On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet seized control of Chile from the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Pinochet, who was one of the most brutal dictators in recent history, conducted mass murder and torture, set up an assassination program to pursue dissidents who fled abroad, and imprisoned tens of thousands of people. He ended Chile’s democracy for a generation. Per capita, if Pinochet’s terror had occurred in the United States, it would have meant 150,000 deaths and a million torture victims, as well as the overthrow of the president and the end of the electoral system. The first 9/11 was pure state terrorism.
In his memoirs, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is frank about the U.S. role in bringing this outcome about. Allende’s leftist presidency posed “a permanent challenge to our position in the Western Hemisphere.” Kissinger dismisses any concerns about the legitimacy of interfering in other countries’ elections or trying to engineer coups, writing that “I cannot accept the proposition that the United States is debarred from acting in the gray area between diplomacy and military intervention.” He recounts that when Allende was first elected, Richard Nixon went berserk and “wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende’s accession to power: If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende we should try it.” Nixon’s CIA encouraged and funded a plot that murdered General René Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean army, whose commitment to the country’s constitution was seen as an obstacle to a successful coup. Nixon ordered that “aid programs to Chile should be cut; its economy should be squeezed until it ‘screamed,’ ” that is, the lives of the Chilean people should be made as miserable as possible to punish them for voting the wrong way.[1]
Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, released by the National Security Archive, uses declassified documents to show how the U.S. government tried to undermine and destroy Allende from the moment he was elected and lavished support on Pinochet after the coup, while lying continually about its role. The Nixon administration imposed an “invisible blockade,” and “NSC records show conclusively that the Nixon administration moved quickly, quietly and politically to shut down multilateral and bilateral aid to Chile” once Allende took office, blaming the resulting economic chaos on Allende’s own policies. Kissinger falsely testified to the Senate in 1974 that “the intent of the United States was not to destabilize or subvert” Allende, despite having internally recommended a course of action that “might lead to [Allende’s] collapse or overthrow.” Kissinger was clear in explaining to Nixon why Allende could not be allowed to succeed. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves,” Kissinger said. Allende posed “some very serious threats” to U.S. interests, including the possibility of lost “U.S. investments (totaling some one billion dollars)” but also the “model effect” that Allende would have on the world if his country flourished. The “example of a successful Marxist government” would have “precedent value” elsewhere and the “imitative spread of similar phenomena” would “significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” Nixon himself said that “our main concern in Chile is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture presented to the world will be his success.”[2]
Thus, just days after Allende was inaugurated, Nixon convened the National Security Council to discuss ways to “bring about his downfall.” A 1970 CIA telegram said that it “is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup” and promising “maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource,” while warning that “it is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States Government] and American hand be well hidden.”[3]
Stephen M. Streeter, in a comprehensive study based on the U.S. archives, concludes that “the maximal goal of the Nixon administration was to block Allende from the presidency by either constitutional means or by promoting a military coup,” while “the minimal goal became punishing Chile so that no other Latin American country would be tempted to imitate the Chilean road to socialism.” Once Allende’s downfall was effected, the Nixon administration immediately embraced the Pinochet junta. Kissinger told Pinochet he had done a “great service to the West” by ending Chilean democracy.[4]
The problem with Allende was that he had posed the threat of a good example. If he had succeeded in his course of independent nationalism and leftist economics, he would have inspired other countries to act similarly. This could have diminished U.S. power. Allende had to go.
After World War II, postwar planners like George Kennan realized that it would be vital for the health of U.S. corporations that the Western industrial societies rebuild so they could import U.S. manufactured goods and provide investment opportunities.
But it was crucial to restore the traditional order, with business dominant, labor split and weakened, and the burden of reconstruction placed squarely on the shoulders of the working classes and the poor. The major thing that stood in the way was the anti-fascist resistance. The United States, therefore, actively suppressed it all over the world, often preferring to have former fascists and Nazi collaborators in power.[5] Sometimes that required extreme violence, but other times it was done by softer measures, like subverting elections and withholding desperately needed food.
U.S. planners recognized that the “threat” in postwar Europe was not Soviet aggression, although the Truman administration led the public to think otherwise. “It is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power,” George Kennan concluded in 1947. Historian Melvyn Leffler writes, “Soviet power paled next to that of the United States,” because it was an “exhausted, devastated nation,” and U.S. officials, therefore, “did not expect Soviet military aggression.” What was a threat was “the prospective renaissance of virulent nationalism or the development of independent neutralism.” The planners “defined security in terms of correlations of power” and “defined power in terms of control over or access to resources,” by which logic any threat to U.S. control of resources was a threat to national security.[6]
As Leffler writes, after the war peoples across the world “wanted a more just and equitable social and economic order,” demanding “reform, nationalization, and social welfare.” They now “expected their governments to protect them from the vagaries of business fluctuations, the avarice of capitalists, and the occasional disasters of the natural world,” viewing this as “their due for the sacrifices they had endured and the hardships they had overcome.”
In Italy, for instance, a worker- and peasant-based movement, led by the Communist Party, had held down six German divisions during the war and liberated northern Italy. As U.S. forces advanced through Italy, they dispersed this anti-fascist resistance and restored the basic structure of the prewar fascist regime. The CIA was concerned about Communists winning power legally in the crucial Italian elections of 1948. Many techniques were used, including restoring the former fascist police, breaking the unions, and withholding aid. But it wasn’t clear that the Communist Party could be defeated. The very first National Security Council memorandum, NSC 1 (1948), specified a number of actions the United States would take if the communists won these elections. One planned response was armed intervention, by means of military aid for underground operations in Italy. The U.S. was willing to consider supporting a coup to stop the left, despite the known “probability [of] plunging Italy into [a] bloody civil war and seriously hazarding [the] start [of] World War III.” The right to override the population is assumed.[7]
Election interference was conducted regularly. From 1948 through the early 1970s, the CIA funneled over $65 million to approved political parties and affiliates. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses,” former CIA officer F. Mark Wyatt admitted.[8] In fact, between 1946 and 2000, the United States undertook over eighty election-interference operations around the world. The New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane suggests that such operations, including the planting of fake news and delivering “suitcases of cash” to favored candidates, continue to this day, noting that “what the C.I.A. may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections is still secret and may not be known for decades.” Shane quotes one ex-CIA officer confirming that “it never changes,” and another saying “I hope we keep doing it.” The issue of whether this is legitimate does not come up for public debate, though there was great hysteria about Vladimir Putin’s attempt to influence the American presidential election.[9]
In Greece, British troops entered the country after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war to suppress the provisional government that resulted in up to 160,000 deaths. This war was complete with torture, political exile for tens of thousands of Greeks, a “reeducation” program for imprisoned leftists, and the destruction of unions and of any possibility of independent politics. Much of the population had to emigrate in order to survive. The beneficiaries included U.S. investors and Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants of the communist-led, anti-Nazi resistance. Our successful defense of Greece against its own population was the model for the Vietnam War—as Adlai Stevenson explained to the United Nations in 1964: “The point is the same in Vietnam today as it was in Greece in 1947 and in Korea in 1950.” Reagan’s advisers used exactly the same model in talking about Central America, and the pattern was followed in many other places as well.[10]
