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“Contrary to what virtually everyone — left or right — says, the United States achieved its major objectives in Indochina. Vietnam was demolished. There’s no danger that successful development there will provide a model for other nations in the region.”

— Noam Chomsky


What Uncle $ham
ReallyAmerican flag - swastika and stripes Wants

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What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky
Odonian Press 1992; ISBN 1-878825-01-1


 
Table of Contents


The main goals of U.S. foreign policy


Devastation abroad


Brainwashing at home


The future


Notes


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Devastation abroad


The Invasion of Panama


Panama has been traditionally controlled by its tiny European elite, less than 10% of the population. That changed in 1968, when Omar Torrijos, a populist general, led a coup that allowed the black and mestizo [mixed-race] poor to obtain at least a share of the power under his military dictatorship.

In 1981, Torrijos was killed in a plane crash. By 1983, the effective ruler was Manuel Noriega, a criminal who had been a cohort of Torrijos and US intelligence.

The US government knew that Noriega was involved in drug trafficking since at least 1972, when the Nixon administration considered assassinating him. But he stayed on the CIA payroll. In 1983, a US Senate committee concluded that Panama was a major center for the laundering of drug funds and drug trafficking.

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And yet, when Noriega was finally indicted in Miami in 1988, all the charges except one were related to activities that took place before 1984 — back when he was our boy, helping with the US war against Nicaragua, stealing elections with US approval and generally serving US interests satisfactorily. It had nothing to do with suddenly discovering that he was a gangster and a drug-peddler — that was known all along.

It’s all quite predictable, as study after study shows. A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to “villain” and “scum” when he commits the crime of independence. One common mistake is to go beyond robbing the poor — which is just fine — and to start interfering with the privileged, eliciting opposition from business leaders.

By the mid 1980s, Noriega was guilty of these crimes. Among other things, he seems to have been dragging his feet about helping the US in the contra war. His independence also threatened our interests in the Panama Canal. On January 1, 1990, most of the administration of the Canal was due to go over to Panama — in the year 2000, it goes completely to them. We had to make sure that Panama was in the hands of people we could control before that date.

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Then, in December 1989, the US celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War by invading Panama outright, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of civilians (no one knows, and few north of the Rio Grande care enough to inquire). This restored power to the rich white elite that had been displaced by the Torrijos coup — just in time to ensure a compliant government for the administrative changeover of the Canal on January 1, 1990 (as noted by the right-wing European press).

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The US put the bankers back in power after the invasion. Noriega’s involvement in drug trafficking had been trivial compared to theirs. Drug trafficking there has always been conducted primarily by the banks — the banking system is virtually unregulated, so it’s a natural outlet for criminal money. This has been the basis for Panama’s highly artificial economy and remains so — possibly at a higher level — after the invasion. The Panamanian Defense Forces have also been reconstructed with basically the same officers.

In general, everything’s pretty much the same, only now more reliable servants are in charge. (The same is true of Grenada, which has become a major center of drug money laundering since the US invasion. Nicaragua, too, has become a significant conduit for drugs to the US market, after Washington’s victory in the 1990 election. The pattern is standard — as is the failure to notice it.)


See also:
The full text of The Invasion of Panama

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Inoculating Southeast Asia


The US wars in Indochina fall into the same general pattern. By 1948, the State Department recognized quite clearly that the Viet Minh, the anti-French resistance led by Ho Chi Minh, was the national movement of Vietnam. But the Viet Minh did not cede control to the local oligarchy. It favored independent development and ignored the interests of foreign investors.

There was fear the Viet Minh might succeed, in which case “the rot would spread” and the “virus” would “infect” the region, to adopt the language the planners used year after year after year. (Except for a few madmen and nitwits, none feared conquest — they were afraid of a positive example of successful development.)

What do you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That’s basically the US strategy in the Third World.

If possible, it’s advisable to have the local military destroy the virus for you. If they can’t, you have to move your own forces in. That’s more costly, and it’s ugly, but sometimes you have to do it. Vietnam was one of those places where we had to do it.

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Right into the late l960s, the US blocked all attempts at political settlement of the conflict, even those advanced by the Saigon generals. If there were a political settlement, there might be progress toward successful development outside of our influence — an unacceptable outcome.

