|
Home
Search
Subscribe Online
Archives
About
Us
Cartoons
Online
Book Store
E-Greetings
Jobs @ MG
Advertise
on MG
Our
Team
Contact Us
Muslim
Matrimonials
Our Advertisers
| |
Intervention: whose gain? whose pain?
By Michael Parenti
Today, the United States is the
foremost proponent of recolonization and leading antagonist of
revolutionary change throughout the world. Emerging from World War II
relatively unscathed and superior to all other industrial countries in
wealth, productive capacity, and armed might, the United States became the
prime purveyor and guardian of global capitalism.
Judging by the size of its financial investments and military force,
judging by every imperialist standard except direct colonization, the U.S.
empire is the most formidable in history, far greater than Great Britain
in the nineteenth century or Rome during antiquity.
A Global Military Empire
The exercise of U.S. power is intended to preserve not only the
international capitalist system but U.S. hegemony of that system.
The Pentagon's "Defense Planning Guidance" draft (1992) urges
the United States to continue to dominate the international system
by"discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging
our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role."
By maintaining this dominance, the Pentagon analysts assert, the United
States can insure "a market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity
that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy".
This global power is immensely costly. Today, the United States spends
more on military arms and other forms of "national security"
than the rest of the world combined. U.S. leaders preside over a global
military apparatus of a magnitude never before seen in human history. In
1993 it included almost a half-million troops stationed at over 395 major
military bases and hundreds of minor installations in thirty-five foreign
countries,and a fleet larger in total tonnage and firepower than all the
other navies of the world combined, consisting of missile cruisers,
nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, destroyers, and spy ships
that sail every ocean and make port on every continent. U.S. bomber
squadrons and long-range missiles can reach any target, carrying enough
explosive force to destroy entire countries with an overkill capacity of
more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 22,000 tactical ones. U.S.
rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly
superior to any other nation's, with an ability to slaughter with
impunity--as the massacre of Iraq demonstrated in 1990-91.
Since World War II, the U.S. government has given more than $200 billion
in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3 million
troops and internal security forces in more than eighty countries, the
purpose being not to defend them from outside invasions but to protect
ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of
domestic anti-capitalist insurgency. Among the recipients have been some
of the most notorious military autocracies in history, countries that have
tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens
because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad,
Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador,
Haiti, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the
Shah), the Philippines (under Marcos), and Portugal (under Salazar). U.S.
leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades,
democratically elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the
Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under
Sukarno), Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations
were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by
the U.S.national security state.
The U.S. national security state has participated in covert actions or
proxy mercenary wars against revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola,
Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western
Sahara, and elsewhere, usually with dreadful devastation and loss of life
for the indigenous populations. Hostile actions have been directed against
reformist governments in Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Zaire,
Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, and elsewhere. Since World War II,
U.S. forces have directly invaded or launched aerial attacks against
Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon,
Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, and Somalia, sowing varying degrees of death
and destruction. Before World War II, U.S. military forces waged a bloody
and protracted war of conquest in the Philippines in 1899-1903. Along with
fourteen other capitalist nations, the United States invaded socialist
Russia in 1918-21. U.S. 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 colonizers. U.S. Marines
invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and again in 1926 to 1933; Cuba,
1898 to 1902; Mexico, 1914 and 1916; Honduras, six invasions between 1911
to 1925; Panama, 1903-1914, and Haiti, 1915 to 1934.
Why Intervention?
Why has a professedly peace-loving, democratic nation found it necessary
to use so much violence and repression against so many peoples in so many
places? An important goal of U.S. policy is to make the world safe for the
Fortune 500 and its global system of capital accumulation. Governments
that strive for any kind of economic independence or any sort of populist
redistributive politics, who have sought to take some of their economic
surplus and apply it to not-for-profit services that benefit the
people--such governments are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of
U.S. intervention or invasion.
The designated "enemy" can be a reformist, populist, military
government as in Panama under Torrijo (and even under Noriega), Egypt
under Nasser, Peru under Velasco, and Portugal under the MFA; a Christian
socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; a social
democracy as in Chile under Allende, Jamaica under Manley, Greece under
Papandreou, and the Dominican Republic under Bosch; a Marxist-Leninist
government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; an Islamic revolutionary
order as in Libya under Qaddafi; or even a conservative militarist regime
as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein--if it should get out of line on oil
prices and oil quotas. The public record shows that the United States is
the foremost interventionist power in the world. There are varied and
overlapping reasons for this: Protect Direct Investments. In 1907, Woodrow
Wilson recognized the support role played by the capitalist state on
behalf of private capital:
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on
having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and
the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered
down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers
of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the
process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful
corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. Later, as president
of the United States, Wilson noted that the United States was involved in
a struggle to "command the economic fortunes of the world."
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large U.S.
investments in Central America and the Caribbean brought frequent military
intercession, protracted war, prolonged occupation, or even direct
territorial acquisition, as with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal
Zone. The investments were often in the natural resources of the country:
sugar, tobacco, cotton, and precious metals. In large part, the
interventions in the Gulf in 1991 (see chapter six) and in Somalia in 1993
(chapter seven) were respectively to protect oil profits and oil
prospects.
In the post cold-war era, Admiral Charles Larson noted that, although U.S.
military forces have been reduced in some parts of the world, they remain
at impressive levels in the Asia-Pacific area because U.S. trade in that
region is greater than with either Europe or Latin America. Naval expert
Charles Meconis also pointed to "the economic importance of the
region" as the reason for a major U.S. military presence in the
Pacific (see Daniel Schirmer, Monthly Review, July/August 1994). In these
instances, the sword follows the dollar.