In Japan, Washington initiated the so-called reverse course of 1947 that terminated early steps toward democratization taken by General MacArthur’s military administration. The reverse course suppressed the unions and other democratic forces. It purged nearly thirty thousand suspected leftists from public- and private-sector jobs as well as teaching posts, and placed the country firmly in the hands of corporate elements that had backed Japanese fascism. (The United States even covered up Japanese war crimes.) As historians John Dower and Hirata Tetsuo conclude, while the “Red Purge was aggressively pursued as part of the anti-communist policy of the Occupation…the reality was that it was a confrontation between labour and capital.” Dower writes that over time, the U.S. “began to jettison many of the original ideals of ‘demilitarization and democratization,’ ” and “aligned themselves more and more openly with conservative and even right-wing elements in Japanese society, including individuals who had been closely identified with the lost war.”[11]
When U.S. forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed the local popular government, consisting primarily of anti-fascists who had resisted the Japanese, and inaugurated a brutal repression, using Japanese fascist police and Koreans who had collaborated with them during the Japanese occupation. About one hundred thousand people were murdered in South Korea prior to what we call the Korean War, including thirty to forty thousand killed during the suppression of a peasant revolt in one small region, Cheju Island. That massacre, for which there is a “a deep, deep American responsibility” (in the words of historian Bruce Cumings), was carried out by South Korean military and police under U.S. command. One eighty-three-year-old survivor of the Cheju Island massacre, asked in 2022 what he wanted from the United States, said that all he needs is a “truthful human apology, a willingness to come and hold my hands.” He is still waiting.[12]
The goal of U.S. strategy is to prevent any challenge to the “power, position, and prestige of the United States,” as the respected liberal elder statesman Dean Acheson put it in 1963. The weakest, poorest countries often arouse the greatest hysteria. After all, if a tiny, powerless country defies the United States, it exposes the U.S. itself as a “paper tiger.” As Michael Grow demonstrates in U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War, countries deemed “threats” were no threat to U.S. security or even U.S. economic interests. They could, however, inspire further defiance elsewhere and undermine U.S. “credibility.”[13]
Take a minor example: British Guiana, where the Kennedy administration approved a covert CIA operation aimed at influencing the national elections. The goal of this operation was to prevent Cheddi Jagan, a dentist with socialist leanings, and his party from winning the elections. They would not tolerate a “second Cuba,” meaning another leftist government in the hemisphere. Declassified documents and historical records indicate that the CIA was authorized to spend substantial resources on subverting democracy. The U.S. attempted to prevent British Guiana from obtaining independence from Britain in order to stall the possibility of social democracy breaking out. American actions also included inciting violence and unrest, with reports of U.S. officials and private citizens being involved in promoting murder, arson, bombings, and creating a general atmosphere of fear. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Britain that he had “reached the conclusion that it is not possible for us to put up with an independent British Guiana under Jagan.” It is simply assumed that it is the U.S. prerogative to decide which leaders we will “put up with.” Stephen Rabe, the leading historian of U.S. intervention in British Guiana, summarizes the horrendous results: “destroying a popularly elected government, undermining democratic electoral procedures, wrecking the economy of a poor nation, and inciting racial warfare. Forbes Burnham, the vicious racist embraced by the United States, made Guiana a dangerous, brutal place and a daily nightmare for the majority Indian population.” British Guiana was of no economic consequence to the United States and certainly posed no threat to “national security.” The intervention was pure Mafia logic: What we say goes. The need to humiliate those who raise their heads is an ineradicable element of the imperial mentality.[14]
Or take the Democratic Republic of Congo, a huge country rich in resources—and one of the worst contemporary horror stories. It had a chance for successful development after independence in 1960, under the leadership of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. But the West would have none of that. CIA head Allen Dulles determined that Lumumba’s “removal must be an urgent and prime objective” of covert action, not least because U.S. investments might be endangered by what internal documents refer to as “radical nationalists.” The CIA attempted to arrange Lumumba’s “permanent disposal.” Under the supervision of Belgian officers, Lumumba was murdered, realizing President Eisenhower’s wish that he “would fall into a river full of crocodiles.” Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, in their definitive study of the murder, conclude that “the Europeans and Americans goaded the Africans to imprison Lumumba and to secure a capital sentence,” because “the West could not conceive a stand-alone African state akin to European countries in its economic and political capabilities,” and “Lumumba aspired to a greatness the West would not abide.” It was not the only such case. American intervention in postcolonial Africa was extensive and secretive. As Susan Williams writes in White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, the years of African independence “were also the years of an intense and rapid infiltration into Africa by the CIA,” and the record “reveals an extent and breadth of CIA activities in Africa that beggars belief.” Congo itself was handed over to the U.S. favorite, the murderous and corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Stuart Reid, in The Lumumba Plot, says that because “a seemingly pro-Soviet leader had been eliminated and replaced with a seemingly pro-American one,” “in Washington’s estimation, the Congo was a success.”[15]
The war on Vietnam, too, emerged from the need to ensure dominance. Vietnamese nationalists would not accept it, so they had to be smashed. The threat was never that this mostly peasant population was going to conquer anyone. It was that they might set a dangerous example of national independence that would inspire other nations in the region. The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand might emulate their example, and if they succeeded, Malaya would follow suit. Pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by then a significant part of our “Grand Area” would have been lost.
This means that in a way, there was truth to what was called the “domino theory.” The publicly presented version of the theory was, of course, ludicrous, with its suggestion that Communism would come to U.S. shores if it wasn’t defeated in Vietnam. The real threat is the “good example.” U.S. planners from Dean Acheson in the late 1940s to the present have warned that “one rotten apple can spoil the barrel.” The danger is that the “rot,” namely social and economic development, might spread. This is why such minor countries, such as British Guiana or Grenada or Laos, must be kept in line.
The security arguments are too ludicrous to consider, and it is surely not the case that their resources were too valuable to lose. Rather, the concern was about a kind of “domino” effect. But under the rotten-apple theory, it follows that the tinier and weaker the country, the less endowed it is with resources, the more dangerous it is. As a George H. W. Bush National Security Policy Review on “third world threats” explained, “much weaker enemies” must not simply be defeated, but defeated decisively and quickly, because any other outcome would be “embarrassing” and might “undercut political support.” A “much weaker” enemy poses no serious threat, but must be pulverized in order to reinforce the lesson. If even a marginal and impoverished country can set out on an independent path, others may follow.[16]
If you want a global system subordinated to the needs of U.S. investors, pieces of it must not wander off. Chile could send the wrong message to voters elsewhere. Suppose they get ideas about taking control of their own country. This would not do. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described Latin Americans as “naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown-ups” and require “a stiff hand, an authoritative hand” (though he advised President Eisenhower that to control the naughty children more effectively, it may be useful to “pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them”). As historian Lars Schoultz, a leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, concludes, the goal of installing National Security States was “to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority.”[17]
Sometimes the point is explained with great clarity. When the United States was planning to overthrow Guatemalan democracy in 1954, a State Department official pointed out that the country’s “agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon,” its “broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants” having a “strong appeal” to other Central American countries with highly unequal societies. Guatemala is therefore a “threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador.”[18]
In other words, what the United States wants is “stability,” meaning security for the “upper classes and large foreign enterprises.” If that can be achieved with formal democratic devices, all the better. If not, the “threat to stability” posed by a good example has to be destroyed before it infects others. This is why even the tiniest speck poses so great a threat.
Soon after Cuba overthrew its U.S.-supported dictator, Fulgencio Batista, this small island was subjected to vicious attack by the global superpower. Fidel Castro came to power in early 1959. By March 1960, a secret decision had been made to depose Castro. The incoming John F. Kennedy administration carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, sending a paramilitary force to overthrow the Cuban government, in what became an embarrassing defeat.
