US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past six decades, democratically elected reformist governments and revolutionary governments and movements, guilty of supporting egalitarian economic programs, have been attacked by their own military forces (secretly infiltrated and funded by the United States), or by US-supported mercenary forces and “dirty tricks” operatives dedicated to rolling back reforms and opening their countries to foreign corporate investors and private market “solutions”—such as happened at one time or another in Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, Chile, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji Islands, Greece (twice), Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti (twice), Honduras, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Iran, Jamaica, Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, South Yemen, Syria, Thailand, Uruguay, Western Sahara, and others.9
Since World War II, US military forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Afghanistan, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq (twice), Laos, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Panama, Somalia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia—a record of military aggression unmatched by any communist or “terrorist” government in history.10 (All these listings are incomplete.) In some instances, neoimperialism has been replaced with an old-fashioned direct colonialist occupation, or attempted occupation, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia (and for more than a century, Puerto Rico), and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even before World War II, the US imperium was engaged in violent interventions. US military forces waged a bloody war of attrition in the Philippines from 1898 to 1903. US expeditionary forces fought in China along with other western armies to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and keep the Chinese under the heel of European and North American colonialists. Along with over a dozen other capitalist nations, the United States invaded revolutionary Russia from 1918 to 1921. US Marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and again in 1926 to 1933; Cuba, 1898 to 1902; Mexico, 1914 and 1916; Panama, 1903 to 1914; Haiti, 1915 to 1934; and Honduras six times between 1911 and 1925.
Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence, or apply some significant portion of their budgets to public-sector, not-for-profit services that benefit the people and bring self-development, are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of US intervention. The designated “enemy” can be:
In sum, we can determine the motives that impel US leaders by observing the following: just about all the countries designated as friendly to the United States are régimes that maintain economic systems integrated into the US sphere of corporate global domination. Just about all the countries designated as unfriendly have at one time or another resisted being drawn into the US sphere of corporate domination.
US-supported military and paramilitary forces, death squads, and police have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labor unions, peasant organizations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of an egalitarian redistributive politics in both the “unfriendly” countries and, when necessary, the “friendly” ones as well.
Our political and corporate leaders repeatedly tell us that the world is a relentlessly hostile place. They see enemies everywhere, largely because their own imperial interests put them in conflict with so many. About half a century ago, the celebrated conservative military figure General Douglas MacArthur had this to say about those who profess to guard our ramparts: “Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.”12
For the global interventionists to insure the blessings of an untrammeled “free market” corporate paradise, they must maintain plutocratic control of the planet. To accomplish this, they must rally public opinion behind them through patriotic pride and fear of alien dangers. Once the people fear for their survival, they are ready to hand over their tax dollars and even their democratic rights to their rulers—who are presumed to know best.