Instead, we installed a typical Latin American-style terror state in South Vietnam, subverted the only free elections in the history of Laos because the wrong side won, and blocked elections in Vietnam because it was obvious the wrong side was going to win there too.

The Kennedy administration escalated the attack against South Vietnam from massive state terror to outright aggression. Johnson sent a huge expeditionary force to attack South Vietnam and expanded the war to all of Indochina. That destroyed the virus, all right — Indochina will be lucky if it recovers in a hundred years.

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While the United States was extirpating the disease of independent development at its source in Vietnam, it also prevented its spread by supporting the Suharto takeover in Indonesia in 1965, backing the overthrow of Philippine democracy by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972, supporting martial law in South Korea and Thailand and so on.

Suharto’s 1965 coup in Indonesia was particularly welcome to the West, because it destroyed the only mass-based political party there. That involved the slaughter, in a few months, of about 700,000 people, mostly landless peasants — “a gleam of light in Asia,” as the leading thinker of the New York Times, James Reston, exulted, assuring his readers that the US had a hand in this triumph.

The West was very pleased to do business with Indonesia’s new “moderate” leader, as the Christian Science Monitor described General Suharto, after he had washed some of the blood off his hands — meanwhile adding hundreds of thousands of corpses in East Timor and elsewhere. This spectacular mass murderer is “at heart benign,” the respected London Economist assures us — doubtless referring to his attitude towards Western corporations.

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After the Vietnam war was ended in 1975, the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing.

When the Mennonites tried to send pencils to Cambodia, the State Department tried to stop them. When Oxfam tried to send ten solar pumps, the reaction was the same. The same was true when religious groups tried to send shovels to Laos to dig up some of the unexploded shells left by American bombing.

When India tried to send 100 water buffalo to Vietnam to replace the huge herds that were destroyed by the American attacks — and remember, in this primitive country, water buffalo mean fertilizer, tractors, survival — the United States threatened to cancel Food for Peace aid. (That’s one Orwell would have appreciated.) No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists. The educated classes know enough to look the other way.

In order to bleed Vietnam, we’ve supported the Khmer Rouge indirectly through our allies, China and Thailand. The Cambodians have to pay with their blood so we can make sure there isn’t any recovery in Vietnam. The Vietnamese have to be punished for having resisted US violence.

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Contrary to what virtually everyone — left or right — says, the United States achieved its major objectives in Indochina. Vietnam was demolished. There’s no danger that successful development there will provide a model for other nations in the region.

Of course, it wasn’t a total victory for the US. Our larger goal was to reincorporate Indochina into the US-dominated global system, and that has not yet been achieved.

But our basic goal — the crucial one, the one that really counted — was to destroy the virus, and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket case, and the US is doing what it can to keep it that way. In October 1991, the US once again overrode the strenuous objections of its allies in Europe and Japan, and renewed the embargo and sanctions against Vietnam. The Third World must learn that no one dare raise their head. The global enforcer will persecute them relentlessly if they commit this unspeakable crime.


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The Gulf War


The Gulf War illustrated the same guiding principle, as we see clearly if we lift the veil of propaganda. ... The US wasn’t upholding any high principle in the Gulf, nor was any other state. The reason for the unprecedented response to Saddam Hussein wasn’t his brutal aggression — it was because he stepped on the wrong toes.

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The US also adamantly refused to allow a reversal of Iraq’s aggression by the peaceful means prescribed by international law. Instead it preferred to avoid diplomacy and to restrict the conflict to the arena of violence, in which a superpower facing no deterrent is bound to prevail over a Third World adversary.

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By refusing diplomacy, the US achieved its major goals in the Gulf. We were concerned that the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East remain under our control, and that the enormous profits they produce help support the economies of the US and its British client.

The US also reinforced its dominant position, and taught the lesson that the world is to be ruled by force. Those goals having been achieved, Washington proceeded to maintain “stability,” barring any threat of democratic change in the Gulf tyrannies and lending tacit support to Saddam Hussein as he crushed the popular uprising of the Shi’ites in the South, a few miles from US lines, and then the Kurds in the North.


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The Iran/Contra cover-up


The major elements of the Iran/contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal contra war run out of Ollie North’s White House office were connected.