Its failure led to hysteria in Washington. Chester Bowles, then serving in the State Department, recalled that a common attitude among high officials was “emotional, almost savage”: “[Castro] can’t do this to us. We’ve got to teach him a lesson.” Kennedy launched a war to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba. His brother Robert Kennedy, who was placed in charge of the operation, wanted to find Cubans who could “stir things up on [the] island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder.” The Cuba Task Force launched a campaign aimed at “the destruction of targets important to the economy.”[19]
The CIA’s many plots to assassinate Castro are by now infamous and can easily be seen as comical (exploding cigar, toxic wetsuit, etc.). Any other nation similarly hell-bent on murdering a head of state, however, would be deemed a terrorist state. In fact, even more deranged criminal schemes were cooked up, including a CIA “proposal to have U.S. agents hijack U.S. planes or bomb U.S. targets and blame the attacks on Cuba to build a pretext for invasion.” This was never implemented, but plenty of other forms of terror were. In one mission, “a seven-man team blew up a railroad bridge and watched a train run off the track, and burned down a sugar warehouse.” “We were really doing almost anything you could dream up,” a CIA official said later, including putting contaminants in sugar and pouring “invisible, untraceable chemicals into lubricating fluids that were being shipped to Cuba” to damage diesel engines. As Keith Bolender documents in his haunting study Voices from the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba, “For half a century the Cuban people have endured almost every conceivable form of terrorism”: bombings of civilian targets, attacks on villages, and even biological terrorism. “The accused,” he writes, “have been primarily Cuban-American counter-revolutionaries—many allegedly trained, financed, and supported by various American government agencies.”[20]
In 1962, Kennedy ordered a total embargo on Cuba. In direct violation of international law, it included a ban on drugs and food products. High officials explained internally that “the Cuban people are responsible for the regime.” Therefore, the United States has the right to punish them, and furthermore, “if [the Cuban people] are hungry, they will throw Castro out.” Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castro’s departure as a result of “rising discomfort among hungry Cubans.” A high State Department official in 1960 articulated the strategy. Because Castro could be removed “through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship…every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba [in order to] bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of the government.” These economic measures would “have the effect of impressing on the Cuban people the cost of this communist orientation.” The U.S. succeeded in isolating Cuba diplomatically, but efforts in 1961 to organize other Latin American countries to join Kennedy’s efforts were unsuccessful, perhaps because of a problem noted by a Mexican diplomat: “If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.”[21]
Salim Lamrani, in his definitive study on the embargo, points out how extreme its restrictions have consistently been. The United States put “strong diplomatic pressure” on countries that declined to help isolate the island, even threatening to withhold economic aid. In 1999, the State Department successfully pressured a Jamaican company not to build a hotel complex there. The Swedish company Ericsson was fined $1.75 million for having repaired Cuban equipment, while the Treasury Department fined an American firm $1.35 million for selling barley. (Lamrani notes again that this violates international law, which prohibits inhibiting the trade of foodstuffs, even in wartime.) The effects of the embargo policy have, of course, been severe.[22]
Particularly onerous has been the impact on the health-care system, deprived of essential medical supplies. Amnesty International showed that “the embargo had contributed to malnutrition that mainly affected women and children, poor water supply and lack of medicine.” In 1992, Congress passed what was called the “Cuban Democracy Act” (CDA), initiated by liberal Democrats and strongly backed by President Clinton. A yearlong investigation by the American Association of World Health found that this escalation of U.S. economic warfare had taken a “tragic human toll,” causing “serious nutritional deficits” and “a devastating outbreak of neuropathy numbering in the tens of thousands.” A “humanitarian catastrophe has been averted only because the Cuban government has maintained” a health system that “is uniformly considered the preeminent model in the Third World.” The UN Human Rights Council has concluded that the embargo directly produces “limitations of the enjoyment of human rights by citizens in Cuba.” But these do not count as human rights violations in the prevailing doctrinal framework; rather, the public version is that the goal of the sanctions is to counteract Cuba’s human rights violations.[23]
Notably, there has scarcely been a word of protest in elite sectors. The rest of the world, and even the majority of the U.S. population, opposes U.S. policy toward Cuba. But successive governments have maintained illegal, brutal policies toward Cuba with utter fanaticism. As Lars Schoultz noted in a 2009 study, the U.S. “has not simply declined to have normal diplomatic and economic relations with Havana for half a century” but has “spent most of these past five decades openly and actively trying to overthrow the island’s government—or, in the euphemism-cloaked circumlocutions of today’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, trying to ‘hasten Cuba’s transition.’ ”[24]
What was Cuba’s crime toward the United States? What explained the hysterical approach, the collective punishment, the decades of support for outright terrorism? Why was the U.S. willing to defy international law and the entirety of global public opinion in an attempt to destroy a small island nation? Lamrani notes that the public explanations shifted across the decades. First it was Castro’s nationalization of U.S.-owned property (i.e., giving Cuba’s wealth to Cuba). Then it was Cuba’s ties to the Soviet Union. (The justification had never made sense, because the relationship was as much the product of U.S. policy as its cause.) Then it was Cuba’s support for liberation movements in the Global South. Finally, after the Cold War ended and destroyed the long-standing justifications for harsh policies toward Cuba, policymakers professed to be deeply concerned by Cuba’s human rights abuses. (Laughable, as U.S. support for human rights abusers around the world was continuing as usual.)[25]
In fact, we know from the annals of State Department records precisely what the “Cuban threat” was, namely “successful defiance.” Castro had demonstrated contempt for the interests of U.S. investors and was committed to redistributionist policies. The model, if successful, could spread, posing a threat to “U.S. interests” (i.e., U.S. business interests) around the world. John F. Kennedy had worried on the campaign trail that “the same poverty and discontent and distrust of America which Castro rode to power are smoldering in almost every Latin nation.” Richard Nixon made it plain, in his memo on his 1959 meeting with Fidel Castro, that “what concerned me most” was Castro’s “almost slavish subservience to prevailing majority opinion—the voice of the mob—rather than his naïve attitude toward Communism.” Castro “seemed to be obsessed with the idea that it was his responsibility to carry out the will of the people whatever it might appear to be at a particular time.”[26]
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as head of a Latin American mission, reported to Kennedy that the Cuban revolution risked “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands.” This idea, he said, had a great deal of appeal throughout Latin America, where “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes…[and] the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” The CIA observed that “Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change.”[27]
American attempts to control Cuba date back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared Washington’s right to dominate the hemisphere. John Quincy Adams instructed his cabinet colleagues that U.S. power would increase while Britain’s declined, so that Cuba (indeed the hemisphere) would fall into U.S. hands by the laws of “political gravitation,” as an apple falls from a tree. As historian Ada Ferrer documents, the U.S. claimed the right “to exercise permanent, indirect rule” and to “intervene militarily in Cuba, uninvited.” Indeed, as Keith Bolender explains, the U.S. was convinced that “ownership of Cuba was natural, preordained, and key to fulfilling vital national expectations.” In U.S. propaganda, Cubans were consistently depicted as unable to control their own country, with the country variously portrayed as “a helpless woman, a defenseless baby, a child in need of direction, an incompetent freedom fighter, an ignorant farmer, an ignoble ingrate, an ill-bred revolutionary, a viral communist.”[28]
By 1898, Adams’s laws of political gravitation had worked their magic, and the United States was able to carry out the military operation known as “the liberation of Cuba,” in reality the intervention to prevent Cuba from liberating itself from Spanish rule, converting it to what historians Ernest May and Philip Zelikow rightly call a “virtual colony” of the United States. Cuba’s major port on Guantánamo Bay has remained an actual colony, held under a 1903 treaty that Cuba was forced to sign at gunpoint, and used in recent years, in violation of the terms of the so-called treaty, as a detention camp for Haitians fleeing the terror of the U.S.-backed military junta, and as a torture chamber for those suspected of having harmed, or intended to harm, the U.S.[29]
