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Title: Those Washington Bullets Again Author: Kevin Carson Date: February 21, 2005 Language: en Topics: US foreign interventions Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/02/those-washington-bullets-again.html
Tim Shorrock, In These Times:
The Bush administration and the Pentagon are leveraging warmer
post-tsunami relations with Indonesia to convince Congress to lift its
restrictions on full military ties with the world’s largest Muslim
nation....
The administration’s push began in January, when Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz visited Aceh province, where an estimated
220,000 people were killed by the tsunami. The U.S. military relief
effort marked the highest level of U.S.-Indonesian cooperation since
1991, when Congress imposed a ban on U.S. training of Indonesian
officers under the State Department’s International Military Education
and Training (IMET) program. Upon his return, Wolfowitz urged Congress
to reevaluate the IMET restrictions. “We can have more positive
influence that way,” he told PBS’s “Online News Hour.”....
Last November, Human Rights Watch said it had “substantial evidence”
that Indonesian security forces “have engaged in extra-judicial
executions, forced disappearances, torture, beatings, arbitrary arrests
and detentions, and drastic limits on freedom of movement in Aceh.”....
After her televised confirmation hearings, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice told Congress that the administration is “currently
evaluating whether to issue the required determination.” But she was
unequivocal on the training funds. “IMET for Indonesia is in the U.S.
interest,” she said in a written response to questions posed to her by
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). IMET, she added, will “strengthen the
professionalism of military officers, especially with respect to the
norms of democratic civil-military relations such as transparency,
civilian supremacy, public accountability and respect for human rights.”
Uh, yeah. Close ties with the U.S. did wonders for “professionalism” and
“norms of democratic civil-military relations” among the officer cadres
of the Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion and Honduran Bttn 3–16, who had the
benefit of the “positive influence” of the School of the Americas.
Especially when U.S. foreign policy is currently under the sway of
humanitarians like John Negroponte and Richard Armitage, for whom
“extra-judicial executions, forced disappearances, torture, beatings,
arbitrary arrests and detentions,” etc., are more a feature than a bug.
Indeed, the Bush State Department is packed with purveyors of fraternal
aid to death squads in the ‘80s. As Justin Raimondo wrote,
The inheritors of the death-squads franchise (Central American division)
have a lot of affinity for the Bushies, considering that so many of the
latter are veterans of the Iran-Contra scandal: Eliot Abrams is now
doing to the Middle East what he did to Central America in the 1980s.
Current Bush administration officials Richard Armitage, John Poindexter,
Roger Noriega, and Otto Reich are all alumni of Death Squad U. Having
perfected their course materials, they are teaching Iraqis – and
American soldiers – the basics of “counter-insurgency” techniques,
updated for the post-9/11 era.
Come to think of it, Indonesia itself at one time was something of a
showpiece for American military assistance to Third World armed forces.
The U.S. had had decidedly frosty relations with Indonesia’s Sukarno at
least since the late 1950s, with a foreign policy aimed at isolating and
destabilizing his regime in much the same way that Venezuela’s Hugo
Chavez has been targeted in the past few years. Sukarno was a left-wing
nationalist who had led Indonesia’s postwar struggle for independence
from the Netherlands. But he was hardly a communist--as indicated by his
suppression of the Indonesian Communist Party following independence. By
the late ‘50s, however, his coalition government included communists,
and (like Chavez) he continued talking to countries that the U.S.
regarded as pariahs. It’s hard to avoid the strong suspicion that
Sukarno’s threat to U.S. “national security” had less to do with any
communist sympathies than with his economic nationalism and his
leadership role in the non-aligned movement. But “communist,” in the
U.S. national security community’s lexicon, usually refers to anybody
who menaces the land-holdings of United Fruit Company or threatens to
nationalize the oil industry. In the case of Sukarno, who nationalized
the country’s oil deposits not long before the coup, the latter may have
been an especially strong consideration.
In any case, in 1965 the Indonesian army overthrew Sukarno, and in the
ensuing months massacred hundreds of thousands of “communists” (although
the distinction between “communist” and “leftist” or even “union
organizer” is rather squishy, among people of a practical bent like
those involved in Suharto’s coup). What’s interesting, though, is that
the helpful folks at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta provided the military
with as many as 5,000 names for their roundup list. The list was “a
detailed who’s-who” of the PKI (Communist Party) leadership, including
“provincial, city and other local PKI committee members, and leaders of
the ‘mass organizations,’ such as the PKI national labor federation,
women’s and youth groups.” [Kathy Kadane, San Francisco Examiner, May
20, 1990]
As evidence that the U.S. leadership saw the coup and its aftermath as a
payoff for American ties to the Indonesian military, consider this 1966
exchange between Bob McNamara and Senator Sparkman in hearings before
the Foreign Relations Committee [Miles Wolpin, Military Aid and
Counterrevolution in the Third World (Toronto and London: Lexington
Books, 1972), p. 8]:
Senator Sparkman. At a time when Indonesia was kicking up pretty
badly--when we were getting a lot of criticism for continuing military
aid--at that time we could not say what that military aid was for. Is it
secret any more?
