THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
Harry Targ
9/11 in Chile
On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed
targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following
a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the
central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building,
President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally
shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.
Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer
stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and
killed. For the next fifteen years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right
to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta
led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside
the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become
President for life.
9/11 in the United States
Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign
terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World
Trade Center, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People
all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the
9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.
But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks,
members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on
Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a
New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam
Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States
control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region.
Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics
said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania,
and Washington.
So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the
headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was
said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and
still goes on although Bin Laden has been killed.
Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush
administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed
to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really
behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass
destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last,
despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans
against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying
preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too
still goes on.
Over the last decade, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S.
soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one
million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died. Meanwhile the
United States has maintained over 700 military installations around the world,
declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc
of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so,
from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in
the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle
East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents
Bush and Obama have declared that United States military overreach to be in the
national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the
world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer operated aircraft,
drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command
headquarters half way around the globe.
Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act has extended the prerogatives of government
to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from
domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually
anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate
that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy.
Domestically, the decade since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained
assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the
population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment has risen dramatically.
Job growth has ground to a halt. Health care benefits have declined while costs
skyrocket. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military,
is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health
facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental
quality.
Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on
terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan
administration that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can
satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, has been starved
even more resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with
reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.
Not all have had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its
attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and
wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or
decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits
who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war
is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and
individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color
who constitute the threat to security and well-being.
Where Do We Go From Here
So the United States 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11
preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military
coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But
in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy,
and economic shifts from the vast majority of the population to the wealthy and
political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and
constraints of civil and political rights were defined as required by threats
to the “homeland.”
As the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to
reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an
opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism:” how this war trumps
traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; how this war must be
waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country; and,
as with the Cold War, military spending must take priority over every other
activity for which the government has a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people
pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome 28 years later.
Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and
domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will
continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their
9/11.
****************************
United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow
MR Online, Posted Oct 23, 2019 by Harry Targ
Just before the Korean War started in 1950, post-World War key foreign policy advisers to President Truman threw their support behind recommendations made in a classified document, National Security Council Document 68, which recommended a dramatic increase in military spending. NSC-68 also recommended that military spending from that point on should be the number one priority of the national government. When presidents sit down to construct a federal budget, the document recommended, they should first allocate all the money requested by military and corporate elites and lobbyists concerned with military spending. Only after that the military advocates receive all they request should government programs address education, health care, roads, transportation, housing and other critical domestic issues. When the United States entered the Korean War, in June, 1950, Truman endorsed the recommendations of NSC 68 and used the war on the Korean peninsula as justification. In Andrew Bacevich’s words the United States fully committed to a “permanent war economy.” As political scientist, Hans Morgenthau wrote about that time; there was no turning back from the new war economy and a “Cold War” against the former Soviet Union. Each subsequent president expanded on the war economy and the narrative of a dangerous world that justified trillions of dollars of spending. According to Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, Sorrows of Empire), between 1947 and 1990, the permanent war economy cost the American people close to $9 trillion. Ruth Sivard (World Military Expenditures) presented data to indicate that over 100,000 U.S. military personnel died in wars and military interventions during this period. And, in other countries, nearly 10 million people died directly or indirectly in wars in which the United States was a participant.
Seventy years later,
Trump era military budgets have reached record highs, $738 billion dollars in
the 2020 fiscal year and a projected $740 billion in 2021. As William Hartung
wrote: “The agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the
Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since
World War II (in Jake Johnson, ‘Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene’: House
Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget,” Common Dreams,
Friday, July 26, 2019). Including past and present military-related spending
the War Resisters League estimates that the 2020 federal budget will consist of
48 percent of all spending, exceeding non-military spending by six percent.
Just one weapon, the notorious F-35 latest generation fighter plane is costing,
by conservative estimates, $1.5 trillion. (Manufacturing facilities for the
plane are found in 433 of 435 Congressional districts).
