Nation-Busting Euphoria,
Nation-Building Fatigue
U.S. imposes its will
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, December 2002
The United States has a long tradition
of arrogance, racism, unilateralism, and disregard of international
law in its external dealings. So while it is easy to imagine that
the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Axis of Evil represents something new,
it doesn't, it is merely more frightening because of the power
and global scope and effects of this Axis, which owns and is eager
to use a truly massive arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction."
The Axis leaders pretend to be quaking in their boots at somebody
else's possession of such weapons (the mainstream media and intellectuals
quake with them), but they pose the real global threat of their
use.
The readiness with which the media and
intellectuals adapt to and serve their leaders' rampaging surprises
many who don't grasp the extent to which the corporate media are
a part of the imperial enterprise and structure and how naturally
the intellectual community accepts and works within the parameters
fixed by imperial needs. If the structure of imperialism gives
the United States the power to impose its will in many foreign
locales, its institutions and intelligentsia will, as a matter
of course, normalize and support the ensuing projection of power.
The liberals will do this with varying degrees of enthusiasm,
some reluctantly, calling for "multilaterally" accepted
constraints-and attacks-on " rogues " (they never question
the identification of rogues), and the acceptance of "responsibilities"
for "nation-building," rather than unilateral actions
and quick exit while readying the imperial center for follow-on
campaigns. But many liberals, along with the mainstream majority
and right wing, are enthused about the new projection of power
in the interest of "self defense" against terrorism.
Given that the superpower's leaders put
its interests first, and especially those of its dominant transnational
corporations; that they are greatly affected by domestic political
considerations, including the demands of the more powerful lobbies;
that the leadership doesn't care a fig for legalisms, and has
contempt for the bleeding heart weaklings among their allies,
the superpower leaders have felt free to run roughshod over international
law and traditional notions of justice. The resultant challenges
to the media and intellectuals to rationalize the law violations,
the use of force, and the bullying to get allies and clients in
line have been severe. But media and intellectuals have met this
challenge impressively.
For example, we regularly encounter the
notion of "nation-building," but never of "nation-busting,"
although arguably that has been the primary role of the United
States for decades. lt shattered Indochina, and when it exited
in 1975 it not only didn't help rebuild but instead imposed a
long boycott on its victim. It destroyed the Sandinista revolution
in Nicaragua, and reduced Nicaragua to the stone age, but even
after it succeeded in getting into power its own neoliberal leadership
in 1990, it abandoned its victim and has allowed it to remain
a basket-case ever since. It helped South Africa and "freedom
fighter" Savimbi crush Angola, and then left. It smashed
Iraq h~ 1991, and then, as with Vietnam, inflicted further severe
damage on its victim via "sanctions of mass destruction."
Serbia and Kosovo were severely damaged, and then abandoned. Afghanistan
has been treated similarly.
The United States suffers from "nation-building
fatigue" even before it can do more than hand out some candy
bars to orphaned children. But its liberals still prate about
its responsibilities and the importance of it completing its good
works after devastating a country in the process of replacing
a demon (usually a former U.S. agent), tailing to note the regularity
with which it runs after it does its hit. (William Blum speaks
of "America's 'traditional policy' of zero reconstruction.")
The U.S. official view is that since the United States has done
such yeoman service in busting some poor country, others should
take on the responsibility of nation-building. Clinton and Albright
left it to the Europeans to reconstruct Kosovo (and to bring it
that still elusive stability and justice), just as Bush and Powell
call for others to do the same in Afghanistan. The trouble is
that those other countries may not have agreed that busting was
desirable or that it should be they who do the reconstruction,
which is more difficult and expensive than just dropping bombs.
Maybe the country that bombs should have the responsibility of
"nation-building" and not be able to shunt it to others.
This pattern of busting without follow-up reconstruction is not
featured in the media or by the intellectual community.
Nor is the fact that "preemption"
and "regime change" by invasion and/or subversion is
in straightforward violation of Articles I and 2 of the UN Charter
and the most basic element of international law-the prohibition
of an armed attack on another state. That process of regime change,
which the Bush administration proposes to carry out against Iraq
is called "aggression," except in cases where the U.S.
