America's Deadliest Export
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ABOUT THIS BOOK For over sixty-five years, the United States war machine has been on automatic pilot. Since World War II we have been conditioned to believe that America’s motives in ‘exporting’ democracy are honorable, even noble. In this startling and provocative book, William Blum, a leading dissident chronicler of US foreign policy and the author of controversial bestseller Rogue State, argues that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster. ABOUT THE AUTHOR William Blum is one of the United States’ leading non-mainstream experts on American foreign policy. He left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to what the US was doing in Vietnam. He then became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first ‘alternative’ newspaper in the capital. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the US, Europe, and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972–73, writing about the Allende government’s ‘socialist experiment,’ and then its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various corners of the world. His book Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II has received international acclaim. Noam Chomsky called it ‘Far and away the best book on the topic.’ In 1999 he was one of the recipients of Project Censored’s awards for ‘exemplary journalism.’ Blum is also the author of Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, and Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire. His books have been translated into 27 foreign-language editions. In January 2006, a tape from Osama bin Laden stated that ‘it would be useful’ for Americans to read Rogue State, to gain a better understanding of their enemy. Blum currently sends out a monthly Internet newsletter, the Anti-Empire Report. Zed Books london | new york Blum_TitlePage.indd 1 26/09/2012 14:01 America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – the Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else was first published in 2013 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © William Blum 2013 The right of William Blum to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Typeset in Monotype Bulmer by illuminati, Grosmont Cover designed by Rogue Four Design All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 78032 447 0 CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 US foreign policy vs the world 15 2 Terrorism 39 3 Iraq 53 4 Afghanistan 79 5 Iran 88 6 George W. Bush 106 7 Condoleezza Rice 111 8 Human rights, civil liberties, and torture 114 9 WikiLeaks 131 10 Conspiracies 146 11 Yugoslavia 154 12 Libya 161 13 Latin America 170 14 Cuba 186 15 The Cold War and anti-communism 199 16 The 1960s 226 17 Ideology and society 230 18 Our precious environment 243 19 The problem with capitalism 247 20 The media 269 21 Barack Obama 285 22 Patriotism 304 23 Dissent and resistance in America 314 24 Religion 323 25 Laughing despite the empire 329 26 But what can we do? 334 Notes 339 Index 353 INTRODUCTION The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world, for which end it is prepared to use any means necessary. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War II the United States has • endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;1 • grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries;2 • attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders;3 • dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;4 • attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.5 The impact on world consciousness in recent decades of tragedies such as in Rwanda and Darfur has been more conspicu- ous than the American-caused tragedies because the first two each took place in one area and within a relatively short period of time. Despite the extensive documentation of the crimes of US foreign 2 A MERIca’ S DE A DLIEST EXPORT policy, because of the very breadth of American interventions and the time period of sixty-eight years it’s much more difficult for the world to fully grasp what the United States has done. In total: since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world),6 in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair, and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands. US foreign policy has likely earned the hatred of most of the people in the world who are able to more or less follow current news events and are familiar with a bit of modern history. Oderint dum metuant – ‘Let them hate so long as they fear’ – was attributed to one or another prominent leader of Ancient Rome. Shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, career diplomat John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the US embassy in Athens, resigned over the Iraq policy. ‘Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?’ he asked in his letter of resignation, referring to the fact that more than one member of the Bush administration had used the expression.7 Following the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, former CIA director James Woolsey commented about worries that storming Baghdad would incite Islamic radicals and broaden support for them: ‘The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America’s victories in Afghanistan,’ he said, proves that ‘only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S. … We need to read a little bit of Machiavelli.’ (In the same talk, Woolsey further estab- lished himself as a foreign policy pundit by stating: ‘There is so much evidence with respect to [Saddam Hussein’s] development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles … that I consider this point beyond dispute.’8) I NTRODUC TION 3 Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, in June 2002, President George W. Bush told America’s future warriors that they were ‘in a conflict between good and evil’ and that ‘We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries.’9 The United States institutional war machine was, and remains, on automatic pilot. When the plans for a new office building for the military, which came to be known as The Pentagon, were brought before the Senate on August 14, 1941, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. ‘Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size?’ he asked. ‘Or is the war to be permanent?’10 ‘Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors,’ observed The Black Commentator in the fourth year of the war in Iraq. ‘American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.’11 It can be said that American history is the history of an empire in the making, since the first British settler killed the first native American. All countries, it is often argued, certainly all powerful countries, have always acted belligerent and militaristic, so why condemn the United States so much? But that is like arguing that since one can find anti-Semitism in every country, why condemn Nazi Germany? Obviously, it’s a question of magni- tude. And the magnitude of US aggression puts it historically into a league all by itself, just as the magnitude of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism did. Is the world supposed to uncritically accept terribly aggressive behavior because it’s traditional and ex- pected? Somehow normal? Is that any way to build a better world? 4 A MERIca’ S DE A DLIEST EXPORT Full spectrum dominance A number of expressions and slogans associated with the Nazi regime in Germany have become commonly known in English. Sieg Heil! – Hail Victory! Arbeit macht frei – Work makes you free. Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt – Today Germany, tomorrow the world. Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht! – I was only following orders! But none perhaps is better known than Deutschland über alles – Germany above all. Thus I was taken aback, in June 2008, when I happened to come across the website of the United States Air Force (www.