May 28th, 2009
Killing Hope
William Blum
469 pages including index
published in 2003
William Blum is a veteran leftwing journalist, active since the 1960ties, who made his name leaking the name and addresses of 200 CIA employees back in 1969. Since then he has been working in relative obscurity until around the turn of the millennium when he wrote a bestselling book about the US’s foreign police: Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. It came at the right time to find its audience, just as interest in the subject soared due to the September 11 attacks. This succes is probably what got Killing Hope published, as it’s an updated version of one of Blum’s older books, originally published in 1986 as The CIA: A Forgotten History. It certainly has some of the hallmarks of a cash-in book, with the updating only going as far as the mid-nineties and the bulk of the book not noticably updated from the first edition. Many of the earlier chapters do not show much awareness of events and new revelations after 1986, if you see what I mean.
Killing Hope is the history of US military and covert interventions since World War II, with each chapter detailing a specific case. The chapters are in order of chronology, with several countries with a long history of US intervention having multiple chapters devoted to them. As Blum shows again and again in these chapters, the US talks a great deal about democracy and freedom, but the reality of its foreign policy at least since World War II is far different. With the excuse of “fighting communism” (or these days, “terrorism”) again and again the US has interfered on the side of dictatorships, nobbled democracies or fought liberation movements in order to safeguard its interests, be they strategic geopolitical ones or commercial ones. And Killing Hope is far from exhaustive, even in its original timeframe of 1945-1985 with Vietnam e.g. only having one short chapter devoted to it and little attention paid to other Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan or South Korea or even the UK.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, US foreign policy
Tags: Add new tag, Killing Hope, William Blum
May 25th, 2009
…For showing your nuclear arsenal is as powerful as America’s was in 1945… That’ll show them.
But seriously, is it too much to ask that for once, the news coverage of these events does not follow the well worn, wrong paths in which everything is looked at through the point of view of “the west”, anything North Korea does is dangerous and irrational, a threat to world peace and only lip service is paid to the context in which North Korea has decided on building a nuclear arsenal, that this is in fact a rational strategy on their part? And would it kill journalists to every now and then mention the greatest “rogue” nuclear power in the world, Israel, which still does not admit to owning nuclear weapons but is thought to have an arsenal of in the hundreds? I won’t mind if nobody mentions the inconsiderate fact that the sole nuclear power to have ever used the weapon in anger is that bastion of liberty and justice, America itself and that it used the atom bomb largely as a warning against the USSR?
North Korea, even though it is an opressive dictatorship, has valid reasons to arm itself with the sole weapons to command the respect of the world’s sole superpower. It can’t really trust its supposed superiority in conventional weapons (and in any case, they still think the Mig-21 is a frontline fighter and upgunned T-55s a match for modern tanks) to deter South Korea and the US from attacking it, but the prospect of a nuclear battlefield still scares America enough to deter it from doing anything drastic. Again and again in the last two decades the US has shown North Korea it will only take it seriously if it rattles the nuclear sabre. Can we blame it then for doing so?
Categories: Manufacturing Consent, US foreign policy
Tags: North Korea, nuclear weapons, pointless scaremongering
May 11th, 2009
Juan Cole agrees with me on the American view of Pakistan:
What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.
All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.
Like I said Saturday, mistrust of democracy has always been a staple of US foreign policy. It’s not surprising that US government sources consistantly overstate the dangers of the Taliban in Pakistan or the importance of the campaign against it; for the US government, the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan is the most important security issue there as it impacts on American operations in Afghanistan.
What is surprising is how far the western news media have internalised this attitude. Not only do they agree with this and present news from Pakistan in the context of the war against the Taliban, but the idea that this war might just be less important to Pakistan itself, that the Taliban is to the Pakistani state as the ETA is to Spain, an important security problem but not a fundamental challenge is almost never mentioned. Pakistan is constantly judged on whether it achieves American goals and nobody thinks this strange. As if we’ve lost the ability to understand any other viewpoint but the American one.
Categories: Manufacturing Consent, US foreign policy
Tags: Pakistan
May 9th, 2009
Manan Ahmed on the failed state rhetoric as used against Pakistan:
It was that under the rule of the military usurper Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan that Pakistan was adopted as a Cold War ally and held up as a model “developing nation”. During Khan’s tenure, Pakistan was said to enjoy the benefits of a so-called “developmental dictatorship” – many dams were built and much cement was poured.
