By Steve Bolton
The Obama Administration’s Orwellian response to the
recent coup in Egypt is not some inscrutable sphinx, nor an enigmatic riddle awaiting
decipherment by an expert in hieroglyphics. It is simply the latest sordid
example of how our foreign policy establishment routinely betrays its charge to
uphold America’s democratic values abroad, as part of a larger and
long-established pattern of their belittlement of liberty and civil rights.
Like Big Brother, the dictator in Orwell’s classic
dystopian novel 1984, the officials who have staffed the agencies responsible
for our foreign affairs have been prone to Doublespeak for most of our nation’s
history. The Obama Administration may feign better compliance with
international law, democratic ideals and human rights than those of recent
presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W.
Bush, but in practice, its behavior is little different. The latest
illustration of this is Obama’s decision not to declare the overthrow of
Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, in July to be
exactly what everyone knows it to be: a coup. This is simply a transparent
attempt to circumvent Section 7008 of the U.S. Foreign Operations
Appropriations Act, which requires the executive branch to end aid to nations
whose governments have been overthrown in military coups. The language in
Section 7008 of the U.S. Foreign Operations Appropriations Act is quite clear:
“Sec. 7008. None of the funds
appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to titles III through VI of
this Act shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to
the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed
by military coup d’état or decree or, after the date of enactment of this Act,
a coup d’état or decree in which the military plays a decisive role: Provided,
That assistance may be resumed to such government if the President determines
and certifies to the Committees on Appropriations that subsequent to the
termination of assistance a democratically elected government has taken office:
Provided further, That the provisions of this section shall not apply to
assistance to promote democratic elections or public participation in
democratic processes: Provided further, That funds made available pursuant to
the previous provisos shall be subject to the regular notification procedures
of the Committees on Appropriations.”[i]
The bottom line is fairly clear. Even Morsi’s
bitterest political enemies in Egypt don’t challenge the fact that he was
fairly elected, in the first truly democratic polls in that nation’s
authoritarian history. Nobody is challenging the plain fact that it was Egypt’s
right-wing military that deposed both Morsi and fellow Muslim Brotherhood
members who held other high offices at the time, not to mention the
constitution Egyptians voted into law at the end of 2012. The lawful president
has been held incommunicado by the military since then, while Hosni Mubarak,
the strongman bankrolled by the U.S. from 1981 until his ouster in a popular
revolution in 2011, was set free at the end of August. Worst of all, the
military government has massacred more at least 500 Muslim Brotherhood
supporters guilty of nothing more than peacefully protesting the coup, not of
exercising their right and duty to oppose the putsch with force. Morsi often behaved in an authoritarian manner
during his year in office, but neither he nor the Muslim Brotherhood engaged in
mass murder of their political opponents. Fear that the Brotherhood would
succeed in establishing an authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist government in
the long run was what motivated the Obama Administration to wink at the coup,
instead of complying with the law by punishing the new Egyptian regime with a
cutoff of all military and economic aid. Their assessment of the risk may
indeed be correct, for in the long run, a theocratic state is exactly what
Egypt was heading towards. The solution proposed to meet that risk is terribly
flawed, however, because Egypt is still on the same road towards a
fundamentalist future. In fact, the entire Middle East has been gradually
heading in that direction ever since the first Islamic fundamentalists appeared
on the political scene in Iran and rural Afghanistan in the mid-1970s. As I
have said often before, political Islam has made great strides in every Muslim
country since then, to the point where it is now either the governing ideology
or the second-ranking political force in each one; like the rest of the region,
Egypt is slowly being swept along in a torrent of political changes that stem
from broader, long-term movements in the global balance of power between
nations and the civilizations they belong to. I also want to see that torrent
stopped, for the prospect of a resurgent Middle East dominated by followers of
Mohammed is a recipe for an epic disaster. Yet that can’t be accomplished by
betraying our democratic ideals and support of civil rights by diluting them
with Doublespeak.
Disloyalty to Democracy
This
particular incident is merely the latest example in a long-standing pattern of
treachery by our elected officials towards these values, dating back to the 19th
Century. Most Americans have a vague sense that at a few points our past, some
of the agencies responsible for our international relations have done unsavory
things, particularly to Native Americans and blacks in the 19th Century. There
is some truth to this, but most Americans would be surprised to learn how
entrenched such sordid behavior continues to be within our foreign policy
establishment. The State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
National Security Agency (NSA), our armed forces and other extensions of our
government have routinely flouted democratic principles for much of the
nation’s history; backing of dictators, the overthrow of democratic
governments, aid to death squads, brutal military interventions and election
tampering have always been the norm, not the exception. Most of the few rare
exceptions have come at times when the general population’s attention has been
focused squarely on foreign policy issues during emergencies, such as the World
Wars and 9/11, when America’s security really was threatened by foreign
governments and movements bent on domination or genocide. Whenever the public
thinks of foreign policy, their attention is focused on these watershed
moments, when its influence over Washington’s behavior is at its peak; in the
interim periods, however, our foreign policy establishment’s decisions have
always been dominated by the interests of Corporate America. The U.S. has
diplomatic relations with virtually all of the 196 sovereign governments on the
planet today, only a handful of which can be found on a map by ordinary
Americans. The ones who are familiar with them are generally those with
economic interests in terms of trade, ownership of foreign investments and the
like. In other words, those motivated by the Almighty Dollar have preeminent
influence over our foreign policy on a day-to-day basis, alongside the
occasional ethnic group with sufficient cohesion to exert pressure on Congress
and the State Department, such as the Jewish lobby on behalf of Israel. One of
the most disturbing examples of Orwellian Doublethink today is the widespread
notion among the public that the U.S. has always bravely stood for ideals like
human rights and democracy, when in fact this is just a bald-faced lie of the
type that politicians are prone to utter. Our leaders and the special interests
they are beholden to may indeed support such causes, but only when they
dovetail with their own selfish interests, particularly their own pocketbooks.
