Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (2 page)

On the other hand, they couldn’t
do
the same things. So for example, Kennedy could invade Cuba and launch the world’s to-date major international terrorist operation against them—which went on for years, probably still is going on.
  ²
He was able to invade South Vietnam, which he did after all: Kennedy sent the American Air Force to bomb and napalm South Vietnam and defoliate the country, and he sent troops to crush the peasant independence movement there.
  ³
And Vietnam’s an area of minor American concern, it’s way on the other end of the world. The Reagan administration tried to do similar things much closer to home in Central America, and couldn’t. As soon as they started moving towards direct intervention in Central America in the first few months of the administration in 1981, they had to back off and move to clandestine operations—secret arms sales, covert funding through client states, training of terrorist forces like the contras in Nicaragua, and so on.
  ⁴

That’s a very striking difference, a dramatic difference. And I think that difference is one of the achievements of the activism and dissidence of the last twenty-five years. In fact, the Reagan administration was forced to create a major propaganda office, the Office of Public Diplomacy: it’s not the first one in American history, it’s the second, the first was during the Wilson administration in 1917. But this one was much larger, much more extensive, it was a major effort at indoctrinating the public.
  ⁵
The Kennedy administration never had to do that, because they could trust that the population would be supportive of any form of violence and aggression they decided to carry out. That’s a big change, and it’s had its effects. There were no B-52s in Central America in the 1980s. It was bad enough, hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered—but if we’d sent B-52s and the 82nd Airborne, it would have been a lot worse. And that’s a reflection of a serious rise in domestic dissidence and activism in the United States over the past twenty-five years. The Reagan administration was forced into clandestine tactics rather than direct aggression of the sort that Kennedy was able to use in Vietnam, largely in order to pacify the domestic population. As soon as Reagan indicated that he might try to turn to direct military intervention in Central America, there was a convulsion in the country, ranging from a massive flow of letters, to demonstrations, to church groups getting involved; people started coming out of the woodwork all over the place. And the administration immediately backed off.

Also, the Reagan military budget had to level off by 1985. It did spurt, pretty much along the lines of Carter administration projections, but then it leveled off at about what it would have been if Carter had stayed in.
  ⁶
Well, why did that happen? Partly it happened because of fiscal problems arising after four years of catastrophic Reaganite deficit spending, but partly it was just because there was a lot of domestic dissidence.

And by now that dissidence is kind of irrepressible, actually. The fact that it doesn’t have a center, and doesn’t have a source, and doesn’t have an organizational structure, that has both strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses are that people get the sense that they’re alone—because you don’t see things happening down the street. And it’s possible to maintain the illusion that there’s no activism going on, because there’s nothing dramatically visible, like huge demonstrations or something; occasionally there are, but not most of the time. And there’s very little in the way of inter-communication, so all sorts of organizing can be happening in parallel, but it doesn’t feed into itself and move on from there. Those are all weaknesses. On the other hand, the strength is, it’s very hard to crush—because there’s nothing to cut off: if one thing gets eliminated, something else just comes up to take its place.

So looking over a long stretch, I don’t think it’s true that things have gotten more passive, more quiescent, more indoctrinated and so on. In fact, if anything, it’s the opposite. But it’s sort of neither more nor less, really, it’s just different.

And you can see it in all kinds of ways. I mean, public opposition to the policies of the Reagan administration kept rising—it was always very high, and it rose through the Eighties.
  ⁷
Or take the media: there have been slight changes, there’s more openness. It’s easier for dissidents to get access to the media today than it was twenty years ago. It’s not
easy
, like it’s 0.2 percent instead of 0.1 percent, but it is different. And in fact, by now there are even people
inside
the institutions who came out of the culture and experiences of the Sixties, and have worked their way into the media, universities, publishing firms, the political system to some extent. That’s had an effect as well.

Or take something like the human rights policies of the Carter administration. Now, they weren’t
from
the Carter administration really, they were from Congress—they were Congressional human rights programs which the Carter administration was forced to adapt to, to a limited extent. And they’ve been maintained through the 1980s as well: the Reagan administration had to adapt to them somewhat too. And they’ve had an effect. They’re used very cynically and hypocritically, we know all that stuff—but nevertheless, there are plenty of people whose lives have been saved by them. Well, where did those programs come from? Where they came from, if you trace it back, is kids from the 1960s who became Congressional assistants and pressed for drafting of legislation—using popular pressures from here, there and the other place to help them through. Their proposals worked their way through a couple of Congressional offices, and finally found their way into Congressional legislation.
  ⁸
New human rights organizations developed at the same time, like Human Rights Watch. And out of it all came at least a rhetorical commitment to putting human rights issues in the forefront of foreign policy concerns. And that’s not without an effect. It’s cynical, doubtless—you can show it. But still it’s had an effect.

The U.S. Network of Terrorist Mercenary States

W
OMAN
: It’s curious that you’re saying that, because I certainly didn’t have that impression. The only human rights issue the Reagan administration seemed to he concerned with was that of the Soviet Jews—I mean, they resumed funding the terror in Guatemala
.

But note how they did it: they had to sneak it in around the back. In fact, there was more funding of Guatemala under Carter than there was under Reagan, though it’s not very well known. See, the Carter administration was compelled to stop sending military aid to Guatemala by Congressional legislation in 1977, and officially they did—but if you look at the Pentagon records, funding continued until around 1980 or ’81 at just about the normal level, by various forms of trickery: you know, “things were in the pipeline,” that kind of business. This was never talked about in the press, but if you look at the records, you’ll see the funding was still going through until that time.
  ⁹
The Reagan administration had to stop sending it altogether—and in fact, what they did was turn to mercenary states.

