Has US Empire Benefited the World?

By Ivan Eland from Commondreams.org

In a recent column, Thomas Friedman, probably the most influential “internationalist” — read: proponent of U.S. interventionism in faraway places — has finally discovered that the United States must soon turn inward and put domestic economic growth first because of its massive public debt, huge federal budget deficit, and looming fiscal crisis caused by a dramatic automatic escalation in entitlements spending.

Eureka, the foreign policy rapture has begun!

The real problem with Friedman’s piece is not him reaching a conclusion that was obvious even before the onset of the Great Recession of 2008, but that he laments how dangerous the world will be without the steady guiding hand of the United States.

Friedman writes, and most Americans will be eager to believe, that the diminished interventionism of the now “frugal superpower” will be bad for the world because:

“[T]he most unique and important feature of U.S. foreign policy over the last century has been the degree to which America’s diplomats and naval, air, and ground forces provided global public goods — from open seas to open trade and from containment to counterterrorism — that benefited many others besides us.

“U.S. power has been the key force maintaining global stability, and providing global governance, for the last 70 years. That role will not disappear, but it will certainly shrink.”

Then Friedman, whose muse is Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University, quotes Mandelbaum as opining:

“When Britain could no longer provide global governance, the United States stepped in to replace it. No country now stands ready to replace the United States, so the loss to international peace and prosperity has the potential to be greater as America pulls back than when Britain did.”

But have the British Empire and the American Empire been all that good for the world? The world somehow got by before they came along.

The American public and many of its foreign policy experts praise the British Empire for ensuring stability, when they probably should examine its violent and often brutal colonial subjugation of what it regarded as inferior races for economic gain.

Adolf Hitler admired the British Empire, but thought it too brutal.

As for the American Empire, it is littered with foreign policy interventions that caused more international problems than they solved.

American entry into World War I led to a string of disasters that the world has never fully recovered from. Without the decisive U.S. entry into the first European war in its history in contravention of the Monroe Doctrine, a win by Germany, then merely a constitutional monarchy with a bombastic king, in a 10-round decision would have led only to the incremental adjustment of European borders to German advantage.

Instead, U.S. entry to tip the balance of the war inadvertently brought about an allied victory that rubbed Germany’s nose in the dirt — demanding a war guilt clause for a conflict in which blame should have been shared across Europe, requiring harsh reparations on an economically drained nation, and deposing Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The latter demand paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler, who exploited the war guilt clause, reparations, and the economic depression to rise to power and attempt to conquer Europe. World War II was merely a resumption of World War I two decades later.

The likely U.S. entry into World War I also kept the Russian provisional government (succeeding the fallen czar) involved in the conflict — increasing the probability of winning and providing much needed aid to do so.

Had the Russian government sued for peace earlier, Vladimir Lenin could not have used the unpopular war to bring a communist government to power. The post-World War II Cold War was borne out of the ashes of World War I.

During that Cold War, the U.S. created the national security state, the first large peacetime army in American history, and a far-flung empire of military bases, unneeded alliances (especially after the advent of nuclear weapons to protect the homeland), foreign military interventions, and large amounts of foreign aid.

Instead of spending much money and many lives (in brushfire wars in the developing world) to conduct an expansive worldwide Cold War against communism, a cheaper approach to accelerate the Soviet Empire’s collapse — as many empires have fallen over the course of history, by financial exhaustion — would have been smarter.

With a less interventionist and less costly U.S. foreign policy, Soviet finances would have been depleted even faster than they were by the costs of providing aid and governance to basket cases they took over in the developing world.

During the Cold War, the U.S. also encouraged the spread of radical Islam around the world to counter godless communism, including providing aid to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen to “give the USSR another Vietnam.” As an unintended consequence of supporting such Islamic militancy, the U.S. created the biggest threat to its homeland since the War of 1812 — al-Qaeda.

Indirectly, the U.S. also helped encourage another strand of radical Islam in Iran. In 1953, it helped overthrow the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran, which led to the restoration of the autocratic shah. Radical Islam has gained support in many Muslim countries because the only dissent that is permitted against authoritarian governments is in the mosques.