The “virtual colony” gained liberation in 1959. Within months the assault began, using the weapons of violence and economic strangulation to punish the inhabitants of “that infernal little Republic” that had so angered the racist expansionist Theodore Roosevelt that he wanted to “wipe its people off the face of the earth.” To this day, Cubans refuse to comprehend that their role is to serve the master, not to play at independence. Lamrani concludes that “the state of economic siege of which the Cuban people are victims reminds us that the United States—by applying wartime measures in times of peace against a nation that has never been a threat to its national security—apparently has still not abandoned its old colonial aspiration of integrating Cuba into the U.S.”[30]
The way to deal with a virus is to kill it and inoculate any possible victims. Cuba survived, but without the ability to achieve its feared potential. Latin America was “inoculated” with harsh dictatorships, such as the coup that established a military regime in Brazil in 1964. The generals had carried out a “democratic rebellion,” Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled home. The rebellion was “a great victory for the free world,” he exulted, which should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments.” By removing what Washington saw as a Castro clone, the generals had achieved “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century.” Brazil remained under military rule until 1985.[31]
A 1954 policy statement by the National Security Council lays out U.S. doctrine frankly. Recognizing a “trend in Latin America toward nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses of the population,” and concerned about both “anti-U.S. prejudices” and “increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses,” official policy is to “arrest the drift in the area toward radical and nationalistic regimes.” Nationalism is off-limits to Latin Americans, because it entails a government that favors the population’s own interest rather than the interests of the United States. The task of the U.S. is to ensure that the countries “base their economies on a system of private enterprise” and “create a political and economic climate conducive to private investment,” with militaries that have an “understanding of, and orientation toward, U.S. objectives.” The objectives of U.S. policy in Latin America are: “hemisphere solidarity in support of our world policies,” “orderly” development, “the safeguarding of the hemisphere” through the development of military forces, the elimination of the communist “menace,” access by the U.S. to raw materials, achieving support for our foreign policy elsewhere, and “standardization of Latin American military organization, training, doctrine and equipment along U.S. lines.” Note the distinct absence of idealistic rhetoric about self-government and civil liberties.[32]
“Communist” was a term regularly used in American political theology to refer to people who are committed to the belief that “the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people,” in the words of a 1949 State Department intelligence report. Or as John Foster Dulles put it, “communists” are those who appeal to “the poor people [who] have always wanted to plunder the rich.” The primary threat is that it will lead nations to transform their economies “in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” (That is essentially correct and is a good operational definition of “communism” in U.S. political discourse.) So it is small wonder, with this kind of background, that John F. Kennedy should say that “governments of the civil military type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing Communist penetration in Latin America.”[33]
The pattern was set. In Guatemala, for instance, democratic capitalist president Jacobo Árbenz had pursued some of the feared nationalist policies: expanding the right to vote, allowing workers to organize, and distributing uncultivated land to the poor. Naturally, this created panic. A CIA memorandum of 1953 described the situation in Guatemala as “adverse to U.S. interests” because of the “Communist influence…based on militant advocacy of social reforms and nationalistic policies.” These “radical” policies included “persecution of foreign economic interests, especially the United Fruit Company,” an action that had gained “the support or acquiescence of almost all Guatemalans.” The government was proceeding “to mobilize the hitherto politically inert peasantry” while undermining the power of large landholders. To make matters worse, “a strong national movement” had formed “to free Guatemala from the military dictatorship, social backwardness, and ‘economic colonialism’ ” that had characterized the past. The success of land reform threatened “stability” in neighboring countries where suffering people did not fail to take notice. Historian Greg Grandin notes that Árbenz was “enormously popular” and had “a mandate to extend the ideals of political democracy into the social realm.” In short, the situation was dire.[34]
So the CIA carried out a successful coup, drawing “on all the advances in psychological warfare.” Guatemalan democracy was ended. The country would be turned into one of the worst slaughterhouses in the hemisphere.[35]
Following the coup that destroyed Guatemalan democracy in 1954, the country was ruled by a series of brutal military officers and swiftly collapsed into civil war. During this time, as regional historian Kirsten Weld writes, “In their quest to maintain U.S. influence, protect U.S. business interests, and contain global ‘communism,’ ” U.S. advisers in Guatemala “abetted and encouraged domestic elites’ efforts to obliterate any voices calling for change in the society.” The United States knew full well, as a State Department memo in 1968 conceded, that Guatemalan security forces would continue “to be used, as in the past, not so much as protectors of the nation against communist enslavement, but as the oligarchy’s oppressors of legitimate social change.”[36]
In 1977, the human rights abuses became so severe that the Carter administration ostensibly cut off military aid to the country. (In fact, between 1978 and 1980, the “human rights”–focused Carter administration gave Guatemala millions of dollars through the State Department’s Military Assistance Program and Foreign Military Sales program.) The Reagan administration ended even the pretense of caring about human rights in Guatemala, and Reagan warmly embraced the country’s military dictator, saying Ríos Montt had gotten a “bum rap,” describing him as a “man of great personal integrity” who was “totally dedicated to democracy in Guatemala.” Reagan pledged to restore military aid even as international human rights organizations documented massacres committed by the Guatemalan army. The government was in fact carrying out one of the worst acts of genocide in the modern history of the Americas, with the close collaboration of U.S. military and intelligence units. Eventually, Ríos Montt was sentenced to eighty years in prison, the first time a former head of state had been convicted of genocide in their own country. “One is tempted to believe,” said Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy, “that some people in the White House worship Aztec gods—with the offering of Central American blood.”[37]
A history of U.S. support for murderers in the Western Hemisphere would take many volumes.[38] As Greg Grandin writes, “by the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror—hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile, from which the region has yet to recover.” For instance, in Bolivia, president Juan José Torres was ousted in 1971 by General Hugo Banzer. Torres had established a People’s Assembly representing the working class (peasants, students, teachers, miners, etc.), one of those “radical” policies that made him unacceptable to Washington. Henry Kissinger had worried that Torres would be “ultra-nationalistic, leftist and anti-U.S.,” and soon ordered the CIA to “crank up an operation post-haste” to remove Torres. Banzer’s coup was backed by the United States, and once in power he was bolstered by significant U.S. military aid (the Banzer government received $63 million in the first year alone). Banzer’s regime arrested and tortured thousands of people, “disappeared” 155 without a trace, and drove 19,000 people out of the country. This did not stop U.S. ambassador Ernest Siracusa from describing Banzer as an “attractive,” “sympathetic,” “typically Catholic family man” who had no “intent” to be repressive.[39]
Torres was abducted and killed in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, a decades-long U.S.-supported program of state terrorism. Condor was a collaboration between right-wing Latin American military governments across the hemisphere that aimed to “find and kill” those deemed “terrorists” or “subversives,” according to a 1976 State Department memo, which noted that “subversion” included “nearly anyone who opposes government policy.” As leading Operation Condor expert John Dinges writes, drawing on declassified archives, the United States was in an “intimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums, and who brought their terrorist operations to our own streets” (referring to the assassination of refugee economist Orlando Letelier by agents of Pinochet on the streets of Washington, DC). According to Dinges, the military governments “were not only led to believe, they were told explicitly in secret meetings that U.S. human rights policy was public and tactical only and that United States sympathies were with the regimes that had overturned democracies and were killing thousands of their own citizens.”[40]
