2

The Third World and the West

Let us start, then, by summarizing what can be considered wrong with Western interventions in the Third World from a universalist point of view, without going back to the African slave trade and other past horrors of colonialism, rather focusing on the policies pursued since 1945, especially by the United States. These have given imperialism its neocolonial form. Countries remain formally independent, but every form of coercion is brought to bear to keep them under Western domination. If we examine those policies objectively we should be able to grasp the answer to that famous post-September 11 question, “Why do they hate us?” We should be able to understand why it would be perfectly natural, if not to hate “us,” at least to hate the policies pursued by our governments. And then we can also understand why we would no doubt feel the same as they do if we were in their place.

But this “policy” was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world…. The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. … Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries…. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter It was of no interest The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them….

To start with, let us consider the wars waged by the United States. They have killed millions of people, especially in Korea, Indochina, Central America, and Iraq. To that death toll must be added the victims of their protégés: Suharto, Mobutu, Pinochet; the Argentinian, Guatemalan, and Brazilian military regimes; the rebel groups supported by the United States and South Africa in Angola and Mozambique; and, finally, Israel. The author William Blum has called this the “American holocaust.”1 The expression may be shocking, but what ought to be much more shocking is the relative indifference in the face of those crimes and that they are seldom perceived as the result of a systematic policy. The impact of the Rwandan tragedy or of Hiroshima on public consciousness is no doubt due to the fact that each of these slaughters took place within a short period of time. But if a system of domination regularly produces so much death and suffering, is the horror any less just because it stretches over a longer period of time? Shouldn’t it be surprising that in the post-1945 world, where racism was officially discredited and abolished, people who consider themselves civilized have killed so many people they consider not civilized enough? The American system of domination is not the first to cost countless lives. But unlike those of the past, the American system is functioning now, and we can oppose it, whereas there is nothing we can do for victims of the past.

Of course, such “another world” would not be heaven on earth. There would no doubt still be civil wars, massacres, and famines. But the West is no paradise, either, and least of all during the period of its own modernization, with children working in mines, semi-slaves working in the colonies, and tens of millions killed in the two great European civil wars known as the First and Second World Wars. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the situation would not have been better had Third World countries been allowed to pursue their own ways of developing instead of being subjected to leaders imposed by the West. Compare, in terms of intelligence, humanity, and honesty, the leaders “they” produced and those that the West supported against them: Arbenz and the Guatemalan dictators, Sukarno and Suharto, Lumumba and Mobutu, the Sandinistas and Somoza, Goulart and the Brazilian generals, Allende and Pinochet, Mandela and apartheid, Mossadegh and the Shah, and today, Chávez and the Venezuelan putschists.2

Think also of the positive influence successful public health and land reform policies could have had on other poor countries if those experiments in China or in Cuba, but also elsewhere—for example in Guatemala in the early 1950s—had not run up against constant hostility from the West. If one thinks about it, and even if it is impossible to make a precise calculation, one can realize that Western obstruction of such progressive measures has cost not millions but hundreds of millions of lives destroyed by hunger, disease, and poverty. To give a simple example, in 1989 the economists Jean Dréze and Amartya Sen estimated that, starting from similar basic conditions, China and India followed different paths of development and that the difference between the social systems of the two countries (notably in regard to health care) resulted in 3.9 million more deaths annually in India. This means that “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958 to 1961. Of course, the Chinese famines are regularly blamed on communism, but it would not occur to anybody to blame the extra Indian deaths on capitalism or democracy.³

Latin America and the Cuban Difference

In Cuba, life expectancy is six years longer than the rest of the continent. Under-five mortality is four times below the average. If Latin America could show the same results as Cuba, 250,000 children’s lives could be saved every year.4 There are 5.7 million working children in Latin America.⁵ For the whole continent, there are 50 million street children.⁶ None of these situations are to be found in Cuba, where all children go to school.