Money is America’s true religion and its leading apostles are among the upper
class, which has great incentive to exercise its undue influence over foreign
affairs for evil ends. When ideals like democracy and human rights conflict
with that idol, or with perceived threats to our strategic position in the
global balance of power, they have historically been jettisoned. Most of the
talk about upholding such ideals is just for public consumption.
When we’re dealing with politicians and other men in
positions of power, we must exercise common sense and watch what they do, not
what they say. And for generations, what they have done would horrify the
public, if their actions became public knowledge. All of the scandals I’m about
to mention are in the public domain; there’s really no reason to get into
speculation about such matters as the assassinations of 20th Century reformers
like John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr., let alone
more tin foil hat stuff of the type that conspiracy buffs are fond of. All of
this is well-documented and beyond dispute, but the present apathetic
generation simply doesn’t care, for the reasons I addressed a month ago in Wannabe Whistleblowing: The Deeper Disgraces
Underlying the NSA Spying Scandal. We
should not be surprised that our government cares so little about democracy,
given that the current generation exhibits so little regard for it. Our nation
has always had difficulty in maintaining adherence to its own ideals
domestically, as hypocrisies like slavery, Jim Crow laws, the wars to grab
Native American land and the violent suppression of labor movements in the
early 20th Century attest. To this list we can add the repression of civil
rights movements in the South and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the middle
of the last century, which included routine acts of repression by institutions
like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and CIA against law-abiding
citizens. One of the most blatant and unpatriotic betrayals of our ideals came
in 1932, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur used the armed forces to drive 43,000
veterans protesting for bonus payments out of the capital, by opening fire on
his own people. For this act of cowardice, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Dwight
Eisenhower commended MacArthur, one of the greatest traitors to American values
in our history. Despite such incessant bumps on the road to liberty, the nation
at least made sacrifices on occasion to right offenses against democracy and
civil rights made in previous generations, particularly during the Watergate
era, which really demonstrated the resiliency of our institutions. Since then,
our domestic commitment to liberty has eroded so badly that the same public
which once brought down a president to stop a handful of wiretaps now blithely
ignores what amounts to a general warrant, issued to the NSA to spy on
everyone, everywhere, at any time, for the flimsiest of reasons, without
supervision. The same generation also tolerates the routine rewriting of the
Constitution by the Supreme Court, which has forgotten that “interpretation”
means to ferret out the meaning assigned to words by those empowered to utter
them, i.e. the framers and amenders of the Constitution. As a result, both
ordinary Americans and their rulers now turn a blind eye to abortion, which has
claimed 48 million American lives and more than one billion infants worldwide
since 1973. This is the greatest violation of civil rights in human history,
which dwarfs the death tolls from slavery and the 19th Century wars with Native
Americans combined. Once you can justify snuffing out the lives of innocent
babies in such large number, you can justify anything, including the murder of
foreign adults in countries with names most Americans can’t pronounce. Any
generation willing to look the other way at the slaughter of its own children
isn’t going to have the moral courage to stand up to abuses by its foreign
policymakers; if we cannot even resist the temptation to violate civil rights
and democratic principles in such blatant ways at home, we will never be able
to prevent powerful men from violating them in other ways abroad.
In a typically Orwellian fashion, the public can now
simply dismiss the whole problem with a wave of a hand, as they have the NSA
wiretap scandal and global genocide of abortion. The problem is that these
incidents are documented beyond the point of reasonable doubt, which can be
verified by anyone who cares enough about their country to educate themselves
about the many repugnant scandals and misuses of authority by its public officials.
Typically, discussions of American misbehavior in international relations begins
with a desultory list of some of our major failures, like the assassination of
our South Vietnamese puppet Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, or the most well-known coups
against democratic governments that took place throughout the 20th Century. It
is easier to retain, however, when presented in a specific order that
illustrates how various forms of intervention act as part of a cohesive system.
The breadth and flexibility of that system in turn illustrates how difficult it
is for any nation that disagrees with the values of America’s upper class, as
well as the elites of its fellow Western nations, to gain authentic
self-government. By the early 20th Century it was already clear to the leaders
of other Western nations that the U.S. would soon assume a preeminent position
in the system of colonial control that the Europeans had gradually established
over the Third World since the 15th Century. After World War II, the
U.S. was able to extend the neocolonial system of control it pioneered in the
Western Hemisphere to much of the rest of the planet, by exercising power in
several specific ways to control other states without formally taking away
their formal independence. The Retreat of the West is a much more detailed account of how this
multi-tiered system of neocolonial control was progressively established over
the course of several centuries, thanks largely to long-term shifts in the
global balance of power between civilizations in ten forms of national power.
As I demonstrate meticulously in that massive tome, America and the rest of the
West are now gradually losing influence over the Third World thanks to the
reversal of numerous trends in global politics that made our dominance possible
for centuries. The West’s influence is waning, but that does not mean that it
cannot still exercise power over the Third World, whether for good or evil. The
multi-tiered system of neocolonial control established by America and its
Western allies is wobbling and eroding more with each passing decade, but
remains formidable, and therefore open to equally formidable abuses. It would
also be a mistake to believe that the temptation to abuse our power evaporated
with the end of the Cold War, for the same pattern of criminal activity held
before the Soviet Union was ever established and survives today, two decades
after the fall of Communism. The real motivations for our misbehavior have
always been the Seven Deadly Sins, which are permanent temptations of mankind –
particularly avarice, which is the leading idol of our commercial civilization.