The United States has supported such autocrats, for example, the shah’s Iran and Egypt’s Mubarak today. The shah’s oppression led to the radical Khomeini revolution and to Iran being a problem to its neighbors.

The United States then helped Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran as a counterweight and eventually built up another future enemy. And these are only a few of the many examples of ill-fated U.S. meddling in faraway, non-strategic countries and regions of the world.

Of course, as Friedman alludes, the United States created the system of open trade, yet trade happens naturally and U.S. efforts merely institutionalized it. An era of free trade had preceded restricted markets during World War I and the Great Depression.

But to accurately portray U.S. interventionist empire-building, especially after World War II, is not to “always blame America first.” In fact, disagreeing with the government’s foreign policy is different from hating American’s society and way of life.

The founders of the United States, who are regularly idolized by most Americans, would roll over in their graves at the mutation of their traditional, peaceful, and restrained foreign policy into a militaristic, globe-girdling empire that is exhausting the country economically and ruining the republic that they created.

© 2010 Consortium News

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute.

Flying the Flag, Faking the News

Published on Thursday, September 2, 2010 by The New Statesman

Flying the Flag, Faking the News

Loud noises from Washington about a US pull-out from Iraq are a poor disguise for America’s determination to keep waging war. And the same sort of spin is at work in Britain

by John Pilger from Commondreams.org

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the "intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society", and that the manipulators "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country". Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism "public relations".

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women that they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he made cigarettes "torches of freedom". In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit Company's monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a "liberation".

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that "engineering public consent" was for the greater good. This could be achieved by the creation of "false realities" which then became "news events". Here are examples of how it is done these days.

False reality The last US combat troops have left Iraq "as promised, on schedule", according to President Barack Obama. The TV news has been filled with cinematic images of the "last US soldiers", silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.

Fact They have not left. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces' assassinations. The number of "military contractors" is 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control.

False reality BBC presenters have described the departing US troops as a "sort of victorious army" that has achieved "a remarkable change in [Iraq's] fortunes". Their commander, General David Petraeus, is a "celebrity", "charming", "savvy" and "remarkable".

Fact There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster, and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays's campaign to "rebrand" the slaughter of the First World War as "necessary" and "noble". In 1980, Ronald Reagan, running for president, rebranded the invasion of Vietnam, in which up to three million people died, as a "noble cause", a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today's Iraq war movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist and victim.

False reality It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are "countless", or maybe "in the tens of thousands".

Fact As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American-led invasion, a million Iraqis have died. This figure, from Opinion Research Business, follows peer-reviewed research by Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as "best practice" and "robust" by the Blair government's chief scientific adviser. This is rarely reported or presented to "charming" American generals. Neither is the dispossession of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children, the epidemic of mental illness, or the poisoning of the environment.

False reality The British economy has a deficit of billions which must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation, in a spirit of "we're all in this together".

Fact We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this PR triumph is that only 18 months ago, the diametric opposite filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth became unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London trough was on full view for the first time, along with the venality of once-celebrated snouts. Billions in public money went to inept and crooked organisations known as banks, which were spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.

Within a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted and the "black hole" was no longer the responsibility of the banks, whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the public. The received media wisdom of this "necessity" is now a chorus, from the BBC to the Sun. A masterstroke, Bernays would surely say.

False reality Ed Miliband offers a "genuine alternative" as leader of the Labour Party.

Fact Miliband, like his brother and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister, he did not refuse to serve under Blair or to speak out against Labour's persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a "profound mistake". Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead. It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes. Neither has he demanded basic social justice - that those who caused the recession clear up the mess and that Britain's fabulously rich corporate minority be taxed seriously, starting with Rupert Murdoch.

The good news is that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence. Two classified documents recently released by WikiLeaks express the CIA's concern that the populations of European countries, which oppose their governments' war policies, are not succumbing to the usual propaganda spun through the media.

