Empires Apart (70 page)

There is a view that the cold war was really a hot war fought by America and Russia using third world proxies. More people have died in conflicts since 1945 than during the Second World War itself. In most cases the two superpowers egged on the combatants, providing the money, weapons, training and moral support needed to make the conflicts as bloody as they have been. To depict these wars as primarily local manifestations of a global imperial struggle is, however, very wide of the mark. There were all sorts of factors driving people to war – historic, economic, ethnic, religious – which needed no outside encouragement. The guerrilla wars and tribal conflicts that erupted around the world from Cambodia to Nicaragua, from Kashmir to Nigeria, were not masterminded by imperial strategists in Moscow and Washington. The superpowers merely chose sides. What
is surprising to many is the sides they chose. In the vast majority of cases the conflicts were between the poor and the powerful, between a ruling elite and those they ruled, and in the vast majority of cases the natural autocrats in Moscow sided with the underclass and the natural democrats in Washington sided with the oligarchs.

It is easy to see why Russia acted as it did. However imperial its practice in eastern Europe, its theory remained stuck in nineteenth-century Marxist dogma. The occupants of the Kremlin believed that the peasants and proletarians of the world were destined to throw off their chains. But why was America so keen to stop them? What had happened to the spirit of 1776? Why was a country created in revolution throwing its might into blocking the revolutions of others? Why was the world's greatest democracy committed to defending some of the most viciously anti-democratic regimes of the twentieth century?

Those who argue that the pursuit of corporate greed and national self-interest led to a cynical disregard for democracy point to the role of ITT in the bloody suppression of democracy in Chile or United Fruit in Central America. They emphasise the strategic value of the oil reserves conspicuously present in war zones from Angola to Iraq. But the US did not intervene in foreign conflicts just to grab oil or because corporate interests were at stake, or even because Russia was backing the other side. Support for dictators around the world was not confined to a few corporate oligarchs or state department apparatchiks. Polls showed that Americans believed overwhelmingly that their country was a power for good in the world and had convinced themselves that men like the Shah of Iran – whose despotic regime depended on a fearsome apparatus of torture and repression – were somehow defenders of ‘western values'. Dictators from Vietnam to Venezuela were held up as standard bearers of a common ideology, the ideology of democracy.

To the Founding Fathers the idea that a Persian emperor could somehow symbolise the cause for which they had fought would have been incomprehensible, but their vision of democracy no longer survived; it had been replaced by the corporatist vision in which freedom
and free markets had become synonymous. There developed a chain of logic as follows: Americans champion democracy, democracy includes free markets, free markets are those in which American corporations are free to operate, American corporations are encouraged by the regime in Country X (Iran, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, for example), therefore in supporting that regime the United States is fostering democracy.

US corporations are at the centre of America's informal empire, and the question of whether they aid or hinder development has been hotly debated. In terms of charting the history of the last century, however, the question is irrelevant. Foreign corporations, whatever their intent, are rich, powerful creatures who will almost inevitably be perceived as being aligned with the rich and powerful in any society. When conflict arises between the ruling elite and the masses (or those who claim to speak for the masses), American corporations will therefore automatically be viewed as part of the establishment and the US government will find itself on the side of the powerful against the powerless. In turn this pushed the United States down a track that Russia had followed since the Mongols: the path of terror.

Terror had been a weapon in the American armoury since the Mystic Massacre, but one that until the cold war had become rusty with disuse. As the US moved to support assorted despots and dictators around the world it discovered what Russian autocrats from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin had instinctively understood: in order to survive, dictatorships need to be fortified by brute force.

