A DISMAL FOREIGN POLICY RECORD

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House and corporate mass media were quick to blame Muslims who hated America's lifestyle and values. Thus began the concept of Islamic terrorism, the idea that Muslim religion was the cause of the attacks, not the foreign policy of the United States.

Such diversion has created Islamaphobia in America which expressed itself well into 2010 with the controversy over a Muslim community center in downtown New York and the Florida preacher who threated to burn Korans.

The reported 9/11 terrorists that attacked New York and Washington were said to be punishing America for backing Israel's repression of Palestinians and what they saw as the US “occupation” of Saudi Arabia. “Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor,” noted journalist Eric S. Margolis, adding, “As the CIA’s former bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer rightly observed, the Muslim world was furious at the US for what it was doing in their region, not because of America's values, liberties or religion. These motives for the 9/11 attack have been largely obscured by the whipping up hysteria over ‘Islamic terrorism.’The planting of anthrax in New York, Florida and Washington soon after 9/11 was clearly designed to promote further anti-Muslim furor. The perpetrators of this red herring remain unknown. But the anthrax attack hastened passage of the semi-totalitarian Patriot Act that sharply limited the personal freedoms of Americans and imposed draconian new laws.”

Osama bin Laden himself alleged that US foreign policy attempts to enslave other nations prompted a violent backlash. It this an outrageous lie or could some truth be found in his statement?

A serious study of United States foreign policy since World War II indeed presents a picture that is contrary to the image that the US promotes peace, democracy, and prosperity overseas, as envisaged by the American public engendered largely through stories in the corporate mass media.

“I don't think we, the American people, deserved what happened [on 9/11]. Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we have had over the last 40 years,” said Gore Vidal in a mid-2002 interview. “Our governments have brought this upon us by their actions all over the world… Unfortunately, we only get disinformation from the New York Times and other official places. Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947–48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.”

As confirmed by the New York Times years ago, US foreign policy has been in the hands of the Council on Foreign Relations elite since at least 1939. In addition to the media corporate leaders, mainstream reporters and anchors listed above, this elite and its associates include present and former government officials such as Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Janet Napolitano, James. L. Jones, Timothy Geithner; former Presidents Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon; virtually every CIA director; as well as a considerable number of familiar past and present government officials such as Paul Volcker, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Wesley Clark, Strobe Talbott, Alexander Haig, Alan Greenspan, Bruce Babbitt, James A. Baker III, Sandy Berger, Colin Powell, Harold Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank C. Carlucci, Richard Darman, John Deutch, Lawrence Eagleburger, Robert McFarlane, Brent Scowcroft, Condoleezza Rice, Casper Weinberger, Bill Richardson, Susan Rice and Larry Summers.

Within three hours after the attacks of 9/11, Kissinger, Talbot, Clark and Haig, among others, were all prominently seen on both CNN and the broadcast networks. Their message was so similar that one would have thought they were reading from the same CFR script: The attacks were terrible, something must be done, terrorism transcends national boundaries and therefore all the nations must come together under the United Nations to successfully combat this new type of warfare.

This clarion call was seen by some as nothing more than an effort to use the 9/11 tragedy as another reason to perpetuate the disastrous status quo of foreign policy: support for America's ongoing policy of neo-colonialism; the use of the United Nations as a tool in that strategy; the political subjugation and control of other nations through military dictators or wealthy families supported by, and often placed in power, by the US military or intelligence services; and the wholesale stripping away of the native wealth of other nations, including the US itself, through the kind of economic globalization and financial centralization that has been promoted by CFR elites for decades.

But as the very phenomenon of 9/11 itself reveals, the result of this empire-building policy has been dismal at best and catastrophic at worst.

Never mind the historical aggression displayed by American foreign policy in the Mexican War of 1848 and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Consider this selection of our misguided foreign policy adventures just since World War II:

In 1953, a few years after Iran's Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh engaged in a gradual and lawful nationalization of the oil industry in that Mideast nation, he and his democratic government were deposed by a coup instigated by the CIA. This brought the Shah to power, with the monarchy assuming complete control in 1963, and turning Iran into a client state of the US. Thousands of Iranians, perhaps millions, died during the repressive rule of the Shah and his brutal SAVAK secret police. The Shah was finally forced out in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who quickly became the US’s latest foreign enemy despite the fact that he had been on the CIA payroll while living in Paris. The Shah was granted asylum in the United States and a medieval version of Islam took control over Iran.

In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA toppled the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, which had nationalized United Fruit property. Prominent American government officials such as former CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, then-CIA Director Allen Dulles, Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were all closely connected to United Fruit. An estimated 120,000 Guatemalan peasants died in the resulting military dictatorships.

Fidel Castro, with covert aid from the CIA, overthrew the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and instituted sweeping land, industrial and educational reforms as well as nationalizing American businesses. Swiftly labeled a communist, the CIA then organized anti-Castro Cubans resulting in numerous attacks on Cuba and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. The island nation has been the object of US economic sanctions since that time.

More than 3,000 persons died in the wake of an invasion of the Dominican Republic by US Marines in 1965. The troops ostensibly were sent to prevent a communist takeover, although later it was admitted that there had been no proof of such a takeover.

Also in 1965, the US began the bombing of North Vietnam after President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the civil war there an “aggression” by the north. Two years later, American troop strength in Vietnam had grown to 380,000, and soon after climbed to more than 500,000. US dead by the end of that Asian war totaled some 58,000, with casualties to the Vietnamese, both north and south, running into the millions.

