The Most Important Place in the
World
excerpted from the book
Empire's Workshop
Latin America, the United States,
and the Rise of the New Imperialism
by Greg Grandin
Metropolitan/Owl, 2006, paper
p54
The first part of Richard M Nixon 1958 vice presidential tour
of Latin America was mostly uneventful, although Peru offered
a hint of what was to come when students stoned Nixon during his
visit to the national university. His handlers were nervous about
Venezuela, the scheduled last stop on the tour. Just a few months
earlier, popular protests had put to an end a ten-year Washington-backed
dictatorship, which had given lucrative contracts to American
mining and oil interests. And Eisenhower's granting of asylum
to a number of the old regime's most hated officials, including
the head of the murderous National Security Police, did nothing
to ease tensions between Washington and the new democratic government.
But buoyed by pro-American rallies that took place in a number
of cities, the vice president insisted that the trip continue
as planned.
Stepping out of his DC-6 onto the tarmac,
ion, along with his wife, Pat, was confronted with an angry crowd
that had assembled on the balcony of the terminal, screaming "Go
home," "Get out, dog," and "We won't forget
Guatemala"-a reference to the U.S.-orchestrated overthrow
of that country's democratically elected president four years
earlier. 4 Members of Nixon's entourage had to pass under the
balcony to get to their motorcade and when they did a torrent
of spit fell on them that some of the stricken at first thought
was rain. On the highway out of the airport, hostile drivers tried
to sideswipe the vice president's limousine. Upon entering Caracas's
narrow city streets, the motorcade was surrounded by a mob and
attacked with sticks, rocks, and steel pipes. Nixon was eventually
rescued, but not before his Secret Service detachment drew their
guns and not before Eisenhower readied the armed forces to evacuate
his vice president if need be.
p56
After the assault on Nixon came the 1959 Cuban Revolution and
the 1964 Canal Zone riots in Panama, along with armed left insurgencies
throughout South and Central America. "Castro-itis,"
diagnosed CIA director Allen Dulles, was spreading throughout
Latin America ... John F Kennedy's response - not just to trouble
in the Western Hemisphere but to the broader challenge that nuclear
rivalry and decolonization posed-was to resurrect the crusading
language of the early Cold War while deflecting it onto the third
world.
p58
Through Nixon's one and a half terms, the cycle of South American
coups that began during the Johnson administration continued apace,
terminating, often with U.S. help, democratic governments in Uruguay,
Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia. As president, Nixon, perhaps because
of his 1958 near-death experience, never visited Latin America.
But this didn't stop him from appreciating the region's newfound
political conversion. "Latin America's had 150 years of trying
at it," he observed in late 1971, "and they don't have
much going on down there." But unlike in the "black
countries" of Africa, its leaders at least knew how to maintain
stability. "They at least do it their way," he said.
"It is an orderly way which at least works relatively well.
They have been able to run the damn place."
Nixon's praise of Latin American dictators,
therefore, was not just personal opinion but conveyed the essence
of the Nixon Doctrine, which charged the security forces in each
country with keeping their own house in order-not unlike Kennedy's
promotion of counterinsurgency in the third world but stripped
of its ennobling rhetoric about development and democracy. "We
must deal realistically with governments in the inter-American
system as they are," said the president in 1969.' In 1976,
Argentina fell to a military junta, bringing the cycle of South
American coups to completion. The entire Southern Cone and most
of the continent were now ruled by anti-Communist dictatorships.
Kissinger, who continued as secretary of state in the Ford administration
after Nixon's resignation, gave the Argentine coup his blessing:
"We have followed events in Argentina closely, we wish the
new government well," he said to its plotters, "we wish
it will succeed. We will do what we can to help it succeed."
