Newly-declassified documents from the U.S. State Department show that former U.S. Secretary of State “Henry Kissinger sanctioned the dirty war in Argentina”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1101121,00.html in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed.
bq. “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed,” Mr Kissinger is reported as saying. “I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems, but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better … The human rights problem is a growing one … We want a stable situation. We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”
Forgiving away human rights abuses in Latin America was standard U.S. policy in the 1970s. Washington favored strong military power and control over messy unpredictable democracy (a formulation which could be a shorthand definition for post-Nazi _fascism_). After reading this week that the U.S. is wrapping entire iraqi villages in barbed wire, it’s hard not to see us returning to this era. What will declassified documents reveal about today’s White House occupants thirty years from now?
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ washington
Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation
November 3, 2003
For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.
Weapons? no. Program? no. Scientists? no. High School Calc? A‑ha!
September 5, 2003
Okay, so the justification for the war on Iraq was the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had ready to use against the U.S.. The U.S. knew where the weapons were and a war would find them. Well, the war came and no weapons were found. So the story changed. The U.S. attacked Iraq because Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which he would then surely use against the U.S. The U.S. knew where the weapons were being developed and they would be uncovered any day now. But five months of inspectors combing Iraq have found nothing.
So now a new story. The U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control tells us that whether Hussein had the weapons “isn’t really the issue.” But the war is still justified because Saddam had scientists who might someday work on a weapons program that might someday build a weapon that might someday be used against the U.S. or one of its allies
Bolton said that Saddam kept “a coterie” of scientists he was preserving for the day when he could build nuclear weapons unhindered by international constraints.
I’m personally just waiting for the next level of Bush Administration retreat. Wait for Bolton to announce next month that it didn’t matter if Saddam didn’t actually have any trained nuclear scientists, as occupation inspectors had uncovered evidence that North Badgdad High taught calculus for its eleventh graders. “They might go on to work on a weapons program someday, we had to invade before Saddam could teach them Calc II.”
The excuses just get more pathetic as the truth becomes harder to ignore: the Bush Administration lied to the American people. The only winners in this war are the energy companies rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure with U.S. taxpayer dollars. It’s time to connect the dots, to stop paying investigators to comb Iraq for the non-existant weapons. The inspectors should be recalled to Washington to investigate the very real bamboozle (dare I say “conspiracy”?) that foisted a war on the American people. We’ve been played for chumps.
Celebrating nuclear terror with amnesia and techno-lust
August 19, 2003
The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has “reassembled the enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945”:www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/national/19MUSe.html. Trying to avoid the controversy that accompanied a 1995 exhibition, the current museum director says this exhibit will:
bq. “focus on the technological achievements, because we are a technological museum… This plane was the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time.”
This continues the moral blindness that created the bloodiest century in human history. Instead of looking at how politics, war and technology intersected in an event that instantly killed 80,000 people, we shine up the metal and blabber on about technology. The bombing’s death count far overshadows the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center two years ago. If the sight of the towers collapsing is a horror we can never forget or minimize, then so too is Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud.
The only way militarism and nationalism survives is by abstracting war and ignoring the very real death, blood and tragedy. The Japanese people caught up in their country’s lust for war were victims as soon as the fighting started. Their participating in their country’s war was a result of propaganda and nationalistic fervor, the same mix that led so many Americans to support the war in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of people killed on August 8, 1945 were people who never fired a gun. They were simply trying to stay alive in a world full of human-made terror. They were ordinary people who watched as their country’s leaders plotted and warred. Most were afraid to say no to war, to unite with pacifists around the world, or to denounce militarism wherever it existed and with whatever excuse it gave for its horror.
The roots of World War II were oil and terror: Japanese leaders attacked its neighbors to gain control of the industrial resources the home islands didn’t have. American leaders (industrial and political) had waged war against Hawaii and the Philippines for control of Pacific shipping lanes. The plotting for war started long before Pearl Harbor and involved the leaders in both countries. In a very real way, the war in Iraq is just the latest chapter in the century-long war over oil.
But history, truth and morality will all be stripped out of the Smithsonian’s new exhibit, as spokespeople for the American Legion and Air Force have declared:
bq. “As long as the enola Gay is presented in the light that it was used — to end the war and save lives — that’s fine.”
bq. “We are satisfied that it is in historical context this time and does not make comments about U.S. aggression in the Pacific.”
No, schoolchildren visiting Washington won’t learn the truth about the bombing. Another generation will be spoon-fed propaganda about its country’s greatness and goodness. Another generation will not pause to consider its country’s old sins and tragic mistakes. A typical blog entry about the Smithsonian exhibit that claims “no single plane did more to save lives in World War II”:http://www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106130896137661056 . Abstract death and claim righteousness to your country, keep militarism going and keep peaceful people from uniting across national boundaries.
Iran-Contra alum behind Terror Psychic Network
July 31, 2003
The Idiot who came up with the “Terror Psychic Network” is leaving the Pentagon over the flap. What’s even more striking is his identity: it’s John Poindexter, one of the people at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan Administration.
For those too young to remember, in the Iran-Contra affair Reagan’s kookiest spooks secretly sold arms to U.S. archenemy number 1 (Iran) in order to circumvent Congressional demands that they not fund an opposition army against U.S. archenemy number 2 (Nicaragua), with the money being funneled through the country that then and now still inexplicably isn’t public enemy number 3 (Saudi Arabia). It was the circuitousness of it all more than anything that kept Reagan out of jail for all of this.
Why Poindexter was ever allowed back anywhere near Washington, much less the Pentagon, is a mystery. Here are some articles on Poindexter’s return to Washington and return of the Iran-Contra crew to the (Bush II) White House. Here’s another article on the resignation of the Reagan crook turned Bush-II fool.
Stopping the Next War Now: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror
October 7, 2001
Originally published at Nonviolence.org
The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.
The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.
The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.
The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.
The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.
There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.
And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.
And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.
A Look Back at the Peace Movement’s Response to the Gulf War
November 20, 1997
It is safe to say that the peace movement’s largest campaign in the past decade took place around opposition to the military build-up and conflict in the Persian Gulf in 1990 – 1. New people became involved, old peaceniks became reactivated and every peace group in the country went into overdrive to organize and educate about the issues.
Recently I have heard several people bemoan the failure of the peace movement during that period, a failure because the war wasn’t stopped. But there were successes beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The week the war started saw two massive protests in Washington. It took almost a decade of involvement in Vietnam before protests that large were ever seen. The peace movement mobilized incredibly quickly and (in retrospect) efficiently, and we surely defined the options available to U.S. President Bush.
The aftermath of the war brought a crisis to many organizations. Their fundraising efforts dried up and budget deficits led to cutbacks in staff and program outreach. It was as if a sort of public amnesia set in and no one wanted to think about peace. This is a natural human response perhaps, but it’s reverberations on the infrastructure of the peace movement continue to this day.
Let’s start a dialogue about the peace movements response to the Gulf War. What were it’s effects on your lives and the organizations you were a part of? Was the peace movement a success, a failure, or something in between?