The U.S. and Israel

I n addition to preeminence in aggression, the U.S.Israel axis has long been important in sponsoring and using torture. The U.S. use of waterboarding goes back to the war against Philippine “niggers” in 1900; its use of electronic methods of torture was extensive during the Vietnam War, along with “Tiger Cages”; and this country was the principal sponsor of regimes of torture in the 1960s and 1970s as U.S. leaders struggled against nationalistpopulist upheavals in the Third World. Many premier torturers learned their lessons in the School of the Americas in those years. Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the rendition gulag are not a break from the past or contrary to “American values,” they are built on a solid tradition. (Chapter 2 of Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection , 1979, was entitled “The PentagonCIA Archipeligo.”) 

Israel has used torture on a systematic basis against Palestinians for decades, the New York Times noting matteroffactly in 1993 that Israel’s torture victims were running to 400-500 per month, but that Israel was “rethinking” the merits of its “interrogation” practices (Joel Greenberg, “Israel Rethinks Interrogation of Arabs,” August 14, 1993). If this were to be done to Jews on a systematic basis in some country, the outcry would be deafening, but here also an Israeli practice condemned everywhere as barbaric is treated in a very low key manner and brings about no negative policy responses from the United States or international community. This has permitted Israel to thrive, to command massive international aid, and to be given regular accolades as a model democracy, despite its long record of being “the only state in the world to effectively legalize the use of methods that constitute torture or illtreatment” (Amnesty International, “The Israeli government should implement the High Court decision making torture illegal,” September 6, 1999). 

The Killing Business is Good 

T he United States and Israel are also major dispensers of death to people who stand in their way. Both are highly militarized, the United States now the dominant military power on earth, Israel toweringly superior in military strength to any of its neighbors. Both have increasingly displayed the arrogance of power and a readiness to use their superior arms in lieu of peaceable means of settling disputes. Both have gravitated to the use of high tech weaponry that has devastating effects on civilians, but which reduces aggressor casualties and the need for land troops. As noted, their violent proclivities are now mutually reinforcing. 

The U.S. use of atomic weapons against civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties in what was a demonstration and warning performance, stands alone in the annals of violence. The U.S. has a longstanding tradition of  threatening to use ever more lethal monstrosities. Israel also has a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal and has long posed a threat of first use, reinforced by the absence of any nuclear retaliatory power by its nearby rivals. The Iran “threat” of acquiring nuclear weapons is the threat of potential selfdefense, which would rob Israel of one important element that allows it regularly to use force against its neighbors. 

During the Vietnam War, in which the United States deployed its ferocious weaponry lavishly against a resistant peasant society, it killed several million people. To this we may add hundreds of thousands killed in Cambodia and Laos. Many thousands have continued to die in Indochina from the millions of unexploded bombs that litter the soil and that the United States has made no effort to clean up or even provide supportive map guidance or technical aid. As one sign read over a U.S. military camp in Vietnam, “Killing is our business, and business is good.” 

Much of U.S. deathdealing has been via sponsorship. It sponsored and long had a special relationship with the Suharto dictatorship, aiding its initial genocidal burst in 1965-66 with possibly a million or more civilian deaths by massacre, and supporting its invasionoccupation of East Timor and some 200,000 further deaths there. It sponsored the rise of National Security States in Latin America, with death squads flourishing and U.S. trained counterinsurgency cadres establishing a state terrorism “infinitely worse than the terrorism they were combating” (an Argentine postjunta truth commission). The U.S.sponsored wars in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s took a heavy civilian toll, with genocidal attacks on the Guatemalan Mayan Indians, among other largescale state murder operations. The U.S.sponsored killings in Latin America in those years ran into the hundreds of thousands (the “disappeared” alone were estimated to be 90,000 back in 1981). The U.S. “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa and support of “freedom fighter” Sav imbi in Angola also contributed many hundreds of thousands of deaths in that area in the 1970s and 1980s.