The Mechanisms of Neocolonialism
As long as the worship of wealth remains the
overwhelming concern of America and its allies, the more temptation we will
have to misuse the neocolonial system we’ve inherited for evil purposes,
particularly material ones. That singular motivation may be a clue as to why
the U.S. and its allies put distinctive emphasis on micromanaging the economies
of their satellites, through international institutions like the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF). Third World nations that fall into the trap
of borrowing from such organizations run a real risk of surrendering their
economic sovereignty, given that they demand a whole series of economic
“reforms” in return for their loans: 1) privatization of public enterprises; 2)
reduction of government subsidies, particularly for food and social programs;
3) reduction of deficit spending; 4) ending cost of living allowances; 5)
decontrolling prices; 6) demanding floating exchange rates; 7) currency devaluation;
8) ending restrictions on profit remittances; 9) raising interest rates; 10)
raising taxes (but not on the wealthy or foreign corporations); 11) restricting
credit; 12) restricting wage growth and 13) reducing government spending,
especially on education and health care.[ii] In practice, what this does is allows Corporate America to rape these countries
of their natural resources, in conjunction with local oligarchies. Invariably,
such “structural adjustment programs” lead to greater poverty – which is not
surprising, since they are capitalist economic policies that represent the
exact opposite of the Catholic economic theory of distributism. As a result,
recipient nations go bankrupt repeatedly and end up addicted to short-term
loans at the expense of long-term economic health, which nonetheless works out
quite well for foreign investors. The “economic aid” provided by the U.S. is
likewise geared to subsidize Corporate America at taxpayer expense, while
simultaneously carrying conditions that further erode the sovereignty of
recipient nations. This is precisely why nations like Iran and Cuba that have
consistently refused such aid ended up retaining independence of action,
whereas nations like Bolivia that once espoused revolutionary ideals were
reduced to virtual servitude by the end of the 20th Century. Egypt is the
poster boy for how entanglement in these types of “tied aid” is a recipe for
disaster. Notwithstanding decades of lending by institutions like the IMF and
more than $1 billion in annual aid from the U.S. alone, Egypt is saddled with a
$38 billion external debt, a basket case of an economy and an enormous gulf
between the rich and poor, all brought on precisely because Egyptian
policymakers caved in to the advice of incompetent Western economists. Unless
it can reverse most of the structural changes forced on it for generations and
regain economic independence, Egypt will be perpetually under the economic
supervision of the West. That not only enables material exploitation but makes
political reengineering a simple matter. On many occasions over the last
century, the West has been able to make recalcitrant states knuckle under by
using the very poverty and instability brought on by their own policies in
order to discredit authentic reformers, by shifting the blame onto the only
factions with the willingness to fix them. The complaint most often directed
against Morsi by the demonstrators who asked for military intervention in July
was that the nation’s economy was in a shambles, which remains true. Just a
couple of years ago the same demonstrators were rightly placing the blame on
Mubarak and his cronies in the military. This is an abject lesson in how easily
such undue economic influence can be translated into self-perpetuating
political power, particularly when the public is terribly gullible and easily
manipulated - as large numbers of Egypt’s people apparently are, in a
disturbing parallel to the constant rewriting of recent history that Big
Brother gets away with in Orwell’s novel.
When a politically malleable nation has lost its
economic independence to this degree, it is child’s play for the U.S. and its
Western allies to bring about “regime change” through such means as embargos,
manipulation of the prices of export products, ending tied aid programs and
cutting off loans to countries stuck in this cycle of dependency. Yet regime
change is rarely necessary in large part because Third World peoples think less
with each passing decade about changing them in ways that would displease the
West. Their education systems are tied to ours through direct subsidies, but a
more important problem is that their schoolteachers, academics and the rest of their
intelligentsia are either educated directly in Western universities, or in
schools that merely ape what those universities teach. “Cultural imperialism”
also snuffs out resistance before it can even begin in the minds of the people
of these client states, who often watch the same movies, listen to the same
music, dress like Americans and buy the same products that the people of the
West do, rather than products of their own native folk traditions. As a result,
it doesn’t even occur to the people of oppressed Third World states to question
Western ideas like capitalism or extreme secularism - although it certainly
occurs more often than in the West, which is thoroughly soaked in such
propaganda day and night, from cradle to grave. If they dare to join
potentially revolutionary institutions like labor unions, they are immediately
coopted by organizations like the American Institute for Free Labor Development
(AIFLD), which in the end guarantees that their labor is neither free nor leads
to development. As a result of these various forms of ideological tampering (some
of which aren’t explicitly intentional) it doesn’t often occur to foreigners to
question the ways of the U.S. or its allies. Yet if they do, several lines of
defense remain, including the aforementioned levers of economic pressure. This
is often supplemented with blatant election tampering, which is the least
dramatic but most common exercise of neocolonial control today. By the 1980s,
the largest portion of the CIA’s budget was devoted to election tampering,
through such means as surreptitiously subsidizing particular candidates,
government officials, newspapers and other such figures. Early in the Cold War,
the U.S. even dared to manipulate the elections of close Western allies like
France and Italy in this way, and was apparently still in the habit of doing so
as late as 1975, when the CIA tried to reengineer Australia’s political system
to its liking The National Endowment for Democracy was established in 1983 with
the express purpose of destroying liberty, by engineering foreign elections to
suit America’s perceived interests; although it is ostensibly a non-profit
organization, almost all of its funding comes from the U.S. government,
including the USAID, which disburses most of the tied aid discussed earlier.
The Iron Fist Behind Inside the Velvet
Glove
It is quite difficult for political parties which
differ from Western ideologies to surmount these formidable obstacles, but when
they do, it is still possible for the U.S. and the rest of the West to block
them through the use of brute force. The first tier of this system consists of
military officers in the dependent country itself, who are coopted by
substantial military aid and years of Western training. Their function is
usually not external defense but internal repression, particularly of peasant
movements, labor unions, human rights activists and democratic reformers, who
seek to change the political and economic status quo in ways which would
undermine selfish Western interests. Sometimes this repression takes the form
of sudden massacres of demonstrators, as it did during the Muslim Brotherhood’s
recent sit-ins. Note how little horror American officials have expressed about
these acts of mass murder, in comparison to those of Tiananmen Square in 1989,
which resulted in an international outcry precisely because they occurred in a
rival nation, China. That is also why we hear so little condemnation of the Tlatelolco
Massacre, in which the Mexican government killed several hundred student
protestors to remove them from the public eye before hosting the 1968 Summer
Olympics. Death squads represent the most virulent form of military repression,
such as those which murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina and other Latin American countries in the
1980s As I deal with in thorough detail
in the eighth chapter of The Retreat of the West, there is overwhelming evidence that these death
squads were funded by agencies like the CIA with the full knowledge of many top
American officials, all of whom should be brought up on war crimes charges. Some
of the worst human rights offenders of the last few decades were trained at the
U.S. Army School of the Americas, which was really little more than a college
for state terrorism.