Secretary McNamara. I think, in retrospect, that the aid was well
justified.
Senator Sparkman. You think it paid dividends?
Secretary McNamara. I do, sir.
My goodness, what drollery! What’s that, Mr. Bones, you think it paid
dividends? Yes indeed, yes indeed, I surely do! Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk!
Indonesia was far from the only case in which the U.S. maintained close
ties to the military forces of a country whose political leadership it
regarded as an enemy. In Chile, for example, the American government’s
attitude toward the civilian government was expressed in Ambassador’s
warning that “Not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile under Allende. Once
Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile
and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.” And the aim of the
Nixon administration, once Allende came to power, was expressed in more
colorful terms: “make the economy scream.” [Holly Sklar, “Overview, in
Sklar, ed., Trilateralism (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 28–29]
But meanwhile, U.S. military aid to the Chilean armed forces continued
unabated. And we all know how that turned out.
U.S. aid to Third World military forces, as its advocates have made
clear for decades, is predicated on a “clear distinction between
building up or cultivating the friendship of an army, on one hand, and
supporting that army’s government.” [Wolpin, p. 20] For example, as DOD
Undersecretary Nutter explained to Representative Fraser in 1971
hearings [Ibid. pp. 17–18], assistance to foreign military forces did
not always aim at increasing the internal security of the countries
involved:
Mr. Fraser. In some of thoese countries, we are providing assistance to
the side that has seized the power.
Secretary Nutter.... We feel it is extremely important to maintain our
relations with the people who are in positions of influence in those
countries so we can help influence the course of events in those
countries....
Mr. Fraser. In your judgment, [national security of the United States]
means internal stability in those countries, is that right?
Secretary Nutter. Not always. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it does
not. It means maintaining our influence in some areas of the world that
are critical to our security. It means helping to promote, as best we
can, the developments that are most in our national interest, but that
does not necessarily mean providing for the internal security of those
countries.
The NSC paper “Overseas Internal Defense Policy” (August 1962) stated
[Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World (New York: Pantheon Books,
1988), p. 133]:
A change brought about through force by non-communist elements may be
preferable to prolonged deterioration of governmental effectiveness....
It is U.S. policy, when it is in the U.S. interest, to make the local
military and police advocates of democracy and agents for carrying
forward the development process.
See, the military and police, in their capacity as “advocates of
democracy,” are to bring about change through force--no doubt planned in
the Ministry of Love. So we should keep in mind that when people like
Dr. Rice refer to “norms of democratic civil-military relations,” they
may be using those terms with connotations we’re not entirely accustomed
to.
In context, it becomes quite clear that “national security” had (and
continues to have) more to do with economic control over resources and
markets, and their integration into a transnational corporate
political-economic framework, than with defense against a military
threat. Consider the following list of political targets of the Military
Assistance Program, compiled by Miles Wolpin from U.S. national security
community’s literature [p. 19]:
...neutralism; leftist revolution; forces of disruption; nationalism;
radical African states; home-grown insurgents; preventing or eliminating
insurgencies inimical to U.S. interests; political instability;
extremist elements; political dissidents; insurgents and their allies,
other extremists, radical elements; militant radicals; revolutions; Arab
nationalism; revolutionary ideas; leftist, ultranationalist,
anti-American, Nasser-type group.
And Methodists!
The central enemy was not “communism” or a potential strategic alliance
with the Soviet bloc, but “obstructive nationalism” that threatened the
“free world’s” control of resources needed for its “security.” [Ibid. p.
22]
Robert Porter, Southern Command CINC, in 1968 described the Military
Assistance Program as an insurance policy for private investments in
Latin America. In an address to the Pan-American Society in New York
City, he said [Ibid. p. 23]:
Many of you gentlemen are leaders and policy makers in the businesses
and industries that account for the huge American private investment in
Latin America.... You can help produce a climate conducive to more
investment and more progressive American involvement in the
hemisphere....
As a final thought, consider the small amount of U.S. public funds that
have gone for military assistance and for AID public safety projects as
a very modest insurance policy protecting our vast private investment in
an area of tremendous trade and strategic value to our country.
As McNamara (or Rice) might put it, it pays dividends.