Rationalizing the Permanent War Economy
A factional dispute
among foreign policy elites began to emerge in the 1970s about the best
strategies and tactics which should be pursued to maximize the continued global
economic, political, and military dominance of the United States in the
international system. The dispute was not over whether the United States should
continue to pursue empire but rather how to continue to achieve it. The debates
were occasioned by the rise of the countries of the Global South, the
societally wrenching experience of the Vietnam War, the growth of power and
influence of the former Soviet Union, and since its collapse, the emergence of
China as a new global economic, political and military power. In addition, the
new international economy was becoming more global, that is to say more
interconnected. Debates about strategy, tactics, surfaced between the
neoliberal globalists who emphasized so-called free trade, financial
speculation, and the promotion of a neoliberal agenda that advocated for the
privatization of all public activities by states and the development of
austerity policies that would shift wealth from the many to the few. The
international debt system would be the vehicle for pressuring poor and rich
countries to transform their own economic agendas. This faction dominated
United States foreign policy making for generations, particularly from Reagan
to Clinton to Obama. In political/military terms, they have sought to push back
challengers to neoliberal capitalism: Russia, China, populist Latin American
countries, and they have advocated advancing US economic interests in Asia and
Africa. Many of the institutions of the neoliberal globalists, sometimes called
the “deep state” include the CIA, NSA, and other security agencies.
The other faction
represented by President Trump and some of his key aides prefer economic
nationalism, restricted trade, building walls, avoiding diplomacy, and they are
driven by a deeply held white supremacist ideology. They believe, as political
scientist Samuel Huntington argued, that we are engaged in a civilizational
conflict with Islam, a fourth world war. The neoliberal globalists undermined
Ukraine, put more NATO troops in Eastern Europe and want to depose Putin and
weaken Russia. This is not on the Trump agenda.
The forbearers of the
current generation of Trumpian economic nationalists, came from the so-called
“neo-conservatives,” historically organized around the 1990s lobby group, The
Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and in the 1950s and 1970s of The
Committee for the Present Danger (CPD). Both the neoliberals and the
neoconservatives share a common vision of a global political economy controlled
by the United States but the former prefer selective use of military force and
greater use of economic and diplomatic pressure and covert interventionism
while justifying policy on humanitarian grounds, including expanding democracy.
Since, they say, the United States represents the hope of democracy in the world,
it is as Madeleine Albright called it. “the indispensable nation.” The
neoconservatives, in a sense more frank, argued that with the collapse of the
former Soviet Union, the United States was the hegemonic power. With that power
PNAC argued, the United States should have imposed a world order and state
regimes that comported with US interests and ideology. Over the years, the
policies of the two factions converged; hence economic penetration, covert
interventions, occasional wars, and support for expanding military spending.
But, often for reasons of domestic rather than international politics,
conflicts between the two factions resurface. That is the case in 2019.
The Ruling Class Agenda for the United States Role in the World:
Before the 2016 election
From a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:
HARDLY A day goes by
without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades
is being eroded. China and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own
illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We
say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage
and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new
report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is
worth saving, and it is worth reminding ourselves why: It generated
unprecedented global prosperity, lifting billions of people out of poverty;
democratic government, once rare, spread to more than 100 nations; and for
seven decades there has been no cataclysmic war among the great powers. No
wonder U.S. engagement with the world enjoyed a bipartisan consensus.
The Washington
Post editorial quoted above clearly articulates the dominant view envisioned by
US foreign policy elites for the years ahead: about global political economy,
militarism, and ideology. It in effect constitutes a synthesis of the “neocon”
and the “liberal interventionist” wings of the ruling class. First, it is
inspired by the necessity of 21st century capitalism to defend neoliberal
globalization: government for the rich, austerity for the many, and
deregulation of trade, investment, and speculation. (Neoliberal globalization,
the latest phase in the development of international capitalism is described in
an important recent book, Jerry Harris, Global Capitalism and the
Crisis of Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).
Second, the Post
vision of a New World Order is built upon a reconstituted United States
military and economic hegemony that has been a central feature of policymaking
at least since the end of World War II even though time after time it has
suffered setbacks: from defeat in Vietnam, to radical decolonization across the
Global South, and to the rise of competing poles of power in Asia, the Middle East,
Latin America, and even Europe. In addition, despite recent setbacks,
grassroots mass mobilizations against neoliberal globalization and austerity
policies have risen everywhere, even in the United States. The Washington Post
speaks to efforts to reassemble the same constellation of political forces,
military resources, and concentrated wealth, that, if anything, is greater than
at any time since the establishment of the US “permanent war economy” after the
last World War.