The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran — you could read about it on the front page of the New York Times.

In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/contra hearings appeared on BBC television and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime “with the cooperation of the United States...at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah — standard operating procedure.

As for the contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way.

So what finally generated the Iran/contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Tehran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged.

We then move to the next phase: damage control. That’s what the follow-up was about.


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The prospects for Eastern Europe


What was remarkable about the events in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was that the imperial power simply backed off. Not only did the USSR permit popular movements to function, it actually encouraged them. There are few historical precedents for that.

It didn’t happen because the Soviets are nice guys — they were driven by internal necessities. But it did happen and, as a result, the popular movements in Eastern Europe didn’t have to face anything remotely like what they would have faced on our turf. The journal of the Salvadoran Jesuits quite accurately pointed out that in their country Vaclav Havel (the former political prisoner who became president of Czechoslovakia) wouldn’t have been put in jail — he might well have been hacked to pieces and left by the side of the road somewhere.

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The USSR even apologized for its past use of violence, and this too was unprecedented. US newspapers concluded that, because the Russians admitted that the invasion of Afghanistan was a crime that violated international law, they were finally joining the civilized world. That’s an interesting reaction. Imagine someone in the US media suggesting that maybe the United States ought to try to rise to the moral level of the Kremlin and admit that the attacks against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia violated international law.

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The one country in Eastern Europe where there was extensive violence as the tyrannies collapsed was the very one where the Soviets had the least amount of influence and where we had the most: Romania. Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, had visited England and was given the royal treatment. The United States gave him favored nation treatment, trade advantages and the like.

Ceausescu was just as brutal and crazed then as he was later, but because he’d largely withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact and was following a somewhat independent course, we felt he was partially on our side in the international struggle. (We’re in favor of independence as long as it’s in other people’s empires, not in our own.)

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the uprisings were remarkably peaceful. There was some repression, but historically, 1989 was unique. I can’t think of another case that comes close to it.

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I think the prospects are pretty dim for Eastern Europe. The West has a plan for it — they want to turn large parts of it into a new, easily exploitable part of the Third World.

There used to be a sort of colonial relationship between Western and Eastern Europe; in fact, the Russians’ blocking of that relationship was one of the reasons for the Cold War. Now it’s being reestablished and there’s a serious conflict over who’s going to win the race for robbery and exploitation. Is it going to be German-led Western Europe (currently in the lead) or Japan (waiting in the wings to see how good the profits look) or the United States (trying to get into the act)?

There are a lot of resources to be taken, and lots of cheap labor for assembly plants. But first we have to impose the capitalist model on them. We don’t accept it for ourselves — but for the Third World, we insist on it. That’s the IMF system. If we can get them to accept that, they’ll be very easily exploitable, and will move toward their new role as a kind of Brazil or Mexico.

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In many ways, Eastern Europe is more attractive to investors than Latin America. One reason is that the population is white and blue-eyed, and therefore easier to deal with for investors who come from deeply racist societies like Western Europe and the United States.

More significantly, Eastern Europe has much higher general health and educational standards than Latin America — which, except for isolated sectors of wealth and privilege, is a total disaster area. One of the few exceptions in this regard is Cuba, which does approach Western standards of health and literacy, but its prospects are very grim.

One reason for this disparity between Eastern Europe and Latin America is the vastly greater level of state terror in the latter after the Stalin years. A second reason is economic policy.

According to US intelligence, the Soviet Union poured about 80 billion dollars into Eastern Europe in the 1970s. The situation has been quite different in Latin America. Between 1982 and 1987, about 150 billion dollars were transferred from Latin America to the West. The New York Times cites estimates that “hidden transactions” (including drug money, illegal profits, etc.) might be in the 700 billion range. The effects in Central America have been particularly awful, but the same is true throughout Latin America — there’s rampant poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, environmental destruction, state terror, and a collapse of living standards to the levels of decades ago.

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The situation in Africa is even worse. The catastrophe of capitalism was particularly severe in the 1980s, an “unrelenting nightmare” in the domains of the Western powers, in the accurate terms of the head of the Organization of African Unity. Illustrations provided by the World Health Organization estimate that eleven million children die every year in “the developing world,” a “silent genocide” that could be brought to a quick end if resources were directed to human needs rather than enrichment of a few.