Israel’s killings have been on a smaller scale, but still notable in light of their claims of being victims of terrorism and merely retaliating to the actions of their weaker neighbors and the Palestinian resistance to their occupation and ethnic cleansing. Israel’s supposed “retaliation” to Palestinian “terrorism” featured a ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths of 20 or 25 to 1 until the second Intifada, when the ratio fell to 3 or 4 to 1, though with a higher injury ratio (the figure of 25-1 is given by James Bennett in the New York Times , March 12, 2002). The killings at Sabra and Shatila, mainly of women, children, and older people, has been estimated at between 1,500 and 3,000, which is far greater than the Israeli police estimate of PLO killings of Israelis for the entire period 1968-81. The total of Israeli killings in Palestine are hard to estimate, but run to tens of thousands. The Israeli killings of Lebanese in the 1982 invasion has been estimated at 17,000-20,000, and the numbers killed in Lebanon before and after that date surely run into many thousands. 

Devastation 

T he United States has used its advanced weapons technology and wealth not only to kill large numbers in countries that stand in its way, but also to destroy their infrastructure and means of livelihood, thereby teaching them and others a lesson in the costs of opposition, setting back their capacity for development and taking vengeance. Vietnam’s forests were bulldozed and destroyed by chemical warfare, its lands were widely ruined by chemicals and millions of bomb craters, a large fraction of its most competent and productive males were killed, mainly in bomb strikes, vast numbers were wound ed and traumatized, and hundreds of thousands of children suffered birth deformities by chemical poisoning. Vietnam no longer posed a threat of a working alternative model. Neither did Nicaragua pose a “threat of a good example” after a decade of U.S.sponsored terrorist and economic warfare that reduced incomes by half and played a key role in ousting the reformist Sandinista government. El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Afghanistan, the Congo, and Angola are other states that have not recovered from U.S. direct or sponsored attacks. 

Iraq was devastated in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 and was then not permitted to recover, even to restore its badly damaged water and sanitary facilities, let alone to feed its people. The 2003-2006 invasion/occupation took a further heavy toll of Iraq’s already devastated infrastructure and was notable for the invader’s severe damage to Iraq’s libraries, museums, and other important historical monuments. Iraq is a shattered society, with serial blows administered by mainly the United States and Britain, with UN connivance. 

Israel ravaged Lebanon time and again from 1978 onward, with exceptionally heavy destruction of infrastructure in 1982 and now in 2006. In 2002 Israel began a systematic destruction of the infrastructure of Palestine, destroying public buildings, records, medical facilities, libraries, among other facilities. In its recent 2006 assault on Gaza, nominally to help free a single captive Israeli soldier, its first target was the electric power station that serves 700,000 Palestinian civilians. Further targets included rooftop water tanks and mains, bridges, roads, and medical facilities. At no time has Israel been penalized or punished by the EU, let alone its patron superpower, for these multiple open, blatant, and illegal attacks on civilian facilities. 

Conclusion 

T his is an age of escalating violence, led by a militarized superpower with an enormous capacity to kill, closely linked with an expansionist and militarized client that sees benefits to its “Greater Israel” and ethnic cleansing program in chaos and warfare. This is a continuation of longstanding policies of this axis of ATDD, but rendered more dangerous by the death of the Soviet Union (and the end of real “containment”) and the coming to power in the United States of an exceptionally irresponsible, stupid, and weak Administration. The weak, stupid, and amoral frequently do stupid and horrendous things to compensate for their mistakes and once again in the Middle East they have unleashed large scale violence and the threat of an even wider war. 

The axis of ATDD is setting the tone across the globe. It preaches that those resisting it only understand force, but the world recognizes that in truth it is the axis duo that only responds to force or its threat. Thus the axis leadership provokes a responsive militari zation and violence across the globe and the huge problems facing the peoples of the world (poverty, disease, environmental threats, inequality, racism, democratic deficits) are unaddressed and become steadily more serious. 

These problems are not going to be dealt with until the world’s public becomes sufficiently aroused to throw out the leadership of the axis and/or force the nonaxis powers to resist axis violence with actions that bite and cannot be ignored.

Edward S. Herman is an economist, media critic, and author and coauthor of numerous books, Triumph of the Market and Beyond Hypocrisy (both South End Press).