I should point out that this criticism is independent of whatever can be said about old-style colonialism. The latter was even more violent than contemporary imperialism, but it indirectly helped to spread medical and scientific knowledge, as well as certain liberal and democratic ideas in places where they did not yet exist. This is not to suggest that the tens of millions of deaths brought about by colonialism can be justified by that spread of ideas, which might have been accomplished otherwise. What needs to be stressed here is that the present situation is radically different. American policy has very often been directed against movements that were essentially “modernizing”; for example, those that emerged from the Bandung Conference and merely sought to enable their own societies to benefit from the advantages of science and, in some cases, of democracy.⁷ It should also be noted that the policies of democratically elected presidents Allende of Chile and Arbenz of Guatemala were in reality scarcely more radical than those of the Swedish social democrats after 1931 or the British Laborites after 1945. But they ran up against incomparably greater foreign-backed opposition.

To defeat such progressive movements, Western powers have often supported the most feudal and obscurantist tendencies, for example, in Angola, Afghanistan or Indochina. Finally, the very fact that the West engages in pillage of resources and massive support for Israel at the same time it presents itself as the champion of modernity and enlightenment tends only to discredit those ideas, particularly in the Muslim world. The selfishness and short-sightedness of Western policymakers weaken the appeal of the universal ideas they claim to defend so ardently.

But We Changed

—Michael Ignatieff8

Or did we?

Of course, the apologists for every other imperial power have said the same thing. So you can go back to John Stuart Mill, one of the most outstanding Western intellectuals, now we’re talking about the real peak of moral integrity and intelligence. He defended the British Empire in very much those words. John Stuart Mill wrote the classic essay on humanitarian intervention. Everyone studies it in law schools. What he says is, Britain is unique in the world. It’s unlike any country before it. Other countries have crass motives and seek gain and so on, but the British act only for the benefit of others.

—Noam Chomsky⁹

Or should one believe this?

—Thomas L Friedman10

The Barricade Effect

When human beings are attacked, they often tend not only to defend themselves but to do so in an excessive and irrational manner; for example, by hunkering down and cutting themselves off from the rest of the world, which often only increases the dangers from which they seek to protect themselves. Almost everyone seemed to understand that tendency when it came to American reactions to September 11: yet this led to the invasion and occupation of two countries, hundreds of thousands of people killed, and, in addition to all that, exaggerated security measures bordering on the absurd. But just suppose that an event comparable to September 11 took place on American soil every day for ten years. What would be the reaction? How many million people would be killed in retaliation? What would become of the famous democratic freedoms of which Americans are so proud? How many people would be unceremoniously thrown into what Amnesty International already calls the “American gulag”—Guantánamo and other more obscure camps? However, the total number of casualties caused by that hypothetical series of events would be on a scale comparable to the loss of human life suffered by the Soviet Union during the Second World War, or even during the course of the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution, when the counterrevolution was supported by Western military intervention.¹¹

Yet throughout the Cold War, very few in the West understood that a large part of Soviet policy, including its control over Eastern Central Europe, far from being aggressive and aiming at world hegemony, was, on the contrary, excessively and clumsily defensive and, in the face of the danger of another aggression from the West, relatively moderate, at least in comparison to American wars after September 11. The risk of Western aggression, even if it was not as great as it looked to Soviet leaders after 1945, was nevertheless more real than the danger of communism brandished in Europe at the same time, or the danger of Islamism brandished today. The same thing could be said for a good part of the spy mania and the repression that flourished in the USSR. In the mainstream Western discourse, these evils are attributed to a purely internal cause, Stalinism. But no one can say what would have happened if the Soviet Union had not been born in the horrors of civil war and had not felt obliged, lucidly enough, to catch up with the West industrially and militarily in the space of a decade to confront the Nazi threat. One can scarcely expect a society subjected to such violence to become a model of humanism, moderation, and democracy.

I know from experience that the usual answer to such objections is to say that such factors “don’t explain everything” and that one cannot “justify the unjustifiable,” that is, Stalinism. One encounters similar reactions when observing that the particularly vengeful way the First World War was concluded through the Versailles Treaty was one of the origins of Nazism, or suggesting that perhaps the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, or London were not unrelated to Western policies in Iraq and Palestine.12 Let us examine those objections.

