He knew nothing about poverty or Asia or people or American politics, but he knew all there was to know about bureaucracy and production technology.
He was obsessed with numbers, calculation, and logic. Senator Barry Goldwater called him "an IBM machine with legs." Through the manipulation of statistics he sought not just a means of measuring reality but a way to conquer and subdue it. Using the same system of materialist accountancy with which he saved the Ford Motor Company, he rationalized the Pentagon bureaucracy and soon the U.S. military was producing corpses as efficiently as the auto giant turned out cars. What profit was to the bottom line, body count was to "progress" in Vietnam.
On grounds of cost-efficiency McNamara championed the electronic battlefield - "people sniffers," infrared sensors, cluster bombs, land mines packed with shrapnel, fragmentation bombs, all washed down with millions of gallons of chemical defoliants designed to peel back the protective Vietnamese jungle impeding Washington's onward march to imperial paradise. Much indebted to the liquid fire that boosted U.S. death counts, McNamara publicly applauded Dow Chemical Company's "service to the free world" in manufacturing napalm.
In 1962, with tens of thousands of Vietnamese dead due to U.S. bombing and defoliation, McNamara arrived in Vietnam impatient to discover what was holding up the victory train. Inspecting Operation Sunrise, a village repopulated after a forced relocation to an urban concentration camp, McNamara immersed himself in systems analysis and input-output ratios, pored over self-congratulatory Pentagon data, and breezily assured a prompt U.S. victory. Failing to even notice the seething villagers in his midst, he fired off a battery of technical questions to his underlings: How much of this? How much of that? Are you happy here?
With the corrupt and murderous Diem regime (South Vietnam) at the point of collapse, McNamara returned to Washington proclaiming that he had "seen nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future."
In 1963, McNamara declared that "we have turned the corner in Vietnam," one of many assurances he gave that U.S. victory was not only meaningful, but right around the corner. And as always, there were optimistic statistics to back him up, sometimes incredibly optimistic, such as a State Department report stating that the U.S. had inflicted 30,000 casualties on 15,000 Vietnamese guerrillas in 1962.
Also in 1963 McNamara announced that Latin American recipients of U.S. military assistance were changing their mission from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security," the green light for the region's security forces to make war on their own people in the name of anti-Communism. These forces studied the techniques of repression at the U.S. School of the Americas and a parade of coups and other bloody interventions followed in countries like Brazil, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama.
In 1964, with the C.I.A. conducting regular raids on Hanoi's coastal installations, McNamara accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of attacking what he presumed to be peaceful American destroyers, which happened to be spying in North Vietnamese territory. "While on routine patrol in international waters" the Secretary of Defense announced, "the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." President Johnson went on nationwide T.V. to condemn North Vietnam's "open aggression on the high seas." He called for broader authority to wage war against Vietnam while promising not to use it.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution swept through Congress, authorizing the President "to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace." In short, carte blanche to completely destroy Vietnam, which the U.S. subsequently did.
However, Washington could never achieve military victory. Unaccountably for John Kennedy's star Defense Secretary, the raggedly-dressed villagers of Vietnam refused to be reduced to statistical abstractions, confounding his prized system of "rational" predictions. McNamara was plunged into gloom and a profound sense of failure.
Years after he and the other members of John Kennedy's "Best and Brightest" administration had killed their millions in Indochina, McNamara was plagued by nightmares and found his eyes welling up with tears at the Vietnam Memorial. He unburdened his conscience in his memoirs, apologizing for having prolonged an unwinnable war.
McNamara's was a highly selective remorse. He was not sorry for napalmed babies, Agent Orange, and the countless My Lai-style massacres. He felt no guilt about two million dead civilians and soaring child cancer and birth defects in Vietnam. His only regret was that American soldiers had died with no chance of being victorious. He insisted his mistakes had been "not of values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities."
Chauffeured by limousine to book signings, he ignored the homeless Vietnam vets rotting on the streets of the nation they had served in battle. His book zoomed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
Sources:
David Harris, Our War, (Random House, 1996)
Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, (Houghton-Mifflin, 1965)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)
Howard Zinn, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, (Beacon, 1967)
David Halberstam, The Best and The Brightest, (Penguin, 1969)
Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
William Blanchard, Aggression American Style, (Goodyear, 1978)
Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism,(South End, 1988)
Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent, (Common Courage, 1992)
Noam Chomsky, "Memories," Z Magazine, July/August 1995
Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America, (Norton, 1984)
Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, Wizards of Media Oz, (Common Courage, 1997)
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
False Saviors - Jimmy Carter
A pious Sunday school teacher confessing to lust in his heart but swearing never to lie, he came to Washington to reestablish public faith in government just when popular disgust at monstrous U.S. crimes in Indochina had reached unprecedented heights. The big business agenda during his term in office (1977-1981) was to roll back the welfare state, break the power of unions, fan the flames of the Cold War to increase military spending, engineer tax breaks for wealthy corporate interests, and repeal government regulation of business. While portraying himself as a peanut-farming populist, Carter delivered the goods for Wall Street.
Having run as a Washington "outsider," he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business relations between Japan and the United States.
His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson's Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request "inactive" status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed's supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was "egocentric" to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail "the end of the human race." (Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.)
In what William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (a study of the Federal Reserve Bank) called his most important appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's assistant for domestic affairs said that, "Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall Street." The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted the money supply and declared, "the standard of living of the average American has to decline."
Wealth was funneled upward and wages and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy rose, unions shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first time ever American white collar families couldn't save money. With urban housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting and overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out, second commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities outpaced wage gains, only credit cards could fill the widening gap.
Hamburger stands and nursing homes proliferated while well-paid manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World. The workforce of the future was said to be a generation of superefficient robots.
Carter's populist assurances simply whetted the public appetite for this kind of dismal anticlimax. While making a few listless gestures towards blacks and the poor, he spent the bulk of his energy promoting corporate profits and building up a huge military machine that drained away public wealth in defense of a far-flung network of repressive "friends" of American business.
The heaviest applause line in his Inaugural Address was his promise "to move this year a step towards our ultimate goal - the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth." But after his beguiling rhetoric faded away, he embarked on a program of building two to three nuclear bombs every day. Although he had promised to cut military spending by $5 to $7 billion, he decided to increase it after just six months in office, and his 5% proposed spending increases in each of his last two years in office were identical to those first proposed by Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, having pledged to reduce foreign arms sales, he ended up raising them to new highs, and after speaking of helping the needy, he proposed cutbacks in summer youth jobs, child nutrition programs, and other popular projects serving important social needs. Similarly, though he had campaigned as a friend of labor, he refused a request to increase the minimum wage and opposed most of organized labor's legislative agenda while handing out huge subsidies to big business. He made much ado about "human rights," but returned Haiti's fleeing boat people to the tender care of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, and when a member of the American delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission spoke of his "profoundest regrets" for the C.I.A.'s role in General Pinochet's bloodbath in Chile, Carter scolded him, insisting that the C.I.A.'s actions were "not illegal or improper."
Carter came to Washington proclaiming his desire for a comprehensive Middle East peace, including a solution to the Palestinian question "in all its aspects." Yet at Camp David he failed to grasp the root of the problem, let alone propose a mature way of dealing with it. He assumed that Palestinians were anonymous refugees whose nationalist aspirations could be safely ignored. He supposed a peace treaty could be signed in the absence of the PLO, world recognized as the Palestinians' "sole legitimate representative." He offered no apologies for negotiating an agreement that failed even to mention Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. He did not protest Prime Minister Menachem Begin's presentation of the Accords before the Israeli Knesset as a "deal," one much more favorable to Israel than to "the Arabs." He pretended not to notice that corralling Palestinians into Bantustans was not simply a tactic of war, but constituted Israel's boasted final product of "peace"! Finally, his much praised Camp David accords were the death warrant for Lebanon, as Israel, its southern border secure with the removal of Egypt from the Arab military alliance, was freed to concentrate undivided attention on a long-planned invasion across its northern border. It was this invasion (June 1982) that convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans could ever change U.S. foreign policy.
Carter was effusive in his praise and blind support of the Shah of Iran, who was deeply unpopular in his country due to policies of supermilitarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. By the time Carter arrived in the White House the Shah's throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Iranian cities were hideously unlivable with fifteen percent of the entire country crowded around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The nation's incalculable oil wealth reached few hands and a restless student generation had no prospects. The country's bloated bureaucracy was totally corrupt. While Shiite leaders rallied popular support, the Shah's secret police threw tens of thousands of Iranians into jail, the economy gagged on billions of dollars of Western arms imports (mostly from Washington), and Amnesty International speculated that Iran had achieved the worst human rights record on the planet. Meanwhile, Carter declared that "human rights is the soul of our foreign policy," though he added the following day that he thought the Shah might not survive in power, a strange expectation if indeed the U.S. stood for human rights around the world.
After the Shah was overthrown, Carter could not conceive of U.S. responsibility for the actions of enraged Iranian students who seized 66 Americans and held them hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, demanding the return of "the criminal Shah." (He had admitted the Shah to the U.S. for emergency medical treatment for cancer, thus precipitating the "hostage crisis.") To Carter, Americans were by definition innocent, outside history, and he dismissed Iranian grievances against the U.S. as ancient history, refusing to discuss them. In his distorted mind, Iranians were terrorists by nature, and Iran had always been a potentially terrorist nation, regardless of what they had suffered at U.S. hands. In short, without the Shah, Carter regarded Iran as a land of swarthy and crazed medievalists, what Washington today calls a "rogue state."