Sounding not too little like Machiavelli - or Tony Soprano - Kissinger
advised the junta that "if there are things that have to
be done, you should do them quickly."
p59
Happy with the political direction Latin America was moving in,
Nixon was caught off guard when he learned in late 1970 that Chileans
had elected the Marxist Salvador Allende president. "That
son of a bitch, that son of a bitch," screamed Nixon. When
the president noticed his startled ambassador to Chile, he calmed
down and said, "Not you, Mr. Ambassador.... It's that bastard
Allende." He then commenced a seven-minute monologue on how
he was going to "smash Allende." He instructed the CIA
to "make the economy scream," and over the next three
years, Washington spent millions of dollars to destabilize Chile
and prod its military to act.
p60
Henry [Kissinger] saw Allende as being a far more serious threat
than Castro," remarked one NSC staffer. "If Latin America
ever became unraveled, it would never happen with a Castro. Allende
was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.
All kinds of cataclysmic events rolled around, but Chile scared
him." Another aide recalled that his boss feared that the
effects of Allende's election would spill over into Western Europe,
particularly into Italy, where the Communist Party had broken
with Moscow and was trying to chart a middle path similar to Allende's.
"The fear," according to Seymour Hersh in his biography
of Kissinger, "was not only that Allende would be voted into
office, but that after his six-year term-the political process
would work and he would be voted out of office in the next election.
Kissinger saw the notion that Communists could participate in
the electoral process and accept the results peacefully as the
wrong message to send Italian voters."
p61
The Watergate scandal revealed something more damning than the
criminal behavior of a president and his top aides. It exposed
Nixon's pathological style, providing an archetype of the politician
not as moral leader but as paranoid conspirator ...
p62
The Ninety-third Congress (1973-75) was perhaps the most anti-imperial
legislature in United States history, passing a series of measures
that, for many of its members, were designed to repudiate American
militarism. The 1973 War Powers Act gave Congress the power to
review, and reverse, executive decisions to send troops abroad.
For the first time ever, the intelligence system was placed under
the supervision of Congress: the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment required
that the CIA inform up to eight congressional committees of its
covert operations; two years later, the Senate, followed by the
House, created a permanent committee to monitor intelligence activity.
In 1975, Congress upgraded the already existing Freedom of Information
Act with a powerful enforcement mechanism and abolished the Un-American
Activities Committee, which had been operating under a new name,
the Internal Security Committee. In 1976, the Clark Amendment
banned Washington from supporting anti-Communist rebels in Angola,
while Attorney General Edward Levi issued new guidelines that
ruled out domestic covert operations. In 1976, Gerald Ford signed
Executive Order 11905, prohibiting peacetime assassinations of
foreign leaders. Between 1974 and 1976, Congress cut military
aid to Turkey and placed limits on assistance to South Korea,
Chile, and Indonesia. During this period, Congress also gave itself
the power to review and veto proposed major arms sales and shuttered
the Office of Public Safety, a government agency implicated in
torture and other human rights abuses in the third world.
Before Jimmy Carter made "human rights"
the centerpiece of his diplomatic policy, young reformist congressional
Democrats such as Tom Harkin of Iowa, Ed Koch of New York, and
Donald Fraser of Minnesota attempted to transform the Cold War
liberal moralism of Truman and Kennedy into an ethical concern
for the immediate suffering caused by 'Washington's national security
policies. Latin America, where the United States had the greatest
influence and the Soviet Union the least, was the natural venue
to try out efforts to make human rights a foreign policy concern.
They focused on dictatorships in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and
Chile and on the civil wars of Central America, which were then
just beginning to gain the attention of the U.S. press. In 1976,
during Gerald Ford's administration, the reformists scored their
first major victory when Koch pushed through an amendment that
ended aid to Uruguay. In retaliation, Pinochet's secret police
hatched a plan to assassinate the New York congressman-not an
idle threat considering that in that same year Chilean agents
executed the Allende official Orlando Letelier, along with his
assistant, Ronni Moffitt, with a car bomb in Washington's Dupont
Circle.
p64
As with the New Left, the Vietnam War radicalized the New Right.
