Year 501 (18 page)

In fairness, we should mention a sign of economic progress now that the US has regained control: marketing of shoe cement to fill the children's bottles, imported through a multinational supplier, has become a lucrative business.
27

A conference attended by government officials and NGOs in Managua in August 1991 concluded that the country now has 250,000 addicts and is becoming an international bridge for drug transport, (in comparison 400,000 addicts are reported in Costa Rica, 450,000 in Guatemala, 500,000 in El Salvador). Addiction is increasing particularly among young people. A conference organizer commented that “In 1986 there wasn't one reported case of hard drugs consumption” while “in 1990, there were at least 12,000 cases.” 118 drug dealing operations were identified in Managua alone, though it is the Atlantic Coast that has become the international transit point for hard drugs, leading to increased addiction. US journalist Nancy Nusser reports from Managua that cocaine has become “readily available only since president Violeta Chamorro took office in April 1990,” according to dealers. “There wasn't any coke during the Sandinistas' time, just marijuana,” one dealer said. Minister of Government Carlos Hurtado said that “the phenomenon of cocaine trafficking existed before, but at a low level.” Now it is burgeoning, primarily through the Atlantic Coast according to “a ranking Western diplomat with knowledge of drug trafficking” (probably from the US Embassy), who describes the Coast now as “a no man's land.” In the
Miami Herald
, Tim Johnson reports that El Salvador too “is finding itself afflicted by a new scourge: drug trafficking.” It is now outranked only by Panama and Guatemala as a corridor for cocaine shipments to the US.
28

Drugs are becoming “the newest growth industry in Central America,”
CAR
reports, as a result of the “severe economic conditions in which 85 percent of the Central American population live in poverty” and the lack of jobs, conditions exacerbated by the neoliberal onslaught. But the problem has not reached the level of Colombia, where security forces armed and trained by the US are continuing their rampage of terror, torture, and disappearances, targeting political opposition figures, community activists, trade union leaders, human rights workers, and the peasant communities generally while US aid “is furthering the corruption of the Colombian security forces and strengthening the alliance of blood between right-wing politicians, military officers and ruthless narcotics traffickers,” according to human rights activist Jorge Gómez Lizarazo, a former judge. The situation in Peru is still worse.
29

These are only symptoms of much deeper malaise, to which we return in Part III.

5. After the Cold War

There is little reason to expect that “the great work of subjugation and conquest” will change in any fundamental way with the passing of the Cold War phase of the North-South conflict. But as always, stable policies must be adapted to changing contingencies, as they were when a New World Order was established in 1945, and again when Richard Nixon announced his “New Economic Policy” in 1971, in both cases, reflecting real changes in the distribution of power. The Soviet decline that accelerated from the late 1970s yields a situation that is also new in a number of respects, though major tendencies persist, including the internationalization of production and finance, the disorders of the affluent alliance, the relative weakening of the still-dominant US economy, and the marginalization of much of the domestic public of the world-dominant societies.

One consequence of the Soviet collapse is the project of imposing the neoliberal mode of subordination on large parts of the region. A second is that new pretexts are needed for intervention. Despite much bombast, the problem of the vanishing pretext was recognized through the 1980s. The population was therefore regaled with international terrorists, Hispanic narcotraffickers, Islamic fundamentalists, crazed Arabs, and other useful constructions, as attempts were made to adapt the standard formula for diverting and subduing the public: fear of some Great Satan, followed by awe as our Grand Leaders heroically overcome him and march on to new triumphs. Regular confrontations were manufactured with the convenient Libyan punching bag; Grenada was about to cut off sea lines and bomb us from a Cuban-built airbase; Sandinistas were spreading their “revolution without borders” and advancing on Texas; Noriega (after he was fired) was leading the Colombian cartel to poison our children; Saddam Hussein stepped out of line and became the Beast of Baghdad, etc. But in general, as the variety of targets illustrates, the formula is not available as routinely as before. President Bush has been criticized for his failure to formulate grand designs in the manner of his predecessors, but that is unfair, given the disappearance of the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to which JFK could appeal, and its variants. The standard formula may lose its effectiveness for other reasons too, as conditions of life decline for the superfluous population.

Other consequences were pointed out forthrightly by rational analysts. In a 1988 end-of-year analysis of the Cold War in the
New York Times
, Dimitri Simes wrote that the impending disappearance of the Soviet enemy offers the US three advantages: first, we can shift NATO costs to European competitors; second, we can end “the manipulation of America by third world nations,” “resist unwarranted third world demands for assistance,” and strike a harder bargain with “defiant third world debtors”; and third, military power can be used more freely “as a United States foreign policy instrument...against those who contemplate challenging important American interests,” with no fear of “triggering counterintervention,” the deterrent having been removed. In brief, the US can regain some power within the rich men's club, tighten the screws on the Third World, and resort more freely to violence against defenseless victims. The senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was right on target.
30

The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 can be taken as the symbolic end of the Cold War. After that, it took real dedication to conjure up the Soviet threat, though habits die slowly. Thus, in early 1990, much excitement was generated by a document published anonymously by University of California Sovietologist Martin Malia, railing about how Brezhnev had “intervened at will throughout the Third World” and “Russia bestrode the world” while “the liberal-to-radical mainstream of Anglo-American Sovietology” regarded Stalinism as having “a democratic cast,” indulging in “blatant fantasies...about democratic Stalinism” and “puerile fetishization of Lenin,” along with a host of similar insights apparently picked up in some Paris café. But in the 1990s, only the most disciplined minds can handle this kind of fare with appropriate gravity.
31

Much can be learned about the Cold War era by observing what happened after the Berlin wall fell. The case of Cuba is instructive. For 170 years, the US has sought to prevent Cuban independence. From 1959, the pretext for invasion, terror, and economic warfare was the security threat posed by this outpost of the Kremlin. With the threat gone, the reaction was uniform: we must step up the attack. The banner is now democracy and human rights, upheld by political leaders and moralists who have demonstrated their commitment to these values with such integrity over the years, for example, during the murderous US crusade against the Church and others who dared organize the undeserving public in Central America through the 1980s. It would not be easy to invent a clearer demonstration of the fraudulence of the Cold War pretext; being doctrinally unacceptable, the conclusions remain invisible (see chapter 6).

