Well, thank you. After that presentation I'll try and sort of sketch in what I take to be the sort of background in terms of U.S. global politics and some of the factors that could be the causes of the events that occurred a week from yesterday.
If I could take two sort of periods I think are watersheds periods. The first is the end of Second World War. Or as some commentators describe it the end of the first nuclear world war, since the war ended by the U.S. bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. About that, there's been a great deal of controversy. Even the Smithsonian had to withdraw an exhibition two years ago because it made suggestions, that veteran organizations and conservatives found unacceptable, about the fact that the U.S. used those bombs even though the Japanese were ready to surrender, and that Truman invented the figure of a half-million casualties if we had to invade Japan, when the Defense Department, or as it was called then, the War Department told him that the casualties would be about thirty-three thousand.
So the decision was made to massacre hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. And after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Truman said, "Now we got them where we want them." And his Secretary of War, Stimson said, "You mean the Japanese?" And Truman said, "No, I mean the Russians." That essentially the bombs were dropped as the first acts of the Cold War not as the last acts of World War Two. And they represented the position that the U.S. moved into, with great alacrity, namely being the major capitalistic imperial power of the country, or world rather.
Let me say what I mean by imperialists, since that is a term we only apply in our culture to Ancient Rome or Britain in the nineteenth century, and never to us. I take it imperialism is that system whereby one nation uses its military, and its economic and political power to dominate the land, the labor, the resources and the political institutions of other countries, for the sake of extracting wealth and resources to the benefit of its own economy, at the expense of the peoples of that country. By that definition, the United States is the greatest imperialist power in the history of the world. We now have a navy larger then all the navies of the world combined. We have a military presence in every ocean of the world, with attack aircraft carriers and the support necessary to invade at a moments notice any other country. It may take military bases in more than 90 different countries across the world, and in at least one country where the host country doesn't even want it, Guantanemo Bay, in Cuba, is the case and point.
The United States is, from the perspective of the rest of the world a rogue super power, and a rogue super power that, since 1991, has had no counter superpower to hold it in check. In 1992, a pentagon study was leaked to the Economist in Britain and published there - a high-level pentagon study - suggesting that now that we were the only superpower left in the world, we would not only not allow any potential adversaries to emerge that could any way counter our military supremacy, but we wouldn't allow any of our allies to ever reach military parity with us either. This caused a great stir in Europe, because it sounded to the Europeans as if they were about to be made subordinate client states to the U.S. Empire, as opposed to colleagues in some world order based on equality. I take it that nearly everything that's happened since 1992 has in fact indicated that that study was policy, and has been followed rather carefully since.
The other major watershed is the Vietnam War. Before the Vietnam War, from World War Two to the beginning of the Vietnam War which at least nominally was around 1964 to 1965. Actually the U.S. was involved as early as 1948, at least. The initial beginnings were 1965. From 1945 to 1965, the United States invaded, on the average, another country every eighteen months. We were a major military intervener, and none of those interventions had a declaration of war. They were essentially unilateral actions by the Executive Branch and the Pentagon.
During the Vietnam War there were numerous interventions that counted as side shows, that weren't even the subject of much attention. From the intervention to - of overthrowing the - let me just refer to my list so I don't leave anyone out. Overthrowing the democratic - liberal democratic - government of Brazil in 1964. Overthrowing the first democratically elected government in the Dominican Republic, by sending twenty five thousand marines in, in 1965. Also, backing a coup in Indonesia in 1965.
The Indonesian case was particularly interesting since the U.S. State Department and central intelligence agencies supplied the Indonesian military, which it had trained, equipped and encouraged in the coup, a list of everyone they thought to be members of the Indonesian Communist Party. The Indonesian military then set about massacring everyone on that list, more than a half-million people in the course of a year, and the State Department checked off every name as the Indonesian military reported back to them that they had been killed.
In 1967, the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected government of Greece, the first European coup the U.S. sponsored since the end of World War Two. In 1973, the United States overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. By the way, the press has pointed out lots of historical connections to this event that occurred last Tuesday. But as far as I know no one has mentioned that this was the anniversary of the U.S. sponsored coup in Chile - September 11, 1973. I take it if they like they can start looking for Chilean sources for terrorists in that country. Since the State Department is notorious for being unable to tell the Latin Americans, from Asians or Africans, there is no telling whom they'll decide to arrest.
