Nation-Busting Euphoria, Nation-Building Fatigue

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The United States has a long tradition of arrogance, racism, unilateralism, and disregard of international law in its external dealings. So while it is easy to imagine that the Bush-Cheney- Rumsfeld Axis of Evil represents something new, it doesn’t, it is merely more frightening because of the power and global scope and effects of this Axis, which owns and is eager to use a truly massive arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Axis leaders pretend to be quaking in their boots at somebody else’s possession of such weapons (the mainstream media and intellectuals quake with them), but they pose the real global threat of their use.

The readiness with which the media and intellectuals adapt to and serve their leaders’ rampaging surprises many who don’t grasp the extent to which the corporate media are a part of the imperial enterprise and structure and how naturally the intellectual community accepts and works within the parameters fixed by imperial needs. If the structure of imperialism gives the United States the power to impose its will in many foreign locales, its institutions and intelligentsia will, as a matter of course, normalize and support the ensuing projection of power. The liberals will do this with varying degrees of enthusiasm, some reluctantly, calling for “multilaterally” accepted constraints—and attacks—on “rogues” (they never question the identification of rogues), and the acceptance of “responsibilities” for “nation-building,” rather than unilateral actions and quick exit while readying the imperial center for follow-on campaigns. But many liberals, along with the mainstream majority and right wing, are enthused about the new projection of power in the interest of “self defense” against terrorism.

Given that the superpower’s leaders put its interests first, and especially those of its dominant transnational corporations; that they are greatly affected by domestic political considerations, including the demands of the more powerful lobbies; that the leadership doesn’t care a fig for legalisms, and has contempt for the bleeding heart weaklings among their allies, the superpower leaders have felt free to run roughshod over international law and traditional notions of justice. The resultant challenges to the media and intellectuals to rationalize the law violations, the use of force, and the bullying to get allies and clients in line have been severe. But media and intellectuals have met this challenge impressively.

For example, we regularly encounter the notion of “nation-building,” but never of “nation-busting,” although arguably that has been the primary role of the United States for decades. It shattered Indochina, and when it exited in 1975 it not only didn’t help rebuild but instead imposed a long boycott on its victim. It destroyed the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and reduced Nicaragua to the stone age, but even after it succeeded in getting into power its own neoliberal leadership in 1990, it abandoned its victim and has allowed it to remain a basket case ever since. It helped South Africa and “freedom fighter” Savimbi crush Angola, and then left. It smashed Iraq in 1991, and then, as with Vietnam, inflicted further severe damage on its victim via “sanctions of mass destruction.” Serbia and Kosovo were severely damaged, and then abandoned. Afghanistan has been treated similarly.

The United States suffers from “nation-building fatigue” even before it can do more than hand out some candy bars to orphaned children. But its liberals still prate about its responsibilities and the importance of it completing its good works after devastating a country in the process of replacing a demon (usually a former U.S. agent), failing to note the regularity with which it runs after it does its hit. (William Blum speaks of “America’s ‘traditional policy’ of zero reconstruction.”) The U.S. official view is that since the United States has done such yeoman service in busting some poor country, others should take on the responsibility of nation-building. Clinton and Albright left it to the Europeans to reconstruct Kosovo (and to bring it that still elusive stability and justice), just as Bush and Powell call for others to do the same in Afghanistan. The trouble is that those other countries may not have agreed that busting was desirable or that it should be they who do the reconstruction, which is more difficult and expensive than just dropping bombs. Maybe the country that bombs should have the responsibility of “nation-building” and not be able to shunt it to others. This pattern of busting without followup reconstruction is not featured in the media or by the intellectual community.

