Problems of domestic control become particularly severe when the governing authorities carry out policies that are opposed by the general population. In those cases, the political leadership may be tempted to follow the path of the Reagan administration, which established an Office of Public Diplomacy to manufacture consent for its murderous policies in Central America. One high government official described its Operation Truth as “a huge psychological operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in denied or enemy territory”—a frank characterization of pervasive attitudes toward the domestic population. 10

While the enemy at home often has to be controlled by intensive propaganda, beyond the borders more direct means are available. The leaders of the current Bush administration—mostly recycled from more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush I administrations—provided sufficiently clear illustrations during their earlier stints in office. When the traditional regime of violence and repression was challenged by the Church and other miscreants in the Central American domains of US power, the Reagan administration responded with a “war on terror,” declared as soon as it took office in 1981. Not surprisingly, the US initiative instantly became a terrorist war—a campaign of slaughter, torture, and barbarism—that soon extended to other regions of the world as well.

In one country, Nicaragua, Washington had lost control of the armed forces that had traditionally subdued the region’s population, one of the bitter legacies of Wilsonian idealism. The US-backed Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinista rebels, and the murderous National Guard was dismantled. Therefore Nicaragua had to be subjected to a campaign of international terrorism that left the country in ruins. Even the psychological effects of Washington’s terrorist war are severe. The spirit of exuberance, vitality, and optimism that followed the overthrow of the dictatorship could not long survive as the reigning superpower intervened to dash the hopes that a grim history might finally take a different course. In the other Central American countries targeted by the Reaganite “war on terror,” forces equipped and trained by the US maintained control. Without an army to defend the population against the terrorists—that is, the security forces themselves—atrocities were even worse. The record of murder, torture, and devastation was extensively reported by human rights organizations, church groups, Latin American scholars, and many others, but it remained little known to citizens of the state that bore prime responsibility, and was quickly effaced. 11

By the mid-1980s, the US-backed terrorist campaigns had created societies “affected by terror and panic, collective intimidation and generalized fear,” in the words of a leading Church-based Salvadoran human rights organization: the population had “internalized acceptance of the daily and frequent use of violent means, and the frequent appearance of tortured bodies.” Returning from a brief visit to his native Guatemala, journalist Julio Godoy wrote that “one is tempted to believe that some people in the White House worship Aztec gods—with the offering of Central American blood.” He had fled a year earlier when his newspaper, La Epoca, was blown up by state terrorists, an operation that aroused no interest in the US: attention was carefully focused on the misdeeds of the official enemy, hardly detectable given the scale of US-backed state terror in the region. The White House, Godoy wrote, installed and supported forces in Central America that could “easily compete against Nicolae Ceausescu’s Securitate for the World Cruelty Prize.” 12

After the terrorist commanders had achieved their goals, the consequences were reviewed at a conference in San Salvador of Jesuits and lay associates, who had more than enough personal experience to draw on, quite apart from what they had observed through the grisly decade of the 1980s. The conference concluded that it does not suffice to focus on the terror alone. It is no less important “to explore what weight the culture of terror has had in domesticating the expectations of the majority,” preventing them from considering “alternatives to the demands of the powerful.” 13 Not only in Central America.

Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed –even preferred, if only for public-relations purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by the beasts in men’s shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order. These are all matters that the second superpower, world public opinion, should make every effort to understand if it hopes to escape the containment to which it is subjected and to take seriously the ideals of justice and freedom that come easily to the lips but are harder to defend and advance.

THE IRAQ CONNECTION - Chapter 5

After eight years, more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush I administrations regained political power in the contested 2000 election. They recognized that the 9-11 atrocities provided them with an opportunity to pursue long-standing goals with even greater intensity, closely following the script of their earlier tenure in office.

For George Bush the younger, PR specialists and speechwriters have constructed the image of a simple man with a direct line to heaven, who relies on his “gut instincts” as he strides forward to “rid the world of evildoers” while contemplating his ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’, a caricature of ancient epics and children’s tales, with an admixture of cowboy fiction. The first time around, the imagery constructed for the leader was not very different, and the rhetoric no less fevered: all states must band together to combat “the evil scourge of terrorism” (Reagan), particularly state-backed international terrorism, a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself,” in a “return to barbarism in the modern age” (George Schultz). 1

Important questions should have arisen at once: What constitutes terrorism? How does it differ from aggression or resistance? The operative answers are revealing, but the questions never entered the arena of public discussion. A convenient definition was adopted: terrorism is what our leaders declare it to be. The practice continues as the war is redeclared. 2 In the 1980s the two main foci of the “war on terror” were Central America and the Mideast/Mediterranean region. In Central America, the war on terror immediately became a barbaric terrorist war, hailed as a grand success and discarded from history. In the Middle East, as we shall see, the commanders in Washington and their local associates were again responsible for crimes far exceeding anything charged to their official enemies. The facts are particularly noteworthy because the retail terror they were opposing was inflated by their propaganda systems to become the lead story of the year by the mid-1980s, an impressive achievement.

