Who Rules the World? (3 page)

Another fateful Kennedy decision in 1962 was to send a Special Forces mission, led by General William Yarborough, to Colombia. Yarborough advised the Colombian security forces to undertake “paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,” activities that “should be backed by the United States.”
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The meaning of the phrase “communist proponents” was spelled out by the respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former minister of foreign affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, who wrote that the Kennedy administration “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” ushering in

what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine.… [not] defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game … [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.
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Vázquez Carrizosa was living under heavy guard in his Bogotá residence when I visited him there in 2002 as part of a mission of Amnesty International, which was opening its yearlong campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia in response to the country’s horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless.
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Terror and torture in Colombia were supplemented by chemical warfare (“fumigation”) in the countryside under the pretext of the war on drugs, leading to misery and a huge flight of the survivors to urban slums. Colombia’s attorney general’s office now estimates that more than 140,000 people have been killed by paramilitaries, often acting in close collaboration with the U.S.-funded military.
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Signs of the slaughter are everywhere. In 2010, on a nearly impassible dirt road to a remote village in southern Colombia, my companions and I passed a small clearing with many simple crosses marking the graves of victims of a paramilitary attack on a local bus. Reports of the killings are graphic enough; spending a little time with the survivors, who are among the kindest and most compassionate people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, makes the picture more vivid, and only more painful.

This is merely the briefest sketch of terrible crimes for which Americans bear substantial culpability, and that we could at the very least have easily ameliorated. But it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies: a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.

The victims within our domains of power, unlike those in enemy states, are not merely ignored and quickly forgotten but are also cynically insulted. One striking illustration of this fact came a few weeks after the murder of the Latin American intellectuals in El Salvador, when Václav Havel visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress. Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the “defenders of freedom” in Washington who “understood the responsibility that flowed from” being “the most powerful nation on earth”—crucially, their responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts shortly before. The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation. Havel reminded us that “we live in a romantic age,” Anthony Lewis gushed in the
New York Times
.
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Other prominent liberal commentators reveled in Havel’s “idealism, his irony, his humanity,” as he “preached a difficult doctrine of individual responsibility” while Congress “obviously ached with respect” for his genius and integrity and asked why America lacks intellectuals who “elevate morality over self-interest” in this way.
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We need not tarry on what the reaction would have been had Father Ignacio Ellacuría, the most prominent of the murdered Jesuit intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a dozen of his associates—a performance that would, of course, have been inconceivable.

Since we can scarcely see what is happening before our eyes, it is not surprising that events at a slight distance are utterly invisible. An instructive example: President Obama’s dispatch of seventy-nine commandos into Pakistan in May 2011 to carry out what was evidently a planned assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama bin Laden.
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Though the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, could easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered and his body dumped at sea without an autopsy—an action that was “just and necessary,” we read in the liberal press.
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There would be no trial, as there was in the case of Nazi war criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal authorities abroad, who approved of the operation but objected to the procedure. As Harvard professor Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition on assassination in international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the practice by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the call for assassination as “international outlawry” in 1863, an “outrage” which “civilized nations” view with “horror” and that merits the “sternest retaliation.”
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We have come a long way since then.

There is much more to say about the bin Laden operation, including Washington’s willingness to face a serious risk of major war and even the leakage of nuclear materials to jihadis, as I have discussed elsewhere. But let us keep to the choice of its nomenclature: Operation Geronimo. The name caused outrage in Mexico and was protested by indigenous groups in the United States, but there seems to have been no other notice of the fact that Obama was identifying bin Laden with the Apache Indian chief who led his people’s courageous resistance to invaders. The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne. How would we have reacted if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”?

Denial of these “heinous sins” is sometimes explicit. To mention a few recent cases, two years ago in one of the leading left-liberal intellectual journals, the
New York Review of Books
, Russell Baker outlined what he had learned from the work of the “heroic historian” Edmund Morgan: namely, that when Columbus and the early explorers arrived they “found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people … In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.”
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That calculation is off by many tens of millions, and the “vastness” included advanced civilizations throughout the continent. No reactions appeared, though four months later the editors issued a correction, noting that in North America there may have been as many as 18 million people—yet still unmentioned were tens of millions more “from tropical jungle to the frozen north.” This was all well-known decades ago—including the advanced civilizations and the crimes that were to come—but not important enough even for a casual phrase. In the
London Review of Books
a year later, the noted historian Mark Mazower mentioned American “mistreatment of the Native Americans,” again eliciting no comment.
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Would we accept the word “mistreatment” for comparable crimes committed by our enemies?

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 9/11

If the responsibility of intellectuals refers to their moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, and peace—and to speak out not simply about the abuses of our enemies but, far more significantly, about the crimes in which we are implicated and which we can ameliorate or terminate if we choose—how should we think of 9/11?

The notion that 9/11 “changed the world” is widely held, and understandably so. The events of that day certainly had major consequences, domestic and international. One was to lead President Bush to redeclare Reagan’s war on terrorism—the first one has been effectively “disappeared,” to borrow the phrase of our favorite Latin American killers and torturers, presumably because its results did not fit well with our preferred self-image. Another consequence was the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, and more recently military interventions in several other countries in the region, as well as regular threats of an attack on Iran (“all options are open,” in the standard phrase). The costs, in every dimension, have been enormous. That suggests a rather obvious question, asked here not for the first time: Was there an alternative?

A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won major successes in his war against the United States. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the US from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” the journalist Eric Margolis writes. “The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap.… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction … may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States.”
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A report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the final bill will be $3.2–4 trillion.
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Quite an impressive achievement by bin Laden.

That Washington was intent on rushing into bin Laden’s trap was evident at once. Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, wrote, “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.” The al-Qaeda leader, Scheuer continued, was “out to drastically alter US and Western policies toward the Islamic world.”

And, as Scheuer explains, bin Laden largely succeeded. “US forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.”
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Arguably, it remains so even after his death.

There is good reason to believe that the jihadi movement could have been split and undermined after the 9/11 attack, which was criticized harshly within the movement. Furthermore, that “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but no such idea was even considered by decision makers in Washington. It seems no thought was given to the Taliban’s tentative offer—how serious an offer we cannot know—to present the al-Qaeda leaders for a judicial proceeding.

At the time, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the horrendous crime of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”—an accurate judgment. The crimes could have been even worse: Suppose that Flight 93, downed by courageous passengers in Pennsylvania, had hit the White House, killing the president. Suppose that the perpetrators of the crime planned to, and did, impose a military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Suppose the new dictatorship established, with the support of the criminals, an international terror center that helped install similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere, and, as the icing on the cake, brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar Boys”—who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

As we all should know, this is not a thought experiment. It happened. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the United States succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile via the military coup that placed General Augusto Pinochet’s ghastly regime in office. The dictatorship then installed the Chicago Boys—economists trained at the University of Chicago—to reshape Chile’s economy. Consider the economic destruction and the torture and kidnappings, and multiply the numbers killed by twenty-five to yield per-capita equivalents, and you will see just how much more devastating the first 9/11 was.

The goal of the overthrow, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us”—screw us by trying to take over their own resources and, more generally, to pursue a policy of independent development along lines disliked by Washington. In the background was the conclusion of Nixon’s National Security Council that if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.” Washington’s “credibility” would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.