However, while for the Democratic Party this led to fragmentation
of its different constituencies, for the Republicans it furthered
consolidation. The diverse groups that made up the conservative
coalition pursued many, often contradictory, objectives, yet they
came together over the need to restore America's authority in
the world and they increasingly understood this authority in military
terms.
p65
With détente out of the way, f conservatives turned against
the antimilitarism that had seeped into the Democratic Party,
with Carter's presidency serving as a lightning rod to help advance
the New Right agenda. Soon after his inauguration in 1976, Jimmy
Carter pardoned draft resisters, declared human rights to be the
moral compass of his foreign policy, and announced that America
was "now free of that inordinate fear of communism which
once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear."
It seemed as if, as Kissinger had feared, the peace movement that
had emerged in the wake of Vietnam was setting the national agenda.
But much more than his predecessor, Gerald
Ford, Carter had to deal with the fallout of defeat in Southeast
Asia. Widespread domestic and international distrust of Washington's
motives, demands to cut the defense budget and reform intelligence
operations, calls to scale back overseas commitments all combined
to limit his foreign policy options. Critics derided his responses
to a series of crises, including revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua,
hostage taking in the Middle East, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
and Marxist insurgencies in Africa and Central America. Chronic
inflation and gas shortages contributed to a general feeling that
America was in decline. Carter's supposed willingness to, in the
words of Jeane Kirkpatrick, "negotiate anything with anyone
anywhere" only confirmed to conservatives their critique
of détente, which had devolved, as they had warned it would,
into acquiescence and appeasement." Conservatives attacked
Carter's stated concern for human rights, which they claimed he
applied more to allies like South Africa than to foes like Cuba,
as a symptom of a larger malady. It was nothing less than a manifestation
of a crisis of confidence in the principles and values that made
America great.
But while Carter's incoherent presidency
allowed militarists to sharpen their knives, a number of his actual
policies facilitated the rearming of the Cold War that his successor
would execute in full. It was Carter, not Reagan, who began to
increase the military budget at the expense of domestic social
services. It was Carter who first proposed the creation of a Rapid
Deployment Force to be dispatched into trouble spots outside of
Europe, designed, according to his NSC adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski,
to strike "pre-emptively" against brewing trouble."
It was Carter who initiated support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan
six months prior to Moscow's 1979 invasion. Such support, Brzezinski
recently admitted, was meant to provoke the invasion and drag
the USSR into its own Vietnam-style quagmire." It was also
Carter who began America's more active military engagement in
the Persian Gulf, threatening in his last State of the Union address
to defend the region "by any means necessary." And while
conservative detractors belittled his human rights diplomacy,
America's first born-again Christian president did reinvest foreign
policy with a sense of ethical principle-an investment that his
successor, Ronald Reagan, successfully exploited.
p67
Reagan's 1980 election gave the first generation of fledgling
hawks an opportunity to occupy influential if not publicly prominent
roles in his administration. Drawn from think tanks, universities,
and the defense industry, they often had no actual expertise in
specific regional areas, but all were broadly dedicated to restoring
a sense of national purpose, which, in their minds, inevitably
meant a restoration of military power. Here began the isolation
and purging of regional experts in the CIA and the State Department
who might suggest a more nuanced policy. As head of the State
Department's policy planning staff, for instance, Wolfowitz replaced
nearly all of the staff 's twenty-five members with neoconservative
allies - familiar names such as Francis Fukuyama, Alan Keyes,
and Lewis "Scooter" Libby-many of whom were recruited
from his former teaching posts at Cornell and the University of
Chicago.
Joining these civilian militarists was
a generation of Vietnam vets politicized by their time in Southeast
Asia. Many of the New Right's most committed cadres, such as Oliver
North, Richard Secord, John Singlaub, and Richard Armitage, had
served multiple tours of duty, bringing their firsthand experience
of defeat to their work as midlevel analysts and operatives in
the shadowy front lines of foreign policy. Armitage, for instance,
played a role in the CIA's infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam,
which was accused by the same congressional committee that exposed
the U.S. role in Chile of executing tens of thousands of South
Vietnamese civilians. Armitage served as point man for third-world
low-intensity warfare operations during his tenure as Reagan's
assistant secretary for international security affairs, developing
close relations with Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Directorate
and the jihadists of Afghanistan's anti-Soviet mujahedeen.°
Others, such as Singlaub, mostly stayed out of government service,
instead influencing public policy through the development of a
thick international and interlocking network of anti-Communist
associates, political pressure groups, and think tanks.