In regard to what is or is not “justifiable,” we must choose between two fundamentally opposite attitudes toward ethical questions. One of them, which could be called “religious”—even if it does not always stem from the notion of a personal god—and which is strongly expressed both by the French “new philosophers” and in the speeches of George W. Bush, is that Good and Evil exist and do battle in and by themselves, that is, independently of any given historical circumstances. The “bad guys”—Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden, Milosevic, Saddam, etc.—are demons that emerge from nowhere, effects without causes. To combat Evil, the only solution is to mobilize what is Good: arouse it from its lethargy, arm it, and send it off to destroy Evil. That is the philosophy of permanent good conscience and of war without end.

The opposite viewpoint, which can be called “materialist” or “scientific,” attempts to situate tragedies and crimes, great or small, in the chain of cause and effect. This is not a matter of denying free will, that is, freedom to make good and evil choices, but rather to leave to one side the seemingly unanswerable question of whether or not human beings are “really” free—and if so, under what circumstances—and to consider that it is only by understanding and acting on causes that one can combat the effects (evil). In Europe, at least, this conception is today almost universally accepted in regard to ordinary criminality. But this is far from the case when it comes to historical tragedies and relations between states. Nevertheless, international law and most efforts in pursuit of peace are related to that philosophy. It also has the merit of encouraging a sense of modesty and a critical mind, and, in regard to our subject, of raising the question as to what it is in Western policy that provokes despair and violent reactions. This is more useful than throwing up our hands and denouncing evil when unexpected events occur.

As for the comment, “But that doesn’t explain everything,” it would certainly be absurd to see Stalinism, Nazism, or Islamic terrorism as solely the Brandt’s Ostpolitik, and hope that a similarly intransigent attitude will bring them victory in the “war against terror.” But it may be suggested that the relative incapacity of the Soviet system to reform itself was partly due to the constant feeling of being under threat, a feeling fostered by Western aggression. The “conservatives” within the system could always argue that Stalin’s leadership did at least finally result in victory, peace, and security. When the system finally collapsed, it did so in a way that had catastrophic consequences for the living standards of a large part of its population. There is reason to think that a more gradual evolution, facilitated by less external pressure and which had already begun under Khrushchev, could have been much easier on the population. George Kennan, the father of the U.S. containment (of Soviet communism) policy, stated in 1992 that “the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union.”14

Socialism and the West

In the former Soviet republics, the decline in life expectancy has been spectacular, especially among men. In the Russian Federation, average life expectancy of men has gone from 70 years in the mid-1980s to 59 years and is today lower than in India. This situation is due notably to economic collapse, decline in the social welfare system and the prevalence of alcoholism and illness. Nontransmissible illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and injuries account for the greater part of the increase in deaths, although infectious diseases are also recurrent If this death rate remains stable, 40 percent of boys age 15 today will die before the age of 60 in Russia.¹⁵

The same type of reflection applies to most formerly colonized countries. There is no telling what would have become of Algeria, Vietnam, Korea, China, the Middle East, without the destruction of war, the imposed opium result of external actions such as civil war, the Versailles Treaty, or occupation of Palestine and Iraq. All those social phenomena have complex causes, and no truly scientific analysis is capable of determining which are the most important. There are obviously internal factors. In the case of the American reaction to September 11, or to what would be a series of such attacks, among such internal factors there is a national self-righteousness far greater than in most other countries.