In a global economy designed for the interests and needs of international corporations and finance, and sectors that serve them, most of the species becomes superfluous. They will be cast aside if the institutional structures of power and privilege function without popular challenge or control.


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The world’s rent-a-thug


For most of this century, the United States was far and away the world’s dominant economic power, and that made economic warfare an appealing weapon, including measures ranging from illegal embargo to enforcement of IMF rules (for the weak). But in the last twenty years or so, the US has declined relative to Japan and German-led Europe (thanks in part to the economic mismanagement of the Reagan administration, which threw a party for the rich with costs paid by the majority of the population and future generations). At the same time, however, US military power has become absolutely preeminent.

As long as the Soviet Union was in the game, there was a limit to how much force the US could apply, particularly in more remote areas where we didn’t have a big conventional force advantage. Because the USSR used to support governments and political movements the US was trying to destroy, there was a danger that US intervention in the Third World might explode into a nuclear war. With the Soviet deterrent gone, the US is much more free to use violence around the world, a fact that has been recognized with much satisfaction by US policy analysts in the past several years.

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In any confrontation, each participant tries to shift the battle to a domain in which it’s most likely to succeed. You want to lead with your strength, play your strong card. The strong card of the United States is force — so if we can establish the principle that force rules the world, that’s a victory for us. If, on the other hand, a conflict is settled through peaceful means, that benefits us less, because our rivals are just as good or better in that domain.

Diplomacy is a particularly unwelcome option, unless it’s pursued under the gun. The US has very little popular support for its goals in the Third World. This isn’t surprising, since it’s trying to impose structures of domination and exploitation. A diplomatic settlement is bound to respond, at least to some degree, to the interests of the other participants in the negotiation, and that’s a problem when your positions aren’t very popular.

As a result, negotiations are something the US commonly tries to avoid. Contrary to much propaganda, that has been true in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central America for many years.

Against this background, it’s natural that the Bush administration should regard military force as a major policy instrument, preferring it to sanctions and diplomacy (as in the Gulf crisis). But since the US now lacks the economic base to impose “order and stability” in the Third World, it must rely on others to pay for the exercise — a necessary one, it’s widely assumed, since someone must ensure a proper respect for the masters. The flow of profits from Gulf oil production helps, but Japan and German-led continental Europe must also pay their share as the US adopts the “mercenary role,” following the advice of the international business press.

The financial editor of the conservative Chicago Tribune has been stressing these themes with particular clarity. We must be “willing mercenaries,” paid for our ample services by our rivals, using our “monopoly power” in the “security market” to maintain “our control over the world economic system.” We should run a global protection racket, he advises, selling “protection” to other wealthy powers who will pay us a “war premium.”

This is Chicago, where the words are understood: if someone bothers you, you call on the Mafia to break their bones. And if you fall behind in your premium, your health may suffer too.

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To be sure, the use of force to control the Third World is only a last resort. The IMF is a more cost-effective instrument than the Marines and the CIA if it can do the job. But the “iron fist” must be poised in the background, available when needed.

Our rent-a-thug role also causes suffering at home. All of the successful industrial powers have relied on the state to protect and enhance powerful domestic economic interests, to direct public resources to the needs of investors, and so on — one reason why they are successful. Since 1950, the US has pursued these ends largely through the Pentagon system (including NASA and the Department of Energy, which produces nuclear weapons). By now we are locked into these devices for maintaining electronics, computers and high-tech industry generally.

Reaganite military Keynesian excesses added further problems. The transfer of resources to wealthy minorities and other government policies led to a vast wave of financial manipulations and a consumption binge. But there was little in the way of productive investment, and the country was saddled with huge debts: government, corporate, household and the incalculable debt of unmet social needs as the society drifts towards a Third World pattern, with islands of great wealth and privilege in a sea of misery and suffering.

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When a state is committed to such policies, it must somehow find a way to divert the population, to keep them from seeing what’s happening around them. There are not many ways to do this. The standard ones are to inspire fear of terrible enemies about to overwhelm us, and awe for our grand leaders who rescue us from disaster in the nick of time.