When all of these lines of defense fail, the armed
forces of a coopted nation can stage a coup to oust any civilian government
whose policies are inimical to those of local oligarchies or the interests of
the West. Third World armies are quite capable of staging coups on their own,
but we have ample and sometimes overwhelming evidence that the U.S. and its
allies played leading roles in instigating many of the coups of the last century
or so. Some of the most well-publicized examples included the overthrow of the
democratically elected presidents of Iran, Guatemala, Brazil and Chile in 1953,
1954, 1964 and 1973 respectively. In each case, the goal was to rid the U.S. of
mildly reformist governments who threatened corporate investments, not our
strategic interests; there is incontrovertible evidence, for example, that the
Kennecott and Anaconda copper companies prevailed on the Nixon Administration
to overthrow Salvador Allende for nationalizing their investments. It is also
certain that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA
director Allen Dulles, were intimately tied to the United Fruit Company, which
badgered them for intervention to protect their plantations from
nationalization. Thirty thousand civilians died in the wake of the Chilean coup
and hundreds of thousands were killed by the military governments who ruled
Guatemala after 1954, which were so brutal that they appalled even the men who
created them. The highest death toll was in the 1965 coup in Indonesia, after
which a minimum of half a million people were butchered by the military
government we installed. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, for the
U.S. instigated many other coups besides this. In 1970, the CIA removed the
moderate government of Prince Sihanouk merely because of its neutrality in the
Vietnam War, thereby accidentally opening the door to the Khmer Rouge
guerrillas, who subsequently exterminated at least one-third of Cambodia’s population.
The CIA was complicit in overthrowing the government of its NATO ally, Greece,
at least twice, in 1965 and 1967. In 1961, the CIA deliberately toppled the
government of Ecuador, then did so again in 1967 on accident, by applying more
subtle political and economic pressure than the agency intended. The mildly
reformist government that took power in Bolivia in 1952 was first thoroughly
coopted, then terminated in coups in 1964 and 1971 – which were only possible
because the Bolivian armed forces had been thoroughly rebuilt from the ground
up with U.S. aid. In 1965, independence leader Patrice Lumumba was executed
after a CIA-engineered coup. Other instances include the 1949 coup in Syria,
the 1960-1963 intervention in Iraq and the 1969 and 1973 golpes in Uruguay. The U.S. was already in the habit of
overthrowing reformist governments long before the CIA was established in 1947,
as evinced by Washington’s attempt to stop the Mexican Revolution by replacing
Francisco Madero with Gen. Victoriano Huerta in 1913. One of the earliest
instances came in 1893, when American settlers deposed the queen of Hawaii,
paving the way for its annexation. These are merely the putsches in which the
U.S. overthrew democratic or reformist governments; when it temporarily proved to
be in our interest, Washington had no qualms about enabling the assassinations
of former puppets like Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 and Vietnam’s
Diem in 1963. On other occasions, the U.S. aided in the overthrow of
authoritarian rulers who were also opposed to our interests, as the CIA
apparently did in 1966 by aiding in the unseating of Ghana’s independence
leader, Kwame Nkrumah. The U.S. has also reengineered the politics of many
other states with a combination of military aid, economic pressure, occasional
low-level direct military intervention and possible involvement in multiple
coups, including Thailand, Laos, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. This incomplete
list of course does not include all of the instances in which the possibility
or overt threat of coups has prevented reformists from taking power or using it
to better the lives of their people; for example, one of the reasons it took
Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva four tries to assume the presidency of Brazil is
that the former military rulers hinted they might thwart his election with a golpe.
Without aid or some other form of influence over
foreign military officers, such threats of destabilization would ring hollow.
That is precisely why most of our foreign “aid” is military in nature, not
developmental; even the food aid is sometimes tainted with political or
military motivations though, as it was during the Guatemalan Civil War, when
peasants who favored leftist guerrillas were enticed with PL480 food aid to
return from the jungle and enter specially guarded camps, complete with
supervised polling places for sham elections. When governments are wise enough
to refuse aid that is soiled with such conditions and are not punished for the
act of refusal –as Castro was before he threw in his lot with the Communist
Bloc – that presents quite a problem for the U.S. and its allies, since it
removes one of their last remaining means of internal leverage. One of the last
remaining options when foreign armies cannot be coopted, or are thoroughly
dissolved in the course of revolutions, is to construct false “freedom fighter”
movements to harass the unmanageable regime. This technique was pioneered in
1954 when a force of exiles and other malcontents was forged by the CIA to
harass Guatemala’s government, which lost its nerve and ceded power to the
military after misjudging the size of the force. The same tactic was tried in
the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The tactic was used primarily by the
Reagan Administration against a handful of Third World regimes that were
receiving foreign aid from the Soviets, but largely failed. The primary reason
for such fiascos is that such movements were contrived, without anywhere near
as much popular support as the governments they fought against, and staffed in
large part by criminals and members of ousted right-wing regimes with bad human
rights records. Furthermore, many of these terrorist armies were trained at
places like the U.S. Army School of the Americas, where many death squad
members and military dictators received instruction. It is not surprising then
that movements like UNITA, RENAMO and the Contras who terrorized Angola,
Mozambique and Nicaragua respectively in the 1980s succeeded at nothing except
killing, raping and destroying the livelihood of peasants in scorched earth
fashion. If political violence meant to cow civilians into submission is an
acceptable definition of “terrorism,” then there is no doubt that the U.S.
openly funded terrorist organizations of this sort quite openly during the
1970s and 1980s. In the Reagan years, the CIA even went as far as to support
car bombers who wantonly killed civilians in Beirut, just like their
Palestinian and Islamic fundamentalist enemies.