Having "lost" Iran, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, along with military outposts and electronic eavesdropping stations used against the Soviet Union, the Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, not making an issue of their having kidnapped the American ambassador in Kabul that year (1979), which resulted in his death in a rescue attempt. While U.S. officials condemned Islamic militants in Iran as terrorists, they praised them as freedom fighters in Afghanistan, though both groups drew inspiration from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was, in the eyes of official Washington, the Devil incarnate. In a 1998 interview Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the U.S. had begun giving military assistance to the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan six months before the U.S.S.R. invaded the country, even though he was convinced - as he told Carter - that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." Among the consequences of that policy were a decade-and-a-half of war that claimed the lives of a million Afghans, moujahedeen torture that U.S. government officials called "indescribable horror," half the Afghan population either dead, crippled, or homeless, and the creation of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist warriors dedicated to unleashing spectacularly violent attacks in countries throughout the world.
The list of disastrous policies can go on. For example, during Carter's brief reign he ordered production of the neutron bomb (which his administration praised for "only" destroying people while leaving property intact), endorsed "flexible response" and "limited" nuclear war, lobbied for the radar-evading cruise missile, developed a rapid deployment force for instant intervention anywhere, enacted selective service registration in peacetime, and advocated the construction of first-strike MX missiles for use in a nuclear shell game along an elaborate system of underground railroad tracks proposed for the Utah desert. While lecturing the Soviets on human rights, he escalated state terror in El Salvador, crushed democracy in South Korea, gave full support to Indonesia's near genocide in East Timor, and maintained or increased funding for the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Brazil's neo-Nazi Generals, and the dictatorships of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Zaire. He refused to heed Archbishop Romero's desperate plea to cut off U.S. aid to the blood drenched Salvadoran junta, and Romero was promptly assassinated. Furthermore, he said nothing at all when the London Sunday Times revealed that the torture of Arabs implicated "all of Israel's security forces" and was so "systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders." And though he presented himself as sympathetic to those who had opposed the Vietnam war, he refused to pay reconstruction aid on the grounds that during the devastating U.S. attack on the tiny country, "the destruction was mutual." (Try arguing that the Nazi invasion of Poland wasn't a crime because "destruction was mutual.")
Carter turned domestic policy over to Wall Street, refusing to increase the minimum wage and telling his Cabinet that increasing social spending "is something we just can't do." According to Peter Bourne, special assistant to the president in the Carter White House, he "did not see health care as every citizen's right," though every other industrial state in the world except apartheid South Africa disagreed with him. He understood that liberals desired it, but, Bourne notes, "he never really accepted it." Instead, "he preferred to talk movingly of his deep and genuine empathy for those who suffered for lack of health care, as though the depth of his compassion could be a substitute for a major new and expensive government solution for the problem." In point of fact, money can be saved under a government funded plan, but Carter was uninterested. He insisted on controlling business costs rather than providing universal coverage, neglecting to note that under Medicare - universal insurance for the elderly - administrative costs were a fraction of those charged under private HMOs.
Carter simply could not comprehend the vast unmet social needs that existed (and exist) in the United States. He thought there was a way to maintain a global military presence, balance the budget, and keep business costs low while adequately meeting social welfare needs via reorganizing programs. When his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano informed him that without increased funding many welfare recipients would be worse off after any reorganization than before, Carter erupted: "Are you telling me that there is no way to improve the present welfare system except by spending billions of dollars? In that case, to hell with it!" In response to a comment that his denial of federal funding for poor people's abortions was unfair, Carter summed up the political philosophy that rendered him hopelessly unprogressive: "Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cannot."
Like political candidates who do their bidding.
Sources:
Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980)
Samuel Bowles et al, After The Waste Land: A Democratic Economics For The Year 2000, (M.E. Sharpe, 1990)
Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter - A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, (Scribner, 1997)
Doug Dowd, Blues For America - A Critique, A Lament, And Some Memories, (Monthly Review, 1997)
William Blum, Rogue State - A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000)
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)
Edward W. Said, Covering Islam - How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, (Vintage, 1997)
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979)
Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East, (Knopf, 2005)
Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, (Bantam, 1986)
Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1981)
Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism - Lessons From Kosovo, (Common Courage, 1999)
Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War - Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-82)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)
Michael Parenti, Land of Idols - Political Mythology in America, (St. Martin's 1994)
Michael Parenti, Democracy For the Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin's, 1995)
Walter LaFeber, The American Age - United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, (Norton, 1989)
Having run as a Washington "outsider," he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business relations between Japan and the United States.
His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson's Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request "inactive" status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed's supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was "egocentric" to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail "the end of the human race." (Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.)
In what William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (a study of the Federal Reserve Bank) called his most important appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's assistant for domestic affairs said that, "Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall Street." The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted the money supply and declared, "the standard of living of the average American has to decline."
Wealth was funneled upward and wages and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy rose, unions shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first time ever American white collar families couldn't save money. With urban housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting and overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out, second commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities outpaced wage gains, only credit cards could fill the widening gap.
Hamburger stands and nursing homes proliferated while well-paid manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World. The workforce of the future was said to be a generation of superefficient robots.
Carter's populist assurances simply whetted the public appetite for this kind of dismal anticlimax. While making a few listless gestures towards blacks and the poor, he spent the bulk of his energy promoting corporate profits and building up a huge military machine that drained away public wealth in defense of a far-flung network of repressive "friends" of American business.
The heaviest applause line in his Inaugural Address was his promise "to move this year a step towards our ultimate goal - the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth." But after his beguiling rhetoric faded away, he embarked on a program of building two to three nuclear bombs every day. Although he had promised to cut military spending by $5 to $7 billion, he decided to increase it after just six months in office, and his 5% proposed spending increases in each of his last two years in office were identical to those first proposed by Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, having pledged to reduce foreign arms sales, he ended up raising them to new highs, and after speaking of helping the needy, he proposed cutbacks in summer youth jobs, child nutrition programs, and other popular projects serving important social needs. Similarly, though he had campaigned as a friend of labor, he refused a request to increase the minimum wage and opposed most of organized labor's legislative agenda while handing out huge subsidies to big business. He made much ado about "human rights," but returned Haiti's fleeing boat people to the tender care of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, and when a member of the American delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission spoke of his "profoundest regrets" for the C.I.A.'s role in General Pinochet's bloodbath in Chile, Carter scolded him, insisting that the C.I.A.'s actions were "not illegal or improper."
Carter came to Washington proclaiming his desire for a comprehensive Middle East peace, including a solution to the Palestinian question "in all its aspects." Yet at Camp David he failed to grasp the root of the problem, let alone propose a mature way of dealing with it. He assumed that Palestinians were anonymous refugees whose nationalist aspirations could be safely ignored. He supposed a peace treaty could be signed in the absence of the PLO, world recognized as the Palestinians' "sole legitimate representative." He offered no apologies for negotiating an agreement that failed even to mention Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. He did not protest Prime Minister Menachem Begin's presentation of the Accords before the Israeli Knesset as a "deal," one much more favorable to Israel than to "the Arabs." He pretended not to notice that corralling Palestinians into Bantustans was not simply a tactic of war, but constituted Israel's boasted final product of "peace"! Finally, his much praised Camp David accords were the death warrant for Lebanon, as Israel, its southern border secure with the removal of Egypt from the Arab military alliance, was freed to concentrate undivided attention on a long-planned invasion across its northern border. It was this invasion (June 1982) that convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans could ever change U.S. foreign policy.
Carter was effusive in his praise and blind support of the Shah of Iran, who was deeply unpopular in his country due to policies of supermilitarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. By the time Carter arrived in the White House the Shah's throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Iranian cities were hideously unlivable with fifteen percent of the entire country crowded around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The nation's incalculable oil wealth reached few hands and a restless student generation had no prospects. The country's bloated bureaucracy was totally corrupt. While Shiite leaders rallied popular support, the Shah's secret police threw tens of thousands of Iranians into jail, the economy gagged on billions of dollars of Western arms imports (mostly from Washington), and Amnesty International speculated that Iran had achieved the worst human rights record on the planet. Meanwhile, Carter declared that "human rights is the soul of our foreign policy," though he added the following day that he thought the Shah might not survive in power, a strange expectation if indeed the U.S. stood for human rights around the world.
After the Shah was overthrown, Carter could not conceive of U.S. responsibility for the actions of enraged Iranian students who seized 66 Americans and held them hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, demanding the return of "the criminal Shah." (He had admitted the Shah to the U.S. for emergency medical treatment for cancer, thus precipitating the "hostage crisis.") To Carter, Americans were by definition innocent, outside history, and he dismissed Iranian grievances against the U.S. as ancient history, refusing to discuss them. In his distorted mind, Iranians were terrorists by nature, and Iran had always been a potentially terrorist nation, regardless of what they had suffered at U.S. hands. In short, without the Shah, Carter regarded Iran as a land of swarthy and crazed medievalists, what Washington today calls a "rogue state."