Turning elsewhere, during the Reagan years Washington’s South African ally had primary responsibility for more than 1.5 million dead and $60 billion in damage in the newly liberated Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. A UNICEF study estimated the death toll of infants and young children in these two countries at 850,000—950,000 in 1988 alone, reversing gains of the early post-independence years primarily through the weapon of “mass terrorism.” That is putting aside South Africa’s practices within its own borders, where it was defending civilization against the onslaughts of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of the “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a 1988 pentagon report. Meanwhile the Reaganites evaded sanctions, increased trade, and provided valuable diplomatic support for South Africa. 3

One of the endeavors of the current incumbents has become well known: the success of the CIA and its associates during the 1980s in recruiting radical Islamists and organizing them into a military and terrorist force. The goal, according to Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was “to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap,” initially by secret operations that would induce them to invade Afghanistan. The Carter-Brzezinski reaction to the subsequent invasion was based on a complete misinterpretation of the Russian decision to intervene, according to the very knowledgeable analyst Raymond Garthoff. The Russian decision was undertaken reluctantly and with narrow and defensive objectives, as “is now clearly established in the Soviet archives,” he writes. For the Reaganites, who took over a year later, “the single aim was bleeding the Russians and pillorying the Soviets in world opinion.” The immediate result was a war that devastated Afghanistan, with even worse consequences after the Russians withdrew and Reagan’s jihadis took over. In the 1980s there was threat of worse, as “CIA-backed incursions of Afghan guerrillas and saboteurs into Soviet territory nearly provoked a major Soviet-Pakistani, if not Soviet-American war,” with unforeseeable consequences. 4

After the Russians withdrew, the terror organizations recruited, armed, and trained by the US and its allies (among them Al Qaeda and similar jihadis) turned their attention elsewhere, inflaming the India-Pakistan conflict with “an unprecedented terrorist offensive in India in March 1993,” and repeatedly bringing the region to the brink of nuclear war in later years as the flames spread. A month earlier, related groups had come close to blowing up the World Trade Center, following a “formula taught in CIA manuals.” The planning was traced to followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who had been helped to enter the US and was protected within the country by the CIA. 5

Also at least partially familiar is the long-standing support of the present incumbents for Saddam Hussein, often attributed to obsessions with Iran. That policy continued without change after Iran’s capitulation in the Iran-Iraq war, because of “our duty to support US exporters,” the state department explained in early 1990—adding the usual boilerplate about how Saddam would improve human rights, regional stability, and peace. In October 1989, long after the war with Iran was over and more than a year after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds, president Bush issued a national security directive declaring that “normal relations between the US and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East.” He took the occasion of the invasion of Panama shortly after to lift a ban on loans to Iraq.

The US offered subsidized food supplies that Saddam’s regime badly needed after its destruction of Kurdish agricultural production, along with advanced technology and biological agents adaptable to WMD. The warmth of the relations was indicated when a delegation of senators, led my majority leader and future republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, visited Saddam in April 1990. They conveyed president Bush’s greetings and assured Saddam that his problems did not lie with the US government. Dole assured Saddam that a commentator on Voice of America who had been critical of him had been removed. 6

Saddam was not the only monster who won the acclaim of the current incumbents. Among others were Ferdinand Marcos, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and Nicolae Ceausescu; all were overthrown from within, despite strong US support until their fate was sealed. Other favorites included Indonesia’s president Suharto, who competed with Saddam in barbarism. The first head of state honored with a visit to Bush the elder’s White House was Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, another high-ranking killer, torturer, and plunderer. The South Korean dictators also received Washington’s strong support until US-backed military rule was finally overthrown in 1987 by popular movements. Even minor thugs could be assured of a warm welcome as long as they were performing their function. Secretary of State Schultz was so enamored of Manuel Noriega that he flew to Panama to congratulate him after he had stolen an election by fraud and violence, praising the gangster for “initiating the process of democracy.” Later Noriega lost his usefulness in the contra war and other enterprises, and was transferred to the category of “evil”—although, like Saddam, his worst crimes were while he was on the US payroll. He then became the target of invasion and kidnapping from the Vatican Embassy in Operation Just Cause. 7

Some of these rulers easily matched Saddam in internal terror. Ceausescu provides an instructive case. Under his rule, the population lived in terror of his dread security forces, renowned for their torture and barbarism. A week after he was overthrown in an unanticipated popular revolt in December 1989, the Washington Post described how he had “destroyed the economic, intellectual, and artistic fabric of Romania,” compiling a “ghastly record in human rights.”