What we're essentially looking at is a policy of continuous intervention. That the Vietnam War brought a sudden halt to. By the time that Saigon was liberated, in 1975, the United States found its self faced with a domestic population, that by the most recent estimates of that period, 82 percent of the public thought the war was illegal and morally wrong and never should have been fought to begin with. That's an overwhelming consensus, relative to the way things started in the early sixties, when Lyndon Johnson ran as the peace candidate in 1964 against Barry Goldwater, and nearly everyone thought the war in Vietnam was justified, at least according to the polls.
In 1975, the anti-Portuguese colonial forces in Angola had just succeeded in throwing out three hundred years of ruthless Portuguese colonial rule in their country. Henry Kissinger suggested to President Ford, that we should send in the troops to overthrow that outcome and to prevent the popular government from codifying its control of the country. Gerry Ford, who was not a particularly notable as an astute foreign policy analyst, suggested to Henry that perhaps the American public wouldn't put up with invading another country at precisely the time we were helicoptering the last Americans off the Saigon embassy. That probably the public wouldn't accept it.
So instead they cranked twenty-five million dollars in to aiding Jonas Savimbi's Unita. An organization supported by the apartheid regime in South Africa at the time. By the way, Unita has been responsible for massive casualties and torture to the citizens of Angola in a way that represents one of the more graphic illustrations of U.S. sponsored terrorism on a very large scale carried out by an organization that has been funded by us.
At the time, the perception was on the part of the Washington elite that the United States couldn't intervene militarily using U.S. troops. They had learned two lessons in the Vietnam War. Not the lessons they should have learned, but the ones they chose to focus on. One was that Americans would not support any military intervention that would result in large numbers of U.S. casualties, of American GIs coming home in body bags. Fifty-eight thousand came home from Vietnam, and that essentially had discouraged the American people from being willing to support further interventions. The government called it 'Vietnam Syndrome,' as if it were some kind of illness. I take it what it was is the American people had finally grown disgusted with the most powerful nation in the world using its military might, everything short of its nuclear weapons, to pulverize a country slightly larger than Massachusetts, with twice the number of bombs dropped by all sides in world war two, with fifty-eight thousand casualties for us, three million casualties for the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, and that that had left America disgusted and sick, and that they called that an illness, they saw as standing in their way instead of a healthy set of insights that America had learned their bitter lesson.
This forced them into alternative strategies. If they couldn't intervene directly, then they needed to rely on the use of mercenary forces. Mercenary forces that could be trained by the United States, equipped by the United States, but whose casualties would be a matter of indifference to the America public. Who wouldn't know any of this was going on and wouldn't be focused on questions of body counts as long as they weren't American bodies that were stacking up. So the decision to shift to the sponsorship of small group and large group and state-level terrorism by the United States was essentially a legacy of the Vietnam War, and the antiwar movement that we'd put together during that period.
I'd like to suggest that there were probably three separate forces that were responsible for the Vietnamese winning the war. First and foremost, the Vietnamese themselves. They fought for thirty years against the French colonialists, the Japanese occupiers, the French when the U.S. returned and supported them, and then the United States. Thirty years of war, at least two million casualties, and their country laid waste to, by the massive bombing that left fifteen percent of the country looking like a moonscape, and craterized. Twenty percent of the country defoliated with Agent Orange - from which birth defects still flow since there are many hot spots left in Vietnam even today.
So that, the Vietnamese get the first credit. The second credit I would give to the U.S. GIs on the ground in Vietnam. Who by 1970, were in insurrection mode. In 1970 alone nearly two hundred fifty Army officers were killed by their own troops in what the Pentagon called fragging, because the most typical method was rolling a fragmentation grenade into the tent of an officer who was intent on putting you in harms way. 'Search and destroy' missions had been replaced by 'search and avoid' missions. Where troops would go a few hundred yards into the woods and sit down for a few hours, smoke some dope, come back, and report they couldn't find the enemy. When officers insisted on actually carrying out their mission, the officers wouldn't survive the experience. So U.S. GIs, first led by troops of color, then ultimately led by GIs on the ground in general, forced Nixon into an air war first, and then ultimately forced him to withdraw from Vietnam.