That has been the pattern right through the 1980s, requiring no little ingenuity as the standard device, the Soviet threat, became harder to take seriously. So the threat to our existence has been Qaddafi and his hordes of international terrorists, Grenada and its ominous air base, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Hispanic narcotraffickers led by the arch-maniac Noriega, and crazed Arabs generally. Most recently it’s Saddam Hussein, after he committed his sole crime — the crime of disobedience — in August 1990. It has become more necessary to recognize what has always been true: that the prime enemy is the Third World, which threatens to get “out of control.”

These are not laws of nature. The processes, and the institutions that engender them, could be changed. But that will require cultural, social and institutional changes of no little moment, including democratic structures that go far beyond periodic selection of representatives of the business world to manage domestic and international affairs.


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Brainwashing at home


How the Cold War worked


Despite much pretense, national security has not been a major concern of US planners and elected officials. The historical record reveals this clearly. Few serious analysts took issue with George Kennan’s position that “it is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power” (October 1947); or with President Eisenhower’s consistent view that the Russians intended no military conquest of Western Europe and that the major role of NATO was to “convey a feeling of confidence to exposed populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier, politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads.”

Similarly, the US dismissed possibilities for peaceful resolution of the Cold War conflict, which would have left the “political threat” intact. In his history of nuclear weapons, McGeorge Bundy writes that he is “aware of no serious contemporary proposal...that ballistic missiles should somehow be banned by agreement before they were ever deployed,” even though these were the only potential military threat to the US. It was always the “political” threat of so-called “Communism” that was the primary concern.

(Recall that “Communism” is a broad term, and includes all those with the “ability to get control of mass movements....something we have no capacity to duplicate,” as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles privately complained to his brother Allen, CIA director, “The poor people are the ones they appeal to,” he added, “and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.” So they must be overcome, to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.)

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Of course, both the US and USSR would have preferred that the other simply disappear. But since this would obviously have involved mutual annihilation, a system of global management called the Cold War was established.

According to the conventional view, the Cold War was a conflict between two superpowers, caused by Soviet aggression, in which we tried to contain the Soviet Union and protect the world from it. If this view is a doctrine of theology, there’s no need to discuss it. If it is intended to shed some light on history, we can easily put it to the test, bearing in mind a very simple point: if you want to understand the Cold War, you should look at the events of the Cold War. If you do so, a very different picture emerges.

On the Soviet side, the events of the Cold War were repeated interventions in Eastern Europe: tanks in East Berlin and Budapest and Prague. These interventions took place along the route that was used to attack and virtually destroy Russia three times in this century alone. The invasion of Afghanistan is the one example of an intervention outside that route, though also on the Soviet border.

On the US side, intervention was worldwide, reflecting the status attained by the US as the first truly global power in history.

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On the domestic front, the Cold War helped the Soviet Union entrench its military-bureaucratic ruling class in power, and it gave the US a way to compel its population to subsidize high-tech industry. It isn’t easy to sell all that to the domestic populations. The technique used was the old stand-by-fear of a great enemy.

The Cold War provided that too. No matter how outlandish the idea that the Soviet Union and its tentacles were strangling the West, the “Evil Empire” was in fact evil, was an empire and was brutal. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy — its own population — by terrifying it with the (quite real) crimes of the other.

In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the US conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe — each side using the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains.

So why did the Cold War end, and how does its end change things? By the 1970s, Soviet military expenditures were leveling off and internal problems were mounting, with economic stagnation and increasing pressures for an end to tyrannical rule. Soviet power internationally had, in fact, been declining for some 30 years, as a study by the Center for Defense Information showed in 1980. A few years later, the Soviet system had collapsed. The Cold War ended with the victory of what had always been the far richer and more powerful contestant. The Soviet collapse was part of the more general economic catastrophe of the 1980s, more severe in most of the Third World domains of the West than in the Soviet empire.

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As we’ve already seen, the Cold War had significant elements of North-South conflict (to use the contemporary euphemism for the European conquest of the world). Much of the Soviet empire had formerly been quasi-colonial dependencies of the West. The Soviet Union took an independent course, providing assistance to targets of Western attack and deterring the worst of Western violence. With the collapse of Soviet tyranny, much of the region can be expected to return to its traditional status, with the former higher echelons of the bureaucracy playing the role of the Third World elites that enrich themselves while serving the interests of foreign investors.