Historian, Michael
Stanley, in an essay entitled “‘We are Not Denmark’: Hillary Clinton and
Liberal American Exceptionalism,” (Common Dreams,
February 26, 2016) points to the ideological glue that is used by foreign
policy elites, liberal and conservative, to justify the pursuit of neoliberal
globalization and militarism; that is the reintroduction of the old idea of
American Exceptionalism, which in various forms has been used by elites since
the foundation of the Republic.
The modern version,
borne in the context of continental and global expansion, serves to justify an
imperial US role in the world. Along with posturing that the United States is
somehow special and has much to offer the world, American Exceptionalism
presumes the world has little to offer the United States. The only difference
between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy is whether the
exceptionalism still exists and must be maintained or has dissipated requiring
the need to “make America great again.” Leaders of both parties, however,
support the national security state, high military expenditures, and a global
presence—military, economic, political, and cultural.
“Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge:” Council on
Foreign Relations 2019
The influential
Council on Foreign Relations issued a Task Force report in September, 2019, on
national security. Task force members included representatives of prestigious
universities, large corporations, and staff from the CFR. In the forward, the
report pointed out that the United States had led the world in technological
innovation and development since the end of World War Two. But, it said, “…the
United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.” It goes
on to propose that the United States “…needs to respond urgently and
comprehensively over the next five years and put forward a national security
innovation strategy to ensure it is the predominant power in a range of
emerging technologies such as AI and data science, advanced battery storage,
advanced semiconductor technologies, genomics and synthetic biology,
fifth-generation cellular networks (5G), quantum information systems, and
robotics.” The report calls for increases in federal support for basic research
and development. This would include investments in higher education, selective immigration
of skilled scientists, and reform of military institutions to more effectively
incorporate new technologies into military capabilities.
Major findings of the
Task Force included the following:
·
Technological
innovation leads to economic and military advantage.
·
US leadership in
science and innovation is at risk.
·
US federal funding for
research and development has stagnated for years.
·
US leadership in STEM
education is declining
·
The Defense Department
and the intelligence community risk falling behind “potential adversaries” if
they do not employ more technologies from the private sector.
·
The defense community
“faces deteriorating manufacturing capabilities,” and “insecure” supply chains,
while depending on other nations for technologies.
·
There is a ”cultural
divide” surfacing between technology and policymaking communities weakening
connections between the defense and intelligence communities and the private
sector.
And, as to our major competitor China:
·
China is investing
significantly in new technologies and will be the world’s biggest investor by
2030.
·
China is closing “the
technological gap” with the United States, and it and other countries are
approaching the US as to artificial intelligence (AI).
·
China is “exploiting”
the openness of the US to secure valuable innovation by violating intellectual
property rights.
While praising
President Trump for some of his efforts the report says that increased budgets
have been too “incremental and narrow in scale.” The Administration has
inadequately moved to develop new communications technologies, and to respond
to the challenge of Huawei’s global expansion.
Therefore the United
States must:
·
restore federal
funding for research and development.
·
attract and educate a
science and technology workforce.
·
support technology
adoption in the defense sector.
·
bolster and scale
technology alliances and ecosystems.
In short, “during the
early years of the Cold War, confronted by serious technological and military
competition from the Soviet Union, the United States invested heavily in its
scientific base. Those investments ensured U.S. technological leadership for
fity years. Faced with the rise of China and a new wave of disruptive
technological innovation, the country needs a similar vision and an agenda for
realizing it.” (9)
Where Does the Foreign Policy of Donald Trump Fit?
Taking “the long view”
of United States foreign policy, it is clear that from NSC-68; to the response
to the Soviet challenges in space such as during the Sputnik era; to global
wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; to covert interventions in the
Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has pursued
global hegemony (and is suggested in the CFR statement). It is also clear that
the pursuit of empire has of necessity involved the creation of a permanent war
economy, an economy that overcomes economic stagnation by the infusion of
enormous military expenditures.
It is also clear that
justification for empire and military spending has necessitated the
construction of an enemy, first the Soviet Union and international communism;
then terrorism; and now China. The obverse of a demonic enemy requires a
conception of self to justify the imperial project. That self historically has
been various iterations of American exceptionalism, the indispensable nation,
US humanitarianism, and implicitly or explicitly the superiority of the white
race and western civilization.