And indeed, there was a great deal of panic and concern in the Pentagon, that all those troops coming home from Vietnam with guerilla warfare skills and souvenir weapons would in fact turn around and raise an insurrection on the ghettos of the United States. Which is why Nixon armed the police forces of the major urban areas with tanks, and half-tracks, and machine guns and turned them into paramilitary organizations in anticipation of the revolution, that unfortunately never happened, but which he was terribly fearful of. By the way as a side note, a similar fear was held by the Portuguese dictatorship, the Salazar dictatorship and it was overthrown by its disenchanted vets from the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa, so Nixon's fears weren't entirely unfounded.
And of course the third group that gets credit for ending the war was the antiwar movement itself. The broad base of Americans who took action in a variety of ways, from resisting the draft to harboring draft resistors. Vermont was itself - we hear a lot about the nineteenth century Underground Railroad and slaves escaping the South - during the Vietnam War the commune system - there were more than sixty communes in the state in the late 1960s - who were an underground railroad for deserters and resistors to get from here to Canada or from wherever they were coming, passing through Vermont to Canada, so there was a long and rich tradition of resistance at various levels, legal and illegal, that finally helped contribute to bringing that war to an end.
But that left the United States with a problem. As early as 1973, Nixon had realized that U.S. intervention was over as a policy, and he and Kissinger developed what they called the 'Surrogate Strategy.' The 'Surrogate Strategy' was to find certain regional powers arm them to the teeth, and have them protect U.S. economic and geopolitical interests without risking U.S. casualties. And they picked a few surrogates that are interesting I think in terms of tonight's discussion.
First, they picked the Shah of Iran. Who had himself been installed by the U.S. overthrow of the democratic Mossadegh government in 1953. The first major overthrow of a democratic government by the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency after World War Two. Which would be followed in the following year of the overthrow of the democratic government of Arbenz of Guatemala, to begin that same process here. But the Shah was installed in 1954, and picked as our man in the eastern end of Middle East. And he was going to protect our interests in the Persian Gulf. By the time he was overthrown, in 1979, he had the fifth largest military establishment in the world, provided for him by the United States.
He also had one of the most notorious secret police, the Savak. Who were trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, who murdered over one hundred thousand Iraqis, many of them tortured in front of their children, or tortured their children in front of them. The Savak was notorious for achieving grotesque levels of torture. So that in an important sense, the U.S. not only created the Savak, but the Savak murdered the middle and left end of the Iraqi political I'm sorry Iranian - political spectrum leaving so they also wind up leaving us with Khomeini. That is when the U.S. Shah was overthrown, Khomeini was the only one left to takeover. Thus in effect the U.S. was indirectly responsible for creating the beginnings of fundamentalist movement that's been a source of such distress lately.
The other surrogate picked was Israel, at the western end of U.S. oil interests. And Israel receives three to four billion dollars a year in military aid. The highest recipient of aid of any U.S. client state, and it makes it possible for it to maintain the most militarized economy then any country in the world. So that in a sense, provides both the context and the situation that we find so explosively near the edge now in terms of the conflict over Palestinian autonomy and the right to a nation-state. They also pick as surrogates Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship in Nicaragua to protect U.S. interests in Central America. And the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines to protect U.S. interests in the Philippine basin.
By 1979, everything began to unravel. The Shah was overthrown, that raised questions about who was going to protect U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf. 1979 was also the year of the Sandinista victory against Somoza in Nicaragua, so suddenly there was no surrogate to protect U.S. interests in Central America. And it was only a couple years after that Marcos went down, too. So that in effect their surrogate strategy seemed in deep trouble. And that left the U.S. facing both the impossibility of using direct military intervention, at the same time there was a question of how it was going to police those parts of the world in which its interests had been protected by those surrogate forces. The result was, I take it, to a shift of increased levels of small-group terrorist training.
