What Is American Interventionism Really About?
Brian McAfee 2838 Mason Muskegon Heights 49444 MI USA (231)
737-8726 brimac6@hotmail.com
What Is American Interventionism Really About?
By Brian McAfee
The war is, for the most part, over. Iraq has been liberated,
the country is in a shambles but Halliburton is on hand to
rebuild. Most of the troops are back home or on their way. With
apparently overwhelming public support, why were those Pesky
demonstrators out there? All across the U.S., in Europe, in
India, pretty much everywhere. After all, isn't Saddam Hussein
the most evil man on earth, a blight on the planet? Well, yes he
is, as are Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Manuel Noriega. All bad
bad men, with one thing in common- 20 years ago we (the U.S.)
armed, trained and financed them.
Manuel Noriega was a well paid CIA man, "our man in Panama" as
it were. Heavily involved with cocaine trafficking, he was
convicted and imprisoned in '89 after a closed door trial,
leaving a cloud over the CIA of apparent involvement of drug
smuggling and involvement in the crack epidemic in our inner
cities. Osama bin Laden first surfaced in Afghanistan in 1979
with the U.S. armed trained and financed Mujahideen, a violent
group of Islamic fundamentalists. They overthrew the Soviet
supported government in Kabul and replaced it with a number of
successive theocracies notorious for their human rights abuses
and treatment of women and girls. They evolved into the Taliban.
The green jacket bin Laden has been seen in since 9/11 is a U.S.
military issue from the days of his partnership with the U.S.
when he was fighting against the other "Great Satan", the Soviet
Union. The current situation brings us to the 50 year mark of
excessive intervention that has resulted in massive bloodshed
throughout the third world.
In 1953, the elected president of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh,
decided to nationalize his country's oil supply, for the usual
reasons, infrastructure, health care, and education. This, of
course, outraged the U.S. and Great Britain who of course
thought the oil was theirs. After a short time it was. They
instilled the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who lived a life of
indulgence for the next 25 years. The SAVAK, the Shah's secret
police which had close ties to the CIA, any perceived threat or
demonstrations for democracy were met with imprisonment, torture
and sometimes death. Under the guidance of the CIA, leftists
were the primary target for SAVAK and in 1979 when the Islamists
swept to power under the Ayatolla Khomeini, there was little the
Shah or SAVAK could do about it. They fled to the U.S. In '54
another elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, decided it would be a
good idea to nationalize some of the unused land in Guatemala,
one of the poorest countries in the world, the land though not
being used, was claimed by United Fruit a U.S. owned company
that was under the control of U.S. Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles. And, you guessed it, the elected president had to
flee. Guatemala has been run by a military dictatorship. Over a
hundred thousand poor and indigenous people have been killed and
our bananas are cheap.
In the Congo in 1960 the U.S. had a problem, there was a new
political leader on the rise, and he was concerned about poverty
and justice in his country. They had just come out of the racist
and colonial yoke. The CIA got on it. The next year Patrice
Lumumba was dead and the U.S. had another dictator in Mobutu.
Indonesia in '65 was probably an exciting place to be, colorful,
politically lively, a strong left and an equally strong right
and a charismatic if somewhat bizarre president Sukarno was
leading a fledgling democracy. Indonesia, even then, was a major
oil producer. Of course the U.S. government was concerned and
the CIA was quite active, a little too active, they planted a
story of an eminent communist takeover and gave the right wing
military a list of "communists" that they wanted dead. The
military and Suharto dictatorship exceeded the list by between
half a million to a million in one of the worst massacres of the
20th century. (Sukarno having been kicked out of the presidency
in the U.S. planned and sponsored coup). Ten years later the
Indonesia story takes another turn. East Timor, the newly
independent former Portuguese colony is under threat from
Indonesia. The U.S. gives a green light for a takeover to
Indonesia, giving them U.S. weapons and their blessing in a
state visit [Ford and Kissinger] as their plane is leaving the
tarmac the Indonesian military makes its move invading the poor
island made up of very poor Aboriginal people. The Indonesian
military being very cruel, over time killed about 200 thousand
of the island's 800 thousand inhabitants.
A few years ago this story took another turn. In a vote East
Timor declared its own independence. The Indonesians violently
retreated off the island, burning and looting as they went. The
U.S. and Australian military were present to make sure their
former ally in crime left an interesting twist to this is that
prior to the U.S. and Australian assistance to kick out the
Indonesian occupiers, in a short article in an Australian
newspaper it was announced that oil and natural gas was found
off shore in East Timor territorial waters. [Over 400,000 were
killed in these struggles]
From '68 to '73 according to William Shawcross, a war reporter
and author of "Sideshow", about the bombing of Cambodia the U.S.
routinely and indiscriminately bombed poor villages up and down
the borders of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The numbers of non
combatants killed are unknown because there was no census but it
is likely to be very high. Another tragic atrocity that few
Americans know about but resulted from direct and violent
interference in another third world democracy. In 1970 Chile
elected its first socialist president Salvador Allende. A
medical doctor, Allende's first act as president was to make it
mandatory that all school children should be given milk during
the school day as he noticed a certain vitamin deficiency among
some of the poor children which impacted their learning. About a
third of the country lived in severe poverty and his ambition
was to rectify this and pay for the usual, infrastructure,
health care, schools. Chile's major natural resource is copper
and Allende offered the main U.S. owned copper company,
Kennecott, the current [at the time] market price for the value
of the copper mines at the time, they said no and involved the
U.S. government, chief among them Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger. In short, the U.S. enacted an embargo, boycotts and
in the end when nothing worked out to their satisfaction a coup
was orchestrated out of Washington. Salvador Allende was
assassinated on 9/11/73. The U.S. supported the Augusto Pinochet
dictatorship in which over 3,200 were murdered by Pinochet's
henchmen. Many that were murdered were women and about 25,000
more were imprisoned and tortured, all civilian leftists.
These examples of U.S. conduct and foreign policy over the past
half century are just a partial glimpse of the whole story. Our
conduct throughout the third world up to this point has been
very anti-democratic. Another aspect to this is a national
election that took place in Bolivia about five years ago in
which only 5% of the electorate voted, the reason for this being
the people had no influence in their own country. The IMF and
World Bank had taken control of the nation's financing cutting
funding for education, health care and infrastructure,
privatizing everything possible, bringing foreign investors in
so they could attempt to profit off the backs of the poor. This
has been a long war on the poor of the world. A change in
attitude and conduct is needed. A change in which mutual
respect, mutual benefit and compassion are paramount. Almost all
of the aforementioned occurrences were preceded at home by
declaration that they were being carried out for "Democracy's"
or "freedom's" sake, none of which was true. I'm proud to be an
American but many of our political leaders should be ashamed of
themselves. Whether it were Nixon and Kissinger or are Bush,
Cheney and Rumsfeld they should do the right thing not the
avaricious thing. The current situation in Liberia may provide
an opportunity to do this. With America and Americans frequent
proclamations of "We are the greatest country in the world." the
"Greatest democracy in the history of the world." and "We're
Number One.". We should strive to achieve compassion as our
nation's chief virtue, only then can we truly say we are the
greatest and number one.