Having "lost" Iran, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, along with military outposts and electronic eavesdropping stations used against the Soviet Union, the Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, not making an issue of their having kidnapped the American ambassador in Kabul that year (1979), which resulted in his death in a rescue attempt. While U.S. officials condemned Islamic militants in Iran as terrorists, they praised them as freedom fighters in Afghanistan, though both groups drew inspiration from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was, in the eyes of official Washington, the Devil incarnate. In a 1998 interview Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the U.S. had begun giving military assistance to the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan six months before the U.S.S.R. invaded the country, even though he was convinced - as he told Carter - that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." Among the consequences of that policy were a decade-and-a-half of war that claimed the lives of a million Afghans, moujahedeen torture that U.S. government officials called "indescribable horror," half the Afghan population either dead, crippled, or homeless, and the creation of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist warriors dedicated to unleashing spectacularly violent attacks in countries throughout the world.
The list of disastrous policies can go on. For example, during Carter's brief reign he ordered production of the neutron bomb (which his administration praised for "only" destroying people while leaving property intact), endorsed "flexible response" and "limited" nuclear war, lobbied for the radar-evading cruise missile, developed a rapid deployment force for instant intervention anywhere, enacted selective service registration in peacetime, and advocated the construction of first-strike MX missiles for use in a nuclear shell game along an elaborate system of underground railroad tracks proposed for the Utah desert. While lecturing the Soviets on human rights, he escalated state terror in El Salvador, crushed democracy in South Korea, gave full support to Indonesia's near genocide in East Timor, and maintained or increased funding for the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Brazil's neo-Nazi Generals, and the dictatorships of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Zaire. He refused to heed Archbishop Romero's desperate plea to cut off U.S. aid to the blood drenched Salvadoran junta, and Romero was promptly assassinated. Furthermore, he said nothing at all when the London Sunday Times revealed that the torture of Arabs implicated "all of Israel's security forces" and was so "systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders." And though he presented himself as sympathetic to those who had opposed the Vietnam war, he refused to pay reconstruction aid on the grounds that during the devastating U.S. attack on the tiny country, "the destruction was mutual." (Try arguing that the Nazi invasion of Poland wasn't a crime because "destruction was mutual.")
Carter turned domestic policy over to Wall Street, refusing to increase the minimum wage and telling his Cabinet that increasing social spending "is something we just can't do." According to Peter Bourne, special assistant to the president in the Carter White House, he "did not see health care as every citizen's right," though every other industrial state in the world except apartheid South Africa disagreed with him. He understood that liberals desired it, but, Bourne notes, "he never really accepted it." Instead, "he preferred to talk movingly of his deep and genuine empathy for those who suffered for lack of health care, as though the depth of his compassion could be a substitute for a major new and expensive government solution for the problem." In point of fact, money can be saved under a government funded plan, but Carter was uninterested. He insisted on controlling business costs rather than providing universal coverage, neglecting to note that under Medicare - universal insurance for the elderly - administrative costs were a fraction of those charged under private HMOs.
Carter simply could not comprehend the vast unmet social needs that existed (and exist) in the United States. He thought there was a way to maintain a global military presence, balance the budget, and keep business costs low while adequately meeting social welfare needs via reorganizing programs. When his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano informed him that without increased funding many welfare recipients would be worse off after any reorganization than before, Carter erupted: "Are you telling me that there is no way to improve the present welfare system except by spending billions of dollars? In that case, to hell with it!" In response to a comment that his denial of federal funding for poor people's abortions was unfair, Carter summed up the political philosophy that rendered him hopelessly unprogressive: "Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cannot."
Like political candidates who do their bidding.
Sources:
Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980)
Samuel Bowles et al, After The Waste Land: A Democratic Economics For The Year 2000, (M.E. Sharpe, 1990)
Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter - A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, (Scribner, 1997)
Doug Dowd, Blues For America - A Critique, A Lament, And Some Memories, (Monthly Review, 1997)
William Blum, Rogue State - A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000)
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)
Edward W. Said, Covering Islam - How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, (Vintage, 1997)
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979)
Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East, (Knopf, 2005)
Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, (Bantam, 1986)
Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1981)
Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism - Lessons From Kosovo, (Common Courage, 1999)
Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War - Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-82)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)
Michael Parenti, Land of Idols - Political Mythology in America, (St. Martin's 1994)
Michael Parenti, Democracy For the Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin's, 1995)
Walter LaFeber, The American Age - United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, (Norton, 1989)
Thursday, June 25, 2009
False Saviors - LBJ
Without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife.
-----Congressman Lyndon Johnson, 1948
I'll always remember LBJ as a demented half-drunk mockery of manliness, a dirty young, middle-aged and old man who called in secretaries to give him head and generals to give him body counts with equal relish.
-----Journalist Andrew Kopkind
He was vain, vindictive, and ignorant. Years went by without his reading a book, and he never read if he could avoid it. Though he preferred to receive information orally, he rarely listened.
The prototypical extrovert, he was devoid of scruples but gripped by a passion to "get things done." From his earliest days the shallowest of status markers captivated him: to enlarge his reputation, surpass the achievements of all his rivals and friends, to gain greater power, to earn more money than anyone else. In pursuit of these ends he became a long-winded bore, endlessly repeating cliches about freedom, especially the entrepreneurial freedom to pile up money. In fact, money and power were all he thought about.
His ideological moorings were nationalist, racist, and sexist. He rated the white race superior to all others, Americans superior to other nationalities, and men superior to women. He held doubters in contempt, even as he questioned his own masculinity, and he yearned to be judged a manly man by John Kennedy's "Best and Brightest," who he feared found him lacking in balls.
He divided males into men and boys. Men were activists and doers who forged business empires and preferred action to talk. Their aggression and can-do optimism gave them the edge in a tough and savage world of other men, and earned them the respect of dominant men. Boys were talkers and writers and intellectuals. Like women, they sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of acting. When he discovered that a member of his administration had turned dovish on Vietnam, Johnson once complained, "Hell, he has to squat to piss."
Elected to the House in 1937 as a New Dealer, he quickly joined forces with anti-labor Southerners. In 1943, he voted to override FDR's veto of the anti-labor Smith-Connally Act, which allowed the government to seize industries threatened by strikes, and four years later he did the same to override Truman's veto of Taft-Hartley, which required union leaders to take an anti-Communist loyalty oath. When he ran for the Senate in 1948 he launched his campaign with Herman Brown of Brown & Root, one of the most anti-labor employers in the country, sitting approvingly on the platform behind him. Once elected he advocated "right-to-work" laws, i.e., illegal to unionize. His anti-labor record proved so extreme that Texas unions were induced to endorse Johnson's right-wing opponent,"Coke" Stevenson, the first time Texas labor had endorsed a candidate for the Senate in half a century. Remembering his friends, Johnson removed a fair labor standards provision in an $8 billion highway bill during his first term as Senate majority leader.
Though Vietnam was his greatest crime, Johnson was also responsible for a series of other coups or interventions that ultimately slaughtered thousands of civilians. In 1964, for example, the Johnson Administration overthrew the democratically elected government of Brazil. The administration of Joao Goulart had committed the grave sin of introducing agrarian reform, ending capital flight, and nationalizing a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph, which they ungratefully complained was "bleeding the Brazilian economy." Washington quickly sounded the alarm at Brazil's "anti-Americanism" and "drift to the left."
The coup began with the U.S. Sixth Fleet standing by offshore while Brazilian troops and tanks advanced on Rio de Janeiro. Encountering only scattered resistance, the Army seized power with U.S. approval, cutting short a Brazilian investigation of C.I.A. bribery. U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled Washington that the Generals had carried out a "democratic rebellion," which constituted "a great victory for the free world," one that "should create a greatly improved climate for private investments."
General Castelo Branco emerged as the president of Brazil's new neo-Nazi national security state. He shut down the Congress, murdered his political opponents, suspended habeas corpus for "political crimes," outlawed criticism of the president, placed labor unions under government control, and maintained internal security by death squad. As protests against his dictatorship mounted, his security forces fired into crowds, burned down homes, and tortured disobedient priests defending the poor. Washington and Wall Street applauded his program of "moral rehabilitation."
The result was the usual free market "miracle." Income distribution shifted sharply upward, the investment climate improved, the World Bank came running with loans, and U.S. aid increased in tandem with torture, killing, hunger, disease, infant death, and profits. A 1975 World Bank study - the high water mark of the economic "miracle" years - reported that 68% of Brazilians had less than the minimum caloric requirement for normal physical activity and that 58% of children suffered from malnutrition.
A year after the coup in Brazil Johnson sent 23,000 Marines to invade the Dominican Republic and suppress a democratic revival there. In 1963, Dominicans had celebrated the end of 31 years of dictatorship under Rafael Trujillo (who had governed by systematic terror and been shot to death) by electing Juan Bosch en masse. Bosch refused to buy planes for the air force, announced agrarian reform, supported a divorce law, low rent housing, and modest nationalization of business, and raised wages. Fed up with the "Communist" administration after just seven months, Generals Toni Imbert and Wessin and Wessin, both graduates of the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama, deposed Bosch in a barracks revolt at dawn. The Johnson Administration quickly recognized the new regime of generals.