(or one of its clients like Israel or Indonesia) indulges in it.
It is testimony to the advanced state of degradation of the "
international community " that the DC Axis can announce many
months in advance that it intends to commit aggression against
Iraq, but this is not denounced as a Hitler-worthy enterprise
that the world community must oppose by all necessary means. Instead,
the U.S. is appeased almost without limit-"we" all agree
that it means well, that its target is monstrous and a true threat
to the U.S. and everybody else, but we must remove this threat
slowly and in stages and not just let the U.S. start bombing tomorrow.
The idea that the Iraq threat is a sick joke, and that that country
has been a victim of serious war crimes committed by the U.S.,
its poodle, and the UN, and that the U.S. and poodle are the main
global threat, is outside the realm of polite discourse.
The U.S. is also appeased in its desire
to be tree of any threat that its citizens might be hauled before
an international crimes court. It regards itself as the global
God (or Godfather), who brings justice (or breaks kneecaps) as
the law-justice giver (or enforcer) and is above or outside the
law. It claims to fear "frivolous" or "politicized"
actions against his citizens; it likes instead Tribunals like
the Yugoslavia Tribunal now dealing with Milosevic that is not
"political" because under the U.S.'s firm control (NATO's
public relations person Jamie Shea even acknowledged this control
in a press conference of May 17, 1999, but the U.S. media and
intellectuals didn't notice or care, given that the U.S. was-once
again-pursuing a just cause).
Strenuous efforts have been made by the
international community to assure the U.S. of the unlikelihood
that its personnel would be hauled before the court, but there
has been little discussion of the threat that if it joined the
court, it would throw its weight around, dominate and compromise
its judicial integrity as it has done with the Yugoslavia Tribunal.
Such a point doesn't arise, nor is the brazenness of it putting
itself in a special category above the law. The U. S. has even
gotten belligerent on the matter of an international court outside
its control. Its congress has passed a law called the American
Service Members Protection Act-in the dissident media referred
to as "The Netherlands Invasion Act"-which calls for
the armed forces to recover by force any U.S. citizen taken into
custody by any purported international crimes tribunal. However,
not to worry: U.S. war crimes ambassador, Pierre-Richard Prosper,
has assured the world that an invasion of the Hague to recover
U.S. prisoners of crime tribunals is not automatic; it is merely
"within the presidential range of tools. It's not mandatory."
It is also worth noting that the United
States never apologizes for anything it does. At most, when it
can't wriggle out of responsibility for killing large numbers
of innocent civilians, as in the assault on the wedding festivities
at Kakarak in Afghanistan on July 1, 2002, or the shooting down
of an Iranian civilian airliner on July 3, 1988 (with 290 dead),
it may express "regrets" and offer some compensation
to survivors. But apologies are for the Japanese, Germans, and
others, not for the U.S. This is because it always means well,
is responding in just causes, and the world owes it a debt for
the service it is rendering. As Human Rights Watch (and Washington
Post) analyst William Arkin said to Afghans, "When are you
going to pay the US for the cost of the bombs and the jet fuel
and the American lives selflessly given,...all done so you can
have a future?" (WP, April 9, 2002). But besides this selfless
purpose in U.S. actions abroad, surely God (or Godfather) cannot
be expected to apologize.
It is a long tradition in the liberal
mainstream to exhort U.S. officials to get their nasty clients
to be good, in accord with "our values." This is of
course important right now when "our values" are allegedly
in competition with those of al Qaeda and other terrorist forces
that represent evil values. A small problem surfaced when we supported
the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, whose murderous proclivities
match those of the Taliban. The Northern Alliance has not only
killed and raped in Pashtun territory during the past year, it
starved and killed Taliban prisoners on a large scale, even after
the Northern Alliance and U.S. forces together had negotiated
a protected surrender.
In a recent op-ed column, Holly Burkhalter,
U.S. policy director for the Physicians for Social Responsibility,
points out that the U.S. failure to "come to grips with the
consequences of alliances with local forces [who]...show little
respect for the laws of armed conflict...resulted in the execution
of hundreds of captured combatants and the imprisonment of thousands
of others in life-threatening squalor." ("POW Atrocities:
An Ugly Lesson," Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2002.) She
urges, among other things, that this country should require military
personnel to protect civilian populations and, "if atrocities
are committed by local partners...secure all evidence, carry out
a full investigation and hold accountable those responsible."