When war through proxies is either impossible or an
unattractive option, the last line of defense in the flexible Western system of
neocolonialism is direct military intervention. America had never been shy
about intervention, but lacked the power projection capabilities and sufficient
economic or strategic motivation to intervene far from its backyard, at least
until the Spanish-American War of 1898. At that point the U.S. not only assumed
control of the Philippines, a distant East Asian colony, but turned Cuba into
America’s chief punching bag, up until the time Fidel Castro seized power in
1959. From 1917-1922 it was occupied again, but such overt interventions
conceal the real story behind Cuban-American relations: there is no question that
U.S. officials were motivated by economic concerns to go to war against Spain,
primarily to thwart the Cuban rebels then fighting for independence from
attaining power. Corrupt motivations were thus married to betrayal of our
ideals as early as this watershed moment in American foreign policy history. It
only went downhill from there, as American servicemen have been routinely put
in harm’s way for crooked causes in Third World hot spots ever since then. The U.S. has routinely invaded Haiti numerous
times over the last century, most notably in the 1915-1934 occupation and most
recently in the 2004, when the Bush Administration reverted to type and
intervened to bolster a right-wing faction. In between, Washington propped up
the Duvalier dictatorships of the mid-20th Century, who routinely tortured their
subjects. Military force was used against Honduras seven times between 1903 and
1925. There were four interventions between 1894 and 1899 in Nicaragua, which
was also occupied in 1912, then again from 1926-1933. During that period, U.S.
Marines chased Nicaragua’s national hero, Augusto Sandino, who was assassinated
after a guarantee of safe conduct by Anastasio Somoza García, the first of
three dictators from the Somoza family propped up by U.S. arms and aid. Oil was
the sole reason for the U.S. occupation of Veracruz from 1914-1917 in the midst
of the Mexican Revolution. In 1901 Teddy Roosevelt detached Panama from
Colombia by waving his “Big Stick,” which was followed by another intervention
in Panama in 1925. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched 22,000 Marines
to prevent the duly elected president, Juan Bosch, from regaining his office
after being ousted by American-backed military officials. This was just the
latest in a long series of interventions there, including the one in 1914 and
the 1916-1924 occupation. Poor students of history who want a neat, flattering
and easily categorized explanation for all of these interventions will blame it
all on anti-Communist fervor, which can’t be true, given that this pattern
began long before the Cold War and has outlasted it by decades. Or they may
blame it on the Monroe Doctrine, when in truth, the exact same system was
extended far beyond the Western Hemisphere once the U.S. attained sufficient
power to take over the old colonial empires of other European states. After the
Spanish-American War, the U.S. fought two bloody wars to prevent the
independence of the Philippines, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives,
most of them civilians killed in brutal counterinsurgency programs. The U.S.
also intervened China’s Boxer Rebellion around the same time and participated
in a little-known multinational effort to stop the Bolshevik Revolution, in
which American soldiers trod on occupied Russian territory from 1918-1920. By
the 1950s the U.S. was already throwing its muscle around the Middle East, by
intervening in Lebanon in 1958 to prevent it from joining a potentially
formidable union of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. When it suited our interests, we
intervened in the 1956 Suez Crisis on Egypt’s side, against our British and
French allies. Of course, we crossed sabers with both Britain and France quite
directly in previous wars. In fact, it is quite difficult to find a nation on
the face of the earth where our soldiers have yet to tread or our spy agencies
have not yet overthrown at one time or another.
Selfishness as the Common Denominator in
American Foreign Policy History
That would not be a bad thing at all, if our
intentions and actions were always in line with our ideals. They haven’t always
been at odds, but when they are, it is the ideals which always take a backseat.
Sometimes American officials decide to make sacrifices to stop the greater of
two evils, but once again, the common denominator is that our strategic
position and selfish economic interests are at stake, not our ideals. As I deal
with more fully in The
Unrealistic School of Thought in Foreign Affairs, terms like Realpolitik and Idealpolitik are only bandied about in fields like political science
and foreign policy history by incompetent or biased professors who desperately
want to appear learned and justify their own nationalistic biases; such inept
intellectuals throw away all common sense by falling for the idealistic
rhetoric of policymakers, which is intended only for public consumption. Our
foreign policy establishment could
sacrifice our perceived strategic and economic interests in favor of the ideals
they pay lip service to, but rarely do. One of the few exceptions may have been
the 1992-1995 intervention to prevent much of Somalia from starving death after
the complete disintegration of the central government. To date, no evidence has
emerged that we acted out of selfish interests then – which is precisely why
the Republican Party lambasted the Clinton Administration for sacrificing the
lives of American servicemen and expending public money in favor of a noble
cause. Under Clinton the U.S. also invaded Haiti once again, but this time to
prevent the overthrow of duly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by the
right-wing military factions the U.S. once funded. These are the only
noteworthy examples in the history of American foreign policy in which we may
have intervened for pure motives, against our selfish strategic and economic
interests. In many other cases, we sided with the right causes for all of the
wrong reasons. For example, in 1986 the Reagan Administration prodded Filipino
dictator Ferdinand Marcos to step down in the face of a widespread popular
revolt, but this was mainly motivated by a correct assessment that a broad
crackdown would play into the hands of Communist guerrillas. As a result, the
rebels were marginalized and later defeated, in a classic example of how
American ideals actually accentuate our security and economic well-being in the
long run. The Reagan Administration also conducted surgical strikes against
Libya’s mad dictator Muammar Khadafy in 1981 and 1986, plus intervened to
prevent him extending his influence over neighboring Chad in 1983. In 2011, we
saw a golden opportunity to rid ourselves of Khadafy once and for all, by
shielding a popular revolt with air cover. George H.W. Bush ordered the
invasion of Panama in 1989 to expel Gen. Manuel Noriega, a creation of the CIA who
became a liability once he became involved with drug traffickers. In the two
Persian Gulf Wars against Iraq, we at least found ourselves fighting against
the right side, although mainly for selfish interests that revolved around oil.