In 1965, the people rose in revolt attempting to restore Bosch to the presidency. Rooftop snipers machine-gunned loyalist troops, rebel units (loyal to Bosch) occupied street corners and patrolled the highways, and ecstatic radio announcements propelled thousands of Dominicans into the streets shouting "Viva Bosch." There they snatched up weapons from arsenals thrown open by the rebel army, and fashioned Molotov cocktails using gasoline donated by filling stations. When Bosch forces took over the public air waves a parade of locals appeared on T.V. denouncing the misery wrought by dictatorship and IMF austerity.
The U.S. Embassy shrieked of ransacked embassies, Castro-style mass executions, and victorious Bosch supporters parading through the streets with their victims' heads on poles. Johnson declared that, “some 1,500 innocent people were murdered and shot, and their heads cut off.” This was pure fabrication. The only large-scale massacres were carried out by loyalist troops with the military and diplomatic support of the Johnson Administration. Thousands of Bosch party activists, local leaders, and members were jailed, beaten, or killed. Declaring he would not permit a second Cuba, Johnson dispatched the Marines, their fifth appearance in the Dominican Republic in the 20th century. Landing at the Generals' air base at San Isidro they fought side-by-side with the junta's troops, blasting through rebel forces on the Duarte bridge with bazookas, 106-mm recoilless rifles, and machine guns. President Johnson brazenly lied to the American people, saying that the U.S. was a neutral arbiter between the contending forces and had "attacked no one."
The U.S. immediately recognized the new police state headed by Donald Reid Cabral, a pro-American businessman who U.S. Ambassador William Taply Bennett fondly called "Donny." The "non-totalitarian" (i.e., anti-Communist) dictator received more money - $100 million - in direct and guaranteed loans from Washington than any Dominican regime in history. The fact that Cabral "had no popular support," according to secret U.S. polls, and that Bosch and his party were still the legally constituted authority of the Dominican Republic, didn't matter at all to LBJ. Nor did the fact that no Dominican lives need have been lost had Washington given support to Bosch's movement.
1965 was also the year that Johnson massively escalated the war in Vietnam, embarking the U.S. and the world on a disaster that would ultimately cost millions of lives. Johnson could never shake his conviction that the U.S. enjoyed a Divine Right to determine the internal politics of Vietnam, and that the series of South Vietnamese dictatorships imposed by Washington deserved "independence" from the overwhelmingly popular National Liberation Front attempting to dislodge them.
LBJ insisted on Hanoi's unconditional surrender in Vietnam. He couldn't stop patting himself on the back for his "generosity" in being willing to let them surrender. If North Vietnam stopped helping the National Liberation Front try to expel the U.S. from the country, LBJ was willing to order his occupying army to cease fire, but not to leave. His moral blindness was so extreme that he never understood that the Vietnamese people had every right to insist on their independence and expel a government imposed on them by a foreign power.
For U.S. troops the war was a pointless slaughter. Battles were a succession of ambushes and fire-fights in mid-jungle. Holding fixed terrain was impossible. Patrols traversed the same ground repeatedly in vicious manhunts for "Vietcong," who were indistinguishable from the civilian population that the Pentagon conceded overwhelmingly supported them. Progress was marked by kill ratio, a statistic that defined massacre as victory.
U.S. soldiers fought in defense of a military junta that had had ten changes of government between 1963 and 1965. At the Honolulu Conference in the latter year, Johnson told then South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, (who declared that Hitler was his only hero) that "when you talk about building schools instead of beheading teachers, and when you speak of erecting clinics instead of firing mortars and destroying them, you speak our language." Bertrand Russell, with far greater realism, called LBJ's war policy "a barbaric . . . aggressive war of conquest." LBJ never realized that backing Hitler enthusiasts could hardly produce any other kind of war.
Anyone who was insufficiently optimistic about the prospects for U.S. "victory" in Vietnam, let alone those who opposed Washington's war policy regardless of its prospects for "success," Johnson quickly condemned as unwitting dupes of Communist conspiracy or outright traitors. In 1965 he told his staff that "the communists already control the three major networks and the forty major outlets of communication." He ordered the F.B.I. to spy on Congress. He described the Soviets as being "in constant touch with anti-war Senators." He said the wayward Senators "ate lunch and went to parties at the Soviet embassy; children of their staff people dated Russians. The Russians think up things for the Senators to say." Faced with massive protests in the spring of 1967 he told Time Magazine's Hugh Sidey that "most of the protests are Communist-led." He had every government intelligence agency investigate, spy on, and undermine anti-war activists. He rejected a C.I.A. analysis that concluded that the peace movement was not under Communist direction.
He never questioned the wisdom of basing economic "health" on massive war spending. During Johnson's time in office the U.S. spent about $50 billion a year in pump-priming war expenditures, nevertheless he never declared that his "Great Society" required putting an end to these gargantuan allocations in support of imperial war. Quite the contrary. He agreed that "the business of America was business" and no business was better than the war business.
Johnson was also a fervent Zionist who knew that nuclear bomb materials were being diverted from a U.S. plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania to Israel, but did nothing to stop it. And he covered up Israel's involvement in the attack on the clearly marked U.S.S. Liberty, which was sailing off the Gaza Strip in international waters during the Six Day War. Johnson referred to the strike as a "deliberate attack" in an off the record press briefing, and his ambassador to the U.N. Arthur Goldberg told Israel's ambassador to the U.S. that U.S. tape recordings revealed that the Israeli pilots knew they were attacking an American ship. Thirty-four men were killed and seventy-five wounded. Johnson helped insure the American public never heard about it.
Johnson was most proud of his domestic social policy. Announcing the War on Poverty in January, 1964, he declared grandly: "This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America . . . Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it, and, above all, to prevent it."(emphasis added) But in reality LBJ had no clue how to end poverty and proved unwilling to commit the resources necessary to waging a serious fight. He naively accepted the anti-poverty "wisdom" of poverty experts, who recommended overcoming the "culture of poverty" by "maximum feasible participation." In other words, they saw nothing wrong with the capitalist system, only with those it oppressed, and as good liberals they could never understand poor people's lack of enthusiasm for "participation" in degrading and exploitative social relations.
Unsurprisingly therefore, LBJ's Great Society programs were premised on the idea that giving a little to the poor - very little - would make it easier to continue giving a lot to the rich. He was quite incapable of seeing the situation with the clarity of writer James Baldwin, who correctly noted that, "the civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo." So it was that LBJ launched his doomed crusade, which as I.F. Stone noted in 1965, even with expenditures doubled, which LBJ called for that year, produced barely $1 billion in new spending for social programs. In short, the "Great Society" had but a microscopic claim on resources compared with the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. was spending annually in its effort to obliterate Indochina. And, when push came to shove, LBJ deliberately held down poverty relief expenditures in order to fund the Vietnam slaughter.
Even on racial matters, supposedly LBJ's crowning achievement, Johnson was no bargain. He proved unwilling to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (mostly black, but open to all races) when it arrived at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964 to challenge the segregationist delegation representing Mississippi that year. Johnson attempted to bribe the MFDP by offering them two "at large" seats alongside the white supremacist delegates, but MFDP's Fannie Lou Hamer, indignant at his proposed compromise, protested: "We didn't come all this way for no two seats!" Johnson tried to prevent her from speaking at the convention. Said his Vice President Hubert Humphrey: "The President has said he that he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention." The following year when Johnson declared to a joint session of Congress, "we shall overcome," radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, just back from Vietnam and observing the speech from the House Press Gallery, "grew suddenly dizzy in the head and queasy in the stomach and nearly pitched over the railing." (Kopkind, "The Thirty Years' Wars," p. 251)
Furthermore, when riots exploded in black ghettos, LBJ faulted not his own prioritizing of war over social spending, but black people themselves for being "ungrateful" for the token efforts he had made on their behalf. Even the establishment press saw more clearly than LBJ. The Boston Globe commented in the wake of the 1967 Newark riots that they represented "a revolution of black Americans against white Americans, a violent petition for the redress of long-standing grievances." The Globe insisted that the civil rights laws and antipoverty measures so boasted of by LBJ had actually done little to alter fundamental conditions for blacks, who continued to live in slums, attend inferior schools, suffer high unemployment, and experience pervasive hostility from the wider white society. The Kerner Commission, assembled to investigate the causes of U.S. race riots, agreed, saying that a national commitment to spending large amounts of money on job training, welfare, housing, and anticrime programs was necessary if racism and poverty were to be cured. But the kind of money the Commission was talking about was earmarked for Vietnam.
Sources:
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant - Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973, (Oxford, 1998)
I.F. Stone, In A Time of Torment, 1961-1967, (Little, Brown and Company, 1967)
Andrew Kopkind, The Thirty Years' Wars - Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965-1994, (Verso, 1995)
William Blum, Killing Hope - U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties - Years of Hope, Days of Rage, (Bantam, 1987)
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, (Penguin, 1969)
Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections - U.S. Staged Elections in The Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, (South End, 1984)
Noam Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993)
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979)
Tad Szulc, Dominican Diary, (Dell, 1965)
Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, (Random House, 1969)
William H. Blanchard, Aggression American Style, (Goodyear, 1978)
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire - Century of the Wind, (Pantheon, 1988)
Michael Albert, Parecon - Life After Capitalism, (Verso, 2003)
David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996)
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, (Ballantine, 1977)
Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1978)
Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection - What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978
Tom Segev, 1967 - Israel, The War, And The Year That Transformed The Middle East, (Henry Holt, 2005)
-----Congressman Lyndon Johnson, 1948
I'll always remember LBJ as a demented half-drunk mockery of manliness, a dirty young, middle-aged and old man who called in secretaries to give him head and generals to give him body counts with equal relish.