—Bertrand Russell13

Today, people in the West, especially the more hawkish, boast of winning the Cold War, which is most often attributed to American intransigence under Reagan than to European policies of compromise such as Willy trade, the occupation of Palestine, the Sykes-Picot Accords, Suez, etc.16 Revolutionary violence can repeatedly be shown to be the product rather than the cause of counterrevolutionary violence, as well as of long-lasting oppression by traditional ruling classes and foreign invasions.¹⁷

Moreover, if it is true, as often said, that most socialist regimes turn out to be dictatorships, that is largely because a dictatorship is much harder to overthrow or subvert than a democracy. It follows that the repeated assaults by the Western ruling classes against every form of socialism have provoked a sort of artificial selection that allows only dictatorial forms to survive. After successfully ousting the democratically elected Mossadegh from power in Iran, the CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt tried to mount a similar putsch in Syria, but failed because Syria was already a dictatorship.¹⁸ Castro has survived in Cuba long after the fall of Allende in Chile.

The Overthrow of Mossadegh

In 1953, the CIA organized a coup d’état that succeeded in overthrowing the government of Muhammed Mossadegh, a conservative nationalist who sought to wrest control of Iranian petroleum from the Anglo-American companies for the benefit of his own country. Celebrating the event the New York Times wrote in its August 6, 1954, editorial: “Under-developed 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 other Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders.”¹⁹

Even though socialism is not the topic under discussion here, one can argue that far from having “failed wherever it was tried,” it has not really been tried anywhere. Wherever radical social changes have occurred, they could only take place in such violent circumstances as to rule out any possibility of socialism, that is, of what was understood by the term in the European socialist movement of the nineteenth century up until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914: overcoming the injustices of the capitalist system by collective appropriation of the means of production in such a way as to preserve “all that is valuable in existing civilization,” as Russell put it, in particular the benefits of peace and democracy. A main source of the tragedies of the twentieth century is that the war waged from 1914to 1918 brought to power those socialists most inclined to use the weapon of dictatorship, the Bolsheviks, and doomed the others to marginalization, or even death (Jean Jaurès, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg), leading to a polemical polarization between communists and social democrats that drowned out reasonable voices of intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell.20 This role of the war in distorting socialism is usually overlooked by those who speak of the horrors of the twentieth century because it argues against war, which is the exact opposite of the “lessons of history” drawn by those who advocate preventive war to eliminate dictatorships and spread democracy.

This line of thought also provides answers to those who advocate Western interventionism by referring to the crimes of Pol Pot or to massacres in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Those tragedies, it is claimed, would have justified military interventions that unfortunately did not take place due to our lack of courage or pressure from anti-imperialist movements. But all three of these tragedies can be shown to have in part resulted from previous interventionist policies. In Cambodia, it is scarcely plausible that the Khmer Rouge would have come to power had the United States not dragged the country into its war by massive “secret” bombing and overthrown Prince Sihanouk to install a dictator of its choice.²¹ As for Rwanda, first German and then Belgian colonial rule played on the principle of “divide and rule,” setting Tutsis and Hutus against each other. Should Iraq be plunged into full-fledged civil war between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, one can count on Western humanitarians to shake their heads in dismay at the “barbarity” of those peoples, locked in their primitive religious and nationalist cultures, while forgetting all that the Americans have done, whether deliberately or by ignorant arrogance, to set them at one another’s throats.

The cantonization proposal was signed on March 18, 1992, by Izetbegovic, Karadzic and Boban on behalf of the Muslim, Serb and Croat communities respectively. It was accepted by all three parties as a compromise to avoid civil war. The Serbs and Croats accepted recognition of independent Bosnia-Herzegovina within existing boundaries, which they did not want, in exchange for “cantonization,” which the Muslim party did not want. The compromise did not satisfy Mr. Izetbegovic because (in the words of United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann) it would have “denied him and his Muslim party a dominant role in the republic.” Ambassador Zimmermann hastened to call on Mr. Izetbegovic in Sarajevo to discuss the Lisbon accord. “He said he didn’t like it, I told him, if he didn’t like it, why sign it?” Zimmermann recalled later. Apparently only too glad to be encouraged to hold out for more, Izetbegovic reversed himself and withdrew his support for the Lisbon accord.