In Argentina, a 1976 coup ousted Isabel Perón, the president, paving the way for General Jorge Rafael Videla’s military dictatorship, termed the “National Reorganization Process.” This overthrow garnered implicit acceptance and support from the Ford administration in the United States. Videla labeled anyone a “terrorist” who “encourag[ed] others through ideas that go against our Western and Christian civilization,” and responded to this pseudo-“terror” with very real terror. As Stephen Rabe writes, Argentine security forces “abducted seven high school students in La Plata and murdered six of them because the students had the temerity to protest the elimination of subsidies for student fares on the city’s buses,” and “murdered a paraplegic, José Liborio Poblete, because he wrote a petition calling on companies to hire a fixed percentage of disabled workers.” During Videla’s rule, the United States maintained strong diplomatic ties with Argentina, evidenced by multiple official visits from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Rabe notes that Kissinger outright “sanctioned state terrorism” by the dictatorship, telling the Argentine foreign minister, “We understand you must establish authority,” asking only that “if there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”[41]
In the 1980s, U.S. policy toward Central America was marked by a brutal insistence on crushing any leftist or popular movements, often under the pretext of preventing the spread of communism. The U.S. intervention in Nicaragua following the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship by the Sandinistas is a particularly egregious example. Initially, the United States attempted to maintain the status quo of “Somocismo without Somoza,” essentially keeping the dictator’s system intact with a different figurehead. Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo hoped that “with careful orchestration, we have a better than even chance of preserving enough of the GN [Somoza’s infamous militia, the Guardia Nacional] to maintain order and hold the Sandinistas in check after Somoza resigns.” “We have to demonstrate that we are still the decisive force in determining political outcomes in Central America and that we will not permit others to intervene,” declared Carter adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. When this failed, the Carter administration sought to sustain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for U.S. power in the region.[42]
Under Ronald Reagan, this strategy escalated into a large-scale, brutal campaign against Nicaragua. The United States waged a terrorist war, supported by economic warfare, to destabilize the Sandinista government, which was committed to improving the conditions of its people and actively involved them in the development process. This commitment posed a threat to the U.S. hegemony, as it set an example of a successful, independent, and leftist government in the region. Henry Kissinger explained: “If we cannot manage Central America” there will be doubt elsewhere “that we know how to manage the global equilibrium.” Ronald Reagan, who had declared Nicaragua an “extraordinary threat” to “U.S. national security,” recognized that Americans might ask themselves: “How can such a small country pose such a great threat?” He insisted we cannot “ignore the malignancy in Managua” lest it “spreads and becomes a mortal threat to the entire New World.”[43]
In its early years, as Latin Americanists Thomas W. Walker and Christine J. Wade write, the “most important long-term concern of the Sandinista Revolution was to improve the human condition of the downtrodden majority of the Nicaraguan people,” a project made difficult by the “terrible domestic economic situation and the huge international debt inherited from the departing dictator and his cronies.” Nevertheless, the government made impressive progress in some domains, including reducing malnutrition, lowering rents, and introducing a National Literacy Crusade that saw drastic improvements in the literacy rate (and won the 1980 UNESCO award for the best program of its kind). But as Walker and Wade write, the “U.S.-sponsored surrogate war and associated forms of economic aggression” destroyed “rural schools, clinics, food storage facilities, day-care centers, and basic development projects.” In the second half of the decade, the war-related expenditures consumed over half of the national budget, thus inevitably depriving social programs of badly needed resources.[44] Greg Grandin further surveys the consequences of Reagan-era policy for Nicaragua. By 1984, using a U.S. “torture manual,” the Contras had “killed, tortured…and mutilated thousands of civilians in the countryside.” By the time the war finally concluded, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans were dead.[45]
In neighboring El Salvador, the United States long supported dictators who carried out severe repression, torture, and murder. By the late 1970s, however, there was a growth of what were called “popular organizations”—peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.
In February 1980, the archbishop of El Salvador, Óscar Romero, wrote to President Carter begging him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. Romero said that he was deeply concerned that the United States was considering new military aid to El Salvador. If that came to pass, he said, “your government, instead of promoting greater justice and peace” will “sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people who repeatedly have been struggling to gain respect for their most fundamental human rights.”[46]
A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d’Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had been declared in El Salvador, and the war against the population began in force (with continued U.S. support and involvement). The first major attack was a massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which between three hundred and six hundred people were butchered. Infants were cut to pieces with machetes, and women were tortured and drowned. Pieces of bodies were found in the river for days afterward. Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labor organizers, students, priests, or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people.[47]
Throughout Carter’s last year in office and into Reagan’s presidency, the death toll in El Salvador climbed steeply as a result of U.S. involvement and support for the Salvadoran military. As NPR summarizes, “While U.S. policymakers argued the need to develop a democratic government in El Salvador, the reality was that Washington was bankrolling a corrupt military, known for kidnapping, torturing, and massacring innocent civilians.” They quote journalist Victor Abalos, who reported from the country at the time: “There were always bodies being discovered in the dumps…. Young, old, women, men—the theme for a lot of people was that life was cheap.” Because the Church had embraced the “preferential option for the poor,” clergy were under particular suspicion, with Bibles being considered subversive and flyers appearing outside churches reading: “Be a patriot, kill a priest.”[48]
The involvement of the Atlacatl Battalion, a unit created, trained, and equipped by the United States, reveals the depth of U.S. complicity. The battalion’s actions were characterized by extreme violence, including murder, rape, and torture. It was formed in March 1981, when specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the U.S. Army. From the start, the battalion was engaged in mass murder. A U.S. trainer described its soldiers as “particularly ferocious…We’ve always had a hard time getting them to take prisoners instead of ears.” In December 1981, the battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape, and burning known as the El Mozote massacre. The Reagan administration belittled the massacre reports, the right-wing press dismissed them as “propaganda,” and The New York Times reassigned the reporter who broke the story. As journalist Mark Hertsgaard explains, the massacre stories were threatening to the administration because they “repudiated the fundamental moral claim that undergirded U.S. policy,” suggesting that “what the United States was supporting in Central America was not democracy but repression.”[49]
U.S. achievements in Central America during the 1980s were a major tragedy, not just because of the appalling human cost, but because there were prospects for real progress toward meaningful democracy, with early successes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. These efforts might have worked and might have taught useful lessons to others plagued with similar problems. The threat was successfully averted.[50]
In 1965–66, the Indonesian Communist Party was liquidated in what a CIA analysis called “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” Estimates of the death toll are imprecise, because the killers subsequently ruled the country for decades and no real investigation was ever conducted. Five hundred thousand is considered a consensus estimate, though it could be as high as a million. The communists in Indonesia had been one of the most successful leftist parties in the world, and were the only mass-based political party in the country. In a short time, they were entirely wiped out, the independent nationalist Sukarno was forced from power, replaced by the murderous dictator Suharto.[51]
In The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, Geoffrey Robinson gives more detail about the massacres. The victims were “overwhelmingly poor or lower-middle-class people—farmers, plantation laborers, factory workers, schoolteachers, students, artists, dancers, and civil servants—living in rural villages and plantations, or in ramshackle kampungs on the outskirts of provincial cities and towns.” They were murdered in “killing fields…dotted across the archipelago,” “felled with knives, sickles, machetes, swords, ice picks, bamboo spears, iron rods, and other everyday implements.” The savagery was extreme. Vincent Bevins says eyewitnesses described “the most shocking scenes imaginable, an explosion of violence so terrifying that even discussing what happened would make people break down, questioning their own sanity.”[52]
