Who Rules the World? (23 page)

It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia. That might even have led Japan to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish. The remedy was clear—and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion.

The same was true in Latin America in the same years: one virus after another was viciously attacked and either destroyed or weakened to the point of bare survival. From the early 1960s, a plague of repression was imposed on the continent that had no precedent in the violent history of the hemisphere, extending to Central America in the 1980s, a matter that there should be no need to review.

Much the same was true in the Middle East. The unique U.S. relations with Israel were established in their current form in 1967 when Israel delivered a smashing blow to Egypt, the center of secular Arab nationalism. By doing so, it protected U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, then engaged in military conflict with Egypt in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the most extreme radical fundamentalist Islamic state, and also a missionary state, expending huge sums to establish its Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines beyond its borders. It is worth remembering that the United States, like England before it, has tended to support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism, which has until recently been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence and contagion.

THE VALUE OF SECRECY

There is much more to say, but the historical record demonstrates very clearly that the standard doctrine has little merit. Security in the normal sense is not a prominent factor in policy formation.

To repeat: “in the normal sense.” But in evaluating the standard doctrine we have to ask what is actually meant by “security”: Security for whom?

One answer is: security for state power. There are many illustrations. In May 2014, for example, the United States agreed to support a UN Security Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel.
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Or by Washington, though it was unnecessary to add that last condition; the United States is uniquely self-immunized from the international legal system. In fact, there is even congressional legislation authorizing the president to use armed force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague for trial—the “Netherlands Invasion Act,” as it is sometimes called in Europe.
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That once again illustrates the importance of protecting the security of state power.

But protecting it from whom? There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the population. As those who have spent time rummaging through archives should be aware, government secrecy is rarely motivated by a genuine need for security, but it definitely does serve to keep the population in the dark. And for good reasons, which were lucidly explained by prominent liberal scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington. In his words: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
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Huntington wrote that in 1981, when the Cold War was again heating up, and he explained further that “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.”
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These simple truths are rarely acknowledged, but they provide insight into state power and policy, with reverberations to the present moment.

State power has to be protected from its domestic enemy; in sharp contrast, the population is not secure from state power. A striking illustration is the radical attack on the Constitution by the Obama administration’s massive surveillance program. It is, of course, justified by “national security.” That is routine for virtually all actions of all states and so carries little information.

When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.
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Britain’s attitude is interesting: in 2007, the British government called on Washington’s colossal spy agency “to analyze and retain any British citizens’ mobile phone and fax numbers, emails, and IP addresses swept up by its dragnet,” the
Guardian
reported.
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That is a useful indication of the relative significance, in government eyes, of the privacy of its own citizens and of Washington’s demands.

Another concern is security for private power. One illustration is the huge trade agreements—the trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic pacts—now being negotiated. These are being negotiated “in secret”—but not completely in secret. They are not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers who are drawing up the detailed provisions. It is not hard to guess what the results will be, and the few leaks about them suggest that the expectations are accurate. Like NAFTA and other such pacts, these are not free-trade agreements. In fact, they are not even trade agreements, but primarily investor-rights agreements.

Again, secrecy is critically important to protect the primary domestic constituency of the governments involved: the corporate sector.

THE FINAL CENTURY OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION?

There are other examples too numerous to mention, facts that are well established and would be taught in elementary schools in free societies.

There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation. Of course, it is not quite that simple. There are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict, but we can consider this to be a good first approximation, and one radically opposed to the received standard doctrine.

Let us turn to another question: What about the security of the population? It is easy to demonstrate that this is of marginal concern to policy planners. Take two prominent current examples, global warming and nuclear weapons. As any literate person is doubtless aware, these are dire threats to the security of the population. Turning to state policy, we find that it is committed to accelerating each of those threats—in the interests of its primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.

Consider global warming. There is now much exuberance in the United States about “a hundred years of energy independence” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of the next century”—perhaps the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security—certainly not for the population. It also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.

These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system. There is a huge public relations campaign in the United States, organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity. And it has had some impact. The United States ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming, and the results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.
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The premier journal of media criticism, the
Columbia Journalism Review
, had an interesting article on the subject attributing this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.”
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In other words, if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97 percent of scientists, it must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.

That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced” doctrine. Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case today than the United States did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba, including Guantánamo, the country’s major port—and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to have it returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The actual media doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.

On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting—and frightening. It reveals very clearly that, from the earliest days, the security of the population was a nonissue, and remains so. There is no need here to run through the shocking record, but there is little doubt that policymakers have been playing roulette with the fate of the species.

As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history. There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear war. For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying the prospects for decent existence—and not in the distant future. For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.

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Outrage

Almost every day brings news of awful crimes, but some are so heinous, so horrendous and malicious, that they dwarf all else. One of those rare events took place when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people.

The Guardian of Virtue in the White House denounced it as an “outrage of unspeakable proportions,” which he attributed to “Russian support.”
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His UN ambassador thundered that “when 298 civilians are killed” in the “horrific downing” of a civilian plane, “we must stop at nothing to determine who is responsible and to bring them to justice.” She also called on Vladimir Putin to end his shameful efforts to evade his very clear responsibility.
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True, the “irritating little man” with the “ratlike face”—as Timothy Garton Ash described him—had called for an independent investigation, but that could only have been because of sanctions from the one country courageous enough to impose them, the United States, while Europeans cowered in fear.
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On CNN, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor assured the world that the irritating little man “is clearly responsible … for the shoot down of this airliner.”
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For weeks, lead stories reported on the anguish of the families, the lives of the murdered victims, the international efforts to claim the bodies, and the fury over the horrific crime that “stunned the world,” as the press reported daily in grisly detail.

Every literate person, and certainly every editor and commentator, should instantly have recalled another case when a plane was shot down with comparable loss of life: Iran Air Flight 655, with 290 killed, including 66 children, shot down in Iranian airspace on a clearly identified commercial air route. The agent of this act has always been known: it was the guided-missile cruiser USS
Vincennes
, operating in Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.

The commander of a nearby U.S. vessel, David Carlson, wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine,
Proceedings
, that he “wondered aloud in disbelief” as “the
Vincennes
announced her intentions” to attack what was clearly a civilian aircraft. He speculated that “Robo Cruiser,” as the
Vincennes
was called because of its aggressive behavior, “felt a need to prove the viability of Aegis (the sophisticated anti-aircraft system on the cruiser) in the Persian Gulf, and that they hankered for the opportunity to show their stuff.”
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Two years later, the commander of the
Vincennes
and the officer in charge of anti–air warfare were given the U.S. Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” and for the “calm and professional atmosphere” maintained during the period around the downing of the Iranian Airbus. The airplane’s destruction itself was not mentioned in the award.
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President Ronald Reagan blamed the Iranians for the disaster and defended the actions of the warship, which “followed standing orders and widely publicized procedures, firing to protect itself against possible attack.”
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His successor, George H. W. Bush, proclaimed that “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are … I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”
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No evasions of responsibility here, unlike the barbarians in the East.

There was little reaction at the time: no outrage, no desperate search for victims, no passionate denunciations of those responsible, no eloquent laments by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations about the “immense and heart-wrenching loss” when the airliner was downed. Iranian condemnations were occasionally noted, but dismissed as “boilerplate attacks on the United States,” as Philip Shenon of the
New York Times
put it.
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