“What was the full intent or effect of the U.S. ambassador’s remark? Opinions differ. The fact remains that the same United States ambassador who first prohibited the Yugoslav People’s Army from maintaining the unity of Yugoslavia, then went on to encourage Izetbegovic’s party to fight to maintain the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Morally and practically, this was contradictory. Practically it made no sense at all: the Yugoslav People’s Army, if not opposed by NATO powers, would have been able to hold Yugoslavia together, obliging the parties thereafter to reach peaceful accommodation. Izetbegovic’s Muslim forces, in contrast, while stronger than admitted, were clearly not able to hold Bosnia-Herzegovina together without considerable outside military assistance.”22

The Lisbon Agreements

For instance, of the Lisbon agreements of February 1992, the Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia at the time, James Bissett, has written, “The entire diplomatic corps was very happy that the civil war had been avoided—except the Americans. The American Ambassador; Warren Zimmerman, immediately took off for Sarajevo to convince [the Bosnian Muslim leader] Izetbegovic not to sign the agreement” Zimmerman later admitted this, although he claimed, implausibly, just to be helping Izetbegovic out of an agreement with which the latter was uncomfortable. However, according to “a high-ranking State Department official who asked not to be identified,” quoted in the New York Times, “The policy was to encourage Izetbegovic to break the partition plan. It was not committed to paper.” That was Bush Sr. As for Clinton, in February 1993 David Owen made this public statement

Against all the odds, even against my own expectations we have more or less got a settlement but we have a problem. We can’t get the Muslims on board. And that’s largely the fault of the Americans, because the Muslims won’t budge while they think Washington may come into it on their side any day now…. It’s the best settlement you can get and it’s a bitter irony to see the Clinton people block it23

The root cause of the war in Bosnia, as well as in Croatia, was that it was hard for the Serbs living there to accept the right of self-determination in republics inside Yugoslavia so long as their own right of self-determination within those administrative entities was denied.

However, the basic issue here is not a matter of the details of those tragedies, which can be lengthily discussed, but in the logic of the argument. Of course, nobody can reproach the West for intervening in Rwanda to stop genocide, because no such intervention took place. The problem is that the mainstream discourse uses nonintervention in situations where it might have been justified (although it remains to be seen what would have been the nature and consequences of such an intervention) to prepare public opinion to accept other interventions that do in fact take place but in very different circumstances. The “lessons of history” are always the same: denunciation of our supposed indifference to the suffering of others and encouragement of military intervention. But there are other lessons that could be drawn: for example, that it would have been better not to destabilize the Sihanouk regime in Cambodia, or to encourage Izetbegovic to reject the Lisbon accord: in a word, to intervene less. More than four decades later, President Clinton apologized for U.S. policy toward Guatemala, but neither he nor other U.S. leaders drew the “lesson of history” that the United States would do better not to interfere in the domestic affairs of other states.24 This asymmetry in official discourse has no basis in fact or logic but simply reflects the desire of governments to overcome their own population’s reluctance to engage in foreign adventures.

Risks for the Future

Finally, there are two aspects of “North-South” economic relations that should be mentioned because they are directly linked to problems of domination and potential military conflicts. The first problem concerns our dependence on the Third World.

The expression may sound surprising since we are used to hearing that “we” are helping “them.” Moreover, a prominent school of postcolonial commentary has sought to convince us that colonialism played only a minor role in the West’s economic development. That argument will be briefly discussed in the following section, but even if it were so, it would be necessary to acknowledge that the situation is constantly evolving in the direction of a growing dependence. For one thing, the traditional role of colonies, which is to provide raw materials, is constantly increasing. Our development model makes Europe and the United States critically dependent on petroleum imports. For another, a growing fraction of manufactured goods come from ex-colonies or former semi-colonies. This problem is usually criticized from the angle of outsourcing and job losses in the developed countries, but can also be seen as a form of dependence: what would we do if those goods were no longer provided or became more expensive? Or if the currency accumulated by the sale of those goods ended up being used to modify the relationship of forces between, say, China and the United States? Of course, it can be said in response that the dependence is mutual: they provide raw materials and unskilled labor, and we provide high technology. But the scientific and technological development of China and India cast serious doubts on that argument.25

In addition to all that, there is the brain drain: skimping on education in the rich countries, along with the universalization of entertainment culture, is leading to the progressive destruction of our public school systems. This decline is more advanced in the United States than in Europe, but Europe is making successful efforts to catch up. Nevertheless, our industries, in particular the arms industry, need brains. It is enough to take a tour of American universities, or even of European laboratories, to realize that the education systems of poor countries are increasingly making up for the deficit of schooling in the rich countries.