A case can be made that the 1999 intervention to prevent Serb radicals from
committing genocide in Kosovo was an act of humanitarianism, but many American officials
and leading opinion makers got on board because they rightly assessed that
allowing the genocide to proceed would have radicalized much of the Muslim world.
Such strategic and economic issues were not a factor in the genocide which
claimed the lives of at least half a million Rwandans in 1994. That is
precisely why we did not intervene, although it would have required only a
minimal expenditure of American lives and treasure to stop it.
In the last decade and a half, the U.S. has also
become embroiled in a simmering war against Islamic fundamentalists sympathetic
to Al-Qaeda, leading to incessant interventions in Afghanistan, Yemen, rural
Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Iraq and other parts of Africa and the Near East.
The battles in this emerging regional war have been fought through a wide range
of means, from drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and various other covert
military operations to all-out invasion in the case of Afghanistan. In contrast
to our past mistakes in Latin America, these interventions really are
absolutely necessary to the security of the U.S., because the forces we’re
fighting are hell-bent on global genocide. The context has changed drastically,
but America’s conduct remains the same: the overriding determinants of our
foreign policy are our strategic position and the economic interests of our
upper class. As the Obama Administration’s misbehavior in the Egyptian crisis
illustrates, our democratic ideals are still quickly discarded whenever they
are deemed to conflict with these superseding motivations. This consistent
pattern of behavior is not confined to a specific region or time period, as
would be claimed by those who downplay such incidents as overly exuberant
pursuit of the Monroe Doctrine or Cold War anti-Communism. What has changed,
however is that the U.S. no longer has the wherewithal to control this far-flung
neocolonial system as easily as it once did. The power wielded by the whole
civilization that America belongs to is in clear decline for multiple reasons,
all of which are bringing about the long-term trend I call the Retreat of the
West. That not only makes it more difficult for us to intervene successfully in
the Third World, but also means that power over this neocolonial system is
gradually being ceded to the leading non-Western powers, like China, India,
Iran, Saudi Arabia and many others. This is why the U.S. has been unable to
stop the wave of democratic elections of leftist candidates across Latin
America in the last two decades, despite possible attempts at interference in
incidents like the failed 2002 coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. It is also
why the Middle East is reverting to the bastion of Islamic fundamentalist it
once was, now that the tide of Western influence that began to rise in the 15th
Century peaked in the early 20th Century, and is now receding. This presents a
much more pressing problem than squashing peasant revolts, unionizers and
popular movements that would threaten our corporate profits.
Despite the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is a far
more dangerous rival than Marxism ever was, it is still not in our long-term
strategic interests to betray our ideals. In fact, they are the only practical
weapon we have available to win this war in the long run. As I have restated ad nauseum in this blog, Western
policymakers have deliberately blinded themselves to the only workable
solutions to the problem of Islam by forbidding any debate out what it actually
consists of. Their behavior is almost identical to that of American and
European officials in the ‘30s, who said that Hitler wasn’t really such a bad
chap after all. Just as that generation of leaders succumbed to this stupid view
because they were too lazy to read Mein
Kampf, so too is the present generation willfully blind to the unspeakable
evils promoted on every other page of the Koran. They will say it’s all a
matter of “interpretation,” but that term entails discovering the meaning
assigned to a document by the person empowered to assign it, not substituting
any definition academia prefers. The only person capable of saying what the
Koran really meant was Mohammed, whose life we know in great detail; he was a
mass murderer who committed at least one massacre of Jews, a womanizer and a
pedophile who married his own nine-year-old cousin. He and his successors
succeeded in implanting Islam in the Middle East and beyond solely through the
use of brute force, in many well-known battles with specific dates, all of
which has been established without question. In the long run, the first
prerequisite for defeating political Islam to be honest about what it really
is, how it has always spread and the immoral code set in stone by the Koran. Islamic
terrorism is not some new or heterodox phenomenon, but simply a return to what
Islam always was before the tide of Western cultural imperialism watered it
down; men like Osama Bin Laden are not betraying Mohammed, but accurately
reading the Koran and acting on his bloody legacy, in accordance with the
wishes of a butcher cut out of the same mold as Stalin and Mao. The Retreat of
the West is gradually evening out the balance of power between the West and the
Islamic world, enabling the latter to become the security threat it was from
Mohammed’s first foreign invasions right up until the 16th and 17th Centuries,
when battles like Lepanto and heroes like John Sobieski finally broke the back
of this ancient menace. What has changed in the interim, however, is the
character of the West itself. Thanks to the parallel process of spiritual decay
known as the Falling Away, the West has now in a “post-Christian” society, as a
result of what Fr. Malachi Martin identified as the Great Apostasy foretold by
Jesus. The new religion of the West is the worship of wealth, but a
civilization based on commercial values simply can’t stand up for long to this
kind of enemy. It is like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors; a society willing to
die for otherworldly causes will always beat one that is focused on rewards in
this world and is therefore unwilling to die, or make any other substantial
sacrifices. Despite the Retreat of the West, we and our European allies still
have a considerable lead over the leading nations of the Islamic world in many
forms of national power, but that merely means that we have sufficient lead
time to lose many more games of Rock, Paper, Scissors in coming generations
before that lead finally evaporates. As a result, we neither have the power to
resist the rise of Islam nor anything substantial to offer fundamentalists to
change their minds. Islam is not in conflict with Christianity this time
around, but a civilization uniquely defined in human history by its extreme
devotion to material goods. This places ordinary Muslims in a terrible dilemma,
in which the only choices available to them are to betray their religion by
surrendering to Western decadence, which is penetrating their societies more
each day through the global mass media and cultural imperialism, or with
following the dictates of an otherworldly yet evil philosophy, merely because
it was forced on their ancestors at sword point millennia ago.