Nor is the fact that “preemption” and “regime change” by invasion and/or subversion is in straightforward violation of Articles 1 and 2 of the UN Charter and the most basic element of international law—the prohibition of an armed attack on another state. That process of regime change, which the Bush administration proposes to carry out against Iraq is called “aggression,” except in cases where the U.S. (or one of its clients like Israel or Indonesia) indulges in it. It is testimony to the advanced state of degradation of the “international community” that the DC Axis can announce many months in advance that it intends to commit aggression against Iraq, but this is not denounced as a Hitler-worthy enterprise that the world community must oppose by all necessary means. Instead, the U.S. is appeased almost without limit—“we” all agree that it means well, that its target is monstrous and a true threat to the U.S. and everybody else, but we must remove this threat slowly and in stages and not just let the U.S. start bombing tomorrow. The idea that the Iraq threat is a sick joke, and that that country has been a victim of serious war crimes committed by the U.S., its poodle, and the UN, and that the U.S. and poodle are the main global threat, is outside the realm of polite discourse.

The U.S. is also appeased in its desire to be free of any threat that its citizens might be hauled before an international crimes court. It regards itself as the global God (or Godfather), who brings justice (or breaks kneecaps) as the law-justice giver (or enforcer) and is above or outside the law. It claims to fear “frivolous” or “politicized” actions against his citizens; it likes instead Tribunals like the Yugoslavia Tribunal now dealing with Milosevic that is not “political” because under the U.S.’s firm control (NATO’s public relations person Jamie Shea even acknowledged this control in a press conference of May 17, 1999, but the U.S. media and intellectuals didn’t notice or care, given that the U.S. was—once again—pursuing a just cause).

Strenuous efforts have been made by the international community to assure the U.S. of the unlikelihood that its personnel would be hauled before the court, but there has been little discussion of the threat that if it joined the court, it would throw its weight around, dominate and compromise its judicial integrity as it has done with the Yugoslavia Tribunal. Such a point doesn’t arise, nor is the brazenness of it putting itself in a special category above the law. The U.S. has even gotten belligerent on the matter of an international court outside its control. Its congress has passed a law called the American Service Members Protection Act—in the dissident media referred to as “The Netherlands Invasion Act”—which calls for the armed forces to recover by force any U.S. citizen taken into custody by any purported international crimes tribunal. However, not to worry: U.S. war crimes ambassador, Pierre-Richard Prosper, has assured the world that an invasion of the Hague to recover U.S. prisoners of crime tribunals is not automatic; it is merely “within [the president’s] range of tools. It’s not mandatory.”

It is also worth noting that the United States never apologizes for anything it does. At most, when it can’t wriggle out of responsibility for killing large numbers of innocent civilians, as in the assault on the wedding festivities at Kakarak in Afghanistan on July 1, 2002, or the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner on July 3, 1988 (with 290 dead), it may express “regrets” and offer some compensation to survivors. But apologies are for the Japanese, Germans, and others, not for the U.S. This is because it always means well, is responding in just causes, and the world owes it a debt for the service it is rendering. As Human Rights Watch (and Washington Post) analyst William Arkin said to Afghans, “When are you going to pay the US for the cost of the bombs and the jet fuel and the American lives selflessly given,...all done so you can have a future?” (WP, April 9, 2002). But besides this selfless purpose in U.S. actions abroad, surely God (or Godfather) cannot be expected to apologize.

It is a long tradition in the liberal mainstream to exhort U.S. officials to get their nasty clients to be good, in accord with “our values.” This is of course important right now when “our values” are allegedly in competition with those of al Qaeda and other terrorist forces that represent evil values. A small problem surfaced when we supported the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, whose murderous proclivities match those of the Taliban. The Northern Alliance has not only killed and raped in Pashtun territory during the past year, it starved and killed Taliban prisoners on a large scale, even after the Northern Alliance and U.S. forces together had negotiated a protected surrender.

In a recent op-ed column, Holly Burkhalter, U.S. policy director for the Physicians for Social Responsibility, points out that the U.S. failure to “come to grips with the consequences of alliances with local forces [who]...show little respect for the laws of armed conflict...resulted in the execution of hundreds of captured combatants and the imprisonment of thousands of others in life-threatening squalor.” (“POW Atrocities: An Ugly Lesson,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2002.) She urges, among other things, that this country should require military personnel to protect civilian populations and, “if atrocities are committed by local partners...secure all evidence, carry out a full investigation and hold accountable those responsible.”