Bound together not by their knowledge
of the world but by a devotion to American power, members of this
new "strategic class," either from within the government
or without, in think tanks and magazines that now had the administration's
ear, were committed to reorienting diplomacy, as Chalmers Johnson
notes, to "policies in which military preparedness"-and,
one might add, a generic belligerent response no matter what the
specifics of the crisis "becomes the highest priority of
state."
p68
Secretary of State Alexander Haig to President Ronald Reagan at
an NSC meeting that "you just give me the word and I'll turn
that fucking island [Cuba] into a parking lot,"
p69
Up until the late 1970s, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua
were ruled, as was most of Latin America, by corrupt, deadly,
but pro-American dictatorships: But in 1979, the Nicaraguan regime
fell to the leftist Sandinistas, with the State Department worrying
that El Salvador and Guatemala, also challenged by armed insurgencies,
would soon follow. With little geopolitical importance, few consequential
allies, and no significant resources, these countries afforded
the White House an opportunity to match its actions with its rhetoric.
While Reagan in effect carried on détente everywhere else
in all but name, in Central America, all bets were off.
p71
Once in office, Reagan came down hard on Central America, in effect
letting his administration's most committed militarists set and
execute policy. In El Salvador, over the course of a decade, they
provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal counterinsurgency
campaign. In Nicaragua, they patronized the Contras, a brutal
insurgency led by discredited remnants of the deposed dictator's
national guard designed to roll back the Sandinista revolution.
In Guatemala, they pressed to reestablish military aid to an army
that was in the middle of committing genocide, defending the country's
born-again president even as he was presiding over the worst slaughter
in twentieth-century Latin America. All told, U.S. allies in Central
America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people,
tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.
p73
... the realism that powered America's military resurgence in
the 1980s was of a particular variety; deeply ideological and
committed to a fulfillment of American purpose in the world. Central
America was its proving ground, as a group of conservative defense
intellectuals worked hard to restore America's sense of self-confidence
in order to justify the carnage taking place there in the name
of national defense. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was the most prominent
of this group, and it was she who vided the moral and intellectual
framework to rationalize Reagan's Central American policy. In
so doing, she merged the realist and idealist traditions of American
diplomacy into a powerful synthesis.
Kirkpatrick considered herself a realist
when it came to foreign policy, in the tradition of Hans Morgenthau,
Dean Acheson, and George Kennan. Though a lifelong Democrat, she
found herself repulsed by the self-flagellation that she believed
had overcome her party; Attracted as a result to Reagan's bid
for the White House, Kirkpatrick met with the candidate early
in 1980 and pronounced his "intuitive grasp" of foreign
affairs "generally correct and very realistic" and soon
accepted his invitation to join his campaign.
As an "action intellectual"-to
borrow a phrase coined by Theodore White to describe the academics
who abandoned their scholarship to join FDR's New Deal and JFK's
New Frontier governments-Kirkpatrick combined practice and theory
to rebut the philosophical premises that underwrote post-Vietnam
antimilitarism.° Appointed by Reagan to the position of ambassador
to the United Nations, she served notice that condemnation of
Washington, which had come too easy in the past, would now have
a cost. Her office compiled and distributed the voting records
of each member nation, and when one or another country maligned
this or that U.S. policy, she called its envoy into her office
and demanded an explanation. In her speeches and writings, she
repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of condemning Israel while
praising Libya, say, or censuring apartheid in South Africa while
ignoring human rights violations in Cuba.