In the United States, even as the atrocities were reported, the Indonesian government was celebrated. This Rwanda-style slaughter was reported as a triumph for the Free World, because by eliminating the independent left opposition, the killers had ensured Indonesia’s government would be pro-Western. Time magazine called the decimation of the Indonesian communists “the West’s best news for years in Asia,” and The Atlantic told readers that “in attacking the communists,” the “incorruptible” Suharto “was doing simply what he believed to be best for Indonesia.” The New York Times was downright euphoric, portraying the event as part of a new “Gleam of Light in Asia.” The Times said that despite our “political troubles in Vietnam,” there were “more hopeful political developments elsewhere in Asia.” While forthrightly calling it a “massacre,” the Times said that “control of this large and strategic archipelago is no longer in the hands of men fiercely hostile to the United States.”[53]
But the United States didn’t just welcome this holocaust. It actively helped the killers carry it out. This was known even at the time—the Times report says that while “Washington is being careful not to claim any credit…it is doubtful if the coup would ever have been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.” Subsequent evidence confirmed the depth of U.S. involvement. Telegrams from the U.S. Embassy requested clandestine aid to “strengthen the hands of those we want to see win in the current mortal struggle for political power,” and noted “small arms and equipment may be needed to deal with the PKI [the Communist Party of Indonesia].” The U.S. even provided the Indonesian army with lists of thousands of communists, with the full knowledge that they would be assassinated.[54]
In fact, since the 1940s, the United States had, according to Robinson, “worked assiduously to undermine the PKI, and weaken or remove President Sukarno,” and had long been encouraging the military to seize power. Bevins summarizes the record: “U.S. strategy since the 1950s had been to try to find a way to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party, not because it was seizing power undemocratically, but because it was popular.” The massacres were the payoff of a long effort to destroy the left and put Indonesia under military control. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta reported in 1958 that it was increasingly probable that “Communists could not be beaten by ordinary democratic means in elections,” thus a “program of gradual elimination of Communists by police and military to be followed by outlawing of Communist Party [is] not unlikely in [the] comparatively near future.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the same day, urged that “action must be taken, including overt measures as required, to insure either the success of the dissidents or the suppression of the pro-Communist elements of the Sukarno government.”[55]
Robert Martens, who worked as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, admitted unapologetically to providing the lists of communists that helped facilitate their liquidation:
It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.[56]
Howard Federspiel, then an Indonesia expert at the State Department, commented in 1990: “No one cared, so long as they were communists, that they were being butchered…. No one was getting very worked up about it.” Bradley Simpson, director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, concludes from the evidence that “the U.S. and its allies viewed the wholesale annihilation of the PKI and its civilian backers as an indispensable prerequisite to Indonesia’s reintegration into the regional political economy,” and thus “Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the Army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party’s unarmed supporters might not go far enough.” Geoffrey Robinson concludes that Western states were “not innocent bystanders,” but rather launched a “coordinated campaign to assist in the political and physical destruction of the PKI and its affiliates” and the imposition of Suharto. Claims that the violence “was the product of domestic political forces over which outside powers had little, if any, influence” are “untrue,” because “Western powers encouraged the army to move forcefully against the Left, facilitated widespread violence including mass killings, and helped to consolidate the political power of the army.”[57]
Thus the United States government was directly responsible for instigating and supporting what the CIA itself called one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.[58] The event is never discussed. Bevins suggests the reason. The truth that the U.S. “engineer[ed] the conditions for a violent clash” and then “assisted and guided its longtime partners to carry out the mass murder of civilians as a means of achieving U.S. geopolitical goals” is so ugly that it is impossible to acknowledge, at least for any American who wishes to continue thinking of the United States as playing a benign or positive role in the world. Bevins reflects that “what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.”
In other words, the story is so revealing that it cannot be known. And so it isn’t. The events are consigned to Orwell’s memory hole, forgotten in the same way as the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth century, the genocidal destruction of Native Americans, and other matters not suitable to be enshrined in official history.
American support and aid for the Suharto regime continued for decades after the successful extermination campaign. In 1975, Suharto invaded East Timor, which had recently won its independence from Portugal, overthrowing the leftist government and launching a decades-long occupation that killed hundreds of thousands. People were herded into buildings or fields and killed en masse. The UN Security Council ordered Indonesia to withdraw, but to no avail. The failure was explained by then UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In his memoirs, he took pride in having rendered the UN “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did” and “worked to bring this about.” C. Philip Liechty, who served as a senior CIA officer in the Jakarta embassy during the East Timor invasion, confessed that Suharto was “given the green light” by the United States, which supplied his forces with “everything they needed.” When news of the mass civilian deaths came out, the CIA tried “to cover them up as long as possible.”[59]
Jimmy Carter declared in 1978 that so long as he was president, “the Government of the United States will continue throughout the world to enhance human rights,” and that “no force on Earth can separate us from that commitment.” Human rights, he claimed, was the “soul of our foreign policy.” Nevertheless, Carter escalated arms supplies to Indonesia, which were used to crush the Timorese resistance. The official U.S. position, as expressed by the State Department to Congress, was that “we made it clear to [the Indonesians] that we understood the situation they were in; we understood the pressures they felt and their concern about the fighting that was going on and the potential for instability that would be caused by developments as they saw them.” In fact, there was no fighting going on beyond Indonesia’s own aggression, which was (as acknowledged by the State Department) conducted “roughly 90% with our equipment.”[60]
The death toll eventually reached two hundred thousand, one of the worst slaughters relative to population since the Holocaust, with one third of the population dying, many due to famine. Clinton Fernandes, author of the comprehensive study The Independence of East Timor, says that “for Indonesia, the military objective of destroying the resistance overrode all other considerations,” while “for Western governments, the maintenance of good relations with the Suharto regime took priority.” Even though “the aircraft provided to the Indonesians by the U.S. was the primary factor in the massive death toll,” protest in the West was minuscule, and there was little reporting. John Pilger says of East Timor: “Other places on the planet may seem more remote; none has been as defiled and abused by murderous forces or as abandoned by the ‘international community,’ whose principals are complicit in one of the great, unrecognized crimes of the twentieth century.”[61]
U.S. presidents stuck with Suharto for decades, even after the massacre of hundreds of pro-independence Timorese demonstrators in 1991 received international media coverage. A 1995 New York Times article explained the reasons the Clinton administration had such cordial relationships with Suharto that “the Cabinet room was jammed with top officials ready to welcome him.” He has “been savvy in keeping Washington happy” through measures like “deregulat[ing] the economy” and “open[ing] Indonesia to foreign investors.” The Times quoted a senior administration official who called Suharto “our kind of guy,” contrasting him with the truculent Fidel Castro, who received a cold welcome in Washington (Castro, after all, was a dictator). The National Security Archive notes that “the Clinton Administration maintained support for Suharto until virtually the end,” including by quashing an investigation into Indonesian labor practices, “and continued to view the Indonesian armed forces as the guarantors of stability,” even when Suharto’s military was massacring protesters against his regime. After Suharto “brutally crushed students’ anti-Suharto protests and kidnapped pro-democracy activists,” Bill Clinton told Suharto in a personal phone call: “Your personal leadership has produced unprecedented economic growth and prosperity for Indonesia and its people. I am convinced you can get through this present difficulty.”[62]
Clinton made it clear that crushing democratic opposition was no obstacle to ongoing U.S. support. Suharto remained “our kind of guy,” as he compiled one of the most horrendous records of slaughter, torture, and other abuses. But Suharto made a mistake, losing control and hesitating to implement harsh International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescriptions. In 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright finally called upon him to resign to “preserve his legacy” and provide for “a democratic transition.” A few hours later, Suharto transferred authority to his handpicked vice president. The rapidity of Suharto’s departure following the loss of U.S. support shows just how easy it would have been for the U.S. to stop the torture of East Timor at any point.[63]