While these are well-meaning recommendations, they gloss over fundamental facts that show the United States to be not so innocent of the crimes in question and to have a policy directly contrary to Burkhalter’s recommendations, for clear and obvious reasons. She also ignores history, recent and more distant. In the recent Afghan war it is on the record that the United States used air power to kill hundreds of prisoners during a prison revolt in the Qala-i-Janghi prison. There is also evidence that U.S. personnel abused Taliban prisoners and were on the scene and did nothing to hinder the stuffing of the prisoners in containers for the death convoy (documented in Jamie Doran’s film Massacre at Mazar, suppressed by the U.S. media).

Burkhalter understates the number probably executed (there are several thousand missing of the 8,000 who surrendered at Kunduz). Her appeal to preserve the evidence and prosecute the killers flies in the face of the U.S. refusal to do that in this very case, and the clear U.S. failure to acknowledge its own killings in Afghanistan, along with a systematic effort to keep them out of sight. Burkhalter can’t acknowledge that it might be U.S. policy to allow or possibly even encourage its clients to kill prisoners, even though Rumsfeld said, “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders, nor are we in a position, with relatively small numbers of forces on the ground, to accept prisoners.” He also said he would “do everything I could” to prevent these people “who have done terrible things” to leave Afghanistan and be free to fight again (Department of Defense Briefing, November 19, 2001; Ian Cobain and Damian Whitworthy, “America Will Take No Prisoners,” Times of London, November 20, 2001).

Burkhalter also fails to recognize that covering up civilian killings of our bombings allows a more lavish use of firepower, killing more enemy cadres—even if at the expense of heavy civilian casualties—and helps keep our own casualties down (see Edward Herman, “Body Counts in Imperial Service,” Z, February 2002; and “‘Tragic Errors’ in U.S. Military Policy,” Z, October 2002).

Looking back further in history, the United States has long supported torture and death squad-prone clients. The rise in torture in the 1960s and 1970s was closely correlated with flows of U.S. aid and training. While the media, pundits, and establishment intellectuals were regularly taken in by claims that the United States was doing its level best to make these clients nice, the apologists failed to note two things. First, that the crucial relationship between the torture regimes and this country was that the United States chose to support them in the first place, suggesting that the torture and terror were either acceptable or positively desired. Second, in a great many cases it was clear that U.S. training in “methods of interrogation,” as well as its stress on the evils of the populists or radicals under attack by the U.S. clients, gave both a spiritual and technical push to torture and killing (see A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors; Miles Wolpin, Military Aid and Counterrevolution in the Third World; Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network).

One of the most dramatic and revealing cases of U.S. official support for client state mass murder was the U.S. relationship to the huge Indonesian killings of 1965-1966, which may have claimed over a million victims, many incidentally on the island of Bali. It is on the record that the United States supplied lists of people to be killed to the coup and genocide managers, and it is also clear that U.S. officials, pundits, and media were ecstatic at what James Reston saw as a “gleam of light” and Time magazine called “The West’s best news for years in Asia,” referring to an Indonesia being subjected to mass slaughter.

Less well known is the fact that U.S. officials had been regretful that the Indonesian military seemed to lack the gumption to “clean house,” and expressed great pleasure when the house cleaning took place. Thus, Rand Corporation and CIA official Guy Pauker had been despondent in 1959 about the possibility of an army takeover, but he did hope that “Perhaps overnight the General Staff or some younger members of the officer corps of Indonesia will strike, sweep their house clean, and rededicate themselves to a higher purpose” (presumably stealing, and opening the door to private investment, after a mass slaughter). After the coup, Pauker exulted that “The assassination of the six army generals by the September 30 Movement elicited the ruthlessness that I had not anticipated a year earlier and resulted in the death of large numbers of Communist cadres [actually, mostly peasant farmers and ordinary citizens who might have supported the Communist Party].” (Quoted in Peter Dale Scott’s chapter in Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years’ Military Terror In Indonesia [Spokesman, 1975].)

This expression of “our values” could be replicated many times over the past several decades.

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Edward S. Herman is an economist, author, and media analyst.