The US even helped Ayub Khan engineer an election victory in 1965. But shortly thereafter, he foolishly went to war with India; his popularity plummeted, and his flashy foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, began a national campaign for a democracy based on socialist principles. Bhutto’s rise ran afoul of the “domino theory” intended to check the spread of Communism; it was in this context that Pakistan was first crowned a “failed state” – giving rise to decades worth of books and studies with titles like The Failure of Democracy in Pakistan (1962), The Failure of Parliamentary Politics in Pakistan, 1953-1958 (1967), Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (1968), Ethnic Conflict and the Failure of Political Integration in Pakistan (1973), Pakistan, Failure in Nation Building (1977) and Pakistan On the Brink (2004).
[...]
The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.
It’s an old constant in US foreign policy to prefer the familiarity of military dictatorships above the uncertainty of democratically elected governments. They’re easier to deal with and easier to manipulate. It’s never about what’s good for Pakistan, just what suits the US best. Having Obama in the White House doesn’t change this.
Categories: Imperialism, US foreign policy
Tags: Pakistan
October 12th, 2008
What We Say Goes
Noam Chomsky
223 pages including index
published in 2007
Noam Chomsky has been one of the most consistent critics of American hegemony and empire of the past four decades, maintaining a prodigious rate of output over the years as one of the few socalled public intellectuals who does not see his role as parroting received wisdom. His books, articles and interviews have always managed to explain in clear, understandable language how America and its ruling class keeps its power both domestically and abroad and particularly how it dictactes the boundaries of acceptable discourse. A measure of his importance as a critic of American power can be found in the vehemence of the criticism aimed at him by both conservative and liberal commentators. Despite their differences, both groups believe in American exceptionalism, the idea that America has a right, or even a duty to shape the rest of the world according to its own desires. What Chomsky has done for so long has been to show the reality behind “defending democracy” and “humanitarian intervention” and neither liberals nor conservatives like this.
What We Say Goes is his latest book, a collection of interviews he gave to David Barsamian about “U.S. power in a changing world”. It’s fair to say that there are few surprises here for those who’ve read his previous books, with the interview format used here precluding much indepth analysis. However, if you look at this book as an introduction to Chomsky and his concerns, What We Say Goes works fine. It’s short and to the point and as per usual Chomsky manages to cut to the heart of things quickly. He talks about all his usual obsessions — the way in which democracy and human rights are used against official enemies, the role of the US in the Middle East and South America, the role of the socalled free press in determining the boundaries of criticism allowed — and ties them together, with the interview format helping in keeping things rolling along.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, Imperialism, US foreign policy
Tags: Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes
February 21st, 2008
(I posted the comment below first at Unfogged but it was too good to just waste on those ingrates.)
What you need to keep in mind when judging Castro is that the man has stayed in power for almost fifty years and is only giving it up because his health has detoriated. This despite enormous odds against him, what with a certain superpower not a hundred miles away not liking him much. Unlike the Eastern European socalled socialist countries, his regime did not crumble once Soviet support was withdrawn, nor did Cuba go the Chinese or Vietnamese way of economic but not political freedom. At the same time his regime has been repressive, but it hasn’t engaged in mass murdering opponents in the same way US backed dictatorships in central America have done, or even (afaik) in the kind of repression that China went through.
That suggests to me that the reason Castro has survived so long in the face of so much difficulty is because the Cuban people want him to and believe he is their legitamite leader, despite some of the nastier features of the system he built.
What might help with this acceptance is the example of neighbouring countries like Haiti, with its history of brutal dictatorships, short periods of democracy undermined by Uncle Sam and civil wars/chaos…
Cuba is poor, but doesn’t have the extreme inequality of many Latin American countries, has free healthcare and school system for all its citizens annd has been able to go its own way despite superpower pressure. Would Cubans want to give up these hardwon achievements in return for the often dubious freedoms of liberal democracy as defined by US foreign policy?
Categories: socialism, US foreign policy, wingnuts
Tags: Cuba, Fidel Castro