-----Journalist Andrew Kopkind
He was vain, vindictive, and ignorant. Years went by without his reading a book, and he never read if he could avoid it. Though he preferred to receive information orally, he rarely listened.
The prototypical extrovert, he was devoid of scruples but gripped by a passion to "get things done." From his earliest days the shallowest of status markers captivated him: to enlarge his reputation, surpass the achievements of all his rivals and friends, to gain greater power, to earn more money than anyone else. In pursuit of these ends he became a long-winded bore, endlessly repeating cliches about freedom, especially the entrepreneurial freedom to pile up money. In fact, money and power were all he thought about.
His ideological moorings were nationalist, racist, and sexist. He rated the white race superior to all others, Americans superior to other nationalities, and men superior to women. He held doubters in contempt, even as he questioned his own masculinity, and he yearned to be judged a manly man by John Kennedy's "Best and Brightest," who he feared found him lacking in balls.
He divided males into men and boys. Men were activists and doers who forged business empires and preferred action to talk. Their aggression and can-do optimism gave them the edge in a tough and savage world of other men, and earned them the respect of dominant men. Boys were talkers and writers and intellectuals. Like women, they sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of acting. When he discovered that a member of his administration had turned dovish on Vietnam, Johnson once complained, "Hell, he has to squat to piss."
Elected to the House in 1937 as a New Dealer, he quickly joined forces with anti-labor Southerners. In 1943, he voted to override FDR's veto of the anti-labor Smith-Connally Act, which allowed the government to seize industries threatened by strikes, and four years later he did the same to override Truman's veto of Taft-Hartley, which required union leaders to take an anti-Communist loyalty oath. When he ran for the Senate in 1948 he launched his campaign with Herman Brown of Brown & Root, one of the most anti-labor employers in the country, sitting approvingly on the platform behind him. Once elected he advocated "right-to-work" laws, i.e., illegal to unionize. His anti-labor record proved so extreme that Texas unions were induced to endorse Johnson's right-wing opponent,"Coke" Stevenson, the first time Texas labor had endorsed a candidate for the Senate in half a century. Remembering his friends, Johnson removed a fair labor standards provision in an $8 billion highway bill during his first term as Senate majority leader.
Though Vietnam was his greatest crime, Johnson was also responsible for a series of other coups or interventions that ultimately slaughtered thousands of civilians. In 1964, for example, the Johnson Administration overthrew the democratically elected government of Brazil. The administration of Joao Goulart had committed the grave sin of introducing agrarian reform, ending capital flight, and nationalizing a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph, which they ungratefully complained was "bleeding the Brazilian economy." Washington quickly sounded the alarm at Brazil's "anti-Americanism" and "drift to the left."
The coup began with the U.S. Sixth Fleet standing by offshore while Brazilian troops and tanks advanced on Rio de Janeiro. Encountering only scattered resistance, the Army seized power with U.S. approval, cutting short a Brazilian investigation of C.I.A. bribery. U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled Washington that the Generals had carried out a "democratic rebellion," which constituted "a great victory for the free world," one that "should create a greatly improved climate for private investments."
General Castelo Branco emerged as the president of Brazil's new neo-Nazi national security state. He shut down the Congress, murdered his political opponents, suspended habeas corpus for "political crimes," outlawed criticism of the president, placed labor unions under government control, and maintained internal security by death squad. As protests against his dictatorship mounted, his security forces fired into crowds, burned down homes, and tortured disobedient priests defending the poor. Washington and Wall Street applauded his program of "moral rehabilitation."
The result was the usual free market "miracle." Income distribution shifted sharply upward, the investment climate improved, the World Bank came running with loans, and U.S. aid increased in tandem with torture, killing, hunger, disease, infant death, and profits. A 1975 World Bank study - the high water mark of the economic "miracle" years - reported that 68% of Brazilians had less than the minimum caloric requirement for normal physical activity and that 58% of children suffered from malnutrition.
A year after the coup in Brazil Johnson sent 23,000 Marines to invade the Dominican Republic and suppress a democratic revival there. In 1963, Dominicans had celebrated the end of 31 years of dictatorship under Rafael Trujillo (who had governed by systematic terror and been shot to death) by electing Juan Bosch en masse. Bosch refused to buy planes for the air force, announced agrarian reform, supported a divorce law, low rent housing, and modest nationalization of business, and raised wages. Fed up with the "Communist" administration after just seven months, Generals Toni Imbert and Wessin and Wessin, both graduates of the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama, deposed Bosch in a barracks revolt at dawn. The Johnson Administration quickly recognized the new regime of generals.
In 1965, the people rose in revolt attempting to restore Bosch to the presidency. Rooftop snipers machine-gunned loyalist troops, rebel units (loyal to Bosch) occupied street corners and patrolled the highways, and ecstatic radio announcements propelled thousands of Dominicans into the streets shouting "Viva Bosch." There they snatched up weapons from arsenals thrown open by the rebel army, and fashioned Molotov cocktails using gasoline donated by filling stations. When Bosch forces took over the public air waves a parade of locals appeared on T.V. denouncing the misery wrought by dictatorship and IMF austerity.
The U.S. Embassy shrieked of ransacked embassies, Castro-style mass executions, and victorious Bosch supporters parading through the streets with their victims' heads on poles. Johnson declared that, “some 1,500 innocent people were murdered and shot, and their heads cut off.” This was pure fabrication. The only large-scale massacres were carried out by loyalist troops with the military and diplomatic support of the Johnson Administration. Thousands of Bosch party activists, local leaders, and members were jailed, beaten, or killed. Declaring he would not permit a second Cuba, Johnson dispatched the Marines, their fifth appearance in the Dominican Republic in the 20th century. Landing at the Generals' air base at San Isidro they fought side-by-side with the junta's troops, blasting through rebel forces on the Duarte bridge with bazookas, 106-mm recoilless rifles, and machine guns. President Johnson brazenly lied to the American people, saying that the U.S. was a neutral arbiter between the contending forces and had "attacked no one."
The U.S. immediately recognized the new police state headed by Donald Reid Cabral, a pro-American businessman who U.S. Ambassador William Taply Bennett fondly called "Donny." The "non-totalitarian" (i.e., anti-Communist) dictator received more money - $100 million - in direct and guaranteed loans from Washington than any Dominican regime in history. The fact that Cabral "had no popular support," according to secret U.S. polls, and that Bosch and his party were still the legally constituted authority of the Dominican Republic, didn't matter at all to LBJ. Nor did the fact that no Dominican lives need have been lost had Washington given support to Bosch's movement.
1965 was also the year that Johnson massively escalated the war in Vietnam, embarking the U.S. and the world on a disaster that would ultimately cost millions of lives. Johnson could never shake his conviction that the U.S. enjoyed a Divine Right to determine the internal politics of Vietnam, and that the series of South Vietnamese dictatorships imposed by Washington deserved "independence" from the overwhelmingly popular National Liberation Front attempting to dislodge them.
LBJ insisted on Hanoi's unconditional surrender in Vietnam. He couldn't stop patting himself on the back for his "generosity" in being willing to let them surrender. If North Vietnam stopped helping the National Liberation Front try to expel the U.S. from the country, LBJ was willing to order his occupying army to cease fire, but not to leave. His moral blindness was so extreme that he never understood that the Vietnamese people had every right to insist on their independence and expel a government imposed on them by a foreign power.
For U.S. troops the war was a pointless slaughter. Battles were a succession of ambushes and fire-fights in mid-jungle. Holding fixed terrain was impossible. Patrols traversed the same ground repeatedly in vicious manhunts for "Vietcong," who were indistinguishable from the civilian population that the Pentagon conceded overwhelmingly supported them. Progress was marked by kill ratio, a statistic that defined massacre as victory.
U.S. soldiers fought in defense of a military junta that had had ten changes of government between 1963 and 1965. At the Honolulu Conference in the latter year, Johnson told then South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, (who declared that Hitler was his only hero) that "when you talk about building schools instead of beheading teachers, and when you speak of erecting clinics instead of firing mortars and destroying them, you speak our language." Bertrand Russell, with far greater realism, called LBJ's war policy "a barbaric . . . aggressive war of conquest." LBJ never realized that backing Hitler enthusiasts could hardly produce any other kind of war.
Anyone who was insufficiently optimistic about the prospects for U.S. "victory" in Vietnam, let alone those who opposed Washington's war policy regardless of its prospects for "success," Johnson quickly condemned as unwitting dupes of Communist conspiracy or outright traitors. In 1965 he told his staff that "the communists already control the three major networks and the forty major outlets of communication." He ordered the F.B.I. to spy on Congress. He described the Soviets as being "in constant touch with anti-war Senators." He said the wayward Senators "ate lunch and went to parties at the Soviet embassy; children of their staff people dated Russians. The Russians think up things for the Senators to say." Faced with massive protests in the spring of 1967 he told Time Magazine's Hugh Sidey that "most of the protests are Communist-led." He had every government intelligence agency investigate, spy on, and undermine anti-war activists. He rejected a C.I.A. analysis that concluded that the peace movement was not under Communist direction.