By the way I should mention as a kind of background for this that the U.S. operated, from 1946 until 1987, a school not widely unknown to even exist in the United States, the U.S. Army School of Americas. Which based in Panama trained some forty thousand Latin American military personnel to return to their home country and serve as death squads in order to assassinate - torture and assassinate - labor leaders, priests and nuns involved in peasant land reform movements, the peasants themselves. The body count that has been racked up by U.S. trained members of the School of Americas - graduates of the School of Americas - is formidable. Some estimates run as high as five to six hundred thousand people for all of Latin America for that forty years. My guess is those are conservative estimates.
By the way, in 1987 the school was forced back to the United States cause Manuel Noriega, a graduate of the school, who decided that he could no longer afford to look like a puppet of the Washington so he threw the school out. The response was of course to invade Panama two years later, to illegally seize him and accuse him of drug running. But it turned out the bag of white powder they found in his home was tortilla flour. That didn't make any difference he was still a sort of former client turned into a victim of U.S. foreign policy.
One of the things that the Reagan administration did all through the 1980s, though as Helen pointed out the Carter administration should be given more credit for being more Reagan-like then it generally is. One of the things the Reagan administration did was to establish a collection of terrorist organizations to carry out U.S. policy. It established the Contras in Nicaragua, former Somoza national guardsmen who had been displaced from the Sandinista revolution, who were trained and equipped to serve as the Contras. And their task was to murder teachers, health care workers, village leaders, members of the Sandinista government - if they could find them. There was even a comic book published by the Central Intelligence Agency, in Spanish, that gave instructions on how to commit acts of sabotage and assassination and that was distributed to the Contras and anyone else they thought might take them seriously and use them.
The estimates are that at least thirty thousand were killed in Nicaragua by the Contras, over a period from 1984 to 1989 - I'm sorry 1990. A similar process happened as I mentioned before in Angola. So we had Contras in Africa and Central America and the decision to train the Mujahideen represented our Contras at the far end of the Mediterranean. So in effect we were actively using mercenaries carrying out terrorism on a large scale, in three different continents at the same time. All because our government felt it couldn't send in the troops. What ultimately happened as a result of that process, is that U.S. government felt increasingly constrained by Vietnam Syndrome, so it set about curing us. The cure started with a small inoculation.
In 1983, Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. Grenada is an island about the size of the city Detroit; it has a hundred thousand population and no army. It was a very easy intervention. Although we did wind up losing a couple of dozen U.S. troops both from friendly fire and crashed planes. A friend of mine, Paul McIsaac, who used to work at WGDR at Goddard, was a WBAI reporter out of New York. He decided to violate the ban on independent journalist covering the invasion. He and a friend rented a launch, and set out to cover the invasion of Grenada on their own as independent journalists. They were seized on the high seas by the U.S. Navy, and held for forty-eight hours – incognito - until the invasion was over.
Cause I take it the other lesson the U.S. learned in Vietnam, besides body counts, was media coverage. The media in Vietnam were all over the place. They were independent media, journalists from Europe and Asia. So there was no real control over what people found out about the war. The My Lai Massacre was finally made public as a result of Dutch and Japanese journalists pressing the issue in a way that it made it impossible for U.S. press to ignore. So that the second lesson, control the media, was in its first instance worked out in Grenada. Where only certain carefully selected members of the national press corps, whom were sympathetic to U.S. policy objectives, were allowed to cover the war.
That was our first inoculation against the Vietnam Syndrome, overcoming that disease. In 1989, newly elected George Bush Senior decided we should have a second inoculation. That was somewhat more costly, that was the invasion of Panama in 1989. In that case, we had a strictly controlled press corps. The only people allowed in had to have Pentagon press credentials and the Pentagon reviewed their materials before they were submitted to the public for publication.
This process would be tightened even more for the Gulf Massacre - the Gulf War - two years later. But by that time the process had been well worked out. The public would only see what the Pentagon chose to allow us to see. And the U.S. body count would be kept relatively low. Although there continue to be reports of large numbers of U.S. casualties than what were officially reported from that war. Since some soldiers, interviewed on the Pacifica station after the war was over, said they personally put two hundred fifty U.S. casualties, who were killed by friendly fire, paratroopers killed by U.S. forces on the ground as they were in the air, and that those were never reported.
There was, by the way, a long history all through the war in Central America in the 1980s of reporting U.S. advisors who were killed as killed in training accidents in Arizona or New Mexico. So that was a way of preventing the public from knowing there were any casualties at all from that war.