But Kirkpatrick did more than just point
out double standards. Prior to serving as ambassador to the United
Nations, which under her tenure was raised to a cabinet-level
position with direct access to the president, she worked as a
Georgetown political scientist who mostly researched the arcanum
of the presidential nominating process. She had a broad engagement
with intellectual history, though, and where groups like the Committee
of Santa Fe offered visceral but not very effective reactions
to the Vietnam syndrome, Kirkpatrick wrote terse, accessible essays
that updated the conservative tradition to the current moment.
Drawing on Thomas Hobbes's respect for the centrality of power
in human affairs and Edmund Burke's respect for the intractability
of tradition to understand the limits of that power, Kirkpatrick
not only pointed out what she described as the hypocrisy behind
criticisms of countries such as El Salvador and South Africa but
actively defended the institutions of those countries as important
bulwarks of order and stability.
It was in Latin America where Kirkpatrick's
ideas were most fully elaborated and applied. In a series of articles,
she used the region to refute what at the time seemed like an
emerging consensus on the correct role of America in the world.
The U.S. military's defeat by a poorly armed peasant insurgency
in Vietnam led many in the Democratic foreign policy establishment
to rethink the wisdom of seeing all global conflict through the
bifocal lens of superpower conflict. They began to recommend an
acceptance of "ideological pluralism"-the belief that
not all societies will follow the same road to development. Accordingly,
third-world nationalism of the kind that drove the United States
out of Southeast Asia was to be dealt with on its own terms and
not as a cat's paw for Soviet Communism.' Even Carter's hawkish
national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued that increased
technological and commercial interdependence had made the world
less ideological; in this, he foreshadowed much of the techno-optimistic
writing on globalization during the Clinton years. Old dogmas
concerning the relationship of territory to national interests
no longer held, Brzezinski suggested, which meant that the United
States could adopt a "more detached attitude toward revolutionary
processes."
Kirkpatrick responded point by point to
this sanguine philosophy of international relations, while broadly
countering it with an old-fashioned conservative insistence on
the dark side of human nature. Carter, of course, had either ignored
or opposed much of the new liberal internationalism, yet Kirkpartrick
successfully linked it to his administration to account for the
fall of Nicaragua and Iran, the spread of insurgencies in El Salvador
and Guatemala, the ongoing influence of Castro, and the emergence
of revolutionary nationalism throughout the Middle East and the
Caribbean.
Kirkpatrick provided the Republican administration
with the argument it needed to justify continued support for brutal
dictatorships. Autocrats, no matter how premodern their hierarchies
and antimodern their values, allowed, she said, for a degree of
autonomous civil society. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist totalitarians
such as the Sandinistas mobilized all aspects of society, which
made war, as a means to maintain such mobilization, inevitable.
Since political liberalization was more likely to occur under
a Somoza than under a Marxist regime like that of the Sandinistas,
Kirkpatrick insisted that a foreign policy that forced allies
to democratize was not only bad for U.S. security but detrimental
for the concerned countries as well: it led in Nicaragua and Iran
not to reform but to radical regimes and was threatening to do
the same in Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina,
Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa. Kirkpatrick's analysis was not
original. It recycled not just dubious distinctions between "authoritarian"
and "totalitarian" regimes but also well-rehearsed justifications
for supporting Latin American dictators dating back to the beginning
of the Cold War. Yet it did provide the Reagan administration
with a rationale for undoing many of Carter's human rights initiatives.