He never questioned the wisdom of basing economic "health" on massive war spending. During Johnson's time in office the U.S. spent about $50 billion a year in pump-priming war expenditures, nevertheless he never declared that his "Great Society" required putting an end to these gargantuan allocations in support of imperial war. Quite the contrary. He agreed that "the business of America was business" and no business was better than the war business.
Johnson was also a fervent Zionist who knew that nuclear bomb materials were being diverted from a U.S. plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania to Israel, but did nothing to stop it. And he covered up Israel's involvement in the attack on the clearly marked U.S.S. Liberty, which was sailing off the Gaza Strip in international waters during the Six Day War. Johnson referred to the strike as a "deliberate attack" in an off the record press briefing, and his ambassador to the U.N. Arthur Goldberg told Israel's ambassador to the U.S. that U.S. tape recordings revealed that the Israeli pilots knew they were attacking an American ship. Thirty-four men were killed and seventy-five wounded. Johnson helped insure the American public never heard about it.
Johnson was most proud of his domestic social policy. Announcing the War on Poverty in January, 1964, he declared grandly: "This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America . . . Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it, and, above all, to prevent it."(emphasis added) But in reality LBJ had no clue how to end poverty and proved unwilling to commit the resources necessary to waging a serious fight. He naively accepted the anti-poverty "wisdom" of poverty experts, who recommended overcoming the "culture of poverty" by "maximum feasible participation." In other words, they saw nothing wrong with the capitalist system, only with those it oppressed, and as good liberals they could never understand poor people's lack of enthusiasm for "participation" in degrading and exploitative social relations.
Unsurprisingly therefore, LBJ's Great Society programs were premised on the idea that giving a little to the poor - very little - would make it easier to continue giving a lot to the rich. He was quite incapable of seeing the situation with the clarity of writer James Baldwin, who correctly noted that, "the civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo." So it was that LBJ launched his doomed crusade, which as I.F. Stone noted in 1965, even with expenditures doubled, which LBJ called for that year, produced barely $1 billion in new spending for social programs. In short, the "Great Society" had but a microscopic claim on resources compared with the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. was spending annually in its effort to obliterate Indochina. And, when push came to shove, LBJ deliberately held down poverty relief expenditures in order to fund the Vietnam slaughter.
Even on racial matters, supposedly LBJ's crowning achievement, Johnson was no bargain. He proved unwilling to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (mostly black, but open to all races) when it arrived at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964 to challenge the segregationist delegation representing Mississippi that year. Johnson attempted to bribe the MFDP by offering them two "at large" seats alongside the white supremacist delegates, but MFDP's Fannie Lou Hamer, indignant at his proposed compromise, protested: "We didn't come all this way for no two seats!" Johnson tried to prevent her from speaking at the convention. Said his Vice President Hubert Humphrey: "The President has said he that he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention." The following year when Johnson declared to a joint session of Congress, "we shall overcome," radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, just back from Vietnam and observing the speech from the House Press Gallery, "grew suddenly dizzy in the head and queasy in the stomach and nearly pitched over the railing." (Kopkind, "The Thirty Years' Wars," p. 251)
Furthermore, when riots exploded in black ghettos, LBJ faulted not his own prioritizing of war over social spending, but black people themselves for being "ungrateful" for the token efforts he had made on their behalf. Even the establishment press saw more clearly than LBJ. The Boston Globe commented in the wake of the 1967 Newark riots that they represented "a revolution of black Americans against white Americans, a violent petition for the redress of long-standing grievances." The Globe insisted that the civil rights laws and antipoverty measures so boasted of by LBJ had actually done little to alter fundamental conditions for blacks, who continued to live in slums, attend inferior schools, suffer high unemployment, and experience pervasive hostility from the wider white society. The Kerner Commission, assembled to investigate the causes of U.S. race riots, agreed, saying that a national commitment to spending large amounts of money on job training, welfare, housing, and anticrime programs was necessary if racism and poverty were to be cured. But the kind of money the Commission was talking about was earmarked for Vietnam.
Sources:
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant - Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973, (Oxford, 1998)
I.F. Stone, In A Time of Torment, 1961-1967, (Little, Brown and Company, 1967)
Andrew Kopkind, The Thirty Years' Wars - Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965-1994, (Verso, 1995)
William Blum, Killing Hope - U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties - Years of Hope, Days of Rage, (Bantam, 1987)
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, (Penguin, 1969)
Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections - U.S. Staged Elections in The Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, (South End, 1984)
Noam Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993)
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979)
Tad Szulc, Dominican Diary, (Dell, 1965)
Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, (Random House, 1969)
William H. Blanchard, Aggression American Style, (Goodyear, 1978)
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire - Century of the Wind, (Pantheon, 1988)
Michael Albert, Parecon - Life After Capitalism, (Verso, 2003)
David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996)
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, (Ballantine, 1977)
Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1978)
Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection - What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978
Tom Segev, 1967 - Israel, The War, And The Year That Transformed The Middle East, (Henry Holt, 2005)
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Coup Plotters Unlimited: "This Is Not A Coup"
The United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran's affairs. Some in Iran - some in the Iranian government, in particular, are trying to avoid that debate by accusing the United States and others in the West of instigating protests over the election. These accusations are patently false.
---------Barack Obama, Washington Post, June 23, 2009
Never believe anything until it's officially denied.
---------Claud Cockburn, father of U.S. journalist Alexander Cockburn
---------Barack Obama, Washington Post, June 23, 2009
Never believe anything until it's officially denied.
---------Claud Cockburn, father of U.S. journalist Alexander Cockburn
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Bulletins From Konsciousness Kontrol
The USA has lessons to teach the bloody, repressive, fanatic, murderous, anti-Semitic ,totalitarian Iranian dictatorship about real, true democracy. Independent American presidential candidate Ralph Nader was not allowed to participate in any debates with ruling party candidates in both the 2004 and 2008 elections, while Iranian president Ahmedinajad debated no less than three opposition candidates on Iranian TV during their presidential campaign. See?... SEE?
Reverting to an earlier tax rate on the state’s wealthiest residents and creating a new tax on oil drilling could bring bankrupt California billions more dollars in revenue, which is why the working class majority should oppose taxing the leisure class and petroleum interests lest they emigrate to another country and take their money with them, leaving everyone all alone and without work or oil. Then what’ll they do?
The more than half a million americans idled every month by the present economic crisis should just watch American Idol and pray that they will be struck by lightening, talent and looks good or bad enough to guarantee them money to pay their cable bills so that they can continue being distracted by this and other important expressions of art, culture and reality evasion.
New serious, very harsh , bold and domineeringly restrictive rules created by the Obama administration will put bankers and other financial capitalists in charge of regulating bankers and other financial capitalists. Citizen consumers who don't know the difference between communism and the public library should demand an end to socialist government in the USA
Color coded democratic revolutions in foreign countries organized and financed by western capital need to be seen as true expressions of the people because of great mobs demonstrating against repressive regimes, but massive mobs demonstrating against america’s foreign wars are meaningless expressions of communist and terrorist inspired ungratefulness for the privileges afforded our shopping masses by their wealthy corporate benefactors.
Questioning any aspect of the holocaust assaults the memories of those hundreds of thousands who - miraculously - survived it , and especially those who weren't born when it happened or who weren't anywhere near europe when it happened, and should mean loss of jobs and/or prison sentences , understandable in the pursuit of historical accuracy, freedom of speech and whatever. Death to the Dictator!
Monty Python is suing twits, twitters, the twittish, and their sister group the twats, who stole their label for fools and use it to claim the opposite. "A twit is an ass, but twitters are a class", said a spokesperson for the national organization TWIT ( Totally Without Intellect) , but pythoners claim copyright infractions and general american stupidity. A python spokesman hissed "Why can’t they just spread celebrity gossip, movie news and color coded revolutions by putting up highway billboards or sending western union teletubbies or some other quaint and backward american practice? "
If Ahmedinajad isn’t replaced , assassinated or converted to Christianity , he will destroy the entire planet, after stealing Israel’s nukes because Iran doesn't have any, but Israel also doesn't really have any and would never really use them if they had them, except for high holiday celebrations or if anti-Semites existentially threatened the european apartheid state they created in a semitic land which is the middle east’s only real democracy. Read it again.
Obama is a socialist , the Democratic party is controlled by communists and America was founded by white martians who came here to escape persecution by interplanetary dark skinned anglo saxon protestant illuminati jewish mafia lesbian free mason abortionists who circumsized moses, crucified christ, planned and executed 911 and were behind the last Yankee world series victory. Really. It was on Fox.
Reverting to an earlier tax rate on the state’s wealthiest residents and creating a new tax on oil drilling could bring bankrupt California billions more dollars in revenue, which is why the working class majority should oppose taxing the leisure class and petroleum interests lest they emigrate to another country and take their money with them, leaving everyone all alone and without work or oil. Then what’ll they do?