But while this particular phase has ended, North-South conflicts continue. One side may have called off the game, but the US is proceeding as before — more freely, in fact, with Soviet deterrence a thing of the past. It should have surprised no one that George Bush celebrated the symbolic end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, by immediately invading Panama and announcing loud and clear that the US would subvert Nicaragua’s election by maintaining its economic stranglehold and military attack unless “our side” won.

Nor did it take great insight for Elliott Abrams to observe that the US invasion of Panama was unusual because it could be conducted without fear of a Soviet reaction anywhere, or for numerous commentators during the Gulf crisis to add that the US and Britain were now free to use unlimited force against its Third World enemy, since they were no longer inhibited by the Soviet deterrent.

Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift, a problem recognized through the 1980s, as we’ve already seen. New enemies have to be invented. It becomes harder to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been “the poor who seek to plunder the rich” — in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role.


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The war on (certain) drugs


One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc.

The effect on public opinion was immediate. When Bush won the 1988 election, people said the budget deficit was the biggest problem facing the country. Only about 3% named drugs. After the media blitz, concern over the budget was way down and drugs had soared to about 40% or 45%, which is highly unusual for an open question (where no specific answers are suggested).

Now, when some client state complains that the US government isn’t sending it enough money, they no longer say, “we need it to stop the Russians” — rather, “we need it to stop drug trafficking.” Like the Soviet threat, this enemy provides a good excuse for a US military presence where there’s rebel activity or other unrest.

So internationally, “the war on drugs” provides a cover for intervention. Domestically, it has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties.

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That’s not to say that “substance abuse” isn’t a serious problem. At the time the drug war was launched, deaths from tobacco were estimated at about 300,000 a year, with perhaps another 100,000 from alcohol. But these aren’t the drugs the Bush administration targeted. It went after illegal drugs, which had caused many fewer deaths — over 3500 a year — according to official figures. One reason for going after these drugs was that their use had been declining for some years, so the Bush administration could safely predict that its drug war would “succeed” in lowering drug use.

The Administration also targeted marijuana, which hadn’t caused any known deaths among some 60 million users. In fact, that crackdown has exacerbated the drug problem — many marijuana users have turned from this relatively harmless drug to more dangerous drugs like cocaine, which are easier to conceal.

Just as the drug war was launched with great fanfare in September 1989, the US Trade Representative (USTR) panel held a hearing in Washington to consider a tobacco industry request that the US impose sanctions on Thailand in retaliation for its efforts to restrict US tobacco imports and advertising. Such US government actions had already rammed this lethal addictive narcotic down the throats of consumers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, with human costs of the kind already indicated

The US Surgeon General, Everett Koop, testified at the USTR panel that “when we are pleading with foreign governments to stop the flow of cocaine, it is the height of hypocrisy for the United States to export tobacco.” He added, “years from now, our nation will look back on this application of free trade policy and find it scandalous.”

Thai witnesses also protested, predicting that the consequence of US sanctions would be to reverse a decline in smoking achieved by their government’s campaign against tobacco use. Responding to the US tobacco companies’ claim that their product is the best in the world, a Thai witness said: “Certainly in the Golden Triangle we have some of the best products, but we never ask the principle of free trade to govern such products. In fact we suppressed [them].” Critics recalled the Opium War 150 years earlier, when the British government compelled China to open its doors to opium from British India, sanctimoniously pleading the virtues of free trade as they forcefully imposed large-scale drug addiction on China.

Here we have the biggest drug story of the day. Imagine the screaming headlines: “US government the world’s leading drug peddler.” It would surely sell papers. But the story passed virtually unreported, and with not a hint of the obvious conclusions.

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Another aspect of the drug problem, which also received little attention, is the leading role of the US government in stimulating drug trafficking since World War II. This happened in part when the US began its postwar task of undermining the anti-fascist resistance and the labor movement became an important target.

In France, the threat of the political power and influence of the labor movement was enhanced by its steps to impede the flow of arms to French forces seeking to reconquer their former colony of Vietnam with US aid. So the CIA undertook to weaken and split the French labor movement — with the aid of top American labor leaders, who were quite proud of their role.