Mass murder has been a feature of twentieth-century history. Even after the passing of Hitler and Stalin millions have died in such killing fields as Indonesia, Cambodia, Rwanda and especially China under the murderous regime of Chairman Mao. These were usually crazed, often genocidal, rampages that may have been sparked by the two superpowers but usually more by accident than design. One exception was the murder
of between 500,000 and a million ‘communists' in Indonesia between 1965 and 1969, which American dissidents like Noam Chomsky claim to have linked directly to the CIA. Even today the full death toll remains unknown. In his memoirs Barack Obama, who lived in Indonesia shortly after the coup, talks about a ‘few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million'. Even the CIA, he says, lost count. In 1990 the
Washington Post
found confirmation that the CIA provided ‘shooting lists' of three to four thousand ‘leftists', who were then murdered by the Indonesian military. Journalist Kathy Kadane reported that one of the American Embassy officials who was involved admitted, ‘I probably have a lot of blood on my hands,' before adding, ‘there's a time when you have to strike hard at the decisive moment'. The spirit of the Mystic Massacre lived on.

In addition to such large-scale pogroms the post-war world also witnessed the systematic use of terror aimed at changing or maintaining the political status quo. Russia established terror schools in East Germany, Bulgaria and other parts of its empire, and many of the world's most infamous terrorists – men like Carlos the Jackal and assorted Middle Eastern murderers – were trained, equipped and to some extent managed by the KGB. Nevertheless it is now clear that statistically far more people were murdered or ‘disappeared' at the hands of US-supported regimes than at those of Russia's proxies. Death squads, many led by graduates of the counter-insurgency school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, operated in numerous countries with the full knowledge and sometimes active support of the CIA.

The study of recent history is always fraught. In theory records should be more complete and analysis therefore more robust, but the prisms of ideology are ever more refractive. Nowhere is this clearer than in the study of terrorism in the cold war period. Russia had an explicit commitment to the use of terror as a tool of revolution. America had no such commitment; indeed its official ideology could not be further away. Nevertheless, without the use of secret police, death squads and widespread torture it was impossible for US-sponsored regimes from Iran to Chile to maintain themselves in power.

American use of terror and torture peaked during the Vietnam War when, as openly disclosed much later, hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians were killed in terror-raids or targeted assassinations. Terror raids on villages usually killed more women than men, often categorised in official statistics as ‘Vietcong nurses' – leading one wag to crack that the Vietcong appeared to be the only army in history to have had more nurses than soldiers. A House of Representatives subcommittee heard how the Phoenix Program routinely included barbaric and fatal tortures. The lessons learnt in Vietnam were passed on elsewhere. Phoenix veteran John Kirkpatrick produced a manual that the CIA issued to the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua; one section, entitled ‘Selective use of Violence for Propagandist Effects', explained the value of murdering ‘carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges'.

One of America's most notorious torturers was Dan Mitrione, a CIA official who taught torture techniques in Brazil and then Uruguay. Using the slogan ‘the right pain in the right place at the right time', Mitrione referred to his students as ‘technicians'. A CIA colleague later recalled one lesson in which four homeless vagrants acted as subjects; all four were tortured to death. When Mitrione was eventually captured and executed by Uruguayan opposition forces, his body was flown back to the United States with great ceremony: Frank Sinatra performed at a benefit in his honour. Although Mitrione's true role was well known to the media in Latin America, it was hardly mentioned in America.

Having established the principle of conducting foreign policy interventions in secret in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, it was natural for America's support for death squads to be hidden from public scrutiny. The CIA agent responsible for the capture in Bolivia of Che Guevara has since described how he gave orders for Guevara to be murdered by a submachine gun blast to the chest so that it would appear that he had been killed in combat. As a consequence of such secrecy most Americans react in horror and disbelief when their opponents describe the United States as a terrorist state. And indeed such a description is a gross oversimplification. In countries like El Salvador CIA officials in one part
of the US Embassy were working closely with paramilitaries, while in another part of the same embassy officials of AID (the US Agency for International Development) were handing out money to people like the Christian human rights worker Dr Rosa Cisneros, who was destined to become one of the paramilitaries' victims.