In 1968, General Sukarno, the unifier of Indonesia, was overthrown by General Suharto, again with aid from the CIA. Suharto proved more dictatorial and corrupt than his predecessor. A reported 800,000 people died during his regime. Another 250,000 persons died in 1975 during the brutal invasion of East Timor by the Suharto regime aided by the US government and Henry Kissinger.

In 1973, the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown by a military coup aided by the CIA. Allende was killed and some 30,000 persons died in subsequent violence and repression, including some Americans. Chile was brought back into the sphere of influence of the US and remained a military dictatorship for the next two decades.

In 1979, the powerful and corrupt Somoza family, which had ruled Nicaragua since 1937, was finally overthrown and Daniel Ortega was elected president. But CIA-backed Contra insurgents operating from Honduras fought a protracted war to oust the Ortega government in which an estimated 30,000 people died. The ensuing struggle came to include such shady dealing in arms and drugs that it created a scandal in the United States called Iran-Contra, which involved persons connected to the National Security Council selling arms to Iran, then using the profits to buy drugs in support of the Contras. All of those indicted or convicted of crimes in this scandal were pardoned by then-President George H. W. Bush.

US Marines landed in Lebanon in 1982 in an attempt to prevent further bloodshed between occupying Israeli troops and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Thousands died in the resulting civil war, including hundreds of Palestinians massacred in refugee camps by right-wing Christian forces while Ariel Sharon, then an Israeli general, looked on in apparent approval. Despite the battleship shelling of Beirut, and the destruction of that great Mediterranean city, American forces were withdrawn in 1984 after a series of bloody attacks on them. More than two decades later, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians remains as intractable and deadly as ever, in large part due to the virtually unconditional support of Israel by the US, which has been institutionalized by the Israel lobby discussed in Part I of this book.

In 1983, US troops invaded the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada after a leftist government was installed. The official explanation was to rescue a handful of American students who initially said they didn't need rescuing. The only real damage inflicted in this tiny war was to a mental health hospital partly owned by a White House physician and widely reported to be a CIA facility.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the US government gave aid and arms to the right wing government of the Republic of El Salvador, which represented the financial interests of a tiny oligarchy, for use against its leftist enemies. By 1988, some 70,000 Salvadorans had died.

More than one million persons died in the 15-year battle in Angola between the Marxist government aided by Cuban troops and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, supported by South Africa and the US government.

When Muammur al-Qaddafi tried to socialize the oil-rich North African nation of Libya beginning with his takeover in 1969, he drew the wrath of the US government. In 1981, it was claimed that Qaddafi had sent hit teams to the United States to assassinate President Reagan and in 1986, following the withdrawal of US oil companies from Libya, an air attack was launched which missed Qaddafi but killed several people including his infant daughter.

In 1987, an Iraqi missile attack on the US frigate Stark resulted in 37 deaths. Shortly afterward, Iraqi officials apologized for the incident. In 1988, a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf resulting in 290 deaths. The Reagan administration simply called it a mistake.

Thousands of freedom-seeking Chinese were killed in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 after government hardliners there conferred with former President Richard Nixon on how to deal with the dissidents. Nixon, of course, was the only US president to resign under threat of criminal indictment and was in power during the shooting of students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.

As many as 8,000 Panamanians died over Christmas 1989, when President George H. W. Bush sent US troops to invade that Central American nation to arrest his former business partner, Manuel Noriega. The excuse was that Noriega was involved in the importation of drugs to the United States. U.S. News & World Report noted that in 1990, the amount of drugs moving through Panama had doubled.

We noted previously that Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, totaled more than 300,000 during the short Persian Gulf War of 1991. It has been estimated that more than one million Iraqis, including women and children, have died as a result of the continued missile and air attacks (not including those killed since the US invasion in 2003) as well as economic sanctions against that nation.

Also in 1991, the United States suspended assistance to Haiti after the election of a liberal priest sparked military action and disorder. Eventually, US troops were deployed. Once again in 2004, the US fomented and backed the toppling of the same democratically elected president and replaced him with an unelected gang of militarists, CIA operatives, and corporate predators.

Other nations that have felt the brunt of CIA and/or US military activity as a result of foreign policy include Somalia, Afghanistan, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Brazil, Chad, Sudan and many others. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated during the Vietnam War, “My government is the world's leading purveyor of violence.” He did not say “my country” or “my people”—it is the government, or rather those who control it, that are responsible. Of course, we the distracted and unaware citizens who claim to live in a democracy must take our fair share of the blame as accessories after the fact.

One American hero, Robert Bowman, flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam and so knows the results of US foreign policy first hand. Bowman rose to a lieutenant colonel (USAF) and later became head of advanced space programs for the Department of Defense. After his retirement he became a bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL. Bowman noted in 1998, “President Clinton [and later President Bush] did not tell the American people the truth about why we are the targets of terrorism when he explained why we bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. [They both] said that we are a target because we stand for democracy, freedom, and human rights in the world. Nonsense! We are the target of terrorists because, in much of the world, our government stands for dictatorship, bondage and human exploitation. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things.”

The solution, Bowman said, is to change our ways. “Getting rid of our nuclear weapons, unilaterally if necessary, will enhance our security. Drastically altering our foreign policy will ensure it…In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear.” Bowman had seen through to the heart of darkness of American foreign policy, going public with the charge that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. “9/11 is based on a pack of lies. It wasn't misjudgment; it was treason…”, proclaimed Bowman to a New York rally in 2005.

If America's dismal and counterproductive foreign policy was simply the result of incautious and insipid blundering, one might expect that occasional mistakes would be made in favor of the American people. But a careful study of the United States’ errant policies during the past century clearly indicate a persistent pattern of policies which only enrich the wealthy and further the goals of the globalist elite.