The more than half a million americans idled every month by the present economic crisis should just watch American Idol and pray that they will be struck by lightening, talent and looks good or bad enough to guarantee them money to pay their cable bills so that they can continue being distracted by this and other important expressions of art, culture and reality evasion.
New serious, very harsh , bold and domineeringly restrictive rules created by the Obama administration will put bankers and other financial capitalists in charge of regulating bankers and other financial capitalists. Citizen consumers who don't know the difference between communism and the public library should demand an end to socialist government in the USA
Color coded democratic revolutions in foreign countries organized and financed by western capital need to be seen as true expressions of the people because of great mobs demonstrating against repressive regimes, but massive mobs demonstrating against america’s foreign wars are meaningless expressions of communist and terrorist inspired ungratefulness for the privileges afforded our shopping masses by their wealthy corporate benefactors.
Questioning any aspect of the holocaust assaults the memories of those hundreds of thousands who - miraculously - survived it , and especially those who weren't born when it happened or who weren't anywhere near europe when it happened, and should mean loss of jobs and/or prison sentences , understandable in the pursuit of historical accuracy, freedom of speech and whatever. Death to the Dictator!
Monty Python is suing twits, twitters, the twittish, and their sister group the twats, who stole their label for fools and use it to claim the opposite. "A twit is an ass, but twitters are a class", said a spokesperson for the national organization TWIT ( Totally Without Intellect) , but pythoners claim copyright infractions and general american stupidity. A python spokesman hissed "Why can’t they just spread celebrity gossip, movie news and color coded revolutions by putting up highway billboards or sending western union teletubbies or some other quaint and backward american practice? "
If Ahmedinajad isn’t replaced , assassinated or converted to Christianity , he will destroy the entire planet, after stealing Israel’s nukes because Iran doesn't have any, but Israel also doesn't really have any and would never really use them if they had them, except for high holiday celebrations or if anti-Semites existentially threatened the european apartheid state they created in a semitic land which is the middle east’s only real democracy. Read it again.
Obama is a socialist , the Democratic party is controlled by communists and America was founded by white martians who came here to escape persecution by interplanetary dark skinned anglo saxon protestant illuminati jewish mafia lesbian free mason abortionists who circumsized moses, crucified christ, planned and executed 911 and were behind the last Yankee world series victory. Really. It was on Fox.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Don't Worry: The Free Market is Self-Correcting
The patient is hemorrhaging to death on the floor. We've given 787 billion blood transfusions to the gang that knifed him 42 times, but for some reason the patient is slow to recover. We need to take a "wait and see" approach to find out how much of the gang's blood will trickle down into the dying patient at some unspecified point in the future. Of little can we be certain, but experts agree that the patient will not be able to sit up, let alone walk, for years to come, if ever.
In short, recovery is on the way and our medical system is sound.
In short, recovery is on the way and our medical system is sound.
Friday, June 19, 2009
False Revolution in Iran
by Michael K. Smith
Every time you think the U.S. media can't misrepresent reality any more preposterously, they turn around and outdo themselves, as they have with the current attempt to portray the losers of the Iranian elections as revolutionaries leading the way to a democratic dawn.
The media czars appear to be quite untroubled by the fact that no evidence has surfaced to substantiate the claim that the Iranian elections were fraudulent. What we are left with, then, is an election with an 85% turnout, far beyond anything seen in the United States, in which Prime Minister Ahmadinejad was the choice of 63% of the voters, with Mousavi gaining slightly more than half that. Moreover, unlike in the U.S., it was a multi-party race in which even candidates that ended up receiving a tiny percentage of the vote were allowed to debate the issues before a national audience. In the United States this is not permitted. Ask Ralph Nader.
How quickly the ballots were counted and who won and who lost in whose hometown does not constitute proof of anything other than a suspicious cast of mind. One can suspect anything one likes, of course, but to substantiate a factual claim one needs proof. Of fraud, there is none.
What about the street violence?
What about it? What would happen in the U.S. if mobs unhappy with an election outcome burned banks and torched buses and attacked the police? What would happen if all this occurred while a foreign state vastly more powerful than the U.S. were engaged in covert operations to overthrow the U.S. government, while it repeatedly stated its willingness to bomb the country and carry out terrorist acts within its territory, as the U.S. and Israel have threatened to do to Iran for years now?
Indeed, what happened at Waco Texas in the Clinton years with no violent provocation at all? Answer: Dozens of American citizens were burned alive by their government.
What about women having to wear the hijab? What of it? Many women feel no conflict in wearing it, convinced they are honoring Allah, not male supremacy. In any case, if the man down the block forces his wife to wear a uniform, does that mean a bully who lets his wife wear what she wants has the right to take over his house?
For Americans to cry foul over the Iranian elections, in sheeplike adherence to our media mind managers, is particularly absurd. A little recent history will show why.
In 1953 the C.I.A. overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran after it nationalized its own oil. The country was turned over to the Shah of Iran, who proved an able student of Nazi torture techniques, which he learned from his Western benefactors, going on to murder and mutilate Iranians on a gargantuan scale. In 1976, Amnesty International reported that his secret police (SAVAK) had carried out more official executions than any other country in the world, a rate Amnesty characterized as "beyond belief." Many victims vanished without a trace. Many were tortured even after they were convicted.
Meanwhile, the U.S. deluged the Shah with billions of dollars of lethal technology, including air-to-air missiles, smart bombs, and aerial tankers, "everything but the atomic bomb," according to a State Department official. An anti-Communist, the Shah was a greatly admired leader of the "Free World," and, as a result, his nuclear program, similar to Iran's nuclear program today, was strongly supported by the U.S..
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter dined with the Shah in the Niyavaran Palace on New Year's Eve. When his turn came to speak, he effusively praised "the great leadership of the Shah," and proclaimed Iran "an island of stability" in a "troubled" region of the world. The region was "troubled" primarily because Arabs and Muslims did not take kindly to Israel murdering and dispossessing them. Carter said Iranian stability was a great tribute "to you, Your Majesty," and to "the respect and the admiration and love" which the Iranian people allegedly felt for him. Overlooking the thousands of political prisoners suffering torture in the Shah's jails, Carter added that, "The cause of human rights is one that also is shared deeply by your people and by the leaders of our two nations." Concluding on a note of utter devotion, he said: "There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship and gratitude."
The Shah was thrilled. The Iranian people were not. Carter didn't even notice the thousands of young Iranians pelting the army with rocks as he was driven to the airport. Not long after, nationwide riots broke out.
In 1978, the Shah's miserable subjects, fed up with hunger, squalid huts, 13-hour workdays, and the ravages of untreated disease, rocked Teheran with furious protests. Attempting to quell the growing turbulence, the Shah's troops machine-gunned a crowd in Jaleh Square, killing and wounding hundreds. In Washington, President Carter told the Shah's son: "We're thankful for this move toward democracy. We know it is opposed by some who don't like democratic principles but his progressive administration is very valuable, I think, to the entire Western world." The Shah's ambassadors politely queried Washington on its appetite for terror: "Would you accept five thousand deaths? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?"
In 1979 the Shah was overthrown. When President Carter subsequently allowed him to enter the U.S. to receive medical treatment for cancer at a New York hospital, enraged Iranian protesters seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran along with 66 Americans inside. They held 52 of them for the remainder of the Carter presidency (until January 20, 1981) During this "hostage crisis" the U.S. media portrayed Iranian street demonstrations as circuses manipulated by mad clerics caught up in religious frenzy, never giving credit to the many legitimate grievances they had with the U.S. Conceding that the ex-Shah had tortured his subjects, the Washington Post found it inconsequential, since "it can be argued that it was entirely in the tradition of Iranian history." By this logic, a foreign power could take over the U.S. and lynch its victims, since lynching is entirely consistent with U.S. history.
Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, which killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many of them in repeated poison gas attacks. In 1981, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a group acting on behalf of the Iraqi regime exploded a 60-pound bomb at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Teheran, blowing apart 71 party leaders who were listening to a speech by the chief justice of the supreme court. Among the dead were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and 27 members of the Iranian parliament. In 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian plane in an ascending flight path, killing 290 people on board. Returning to the docks in San Diego, the Commander of the ship was given a hero's welcome. Later he was awarded a medal. Vice President George Bush (Sr.) declared: "I'll never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
In recent years the U.S. has been involved in another coup attempt in Iran. In 2007 President George W. Bush authorized the C.I.A. to destabilize the Iranian government. These operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, include a coordinated propaganda campaign, placement of negative newspaper articles, and the manipulation of Iranian currency and international banking transactions.
U.S. and Pakistani intelligence backed a separatist militia of militant Sunni tribesmen from the Baluchi region of Iran. The group - Jundallah (Soldiers of God) - carried out murderous raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province. "I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran," said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker confirmed the story, stating that the U.S. was intent on "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change." He added that the U.S. Congress had approved up to $400 million to fund the destabilization efforts. "The irony is that we're once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties. Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11 attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
In short, lack of democracy in Iran is a longstanding U.S. value, just as it is around the world. Washington cannot tolerate independent nationalism, and even less a leader who tells the truth to its face about Israel, and refuses to kowtow to Holocaust orthodoxy. Now the Iranian people have spoken and elected Ahmadinejad to a second term. The proper way to respond to this event has been demonstrated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who issued the following statement upon receiving the news:
"The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in the name of the Venezuelan people, confirms to the people and government of the Islamic Republic of Iran its recognition of the extraordinary democratic day evidenced this past Friday, June 12, when presidential elections with historical levels of popular participation took place and resulted in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela hereby declares its firmest rejection of the vicious and unfounded campaign to discredit the institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed from outside the country, designed to confuse the political climate of our brother country. From Venezuela we denounce these acts of interference in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, at the same time as we demand an immediate end to the maneuvers of intimidation and destabilization against the Islamic Republic.