By 1990, when the situation in Iraq was transforming itself. I take it the U.S. was looking for the final and decisive cure to the Vietnam Syndrome. Indeed when that war ended the first thing President Bush said publicly was now we've beaten the Vietnam Syndrome. Suggesting that that was a central objective to the war.
I'd like to back up just a bit, and suggest that the public at large doesn't understand the circumstances of that war. The U.S. had been an ally of Iraq's during the Iran-Iraq war. I was involved in doing draft counseling and counseling for military personnel facing recall. And one person that came to me was a GI who had been in the Air Force, doing intelligence missions flying over Iraq - I'm sorry flying over Iran - and then providing the airborne intelligence they gathered to Iraq, as part of the U.S. support for Iraq in that war. And the reason for the U.S. support for Iraq was essentially the U.S. had armed Iran to the teeth, then those arms fell into Khomeini's hands, so it was necessary to cut Iran down to size and Iraq was available to do it.
Of course, after Iraq cut Iran down to size, and between them they lost nearly a million people in that war from 1982 to 1988, then the U.S. was confronted with having to cut Iraq down to size. Since it had now become potentially the dominant regional power. So it set about doing several things.
First, it encouraged Kuwait to carry out acts of economic warfare against Iraq. Kuwait was given slant-drilling technology by U.S. multinational oil companies that allowed them to drill at an angle under the border with Iraq. And steal hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from them, in an act of economic warfare.
The second thing is Kuwait undercut - I'm sorry - overproduced its OPEC limit on oil production. So that they were producing vastly more oil then they were supposed to, driving down the price of oil. For Iraq that resulted, according Abbas Alnasrawi, our OPEC specialist in the [University of Vermont] Economics department, a loss for Iraq of eighteen billion dollars a year of oil revenues. Kuwait on the other hand, made out like a bandit, they had invested so many petrol dollars in the U.S. economy that keeping the price of oil low actually raised the value of their investments in the United States in a way that compensated for them selling oil for less than its agreed upon price.
So they were doing economic sabotage of Iraq's economy, by their oil production. And finally, they were the only Middle Eastern country that had provided money to Iraq to fight against Iran who demanded an immediate repayment, of some ten million dollars in war debt. Every other Arab state remitted that debt, in gratitude to Saddam Hussein for having stopped the spread of fundamentalism out of Iran. Those were the three acts of war the U.S. encouraged Kuwait to carry out against Iraq.
The U.S. ambassador met with Saddam Hussein - the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq - met with Saddam Hussein two weeks before the invasion. And she said we don't have any treaty commitments to Kuwait, this is an Arab-Arab conflict, settle it any way you like we won't be involved. The U.S. under Secretary of State Kelly, for Mideast affairs said the same thing to Congress, covered on CNN and watched in Baghdad three days before the invasion. So essentially, the U.S. enticed Saddam into invading Kuwait and then used it as the means to put a half million troops in the Persian Gulf and control the oil supplies of the Gulf region.
Prior to that time Saudi Arabia and other sympathetic client dictatorships had been unwilling to see the U.S. presence in the Gulf because it would have destabilized their own legitimacy as governments. They would have looked like, what they were, clients of the United States. After the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, all that objection melted away, and the U.S. became the permanent military presence in the gulf. We still have some sixteen thousand troops, attack aircraft carriers and support units in the Gulf and enough supplies there to put a half million troops back in, in the space of a few months, to control anything that goes on in the Gulf.
By the way, only about fourteen percent of our oil came from the Gulf at the time. Another four percent came from Iraq and Kuwait gulf combined. So U.S. oil - while that was used to mobilize people here into the fear of lines at the gas stations - wasn't the reason why the U.S. was involved. I take it that the more likely explanation is that our chief economic competitors were vastly more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than we are. Germany at the time got sixty percent of its energy from the Persian Gulf; Japan ninety percent. The reason they were both reluctant to help pay for that war, is because they weren't sure they were going to be the beneficiaries of having the U.S. Empire able to shut off their energy supplies and bring their economies to its knees - or their knees – at any time.