The Decline of Science and Engineering

“But because of the steady erosion of science, math and engineering, education in U.S. high schools, our cold war generation of American scientists is not being fully replenished. We traditionally filled the gap with Indian, Chinese, and other immigrant brainpower But post-9/11, many of these foreign engineers are not coming here anymore, and, because the world is now flat and wired, many others can stay home and innovate without having to emigrate.”²⁶

“According to the New York Times, the U.S. military is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to send scientists on a screenwriting course in Los Angeles, with the aim of producing movies and television shows that portray scientists in a flattering light It is being billed as a radical solution to one of America’s most vexing long-term national security problems: the drastic decline in the number of U.S. students pursuing science and engineering.”²⁷

Leaving aside the immoral aspect of this situation, one can wonder just how stable it all is. Isn’t the Chinese strategy of accumulating capital more efficient in the long run than the American strategy of gigantic deficits to finance the accumulation of weapons? (After all, the Chinese strategy is more or less similar to what the United States did in the 19th century.) Writing over a century ago, the economist John Hobson, quoted below, was remarkably prescient about the tendency of imperialism, except for an essential aspect: neither China nor India can any longer be exploited at will. The twentieth century, through its wars and revolutions, saw a turn of the tide in the relationship of forces created between the West and the Third World during the previous centuries. Colonialism was replaced by neocolonialism and Europe by the United States, but this system of domination is much weaker than the one that went before. Moreover, it is in trouble everywhere: Asia has in large part gained real independence, that is, it has freed itself from neocolonialism as well as colonialism, with the notable exception of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and certain parts of former Soviet Asia.28 Latin America seems to be emerging from a long period of dictatorships and political discouragement and turning in the direction of greater independence. Western domination persists in Africa and the Arab world, but for how long? If the Iraqi resistance is not crushed, and for the moment nothing indicates it will be, it could sound the death knell of neocolonialism.

The dominant power of the nineteenth century was England. It lost its status to the United States, without direct conflict between the two, but nevertheless through two world wars against the rising great power of the period, Germany. Will the United States accept peacefully the loss of its status of unique superpower if the development of China or India leaves no choice? That is the question. For now it is clear that all leading U.S. strategists, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to the neoconservatives, are determined to avoid that scenario at all costs, even resorting to the militarization of space, source of incalculable new dangers.²⁹

Another problem is simply the exhaustion of natural resources, which is potentially more dangerous than problems of pollution or even of climate change, because the struggle for dwindling resources is very likely to be a factor in future wars. The West absorbs a disproportionate share of the planet’s natural resources, though at the same time promoting its way of life as an example for others to follow. Of course, one can always hope that technological innovation, for example, mastery of nuclear fusion, a spectacular improvement in harnessing solar energy, or some other radical break-through will provide a miracle solution to such problems. But it is unreasonable in the present state of our knowledge to behave as if such a solution is sure to emerge. Nature is under no obligation to be kind to us and to satisfy our every whim. We are in the position of those who climb a ladder and then, having safely reached the top, tell others to follow while pulling the ladder up with us. There is something fairly comical about the dismay aroused in our countries by the increase in China’s energy needs, an increase that is the inevitable consequence of the path of development we ourselves are so proud of having pioneered.