Create Opportunities for New Investments. Sometimes the dollar follows the
sword, as when military power creates opportunities for new investments.
Thus, in 1915, U.S. leaders, citing "political instability,"
invaded Haiti and crushed the popular militia. The troops stayed for
nineteen years. During that period French, German, and British investors
were pushed out and U.S. firms tripled their investments in Haiti.
More recently, Taiwanese companies gave preference to U.S. firms over
Japanese ones because the U.S. military was protecting Taiwan. In 1993,
Saudi Arabia signed a $6 billion contract of jet airliners exclusively
with U.S. firms. Having been frozen out of the deal, a European consortium
charged that Washington had pressured the Saudis, who had become reliant
on Washington for their military security in the post-Gulf War era.
Preserving Politico-Economic Domination and the International Capital
Accumulation System. Specific investments are not the only imperialist
concern. There is the overall commitment to safeguarding the global class
system, keeping the world's land, labor, natural resources, and markets
accessible to transnational investors. More important than particular
holdings is the whole process of investment and profit. To defend that
process the imperialist state thwarts and crushes those popular movements
that attempt any kind of redistributive politics, sending a message to
them and others that if they try to better themselves by infringing upon
the prerogatives of corporate capital, they will pay a severe price.
In two of the most notable U.S. military interventions, Soviet Russia in
1918-20 and Vietnam in 1954-73, most of the investments were European, not
American. In these and other such instances, the intent was to prevent the
emergence of competing social orders and obliterate all workable
alternatives to the capitalist client-state. That remains the goal to this
day. The countries most recently targeted being South Yemen, North Korea,
and Cuba.
Ronald Reagan was right when he avowed that his invasion of Grenada was
not to protect the U.S. nutmeg supply. There was plenty of nutmeg to be
got from Africa. He was acknowledging that Grenada's natural resources
were not crucial. Nor would the revolutionary collectivization of a poor
nation of 102,000 souls represent much of a threat or investment loss to
global capitalism. But if enough countries follow that course, it
eventually would put the global capitalist system at risk.
Reagan's invasion of Grenada served notice to all other Caribbean
countries that this was the fate that awaited any nation that sought to
get out from under its client-state status. So the invaders put an end to
the New Jewel Movement's revolutionary programs for land reform, health
care, education, and cooperatives. Today, with its unemployment at new
heights and its poverty at new depths, Grenada is once again firmly bound
to the free market world. Everyone else in the region indeed has taken
note.
The imperialist state's first concern is not to protect the\ direct
investments of any particular company, although it sometimes does that,
but to protect the global system of private accumulation from competing
systems. The case of Cuba illustrates this point. It has been pointed out
that Washington's embargo against Cuba is shutting out U.S. business from
billions of dollars of attractive investment and trade opportunities. From
this it is mistakenly concluded that U.S. policy is not propelled by
economic interests. In fact, it demonstrates just the opposite, an
unwillingness to tolerate those states that try to get out from under the
global capitalist system.
The purpose of the capitalist state is to do things for the advancement of
the entire capitalist system that individual corporate interests cannot
do. Left to their own competitive devices, business firms are not willing
to abide by certain rules nor tend to common systemic interests. This is
true both for the domestic economy and foreign affairs. Like any good
capitalist organization, a business firm may have a general long-range
interest in seeing Cuban socialism crushed, but it might have a more
tempting immediate interest in doing a profitable business with the class
enemy. It remains for the capitalist state to force individual companies
back in line.
What is at stake is not the investments within a particular Third World
country but the long-range security of the entire system of transnational
capitalism. No country that pursues an independent course of development
shall be allowed to prevail as a dangerous example to other nations.
Common Confusions
Some critics have argued that economic factors have not exerted an
important influence on U.S. interventionist policy because most
interventions are in countries that have no great natural treasures and no
large U.S. investments, such as, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and
Vietnam. This is like saying that police are not especially concerned
about protecting wealth and property because most of their actions take
place in poor neighborhoods. Interventionist forces do not go where
capital exists as such; they go where capital is threatened. They have not
intervened in affluent Switzerland, for instance, because capitalism in
that country is relatively secure and unchallenged. But if leftist parties
gained power in Bern and attempted to nationalize Swiss banks and major
properties, it very likely would invite the strenuous attentions of the
Western industrial powers. Some observers maintain that intervention is
bred by the national-security apparatus itself, the State Department, the
National Security Council, and the CIA. These agencies conjure up new
enemies and crises because they need to justify their own existence and
augment their budget allocations. This view avoids the realities of class
interest and power. It suggests that policymakers serve no purpose other
than policymaking for their own bureaucratic aggrandizement. Such a notion
reverses cause and effect. It is a little like saying the horse is the
cause of the horse race. It treats the national security state as the
originator of intervention when in fact it is but one of the major
instruments. U.S. leaders were engaging in interventionist actions long
before the CIA and NSC existed.
One of those who argues that the state is a self-generated aggrandizer is
Richard Barnet, who dismisses the "more familiar and more sinister
motives" of economic imperialism. Whatever their economic systems,
all large industrial states, he maintains, seek to project power and
influence in a search for security and domination. To be sure, the search
for security is a real consideration for every state, especially in a
world in which capitalist power is hegemonic and ever threatening. But the
capital investments of multinational corporations expand in a far more
dynamic way than the economic expansion manifested by socialist or
precapitalist governments.
In fact, the case studies in Barnet's book Intervention and Revolution
point to business, rather than the national security bureaucracies, as the
primary motive of U.S. intervention. Anti- communism and the Soviet th | |
