States
is bombing the country back to a pre-industrial era. It would like the
world to believe that its intervention is motivated only by "humanitarian"
impulses. Perhaps the above history of U.S. interventions, can help one
decide how much weight to place on this claim." JC