The Only Practical Antidote to Islamic
Fundamentalism
This is the dynamic powering the meteoric rise of
Islamic fundamentalism over the past generation. As I have discussed in more
detail in columns like Mali
and the Return of Mohammed and Out
of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Syria’s Bloody Transition to Islamic
Fundamentalism, political Islam has confounded academic experts for decades
by steadily advancing across the Umma,
i.e. the one billion people of the Muslim world, for four decades without
respite. They said a generation ago that it wouldn’t advance far beyond its
starting points in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the resistance of the mujahedeen
to the contemporaneous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but they were dead
wrong. Today Islamic fundamentalists of one brand or another are either the
ruling faction or the leading opposition in every country with a Muslim
majority; today, the second most popular name for newborn males in the Middle
East is Osama. In fact, fundamentalism has been so successful that we have
already reached the point where the only battle left to fight is between
competing interpretations of it. As discussed in The
Berlin Solution to the Syrian Conundrum, this is nowhere more manifest than
in the current fighting between Sunni and Shiite extremists in the Syrian Civil
War, which has at least postponed the nightmarish possibility of an alliance
between them for another generation. This is also related to a disturbing pattern
I refer to as “Islamic leapfrog,” in which each generation of fundamentalists
tries to outdo the last in radicalism. Egypt is trapped in the same trends and
dilemmas as its neighbors. The only viable political alternatives in Egypt
today are either shallow technocrats who merely perpetuate Western cultural and
financial imperialism, or Islamic fundamentalists of one stripe or another. The
extent to which the latter faction has already won that battle is best
illustrated by the fact that Egypt’s new strongman, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi,
is a devout Muslim whose wife and daughter wear the full niqab, or traditional face veils. A large majority of the
demonstrators who called for the coup also had favorable views of political
Islam. Regardless of whether or not they succeed in uprooting the Muslim
Brotherhood from the political system, the fact remains that fundamentalism is
seeping throughout Egyptian society. The handwriting is on the wall. And some
of the messages written there ought to be taken as omens of worse to come,
particularly the fact that one of the leading factions behind the coup was the
Al-Nour party, which espouses an even more radical brand of fundamentalism than
the Muslim Brotherhood. Nevertheless, it won a quarter of the votes in Egypt’s
first free parliamentary elections. It is no longer a matter of whether or not
Islam will be a leading factor in Egyptian politics for years to come, but a question
of which faction and brand will be at the helm. The global, centuries-long
trends that are powering this shift, such as the Retreat of the West and the Falling
Away, don’t appear ready to end any time soon, so a generation or now we can
expect to see Egypt even more solidly in the fundamentalist camp, with the
leading opposition likely to consist of those with an even more radical version
of Mohammed’s vision.
Given our record of ineffectual resistance to the
rise of Islam, it is tempting for our policymakers to betray our ideals in an
all-out effort to defeat such a frightening bogeyman. This is especially easy
for them, given that they’re habitually prone to employing shady tactics like
election tampering, instigating military coups, funding state terrorism and genocide
whenever it suits them. We must resist that temptation more than ever before,
however, because what we are actually fighting is a spiritual war, between one
side that is animated by an evil spirit and another that has sold its soul for
material aggrandizement. Unless we can offer our opponents something better
than Islam, we will lose that war for souls, after which defeat on the
battlefield will follow. It is imperative that we take the moral high ground by
putting ideals like liberty and truth first, otherwise we will squander our
only hope, which is conversion. If we display bias by changing the standards of
what a “coup” consists of, we’ll end up teaching our enemies a terrible lesson:
we can’t be counted on to stick to our agreements, fair and square. One of the
leading virtues of democracy is that it prevents armed conflict between
political factions, by guaranteeing them hope of winning the allegiance of the
populace at the ballot box; not everyone wins, but everyone has a chance, which
thereby defuses the incentive to take up arms. By backing the Egyptian coup, we
are teaching the Muslim Brotherhood a terrible lesson that they have no hope of
ever getting their policies enacted, regardless of how many polls they might
win in the future. Calls by the Western politicians for a return to normalcy
and “democratic processes” are hollow, for the bottom line is that those processes
will always be tainted by the specter of military interference. It matters
quite little whether or not countries like Egypt are ruled by military officers
or civilian politicians, as long as the former can determine who the latter are
at will. If they are allowed to be the final arbiters, then civilian
institutions and multiparty elections are merely a sham; if they can toss out
any electoral results they don’t like, then more elections aren’t going to lead
to liberty. The practical lesson this experience teaches Islamic
fundamentalists is that they can’t count on the armies coopted by Western aid
to abide by the decisions of the electorate, which leaves them with one
alternative: defeating those armed forces in battle and replacing them with their
own. This is precisely why Third World states like Cuba and Iran which have
thoroughly substituted new institutions have survived and retain some capacity
for independent action today. In the first case, this occurred suddenly when
Castro’s guerrillas took power in 1959, while in the latter, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, succeeded in deftly replacing the armed forces from the top down with
officers loyal to the theocracy. In a similar way, Recep Tayyip Erdogan was
only able to retain the presidency of Turkey by skillfully removing officers
who would have staged a coup to stop his mild brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
In contrast, most of the aforementioned coups instigated by the U.S. in the
past have been undertaken by military officers that civilian reformists failed
to remove in time. Unless such institutions are fully reformed,
counterrevolution becomes practically inevitable. A more recent and relevant
example for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is what happened in 1992, when Algerian fundamentalists
won an overwhelming victory at the polls, fair and square, and were cheated out
of it by a Western-backed military coup. As much as I dislike their cause, they
had every right to take up arms to prevent the military from usurping power,
given that this would have constituted defensive violence by the legitimate rulers.
The fundamentalists would have won the civil war that followed, if exceptionally
violent factions like the GIA (Armed Islamic Group) had not emerged and alienated
the populace with their wanton cruelty and mass murders. The Muslim Brotherhood
would likewise be within its rights to defend its rights with force, but this
is the outcome least favorable to the West, since it would likely lead to even
more rapid and lasting militarization and radicalization of the Umma. It is better for us to allow a
fundamentalist victory, even to the point of jeopardizing our short-term
strategic position, than to risk our long-term position in the Middle East by forcing
both democrats and moderate fundamentalists to take up the gun.