The task required strikebreakers and goons. There was an obvious supplier: the Mafia. Of course, they didn’t take on this work just for the fun of it. They wanted a return for their efforts. And it was given to them: they were authorized to reestablish the heroin racket that had been suppressed by the fascist governments — the famous “French connection” that dominated the drug trade until the 1960s.

By then, the center of the drug trade had shifted to Indochina, particularly Laos and Thailand. The shift was again a by-product of a CIA operation — the “secret war” fought in those countries during the Vietnam War by a CIA mercenary army. They also wanted a payoff for their contributions. Later, as the CIA shifted its activities to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the drug racket boomed there.

The clandestine war against Nicaragua also provided a shot in the arm to drug traffickers in the region, as illegal CIA arms flights to the US mercenary forces offered an easy way to ship drugs back to the US, sometimes through US Air Force bases, traffickers report.

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The close correlation between the drug racket and international terrorism (sometimes called “counterinsurgency”, “low intensity conflict” or some other euphemism) is not surprising. Clandestine operations need plenty of money, which should be undetectable. And they need criminal operatives as well. The rest follows.


[Back to Table of Contents]


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Continued on page 3 with War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.




About the Author


Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a major figure in twentieth-century linguistics. He has taught since 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a full professor at the age of 32. His 1957 work Syntactic Structures revolutionized the field of linguistics, fundamentally changing the current understanding of language and mind. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. Currently he is also the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

Chomsky has received honorary degrees from the University of London, University of Chicago, Georgetown University and Cambridge University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. His work in linguistics, which has been internationally acclaimed, has earned Chomsky the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences and the Helmholtz Medal.

Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Chomsky became politically conscious at a very young age, writing his first political article, on the fight against fascism in Spain, when he was only ten years old.

Chomsky has written many books on contemporary issues and is an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and corporate power. His political talks have been heard, typically by standing-room only audiences, all over the country and the globe.

In a saner world, his tireless efforts to promote justice would have long since won him the Nobel Peace Prize. But no, the committee prefers to give it to sleazy war-criminals like Henry Kissinger.



Books by Noam Chomsky




Audio books:



Other works:




Related sites


What Uncle Sam Really Wants
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html

Zmag.org provides the complete text of the book.


The Noam Chomsky Archive
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/

“This archive is hosted by ZNet, the web site of Z Magazine. It contains the full text to many of Chomsky’s major works, the complete audio to several important lectures, and numerous articles, interviews and speeches.”



School of the Americas Watch
http://www.soaw.org/index.html

The United States Army “School of the Americas”, in Fort Benning, Georgia, teaches its students how to torture human beings.

Graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas have been responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America.

Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.

Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the torture of countless people throughout Central and South America and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 human beings.



The US Army School of Assassins
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/soa/

Exposes the dirty deeds of the U.S. Army School of “the Americas” (Assassins) throughout Latin America. Special sections on Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Grenada, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.




Related books


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky


Body of Secrets:
Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
by James Bamford

In 1962, U.S. military leaders had a top-secret plan for committing terrorist attacks on Americans in Miami and Washington D.C., while blaming Cuba. Codenamed “Operation Northwoods”, the plan was intended to provide the propaganda necessary to create popular support for an invasion of Cuba.


The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky


Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991


Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others


The Real Terror Network:
Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
by Edward S. Herman


Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum


Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum


The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark


Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League


To Kill A Nation:
The Attack on Yugoslavia
by Michael Parenti


Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving


The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee


Against Empire
by Michael Parenti


The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
by Gore Vidal


The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti


Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti


A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn


The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine


Colombia:
The Genocidal Democracy
by Javier Giraldo


I Was Never Alone:
A Prison Diary from El Salvador
by Nidia Diaz


Cuban Liberation:
Castro, Che Guevara and Jose Marti
(bibliography)


Living Like the Saints:
A Novel of Nicaragua
by Liston Pope Jr.


Dying For Growth:
Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor
Edited by Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin and John Gershman


Eyes of the Heart:
Seeking a path for the poor in the age of globalization
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide


Corporate Predators:
The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman


Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don’t Want You to See
by David McGowan


Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee


The Hidden Persuaders:
What makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do?
by Vance Packard


Toxic Sludge is Good for You!:
Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton


Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti


Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky


The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media:
Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News
by Norman Solomon


War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors


War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick




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