US foreign Policy Archives - Martin's Booklog

Killing Hope – William Blum

Published on May 28, 2009

Cover of Killing Hope

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.

President’s Secret Wars – John Prados

Published on December 8, 2007

Cover of Presidents' Secret Wars

Presidents’ Secret Wars
John Prados
480 pages including index
published in 1986

One of the things I’ve been kicking my head against in my other blog is the idea that George Bush and the Republicans are the fount of all evil and if only the Democrats come into power, the United States will once again become a force for good. Anybody with any knowledge of post-WW2 American history knows how wrong that idea is, yet far too many intelligent people still are found of this myth, which manifests itself in things like the idea that John F. Kennedy would’ve stopped the War on Vietnam if he hadn’t been killed. All of this is why more people should read books like this, Presidents’ Secret Wars, which traces the history of America’s CIA initiated secret wars since 1945, up to the eve of the Iran-Contra Scandal. (An updated version has been published since, but the local library only had the original version.) It shows that liberal presidents have been just as guilty as conservative ones in unleashing dirty wars on other countries.

The CIA was created in 1947, as a succesor to the wartime OSS, with its main task being espionage. From the start however it also had a covert action function; not surprising as many of the early CIA officers came from the OSS, which had a long and largely succesful history of covert action against nazi Germany during WW2. 1947 was the year the Cold War officially got started, when it became clear that the enforced wartime alliance of Soviet Russia and the western powers was definately at an end.

Ghost Wars – Steve Coll

Published on December 8, 2007

Cover of Ghost Wars

Ghost Wars
Steve Coll
230 pages
published in 1974

When New York and Washington were under attack on September 11, 2001, it came as a bolt out of the blue, just like that other sneak attack permanently etched in the American psyche, the attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. The mythology surrounding both attacks would portray the US as innocent victim of cruel, remorseless enemies, but as anybody who paid any attention in the past six years should know by now, the September 11 attacks were in fact blowback, the end result of years, if not decades of bad choices made in America’s foreign policy. In Ghost Wars, Steve Coll describes this hidden history behind the attacks, starting with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 up until September 10, 2001. It makes for fascinating, if depressing reading.

Depressing, because Coll shows you how year after year it seems successive American governments made the wrong choices in Afghanistan. Sometimes these choices were made out of ignorance, sometimes out of indifference, sometimes because other policy concerns were more important. But all those choices helped create Al Quida and eventually would lead to the September 11 attacks. But it’s not just American policies that created the Taliban and Bin Laden; Steve Coll also pays attention to the role Saudi Arabia and Pakistan played in first financing the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance and later supporting various parties in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet departure.