So those were conditions that led the U.S. to entice Saddam into invading. And then Saddam made immediately offers to negotiate. By late August, the invasion was the beginning of August, Iraq offered to withdraw all of Kuwait, except the contested border region where the Rumaila oil field was, and two offshore islands.
Even former Republican State Department officials said that was a perfectly adequate basis for negotiating. Bush refused to negotiate. And those refusals continued all through the fall. And for those of you who are old enough to remember it, we had our first war where there was a countdown, in which we knew that on January 16 the war was going to start. So we could organize an antiwar movement knowing when the war was going to begin, and they could try and stop us from organizing. It was a very bizarre period. And the result was for the U.S. to intentionally start that war on January 16, and to claim between two and three hundred thousand casualties, depending on which UN estimates you use, in six weeks of the most intense bombing in human history.
That bombing also included eighty-eight tons of depleted uranium, and so it was, in a sense, the second atomic war. Since depleted uranium - well the phrase depleted makes it sound safe - is in fact radioactive for several hundred thousand years, and able to claim human casualties for that period of time. Since the war itself ended, the bombing phase, there's been a fourteen-fold increase in leukemia, and other related cancers based on the exposure to depleted uranium. By the way, ‘saving Kosovo' involved dropping depleted uranium on them, two years ago. As if that were going to make it safe for anyone to re-inhabit after it had been done. The U.S. in effect carried out a systematic policy in Iraq. Since the Iraqi war ended, the U.S. having bombed the sewage treatment facilities, and then illegally blockaded the flow of medicine and food to the country, has claimed casualties of over a million people; estimates are about three-quarters of those were children.
Madeleine Albright, as Secretary of State, in the last year, was asked by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes whether the loss of three-quarters of a million was worth it, and without a hesitation she said yes it was worth the cost. When you look for why people are so angry that they're willing to destroy themselves in order to attack miserable symbols of U.S. power, that kind of answer is part of the answer to that question. And its certainly, well its not a justified behavior, but its not an irrational behavior in terms of the inability to understand what provoked people to do that.
So I would argue what we're seeing now in terms of the current crisis is an attempt to return to a pre-Vietnam Syndrome period. We're being told we're going to have to send land troops in, ground troops wherever we decide to invade, whenever we decide who is responsible, and that that's likely to result in casualties. We're being told we have to accept casualties again as a way of saying you can't continue the Vietnam Syndrome with respect to Americans in body bags anymore.
By the way if we send troops into Afghanistan, its now estimated by international organizations working to rid the planet of land mines, that eighty percent of all the unexploded land mines in the world are located in Afghanistan, planted by Soviet forces during their ten year war there. So you can expect a high number of casualties if that's the place we have to send in ground troops into. So that's certainly part of what's going on.
I also take there's also a sense that they can massively increase the military budget. Even though there's now a recession and a shortfall - and estimates always exaggerated about what the surplus will be. That essentially they could roll back all the efforts of the last decade to get a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War by terrorizing us in a way the Cold War was itself a way of terrorizing the public into accepting a permanently militarized economy. And I take it that was the main legacy of the Second World War, to discover that we could only prevent an economic crisis by permanently militarizing our economy at the expense of meeting human needs and providing social services. So they're preparing to do that.
They're also laying the groundwork, as Helen suggested, for a massive repression of all movements that are against their momentum both in terms of globalized corporate, so-called free trade as opposed to humane fair trade and to prevent any kind of movements in opposition that might handicap them politically. So we'll see domestic repression, massive increase in military spending, and a likelihood of a protracted war that will simply produce more desperate people with nothing left to lose who are willing to do what the people did to the Pentagon and the World Trade Center last week.
And as Helen suggested, I think the only people in the world who are in an adequate position to do anything but this coming nightmare, is the American population. Where are, as Che Guevara once suggested, ‘in the belly of the monster'. Some people asked Che if they should leave the United States and come to Cuba. And he said no, "Stay where you are. It's terribly important for all the peoples of the world that there be a movement in opposition to this militarism and to global domination that ultimately transforms the United States into the sort of humane nation that our people that it was all along. And which will diffuse the desperation that led to the events of a week ago Tuesday
Compiled by Aaron Hawley and posted on the SPARC web space.