After World War II, nationalist currents developed in Iran. The movement coalesced around Mohammad Mosaddegh, an old-fashioned liberal of immense charisma, which appealed to Iranians of all social classes. Mosaddegh became prime minister in 1951, committed to the nationalization of Iranian oil, which had remained a British monopoly. By 1953, the United States agreed with Britain that Mosaddegh had to go. His parliamentary regime was overthrown in a coup, restoring the more compliant shah, Reza Pahlavi, to power. The CIA eventually admitted that the coup “was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.”[64]
Historian Roham Alvandi and political scientist Mark J. Gasiorowski note that “both Britain and the United States publicly denied their roles in the 1953 coup so as not to embarrass the shah or endanger their close political and economic ties with Iran,” and even after incontrovertible evidence emerged, denial or downplaying of the U.S. role “reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.” There was also a “worry that if the U.S. public is made to feel guilty about the CIA intervention in Iran in 1953, they may be less likely to support another U.S. intervention in Iran today.” Indeed, if the U.S. public understood this source of Iranian grievance against the United States, they are at dangerous risk of empathizing with an official enemy. The public must therefore be kept from learning the truth about their country’s foreign policy. But internally, as State Department officer Andrew Killgore recounts, it “was regarded as [the] CIA’s greatest single triumph,” a “great American national victory,” because “[w]e had changed the course of a whole country.”[65]
The shah would remain in power for the next twenty-six years, maintained by U.S. support, even as he imprisoned, tortured, and executed dissidents and was condemned as a major human rights abuser by Amnesty International. One consequence of the coup was that U.S. oil companies took 40 percent of the Iranian concession, part of the general takeover of the world’s major energy reserves by the United States. The U.S. also helped the shah pursue a nuclear program, training Iranian nuclear engineers, with U.S. officials arguing strongly that nuclear power would benefit Iran. (Once the country became an official enemy, the reasoning switched, and it was seen as impossible for Iran to have legitimate peacetime uses for a nuclear program.)[66]
The New York Times was pleased with the lesson that had been taught to Iranians and any who might try to follow their course of independent nationalism.
Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism…. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran’s experience will prevent the rise of Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders.[67]
In 1979, Iranians carried out another illegitimate act: they overthrew the tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path, not following U.S. orders. The Carter administration considered supporting a military coup (deciding against it on pragmatic grounds), and tried “retaining as much of the Shah’s regime as possible,” in the words of Middle East analyst Mahan Abedin, though the strategy quickly unraveled.[68]
The United States’ hostile acts toward Iranians continued through the 1980s. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran with strong U.S. support. The war killed hundreds of thousands of people, devastating Iran, with Saddam using chemical weapons (again, with U.S. support). The Reagan administration falsely blamed Iran for the use of chemical weapons against Kurds, and blocked Congress from issuing any criticism of Saddam’s chemical warfare. After the war, President George H. W. Bush’s Pentagon invited Iraqi weapons scientists to the U.S. for training in bomb production, a serious threat to Iran. The U.S. public might not remember any of these events, but Iranians do.[69]
Today, the “Iranian threat” is a Western obsession. Undoubtedly, Iran is a fundamentalist regime with a horrendous human rights record. But that has nothing to do with it. There is, after all, no more extreme fundamentalist regime on Earth than Saudi Arabia. It is a missionary state that aims to disseminate its extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam around the world. In Yemen, the Saudi government is responsible for one of the most horrific humanitarian crises of our time, in inflicting mass starvation and bombing civilian targets, including a bus full of schoolchildren, with U.S.-provided weapons. (The United States even refueled Saudi planes on their bombing runs.) The regime also killed and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw. Yet Saudi Arabia still managed to retain good relations with both the Trump and Biden administrations, and Mohammed bin Salman received a friendly fist bump from Joe Biden, who was committed to “moving on” from the murder, ignoring the pleas of Khashoggi’s fiancée. The Biden administration even went to court to try to prevent Khashoggi’s family from successfully suing the Saudi leader. The warm embrace of the Saudi dictatorship by U.S. presidents should destroy any pretense that “human rights” or “democracy” factor into a country’s status as an official enemy, or that Iran’s status as an adversary is related to its government’s repressive acts.[70]
The current panic about Iran focuses on Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons. But we should note a few facts. First, it is not clear that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The Congressional Research Service observes that “official U.S. assessments [conclude that] Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and has not resumed it.” Second, Iran resides in the neighborhood of three nuclear powers, Israel, India, and Pakistan, which are backed by the United States and have refused to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty. Finally, Iran is regularly threatened with force by both the United States and Israel, and acquiring a nuclear deterrent might well be a rational move.[71]
Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld wrote that “the world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy,” particularly when they are under constant threat of attack, in violation of the UN Charter. Intelligence expert Thomas Powers notes that there has been very little mainstream U.S. commentary on why Iran might want a nuclear weapon, with the dominant assumption simply being that “the country is run by religious fanatics crazy enough to use a bomb if they had one.” In fact, Powers says, Iran probably wants a nuclear weapon for the same reason other states do: to deter attack. “As tools of coercive diplomacy nuclear weapons are almost entirely useless, but they are extremely effective in blocking large-scale or regime-threatening attack. There is no evidence that Iran has a different motive, and plenty of reason for Iran to fear that attack is a real possibility.” Powers points to the long history of U.S. presidents publicly discussing the possibility of attacking Iran, and notes that the invasion of Iraq means there is very good reason to take these threats seriously. Nuclear states “cannot be casually threatened,” and the regime might rationally believe nukes can “save Iran from a similar fate” as its neighbor. In considering the “Iranian threat,” we must also consider the threats against Iran and how they compare. Iran does not assassinate Israeli scientists or carry out sabotage, but Israel does against Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Iran “must face a credible nuclear threat,” a statement he walked back, perhaps upon remembering that Israel’s nuclear weapons are illegal and supposed to be a secret.[72]
On and off since 1979, the United States has attacked the Iranian population with the use of harsh sanctions. Human Rights Watch has warned that the sanctions regime “pose[s] a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines—and has almost certainly contributed to documented shortages—ranging from a lack of critical drugs for epilepsy patients to limited chemotherapy medications for Iranians with cancer.” The Trump administration made it clear that the collective punishment of Iranians was the purpose, not an unintended consequence, of sanctions, with Mike Pompeo boasting that “things are much worse for the Iranian people [with the U.S. sanctions], and we are convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime.” Biden has mostly continued the same approach, although he generously allowed Iran to access some of its own oil revenues.[73]
In 2014, a deal was reached between Iran and the five UN Security Council states, plus the European Union, to put limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Nuclear-arms-control experts hailed the deal as successfully “reduc[ing] the risk of a destabilizing nuclear competition in a troubled region.” In 2017, the United States certified that Iran was complying with the deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) affirmed Iran’s compliance and concluded it had “no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009.” Nevertheless, in 2018, Donald Trump withdrew from the deal and reimposed sanctions that had been lifted under it, wrecking the agreement. Iran has repeatedly urged the United States to return to the deal, promising to rejoin “within an hour of the U.S. doing so.” “We are not going to waste time on it,” Biden’s Iran envoy said in 2022 when asked about rejoining the deal. “It’s not up for discussion,” said Kurt Campbell, Biden’s nominee for deputy secretary of state. Instead, “we must isolate them diplomatically, internationally.” Iran must be punished for violating an agreement we sabotaged.