In this light, while
specific policies vary, the trajectory of US foreign policy in the twenty-first
century is a continuation of the policies and programs that were
institutionalized in the twentieth century. Three seem primary. First, military spending, particularly in new
technologies continues unabated. And the CFR report raises the danger of the
United States “falling behind,” the same metaphor that was used by the writers
of the NSC-68 document, or the Gaither and Rockefeller Reports composed in the
late 1950s to challenge President Eisenhower’s worry about a
military/industrial complex, the response to Sputnik, Secretary of Defense
McNamara’s transformation of the Pentagon to scientific management in the
1960s, or President Reagan’s huge increase of armaments in the 1980s to
overcome the “window of vulnerability.”
Second, the United States continues to engage in policies recently
referred to as “hybrid wars.” The concept of hybrid wars suggests that while
traditional warfare between nations has declined, warfare within countries has
increased. Internal wars, the hybrid wars theorists suggest, are encouraged and
supported by covert interventions, employing private armies, spies, and other
operatives financed by outside nations like the United States. Also the hybrid
wars concept also refers to the use of economic warfare, embargoes and
blockades, to bring down adversarial states and movements. The blockades of
Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are examples. So the hybrid war concept suggests the
carrying out of wars by other, less visible, means.
Third, much of the discourse on the US role in the world
replicates the bipolar, super power narrative of the Cold War. Only now the
enemy is China. As Alfred McCoy has pointed out (In the Shadows of the American
Empire, 2017), the United States in the twenty first century sees its economic
hegemony being undermined by Chinese economic development and global reach. To
challenge this, McCoy argues, the United States has taken on a project to
recreate its military hegemony: AI, a space force, biometrics, new high tech
aircraft etc. If the US cannot maintain its hegemony economically, it will have
to do so militarily. This position is the centerpiece of the recent CFR Task
Force Report.
Recognizing these
continuities in United States foreign policy, commentators appropriately
recognize the idiosyncrasies of foreign policy in the Trump era. He has reached
out to North Korea and Russia (which has had the potential of reducing tensions
in Asia and Central Europe). He has rhetorically claimed that the United States
must withdraw military forces from trouble spots around the world, including
the Middle East. He has declared that the United States cannot be “the
policeman of the world,” a declaration made by former President Nixon as he
escalated bombing of Vietnam and initiated plans to overthrow the Allende
regime in Chile. For some of these measures, Trump has been inappropriately
criticized by Democrats and others. Tension-reduction on the Korean Peninsula,
for example, should have been encouraged.
However, while Trump
moves in one direction he almost immediately undermines the policies he has
ordered. His announced withdrawal from Syria, while in the abstract a sign of a
more realistic assessment of US military presence in the Middle East was
coupled with a direct or implied invitation to the Turkish military to invade
Northeast Syria to defeat the Kurds. Also, at the same time he was withdrawing
troops from Syria, the Defense Department announced the United States was
sending support troops to Saudi Arabia. He withdrew from the accord with Iran
on nuclear weapons and the Paris Climate Change agreement. Time after time, one
foreign policy decision is contradicted by another. These contradictions occur
over and over with allies as well as traditional adversaries. Sometimes
policies seem to be made with little historical awareness and without
sufficient consultation with professional diplomats. (One is reminded of the
old Nixon idea, the so-called “madman theory.” Nixon allegedly wanted to appear
mad so that adversaries would be deterred from acting in ways contrary to US
interests out of fear of random responses).
The contradictory
character of Trump foreign policy has left the peace movement befuddled. How
does it respond to Trump’s occasional acts that go against the traditional
imperial grain at the same time that he acts impetuously increasing the dangers
of war? How does the peace movement participate in the construction of a
progressive majority that justifiably seeks to overturn the Trump era and all
that it stands for: climate disaster, growing economic inequality, racism,
sexism, homophobia, and hybrid war? Perhaps the task for the peace movement is
to include in the project of building a progressive majority ideas about
challenging the US as an imperial power, proclaiming that a progressive agenda
requires the dismantling of the permanent war economy. These are truly troubled
times, with to a substantial degree the survival of humanity and nature at
stake. The war system is a significant part of what the struggle is about.
·
About Harry Targ
Harry Targ is a
retired Professor of Political Science, Purdue University. He has written books
and articles on US foreign policy, international political economy, and issues
of labor and class struggle. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.