Kirkpatrick went beyond merely justifying
alliances with unseemly allies. In repudiating the "rational
humanism" of the liberal internationalists, she gave voice
to what may be called the Hobbesian impulse in U.S. foreign policy-an
insistence that brute power and not human reason establishes political
legitimacy. In a 1980 essay titled "The Hobbes Problem: Order,
Authority, and Legitimacy in Central America," she invoked
the seventeenth-century philosopher to attack Carter's conditioning
of military aid to El Salvador on the implementation of social
reforms, including a land reform, and on the reduction of human
rights violations. Such requirements, she wrote, were wrongheaded
because they ignored the fact that "competition for power,"
rooted "in the nature of man," is the foundation of
all politics. Kirkpatrick advised the incoming Republican administration
to abandon Carter's reform program and sanction the Salvadoran
military' effort to impose order through repression, even if it
meant the use of death squads. Such a course of action was justified,
she contended, because Salvador's political culture respected
a sovereign who was willing to wield violence-proof of which was
that one of the death squads took the name Maximiliano Hernández
Martinez, a dictator who in 1932 slaughtered as many as thirty
thousand indigenous peasants in the course of a week. Kirkpatrick
described Hernández Martinez as a "hero" to Salvadorans
and argued that by taking his name the assassins sought to "place
themselves in El Salvador's political tradition and communicate
their purpose." (Perhaps a similar logic explains why a notoriously
corrupt and brutal Contra unit in Nicaragua took the name "Jeane
Kirkpatrick Task Force.") Washington needed to think "more
realistically" about the course of action it pursued in Latin
America, Kirkpatrick argued elsewhere: "The choices are frequently
unattractive."
Kirkpatrick also repeatedly attacked what
might be called the Kantian impulse in U.S. foreign policy, after
Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher
who believed that human progress would result in a peacefully
ordered world government. Again and again she hammered against
the conceit that U.S. power should and could be used to promote
universal, internationalist abstract goals such as "human
rights," "development," and "fairness."
She warned against trying to be the "world's midwife"
to democracy. "No idea," she complained, "holds
greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief
that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere,
under any circumstances." In classic conservative terms,
she cautioned that "thought set free from experience is unlimited
by the constraints of experience or of probability. If history
is not relevant then the future is free from the past. Theories
cut loose from experience are usually blinding optimistic. They
begin not from how things are but how they ought to be, and regularly
underestimate the complexities and difficulties concerning how
you get there from here."
It is important to emphasize that Kirkpatrick
was not arguing against morality in foreign policy. Far from it,
for she believed that a conviction in the righteousness of U.S.
purpose and power was indispensable in the execution of effective
diplomacy. But for America's foreign policy establishment, Vietnam
shook that conviction. The optimism in which liberal internationalists
approached the world, she charged, was but a thin mask to hide
the shame they felt over American power. The problem was not idealism
as such but Carter's misplaced application of it, which led him
and his advisers not only to doubt American motives but to abandon
the responsibility of power for the abstractions of history. Carter's
White House, Kirkpatrick pointed out, repeatedly explained foreign
policy setbacks in impersonal terms such as "forces"
or "processes." "What can a U.S. president faced
with such complicated, inexorable, impersonal processes do?"
Kirkpatrick asked; "The answer, offered again and again by
the president and his top officials, was, Not Much."
Setting the stage for today's neocons,
she called for a diplomacy that once again valued human action,
resolve, and will. If America acted with moral certainty to defend
its national interests, the consequence would, by extension, be
beneficial for the rest of the world. "Once the intellectual
debris has been cleared away," she believed, "it should
become possible to construct a Latin American policy that will
protect U.S. security interest and make the actual lives of actual
people in Latin America somewhat better and somewhat freer."
American diplomacy here, even in the hands
of a committed realist such as Kirkpatrick, is an article of faith,
expressed in the selfconfident writ of policy makers that when
America acts in the world, even when it does so expressly to defend
its own interests, the consequences of its actions will be in
the general interest. It is in such assuredness that the roots
of the punitive idealism that drives the new imperialism can be
found, roots that began to sprout in Reagan's Central American
policy.
p80
In 1981, [Elliot] Abrams, as secretary of state for human rights
circulated a memo approved by his boss, Haig, arguing that while
a military response to the Soviets remained crucial, the United
States also needed an "ideological response."
"We will never maintain wide public
support for our foreign policy unless we can relate it to American
ideals and to the defense of freedom..."
p86
GW Bush warned Middle East regimes in his March 2005 speech
"The time has come to stop using murder as a tool of policy,"
Empire's
Workshop
Home Page