"The people and government of Venezuela are certain that the Iranian people will know how to solve its internal problems and will continue the path of the Islamic Revolution."
Now there's a gentleman who respects democracy.
Sources:
Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf, 2005)
William Shawcross, The Shah's Last Ride, (Simon and Schuster, 1988)
Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind The Gulf War, (Penguin, 1991)
Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War - Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-1982)
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979)
Reza Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals, (Vintage, 1976)
Edward Said, Covering Islam, (Vintage, 1981)
Steve Weissman, How Uncle Sam Diddles Democrats From Ukraine to Venezuela, Truthout, June 18, 2009
Chavez saludo y reconoce triunfo de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad y quiere hacer desaparecer Globovision, http://www.novacolombia.info/nota.asp?n=2009_6_18&id=9358&id_tiponota=8
Every time you think the U.S. media can't misrepresent reality any more preposterously, they turn around and outdo themselves, as they have with the current attempt to portray the losers of the Iranian elections as revolutionaries leading the way to a democratic dawn.
The media czars appear to be quite untroubled by the fact that no evidence has surfaced to substantiate the claim that the Iranian elections were fraudulent. What we are left with, then, is an election with an 85% turnout, far beyond anything seen in the United States, in which Prime Minister Ahmadinejad was the choice of 63% of the voters, with Mousavi gaining slightly more than half that. Moreover, unlike in the U.S., it was a multi-party race in which even candidates that ended up receiving a tiny percentage of the vote were allowed to debate the issues before a national audience. In the United States this is not permitted. Ask Ralph Nader.
How quickly the ballots were counted and who won and who lost in whose hometown does not constitute proof of anything other than a suspicious cast of mind. One can suspect anything one likes, of course, but to substantiate a factual claim one needs proof. Of fraud, there is none.
What about the street violence?
What about it? What would happen in the U.S. if mobs unhappy with an election outcome burned banks and torched buses and attacked the police? What would happen if all this occurred while a foreign state vastly more powerful than the U.S. were engaged in covert operations to overthrow the U.S. government, while it repeatedly stated its willingness to bomb the country and carry out terrorist acts within its territory, as the U.S. and Israel have threatened to do to Iran for years now?
Indeed, what happened at Waco Texas in the Clinton years with no violent provocation at all? Answer: Dozens of American citizens were burned alive by their government.
What about women having to wear the hijab? What of it? Many women feel no conflict in wearing it, convinced they are honoring Allah, not male supremacy. In any case, if the man down the block forces his wife to wear a uniform, does that mean a bully who lets his wife wear what she wants has the right to take over his house?
For Americans to cry foul over the Iranian elections, in sheeplike adherence to our media mind managers, is particularly absurd. A little recent history will show why.
In 1953 the C.I.A. overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran after it nationalized its own oil. The country was turned over to the Shah of Iran, who proved an able student of Nazi torture techniques, which he learned from his Western benefactors, going on to murder and mutilate Iranians on a gargantuan scale. In 1976, Amnesty International reported that his secret police (SAVAK) had carried out more official executions than any other country in the world, a rate Amnesty characterized as "beyond belief." Many victims vanished without a trace. Many were tortured even after they were convicted.
Meanwhile, the U.S. deluged the Shah with billions of dollars of lethal technology, including air-to-air missiles, smart bombs, and aerial tankers, "everything but the atomic bomb," according to a State Department official. An anti-Communist, the Shah was a greatly admired leader of the "Free World," and, as a result, his nuclear program, similar to Iran's nuclear program today, was strongly supported by the U.S..
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter dined with the Shah in the Niyavaran Palace on New Year's Eve. When his turn came to speak, he effusively praised "the great leadership of the Shah," and proclaimed Iran "an island of stability" in a "troubled" region of the world. The region was "troubled" primarily because Arabs and Muslims did not take kindly to Israel murdering and dispossessing them. Carter said Iranian stability was a great tribute "to you, Your Majesty," and to "the respect and the admiration and love" which the Iranian people allegedly felt for him. Overlooking the thousands of political prisoners suffering torture in the Shah's jails, Carter added that, "The cause of human rights is one that also is shared deeply by your people and by the leaders of our two nations." Concluding on a note of utter devotion, he said: "There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship and gratitude."
The Shah was thrilled. The Iranian people were not. Carter didn't even notice the thousands of young Iranians pelting the army with rocks as he was driven to the airport. Not long after, nationwide riots broke out.
In 1978, the Shah's miserable subjects, fed up with hunger, squalid huts, 13-hour workdays, and the ravages of untreated disease, rocked Teheran with furious protests. Attempting to quell the growing turbulence, the Shah's troops machine-gunned a crowd in Jaleh Square, killing and wounding hundreds. In Washington, President Carter told the Shah's son: "We're thankful for this move toward democracy. We know it is opposed by some who don't like democratic principles but his progressive administration is very valuable, I think, to the entire Western world." The Shah's ambassadors politely queried Washington on its appetite for terror: "Would you accept five thousand deaths? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?"
In 1979 the Shah was overthrown. When President Carter subsequently allowed him to enter the U.S. to receive medical treatment for cancer at a New York hospital, enraged Iranian protesters seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran along with 66 Americans inside. They held 52 of them for the remainder of the Carter presidency (until January 20, 1981) During this "hostage crisis" the U.S. media portrayed Iranian street demonstrations as circuses manipulated by mad clerics caught up in religious frenzy, never giving credit to the many legitimate grievances they had with the U.S. Conceding that the ex-Shah had tortured his subjects, the Washington Post found it inconsequential, since "it can be argued that it was entirely in the tradition of Iranian history." By this logic, a foreign power could take over the U.S. and lynch its victims, since lynching is entirely consistent with U.S. history.
Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, which killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many of them in repeated poison gas attacks. In 1981, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a group acting on behalf of the Iraqi regime exploded a 60-pound bomb at a meeting of the ruling Islamic Republican Party in Teheran, blowing apart 71 party leaders who were listening to a speech by the chief justice of the supreme court. Among the dead were four cabinet ministers, six deputy ministers and 27 members of the Iranian parliament. In 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian plane in an ascending flight path, killing 290 people on board. Returning to the docks in San Diego, the Commander of the ship was given a hero's welcome. Later he was awarded a medal. Vice President George Bush (Sr.) declared: "I'll never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
In recent years the U.S. has been involved in another coup attempt in Iran. In 2007 President George W. Bush authorized the C.I.A. to destabilize the Iranian government. These operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, include a coordinated propaganda campaign, placement of negative newspaper articles, and the manipulation of Iranian currency and international banking transactions.
U.S. and Pakistani intelligence backed a separatist militia of militant Sunni tribesmen from the Baluchi region of Iran. The group - Jundallah (Soldiers of God) - carried out murderous raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province. "I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran," said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker confirmed the story, stating that the U.S. was intent on "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change." He added that the U.S. Congress had approved up to $400 million to fund the destabilization efforts. "The irony is that we're once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties. Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11 attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
In short, lack of democracy in Iran is a longstanding U.S. value, just as it is around the world. Washington cannot tolerate independent nationalism, and even less a leader who tells the truth to its face about Israel, and refuses to kowtow to Holocaust orthodoxy. Now the Iranian people have spoken and elected Ahmadinejad to a second term. The proper way to respond to this event has been demonstrated by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who issued the following statement upon receiving the news:
"The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in the name of the Venezuelan people, confirms to the people and government of the Islamic Republic of Iran its recognition of the extraordinary democratic day evidenced this past Friday, June 12, when presidential elections with historical levels of popular participation took place and resulted in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela hereby declares its firmest rejection of the vicious and unfounded campaign to discredit the institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed from outside the country, designed to confuse the political climate of our brother country. From Venezuela we denounce these acts of interference in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, at the same time as we demand an immediate end to the maneuvers of intimidation and destabilization against the Islamic Republic.
"The people and government of Venezuela are certain that the Iranian people will know how to solve its internal problems and will continue the path of the Islamic Revolution."
Now there's a gentleman who respects democracy.
Sources:
Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf, 2005)
William Shawcross, The Shah's Last Ride, (Simon and Schuster, 1988)
Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind The Gulf War, (Penguin, 1991)
Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War - Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-1982)
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979)
Reza Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals, (Vintage, 1976)
Edward Said, Covering Islam, (Vintage, 1981)
Steve Weissman, How Uncle Sam Diddles Democrats From Ukraine to Venezuela, Truthout, June 18, 2009
Chavez saludo y reconoce triunfo de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad y quiere hacer desaparecer Globovision, http://www.novacolombia.info/nota.asp?n=2009_6_18&id=9358&id_tiponota=8
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