While these are well-meaning recommendations,
they gloss over fundamental facts that show the United States
to be not so innocent of the crimes in question and to have a
policy directly contrary to Burkhalter's recommendations, for
clear and obvious reasons. She also ignores history, recent and
more distant. In the recent Afghan war it is on the record that
the United States used air power to kill hundreds of prisoners
during a prison revolt in the Qala-i-Janghi prison. There is also
evidence that U. S. personnel abused Taliban prisoners and were
on the scene and did nothing to hinder the stuffing of the prisoners
in containers for the death convoy (documented in Jamie Doran's
film Massacre at Mazar, suppressed by the U.S. media).
Burkhalter understates the number probably
executed (there are several thousand missing of the 8,000 who
surrendered at Kunduz). Her appeal to preserve the evidence and
prosecute the killers flies in the face of the U.S. refusal to
do that in this very case, and the clear U.S. failure to acknowledge
its own killings in Afghanistan, along with a systematic effort
to keep them out of sight. Burkhalter can't acknowledge that it
might be U.S. policy to allow or possibly even encourage its clients
to kill prisoners, even though Rumsfeld said, "The United
States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders, nor are we in
a position, with relatively small numbers of forces on the ground,
to accept prisoners." He also said he would "do everything
I could" to prevent these people "who have done terrible
things" to leave Afghanistan and be free to fight again (Department
of Defense Briefing, November 19, 2001; lan Cobain and Damian
Whitworthy, "America Will Take No Prisoners," Times
of London, November 20, 2()01).
Burkhalter also fails to recognize that
covering up civilian killings of our bombings allows a more lavish
use of firepower, killing more enemy cadres-even if at the expense
of heavy civilian casualties-and helps keep our own casualties
down.
Looking back further in history, the United
States has long supported torture and death squad-prone clients.
The rise in torture in the 1960s and 1970s was closely correlated
with flows of U.S. aid and training. While the media, pundits,
and establishment intellectuals were regularly taken in by claims
that the United States was doing its level best to make these
clients nice, the apologists failed to note two things. First,
that the crucial relationship between the torture regimes and
this country was that the United States chose to support them
in the first place, suggesting that the torture and terror were
either acceptable or positively desired. Second, in a great many
cases it was clear that U.S. training in "methods of interrogation,"
as well as its stress on the evils of the populists or radicals
under attack by the U.S. clients, gave both a spiritual and technical
push to torture and killing.
One of the most dramatic and revealing
cases of U.S. official support for client state mass murder was
the U.S. relationship to the huge Indonesian killings of 1965-1966,
which may have claimed over a million victims, many incidentally
on the island of Bali. It is on the record that the United States
supplied lists of people to be killed to the coup and genocide
managers, and it is also clear that U.S. officials, pundits, and
media were ecstatic at what James Reston saw as a "gleam
of light" and Time magazine called "The West's best
news for years in Asia," referring to an Indonesia being
subjected to mass slaughter.
Less well known is the fact that U.S.
officials had been regretful that the Indonesian military seemed
to lack the gumption to "clean house," and expressed
great pleasure when the house cleaning took place. Thus, Rand
Corporation and CIA official Guy Pauker had been despondent in
1959 about the possibility of an army takeover, but he did hope
that "Perhaps overnight the General Staff or some younger
members of the officer corps of Indonesia will strike, sweep their
house clean, and rededicate themselves to a higher purpose"
(presumably stealing, and opening the door to private investment,
after a mass slaughter). After the coup, Pauker exulted that "The
assassination of the six army generals by the September 30 Movement
elicited the ruthlessness that I had not anticipated a year earlier
and resulted in the death of large numbers of Communist cadres
[actually, mostly peasant farmers and ordinary citizens who might
have supported the Communist Party].''
This expression of "our values"
could be replicated many times over the past several decades.
Edward S. Herman is an economist, author,
and media analyst.
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