Iran is considered by the United States to be “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.” One of the main crimes cited is the country’s use of cyberattacks, with the State Department’s Country Report on Terrorism warning that Iran “maintains a robust offensive cyber program and has sponsored cyber attacks against foreign government and private sector entities.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2023 Annual Threat Assessment states that “Iran’s growing expertise and willingness to conduct aggressive cyber operations make it a major threat to the security of U.S. and allied networks and data. Iran’s opportunistic approach to cyber attacks makes critical infrastructure owners in the United States susceptible to being targeted.”[74]
When a country is accused of “aggressive” or “offensive” behavior, very often the United States engages in the same behavior. In fact, as explained by Thomas Warrick, former deputy assistant secretary for Counterterrorism Policy for the Department of Homeland Security, in 2013, “Iran developed a cyberattack capability after the ‘Stuxnet’ malware that targeted Iran’s Siemens industrial control systems (ICS) came to light in June 2010.” Stuxnet, the “first known cyberweapon,” was jointly developed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence and let loose on Iran under the Obama administration, in order to hobble the country’s nuclear program. Gary Samore, the White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, all but acknowledged that the U.S. had attacked Iran with Stuxnet, saying, “We’re glad they are having trouble with their centrifuge machine” and that we “are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them.” Iran has been attacked repeatedly by Stuxnet and other cyberweapons, including an attack on its banking system in 2019 by an unknown “state entity.”[75] In his first months in office, President Obama “secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons.” The Trump administration admitted to repeatedly using cyberattacks on Iran.[76]
The Iranian state certainly provides arms to and sponsors organizations that carry out heinous atrocities. In this respect they act like other states, including our own. But what if Iran were to murder the second-highest U.S. official, or a leading general, in the Mexico City International Airport, along with the commander of a large part of the U.S.-supported army of an allied nation? This would be construed as an act of war, certainly a serious terroristic crime. Yet this is precisely what the U.S. did to Iranian general Qassim Soleimani, assassinating him in the Baghdad airport. The United Nations special rapporteur investigating extrajudicial and summary executions condemned the murder, saying that it “risked eroding international laws that govern the conduct of hostilities,” warning that if other countries behaved similarly to the United States, a disastrous “global conflagration” would be the likely result. Yet despite being a blatant violation of international law and Iraq’s sovereignty, the murder was praised in the U.S. (For Trump’s Republican critics, it was “finally something to like.”) American consumers can even role-play the assassination in a Call of Duty video game. A rogue superpower has no reason to care what the international community thinks.[77]
George Kennan, in a briefing for Latin American ambassadors, explained that one of the main concerns of U.S. policy is the “protection of our raw materials.” Who must we protect our raw materials from? Primarily, the domestic populations of the countries who possess them. How will we protect our raw materials from that population? Kennan said we should be ruthless. The answer “might be an unpleasant one,” but “we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government.” This is, he said, “not shameful,” because “the Communists are essentially traitors” and so “it is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.” (“Communism,” as we have seen, was a term applied to all who refused to take orders, whether or not they believed in communism.)[78]
Similarly, Eisenhower’s panel on covert action, in the Doolittle Report, recommended that given “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination” we must embrace a “fundamentally repugnant philosophy” with “no rules,” where “hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply,” the only goal being to “subvert, sabotage, and destroy” the enemy. The United States has followed Kennan’s and Doolittle’s precepts consistently, setting aside such “vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.” The general principle is that human rights violators are acceptable when they serve the U.S. “national interest,” and not when they don’t, so that even Jimmy Carter’s “human rights–focused” presidency supported atrocious human rights abusers allied with the U.S. A study by Lars Schoultz showed that “U.S. aid has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens.” It had nothing to do with how much a country needed aid, only with its willingness to serve the interests of wealth and privilege.[79]
This is no defense of the human rights records of Cuba, Iran, or the 1980s Sandinista government. Instead, it demonstrates the emptiness of the proclaimed principles. Over the past decades, the leading recipients of U.S. military aid have been Israel and Egypt. Egypt is suffering under one of the harshest dictatorships in its history, yet the Biden administration has refused to follow existing U.S. law that prohibits aid to human rights abusers, waiving the requirement in order to continue supplying Egypt with weaponry. Israel maintains an apartheid regime that has been condemned universally by international human rights organizations. The record says more than the rhetoric.[80]
The pattern of support for dictatorships thus continues to this day, including among Democratic presidents who make loud professions of commitment to human rights. In 2023, for instance, a number of human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch sent a joint letter to the Biden administration with a plea for the life of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. Al-Khawaja is the sixty-two-year-old cofounder of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He had been imprisoned by the dictatorial government of Bahrain for twelve years and “subjected to severe physical, sexual, and psychological torture.” His health had been deteriorating, and he had been denied necessary medical care. Al-Khawaja was on a hunger strike along with hundreds of other political prisoners in the country. The dictatorship in Bahrain being infamously brutal, this kind of dissent is rare.[81]
In their letter to the Biden administration, the human rights organizations implored the president to use his leverage with Bahrain to secure the release of al-Khawaja. But they needn’t have bothered sending their letter. The Biden administration happily agreed to sign a new security pact with Bahrain, committing the United States to defending Bahrain in military disputes with other countries. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft pointed out that the U.S. commitment to defending Bahrain has no compelling justification. The regime does not face an external threat. Rather, “to the extent the regime in Bahrain faces a security threat, it involves not external aggression but instead internal strife stemming from an unpopular Sunni regime repressing a largely Shia population.”[82]
The Biden administration, in announcing its “comprehensive security integration and prosperity agreement” with the dictatorship, boasted of all the ways that the partnership will involve “enhancing deterrence, including through expanded defense and security cooperation, interoperability, and mutual intelligence capacity-building.” Only a tiny passage at the end of the announcement even mentions human rights, explaining that both countries will continue to “engage in constructive dialogue on the importance of universal values, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.”[83]
Biden’s embrace of the dictatorship must have been bitterly disappointing for Maryam al-Khawaja, the daughter of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. She told NPR that as her father’s condition has deteriorated, so far there had been nothing but “lip service” from the U.S. government on human rights. The security agreement “angered and disappointed Bahraini activists and other critics of the Gulf monarchy, which crushed an uprising that swept the kingdom in 2011, during the Arab Spring.”[84]
It is clear the Biden administration simply did not care what the activists against the Bahraini dictatorship wanted. It would have been very easy to say to Bahrain: the United States is not going to commit to a military partnership while you continue to hold political prisoners. But the administration has been trying to strengthen ties with Persian Gulf states to counter China and Russia in its competition for global dominance. The human rights of Bahraini activists are considered unimportant next to the geostrategic goal of remaining more powerful than the other large countries.
The United States plainly has no problem with the violation of human rights. It all depends on the perpetrator. While Biden has signed a bill punishing China for its repression of Uyghurs, he has been happy to fist-bump a dictator like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and provide an endless supply of weapons to Israel to continue obliterating Gazans trapped in an open-air prison. Once we see that the ideals are applied selectively, we can ask what governs the choice to apply or not apply them in particular cases. As a general rule, the United States opposes the criminality and violence of those powers we wish to contain and supports the criminality and violence of our valued partners and allies. There is a single standard, then: whatever serves our perceived interests is good, whatever undermines them is not.[85]