For the rulers of the world, this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does.

© 2010 New Statesman

John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Environmental Protection of Bases

Published on Monday, April 26, 2010 by Foreign Policy in Focus
Environmental Protection of Bases?
by David Vine

Just weeks before today’s Earth Day, and for the second time in little more than a year, environmental groups have teamed with governments to create massive new marine protection areas across wide swaths of the world’s oceans. Both times, however, there’s been something (pardon the pun) fishy about these benevolent-sounding efforts at environmental protection.

Most recently, on April 1, the British government announced the creation of the world’s largest marine protection area in the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago, which would include a ban on commercial fishing in an area larger than California and twice the size of Britain. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called it “a major step forward for protecting the oceans.

A representative for the Pew Charitable Trusts—which helped spearhead the effort along with groups including the Marine Conservation Society, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Greenpeace—compared the ecological diversity of the Chagos islands to the Galapagos and the Great Barrier Reef. The Pew representative described the establishment of the protected area as “a historic victory for global ocean conservation.” Indeed, this was the second such victory for Pew, which also supported the creation, in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, of three large marine protection areas in the Pacific Ocean, around some of the Hawai’ian islands and the islands of Guam, Tinian, and Saipan.

The timing of the announcements for both the Indian Ocean and Pacific marine protection areas—on the eve of upcoming British parliamentary elections and in the days before Bush left office when he was trying to salvage a legacy—suggests that there’s more here than the celebratory announcements would suggest.

A Base Issue
Both marine protection areas provide safe homes for sea turtles, sharks, breeding sea birds, and coral reefs. But they are also home to major U.S. military bases. Chagos’s largest island, Diego Garcia, hosts a secretive billion-dollar Air Force and Navy base that has been part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The Pacific protection areas are home to U.S. bases on Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Rota, Farallon de Medinilla, Wake Island, and Johnston Island.

In both cases, the otherwise “pristine” protected environments carve out significant exceptions for the military. In Chagos, the British government has said, “We nor the US would want the creation of a marine protected area to have any impact on the operational capability of the base on Diego Garcia. For this reason…it may be necessary to consider the exclusion of Diego Garcia and its three-mile territorial waters.” In the Pacific, the Bush administration stressed that “nothing” in the protected areas “impairs or otherwise affects the activities of the U.S. Department of Defense.”

The incongruity of military bases in the middle of environmental protection areas is particularly acute since many military installations cause serious damage to local environments. As Miriam Pemberton and I warned in the wake of Bush’s announcement, “Such damage includes the blasting of pristine coral reefs, clear-cutting of virgin forests, deploying underwater sonar dangerous to marine life, leaching carcinogenic pollutants into the soil and seas from lax toxic waste storage and military accidents, and using land and sea for target practice, decimating ecosystems with exploded and unexploded munitions. Guam alone is home to 19 Superfund sites.”

Similarly, the base on Diego Garcia was built by blasting and dredging the island’s coral-lined lagoon, using bulldozers and chains to uproot coconut trees from the ground and paving a significant proportion of the island in asphalt. Since its construction, the island has seen more than one million gallons of jet fuel leaks, water fouled with diesel fuel sludge, the warehousing of depleted uranium-tipped bunker buster bombs, and the likely storage of nuclear weapons.

For all the benefits that marine protection areas might bring, governments are using environmentalism as a cover to protect the long-term life of environmentally harmful bases. The designation also helps governments hold onto strategic territories. Indeed, all of the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands involved are effectively colonies, including the Chagos Archipelago, which Britain refers to as the British Indian Ocean Territory and which was illegally detached from Mauritius during decolonization in the 1960s.

Ratifying Expulsion
The environmental cover-up goes deeper. In addition to the Mauritian sovereignty claim on Chagos, the islands are also claimed by their former indigenous inhabitants, the Chagossians, whom the U.S. and British governments forcibly removed from their homeland during the base’s creation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since their expulsion, the Chagossians have been struggling for the right to return and proper compensation. Three times since 2000, the British High Court has ruled the removal unlawful, only to have Britain’s highest court overturn the lower-court rulings in 2008. The Chagossians have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and expect hearings to begin this summer.