US public opinion and the American judiciary have developed a schizophrenic approach to terrorism. Instinctively Americans abhorred the use of terror even before 9/11; in many ways it represented the polar opposite to the democratic values on which the United States is assumed to have been built. But there have always been exceptions in practice. In 1976 a Cuban aircraft exploded after taking off from Barbados, killing all seventy-three on board. Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent based in Venezuela, was accused of being the terrorist mastermind behind the bombing, but in 1985 he escaped from jail in Caracas and fled to the United States, where he successfully rebuffed attempts by Venezuela to extradite him for more than twenty years. Irish terrorists responsible for atrocities at home were allowed to live openly in the United States. Long after 9/11, and despite pleas from the families of those killed in the terrorist Omagh bombings, Bush II refused to shut down the websites run by the ‘political wing' of those responsible, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement. The scandal over the use by the Reagan regime of funds from Iranian arms sales to fund Nicaraguan Contras focused on the legality of the scheme, not the fact that the Contras were one of the most sadistic terrorist organisations in the western hemisphere.

Since Mystic and the slave raids in Georgia, Americans – like Russians – have implicitly distinguished good terror (ours) from bad (yours). A clear demonstration of this came when John Negroponte was appointed by Bush II to head counter-terrorism activities after 9/11. Investigative reporters for the
Baltimore Sun
had previously established that the military commanders of one of Latin America's most vicious death squads, Battalion 3-16 in Honduras, had been on the CIA payroll during Negroponte's time as ambassador to Honduras. Negroponte has consistently denied knowledge of any wrongdoing by the Honduran military forces.

The most notorious twentieth-century example of America's use of terror occurred during the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese started to transport troops and materials through neutral Cambodia, and President Johnson ordered the US Air Force to bomb the jungle tracks that were being used by the enemy. Initially the raids were restricted to a narrow band of territory within 30 miles of the frontier. Johnson's successor Richard Nixon went much further. According to transcripts published forty years later he ordered a ‘massive bombing campaign' deep into Cambodia, with the incantation ‘anything that flies on anything that moves'.

Just as Stalin's bureaucrats carefully documented the awful work of the Gulags, so the United States recorded the bombing raids on Cambodia. Documents declassified at the end of the century revealed that 2,756,941 tons of explosive had been dropped on to the villages and countryside of a nation with which the United States was nominally at peace – more explosives than the allies had dropped in the entire Second World War, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen later estimated that as many as 800,000 people died in US bombing. (Survivors were pushed into the arms of the one group that promised to protect them from the terror raining down on their homes – the Khmer Rouge, which in turn went on to murder an estimated 1.7 million in a further orgy of blood-letting.) After the initial raids on North Vietnamese supply lines there was no military rationale for the bombing, which served only to terrorise the rural population. The moral implications of Nixon's orders are open to argument. Noam Chomsky calls them genocide, just as others labelled Stalin's mass deportations in the Second World War genocide. To others both actions could be regarded as unfortunate consequences of modern war. The point is that the terror experienced by peasant families cowering as wave after wave of bombs descended on them (some villages were subject to raids lasting up to eight hours) can have been no less than that of families waking to the knock on the door that signalled the arrival of Stalin's secret police and the call of the Gulag.

Historians have pored over the psychology of mass murderers like Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, but have not usually put Richard
Nixon in the same category. Although the Cambodian men, women and children who died in their thousands may have considered him as evil as his Russian counterparts, the fact is he was no psychotic sadist. America's actions were not the result of one deranged individual. America's democratic values and the Constitution's checks and balances would constrain such overtly psychotic behaviour. Although the full scale of the raids was kept secret from the American people, thousands were in the know and actively supported the bombing, despite knowing full well what it implied for those innocent civilians on the ground. What was the psychology of these people? Was there a collective psychosis? The answer may be seen in the parallels with two more recent events: the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada immediately after the totally unrelated killing of US troops in Lebanon, and the second invasion of Iraq after the totally unrelated 9/11 attack. In all three cases the US, the most powerful empire in the world, found itself powerless against an enemy that in theory it should have been able to dispose of in an instant. The terrorist attacks in Lebanon and on 9/11 were bad enough – but that there was no immediate way to retaliate was unforgivable. Something had to be done; someone had to be hurt. Terror was unleashed not out of a lust for power like Stalin or a love of pain like Ivan the Terrible but out of simple frustration. Terror was made prosaic.