The Egyptian coup leaders are giving them no choice,
for unless they are forcibly removed from the power they’ve usurped and
punished severely for daring to overthrow democratic institutions, they and
like-minded officers in other Third World hot spots will continue to flout the
law and the will of the people whenever they choose. Although it has been the
long-standing habit of the our leaders to instigate and applaud such offenses
against liberty, there is no reason why our government has to betray its
principles; it is staffed by human beings, all of whom could exercise their free
will to choose otherwise. America could prove that it really does value
democracy and human rights, by putting its perceived strategic and economic
interests aside for a moment to see that the coup leaders face stiff penalties
for their crimes. Washington ought to push for international arrest warrants
for the officers and leading politicians involved in the coup, particularly
those complicit in the horrific massacres which followed. Make no mistake about
it: the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded groups are indeed our enemies. Yet
if we do not treat our enemies fairly, then we not only forfeit any chance of converting
them into friends, but also our souls – at which point, we no longer deserve to
win. That is a high price to pay for some slight short-term strategic
advantage.
We must not forget that those who govern America are
also the enemies of democracy and human rights, as proven by their longstanding
pattern of betrayal of those ideals; they differ from Islamic fundamentalists
only in the nature of their evil, not in the quantity of it. The kind of
waffling the Obama Administration is engaging in today sends the message that the
West really is as decadent and lacking in backbone as Islamic fundamentalists
perceive them to be. One of the most degrading faults of the present generation
of Westerners is their penchant for obscuring the definitions of things in
order to get away with crimes. In ages past, the officials of great empires
like the Soviet Union and U.S. would simply lie about their crimes and try to
conceal them, not try to fudge them with a lot of Doublespeak. Subjectivity is
a tactic that may be particularly dangerous to one’s mental health. We can see
it in the manner in which Western women excuse the murder of their unborn
children by claiming that they’re not really alive, or adulterous Catholics who
obscure the definition of marriage in order to get fake annulments, or the way
in which the Bush Administration changed the meaning of torture to suit itself.
Our present generation of rulers thinks it can commit any crimes that it likes,
as long as it can concoct a few legal briefs with a few excuses written in florid
legalese. When ordinary citizens think up such excuses for their crimes, or pay
lawyers to do so, the courts often simply disregard their excuses by convicting
and punishing them appropriately. Our leaders must be held to an even more
stringent standard, not cut extra slack because of the positions they hold,
which is precisely why members of the Bush Administration should have been
jailed for ordering and excusing acts of torture. They should not have been
able to wave false legal briefs like talismans, as if bad logic employed by the
legal priesthood represented some kind of defense against prosecution. The
Obama Administration isn’t acting any differently by obscuring the definition
of what a coup is. It is openly defying Section 7008 of the U.S. Foreign
Operations Appropriations Act, just as the Bush Administration defied domestic
and international laws against torture of prisoners. They should likewise be
prosecuted for their refusal to carry out the law, which the executive branch
cannot enforce selectively to its liking. I wouldn’t hold my breath, however,
given that Nixon, Reagan and Johnson were not impeached for far more numerous
and far worse crimes against domestic and international law they committed
while in office, at the cost of millions of innocent lives. Much more
disgusting violations of human rights and democratic principles have routinely
been committed by agencies like the CIA and State Department throughout our
history, but most of them went unpunished as well. Our ruling class simply
doesn’t have any more respect for the rule of law, or the will of the
electorate, than Egypt’s military does. Nor do they have any respect for the
plain truth, as shown by their cowardly redefinition of what a coup is. Whether
we’re speaking of Egypt or the United States, leaders will never learn respect
for democratic institutions and the rule of law until those institutions mete
out painful punishments for disrespecting them. Unfortunately, as I discuss
more fully in the aforementioned article on the NSA scandal and The
Deaf Protesting the Blind: The Failure of the Occupy Movement and Other
Organized Dissent since Reagan, the general public no longer has any
stomach for holding its leaders accountable for their crimes. In fact, we’re
not even sure what crime is any longer, thanks to the same bad habit of redefinition
that makes us unsure of what a coup is, or torture, or human life, or marriage.
Our civilization has lost its love of liberty and human rights in tandem with this
descent into the madness of subjectivity, as a direct result of its rejection
of Christianity. The further we get from it, the less capable we are of winning
the long-term struggle against Islam, using the only weapon that proved
practical in the last Clash of Civilizations. And if we slowly become a
treacherous nation, willing to back mass murderers abroad while excusing the
genocide of abortion at home, it is questionable that we deserve to survive. "You
are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be
made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out
and trampled underfoot."[iii]
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[i]
Cited at Leahy, Sen. Patrick, 2013, “Provisions Relevant To The Situation In Egypt In The FY12 State Department
And Foreign Operations Appropriations Law,” published July 3, 2013 at
the senator’s official website, Patrick Leahy United States Senator for
Vermont. Available online at http://www.leahy.senate.gov/press/provisions-relevant-to-the-situation-in-egypt-in-the-fy12-state-department-and-foreign-operations-appropriations-law_--
[ii]
See p. 4, Pollin, Robert and Zepeda, Eduardo, 1987, "Latin American Debt:
The Choices Ahead", pp. 1-16 in Monthly Review, Vol. 38, No. 9; p.
61, Hancock, Graham, 1989, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and
Corruption of the International Aid Business. The Atlantic Monthly Press:
New York. Some other good sources include pp. 32-36, Bandow, Doug, 1994,
"The IMF: A Record of Addiction and Failure", pp. 15-36 in Perpetuating
Poverty: The World Bank, the IMF, and the Developing World, Doug Bandow and
Ian Vasquez, eds. Cato Institute: Washington D.C.; and Paul, Louis W., 1997, Who
Elected the Bankers?: Surveillance and Control in the World Economy.
Cornell University Press: Ithaca, New York.
[iii]
Matthew 5:13.