US opposition to Haitian independence for two centuries also continued, quite independently of the Cold War. Events of the 1980s, notably after the fall of the Berlin wall, also illustrate with much clarity traditional US distaste for democracy and indifference to human rights. We return to details (chapter 8).

Another instructive example is Saddam Hussein, a favored friend and trading partner of the West right through his worst atrocities. As the Berlin wall was tottering in October 1989, the White House intervened directly, in a highly secret meeting, to ensure that Iraq would receive another $1 billion in loan guarantees, overcoming Treasury and Commerce department objections that Iraq was not creditworthy. The reason, the State Department explained, was that Iraq was “very important to US interests in the Middle East”; it was “influential in the peace process” and was “a key to maintaining stability in the region, offering great trade opportunities for US companies.” As is the norm, Saddam Hussein's crimes were of no account until he committed the crime of disobedience. And the West soon returned to tacit support for him against an even greater enemy, freedom and democracy in the Third World, as already discussed.
32

Again the lesson is clear: the priorities are profits and power; democracy in more than form is a threat to be overcome; human rights are of instrumental value for propaganda purposes, nothing more.

As Simes had observed, one consequence of the Soviet collapse is that overt intervention became a more feasible option. It comes as small surprise, then, that Bush should inaugurate the post-Cold War era by invading Panama to save us from the arch-demon Noriega, after a carefully designed propaganda campaign to which the press lent its considerable talents, even suppressing the fact that the invasion was accompanied by the announcement of new aid for Bush's friends in Beijing and Baghdad, who made Noriega look like a choirboy in comparison. Real interests again were served: US business partners were placed back in power, the security forces were returned to US control, and Washington was able to direct the fate of the Panama Canal. The meaning of the Cold War is once again dramatically illustrated, though the doctrinal system remains immune.
33

The second act of post-Cold War aggression was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, shifting Saddam Hussein overnight from moderate-who-is-improving to reincarnation of Attila the Hun. The US-UK alliance moved quickly to bar the diplomatic track for fear that peaceful means might “defuse the crisis” with “a few token gains” for their former friend, as the Administration position was outlined by
Times
diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman in late August. Had these fears been realized, the invasion would have resembled the US invasion of Panama, an unacceptable outcome of course. The
Times
and its colleagues dutifully suppressed the opportunities for a negotiated Iraqi withdrawal that opened from mid-August, according to high-ranking US officials. On the eve of the January 15, 1991 bombing, the US population, by about 2 to 1, favored a diplomatic settlement along the lines of an Iraqi proposal that had been released by US officials, but were unaware of the existence of this proposal, and the instant US rejection of it, thanks to media discipline. The rascal multitude, once again, was kept in its proper place. At no time was the Administration called upon to present an argument for war rather than diplomacy—at least one that could not be refuted instantly by a literate teenager. The doctrinal institutions succeeded brilliantly in excluding every fundamental question that would have arisen in a functioning democracy.

The war policy was also strongly opposed by the population in the region. The Iraqi democratic opposition, always rebuffed by Washington (hence the press), opposed US policy throughout: the pre-August 1990 support for the Iraqi dictator, the refusal to explore peaceful means, and finally the tacit support for Saddam Hussein as he crushed the Shi'ite and Kurdish rebellions. One leading spokesman, banker Ahmad Chalabi, who described the outcome of the war as “the worst of all possible worlds” for the Iraqi people, attributed the US stand to its traditional policy of “supporting dictatorships to maintain stability.” In Egypt, the one Arab ally with a degree of internal freedom, the semi-official press wrote that the outcome demonstrated that the United States only wanted to cut Iraq down to size and thus to establish its own unchallenged hegemony, in “collusion with Saddam himself” if necessary, agreeing with the “savage beast” on the need to “block any progress and abort all hopes, however dim, for freedom or equality and for progress towards democracy” (April 9). The media suppressed the basic facts throughout with their usual discipline. Thus, immediately after Egypt denounced the US for colluding with Saddam,
Times
correspondent Alan Cowell informed the public of the “strikingly unanimous view” among the Arab allies in support of the US position that “whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression” (April 11). The
Times
does deserve credit, however, for Friedman's lucid explanation of why we must seek some clone of Saddam Hussein to rule with an “iron fist” rather than face the threat of freedom for the people of Iraq (“instability”).

The United Nations suffered further blows. The invasion of Kuwait was unusual in that the US and UK opposed an act of international violence, and thus did not pursue their usual resort to the veto or other means to block UN efforts to reverse the crime. But under US pressure, the Security Council was compelled to wash its hands of the matter, radically violating the UN Charter by leaving individual states free to act as they chose. Further US pressures prevented the Council from responding to the call of member states for meetings, as stipulated by council rules that the United States had vigorously upheld when they served its interests. That Washington has little use for diplomatic means or institutions of world order, unless they can be used as instruments of its own power, has been dramatically illustrated in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central America, and elsewhere. Nothing is likely to change in this regard, including the efficiency with which the facts are concealed.
34