The sanctions imposed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003, combined with the devastating effects of the 1991 Gulf War which targeted civilian infrastructures in particular, had catastrophic effects for the civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of children died because of those sanctions. The United Nations coordinator for humanitarian aid to Iraq, Dennis Halliday, resigned in September 1998, declaring: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.” When told that the effects of the sanctions were due to the indifference of the regime to its own population, Halliday replied: “That’s absolute garbage, the fact is that before Saddam Hussein got himself into trouble in Iran, and then of course in Kuwait, they had invested massively in civilian infrastructure. Health care clinics, rural clinics, education, 10,000 schools scattered throughout the country, an educational and health care system which was the envy of all its Arab neighbors. Iraq had a very widespread food distribution system of its own before we got involved.”30

Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, resigned in February 2000 for the same reasons, and jutta Burghardt who directed the World Food Program for Iraq, followed suit shortly thereafter In a devastating report on the sanctions policy, Marc Bossuyt wrote:

The sanctions regime against Iraq has as its clear purpose the deliberate infliction on the Iraqi people of conditions of life (lack of adequate food, medicines, etc.) calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. It does not matter that this deliberate physical destruction has as its ostensible objective the security of the region. Once clear evidence was available that thousands of civilians were dying and that hundreds of thousands would die in the future as the Security Council continued the sanctions, the deaths were no longer an unintended side effect—the Security Council was responsible for all known consequences of its actions. The sanctioning bodies cannot be absolved from having the “intent to destroy” the Iraqi people. The United States Ambassador to the United Nations [Madeleine Albright] in fact admitted this; when questioned whether the half-million deaths were “worth it” she replied: “We think the price is worth it ‘The States imposing the sanctions could raise questions under the genocide Convention.³¹

Moreover, although it may not be entirely rational, one cannot help feeling a particular revulsion at the sight of the strong attacking the weak: the Israelis installing checkpoints and colonies in the occupied territories, or the United States bombing all of Indochina, relentlessly destroying the Sandinista revolution, depriving Cuba of anything that could help it achieve its public health goals, and condemning hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to slow death. Seen from a distance of space or time, the West presents an image of widespread indifference to criminal policies pursued with a perfectly clear conscience, symbolized by the “humanitarian” interventionist Bernard Kouchner providing moralistic cover for the cynicism of a Donald Rumsfeld.

The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already exhibted by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a larger body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods; all the main arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and manufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa. … We have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of Western states, a European federation of great powers which, so far from forwarding the cause of world civilization, might introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new financial aristocracy. Let those who would scout such a theory (it would be better to say: prospect) as undeserving of consideration examine the economic and social condition of districts in Southern England today which are already reduced to this condition, and reflect upon the vast extension of such a system which might be rendered feasible by the subjection of China to the economic control of similar groups of financiers, investors, and political and business officials, draining the greatest potential reservoir of profit the world has ever known, in order to consume it in Europe. The situation is far too complex, the play of world forces far too incalculable, to render this or any other single interpretation of the future very probable; but the influences which govern the imperialism of Western Europe today are moving in this direction, and, unless counteracted or diverted, make towards some such consummation.32

The Lesson of Guatemala

On June 17, 1952, the Guatemalan congress adopted an agrarian reform law introduced by the country’s popular president, Jacobo Arbenz, elected in 1950.³³ The law was hailed as a “constructive and democratic” model by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Uncultivated land on large holdings was expropriated (with compensation) and distributed to landless peasants, descendants of the Mayans who had been crushed by the Spanish conquest. To give the new small property owners the means to make good use of their land, a system of low-interest farm credit was instituted. Literacy courses were introduced into the countryside. Finally, the government sponsored a road-building program to break the foreign monopoly on transport and enable small farmers to market their produce. Far from collectivizing land in the Soviet manner, the reform favored small, private family farms. It aimed at creating the conditions for a modern capitalist economy.

Two years after introducing his agrarian reform, Jacobo Arbenz was driven out of office on June 27, 1954, by a military putsch organized by the CIA. The CIA at the time was headed by Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Both Dulles brothers had professional links with the United Fruit Company, which owned vast plantations in the country. Even though Arbenz’s reforms did not directly threaten United Fruit, the bad example was unwelcome.

• Media conformism. U.S. media relay the official U.S. government version of events without serious investigation. Opposing views are dismissed as absurd.