Again, the timing of the announcement of the Chagos marine protection area is far from coincidental. It could cement forever the Chagossians’ exile no matter the ruling of the European court. “The conservation groups have fallen into a trap,” explained Chagossian Roch Evenor, secretary of the UK Chagos Support Association. “They are being used by the government to prevent us returning.”

Others agree. In a letter to Greenpeace UK, Mauritian activist Ram Seegobin wrote, “Clearly, the British government is preparing a fall-back plan; if they lose the case in Europe, then there will be another ‘reason’ for denying the banished people their right of return.”

British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights organization Reprieve, was even more direct: “The truth is that no Chagossian has anything like equal rights with even the warty sea slug.”

While the Pew Charitable Trusts, a foundation created by the children of one of the founders of Sun Oil Company, has been working behind the scenes for three years with British officials on the marine protection areas, other environmentalists have opposed the plan. “Conservation is a laudable goal,” Catherine Philp argued recently in The Times of London, “but it is a hollow and untruthful one when decided on behalf of the true guardians of that land who were robbed of it; not for the protection of the environment, but for a cheap media win and the easy benefit of the military-industrial machine.”

It did not have to be this way. The Chagossians, as one of their leaders, Olivier Bancoult, has said, once “lived in harmony with our natural environment until we were forcibly removed to make way for a nuclear military base.” The U.K. and U.S. governments could correct this injustice and protect the environment at the same time by finally allowing the Chagossians to return and serve as the proper guardians of their environment. It is not too late to correct this mistake. It is not too late to prevent the good name of environmentalism from being used to compound injustices that have been covered up for too long.

David Vine is assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, DC, the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009), and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

UK Admits to Servicemen Being Exposed to Radiation

UK admits servicemen exposed to radiation
5:00AM Monday August 04, 2008
By Alanah May Eriksen
and AAP

British Defence chiefs have admitted servicemen were exposed to dangerous
radiation levels during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in
the 1950s.

But a New Zealand veterans advocate has dismissed the admission as a token
gesture, which goes nowhere towards satisfying a claim for compensation by
sailors here.

The Sunday Mirror reported yesterday that court papers show the British
Ministry of Defence (MoD) now believes - after years of denials - that
nuclear tests were responsible for the deaths of some British servicemen.

However, the MoD insists that only 159 men were affected out of the 20,000
who were present.

About 800 former servicemen from Britain, New Zealand and Fiji launched a
multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the MoD this year, claiming they had
been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during tests at sites
including Maralinga in South Australia and Christmas Island.

The court documents show two Royal Air Force servicemen, Eric Denson and
John Brothers, were irradiated after being ordered to fly through the
mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs to collect samples.

Film badges worn by the men recorded the amount of radiation they were
exposed to. "Eric had a dose equivalent to 190 years of background
radiation," the newspaper said. "John's was 107. The MoD's maximum safe dose
was just 30."

About 550 New Zealand sailors on board the frigates HMNZS Pukaki and HMNZS
Rotoiti were at the series of nine aerial bomb explosions at Christmas
Island in the Pacific and Malden Island, part of Kiribati, beginning on May
15, 1957.

There are thought to be about 160 left alive.

The sailors, banded together as the New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans
Association, are part of the class action lawsuit.

The chairman of the association, Roy Sefton, who suffers from muscle and
skeletal pain that he is certain is a result of being exposed to the
testing, said the admission was laughable.

"It's rubbish. I don't know how many, but there have been many thousands
exposed. It's not even within the realms of reality. It's a token gesture.

"You wouldn't have all these men 20 nautical miles from ground zero if it
wasn't for some sort of purpose, to see how they reacted."

Mr Sefton said British defence chiefs wanted to play the incident down
because Britain wanted to upgrade its nuclear power stations and build new
ones.