See, one of the interesting features of the 1980s is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, the states that are involved in the World Anti-Communist League and the various military groups that unite the Western Hemisphere, Saudi Arabia to fund it, Panama—Noriega was right in the center of the thing. We caught a glimpse of it in things like the Oliver North trial and the Iran-contra hearings [Oliver North was tried in 1989 for his role in “Iran-contra,” the U.S. government’s illegal scheme to fund the Nicaraguan “contra” militias in their war against Nicaragua’s left-wing government by covertly selling weapons to Iran]—they’re international terrorist networks of mercenary states. It’s a new phenomenon in world history, way beyond what anybody has ever dreamt of. Other countries hire terrorists, we hire terrorist states, we’re a big, powerful country.

Actually, one significant thing came up in the North trial, to my surprise—I didn’t think anything was going to come up. One interesting thing was put on the record, this famous 42-page document that they referred to; I don’t know if any of you saw that.
  ¹⁰
See, the government would not allow secret documents to appear, but they did permit a summary to appear, which the judge presented to the jury saying, “You can take this to be fact, we don’t question it anymore because it’s authorized by the government.” That doesn’t mean it’s not disinformation, incidentally; it means that this is what the government was willing to say is the truth, whether it’s true or not is another question. But this 42-page document is kind of interesting. It outlines a
massive
international terrorist network run by the United States. It lists the countries that were involved, the ways we got them involved. All of it is focused on one thing in this case, the war in Nicaragua. But there were plenty of other operations going on, and if you expanded it to look at, say, Angola, and Afghanistan, and others, you’d bring in more pieces. One of the main players is Israel: they’ve helped the United States penetrate black Africa, they’ve helped support the genocide in Guatemala; when the United States couldn’t directly involve itself with the military dictatorships of the southern cone in South America, Israel did it for us.
  ¹¹
It’s very valuable to have a mercenary state like that around which is militarily advanced and technologically competent.

But the point is, what was the need to develop this huge international terrorist network involving mercenary states? It’s that the U.S. government couldn’t intervene directly whenever it wanted to anymore, so it had to do it in what amounted to quite inefficient ways. It’s a lot more efficient to do what Kennedy did, and what Johnson did—just send in the Marines. That’s efficient, it’s an efficient killing-machine, it’s not going to be exposed and put a crimp in the works, you don’t have to do it around the corners. So you’re right: the Reagan administration
did
support Guatemala—but indirectly. They had to get Israeli advisers in there, and Taiwanese counter-insurgency agents and so on.

Just to take one example of this, the Chief of Intelligence for the F.D.N., the main contra force in Nicaragua, defected about six months ago, a guy named Horacio Arce; he’s the most important defector yet. This was of course never reported in the United States, but he was very widely interviewed in Mexico.
  ¹²
And he had a lot of things to say, including details of his own training. He had been brought illegally to Eglin Air Force base in Florida, and he described in detail what the training was like there and then in San Salvador where he was sent for paratroop practice. The trainers were from all over the place: they had Spanish trainers, plenty of Israeli trainers, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Taiwanese, Dominicans, separate Japanese trainers for the Misquito Indian recruits—they’ve got a huge operation running. And it’s all clandestine, and all obviously illegal.

And it’s lethal alright, I mean, in Guatemala alone maybe a hundred thousand people were killed during the 1980s, and the popular movements were decimated.
  ¹³
But lethal as it is, it would have been a lot worse without the restrictions that have been imposed by U.S. domestic dissidence in the last twenty-five years. I think that’s the important point. If you want to measure the achievement of the popular movements here, you have to ask, what would things have been like if they hadn’t been around? And things would have been like South Vietnam in the Sixties—when the country was wiped out, and may never recover. And remember, Central America’s a much more significant concern for the United States than Vietnam: there’s a historical commitment to controlling it, it’s our own backyard, and American business wants it as the equivalent of what East Asia is to Japan, a cheap labor area for exploitation. Yet the Reagan administration was unable to intervene there at the level that Kennedy did in an area of marginal American concern, Vietnam. That’s a big change, and I think it’s primarily attributable to the domestic dissidence.

After all, what are the Iran-contra hearings about? What they’re about is the fact that the government was driven underground. Well, why was the government driven underground, why didn’t they just come out and do everything up front? They couldn’t. They couldn’t because they were afraid of their own population. And that’s significant, you know. It’s very rare that a government has had to go this deep underground in order to carry out its terrorist activities. It’s an unusual situation; I don’t even think there’s a historical precedent.

Overthrowing Third World Governments

W
OMAN
: The Allende coup in Chile—that wasn’t above ground. [Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup engineered by the C.I.A. in 1973.]

The Allende thing was underground, that’s true—but that was a one-shot affair. And even there, notice that it was done in a different style: it was done in the classic style, it was like the Iran side of the Iran-contra affair. See, there’s a classic technique when you want to overthrow a government: you arm its military. That’s the standard thing, for obvious reasons. You want to overthrow a government, who’s going to overthrow it for you? Well, the military, they’re the guys who overthrow governments. In fact, that’s the main reason for giving military aid and training all around the world in the first place, to keep contacts with our guys in the place that counts, the army.