Another American law professor evaluated the program at Banaras in 1971. He concluded that it had failed; most of its graduates did not even go into law practice. The Ford Foundation, to its credit, drastically cut back its legal education efforts in India after the 1971 report.
One of those who observed the failure of the Ford experiment was N. R. Madhava Menon, a little-known Indian law professor at Delhi University who had met some of the American consultants in the 1960s. After a year’s sabbatical spent at Columbia, Professor Menon started a legal aid clinic at Delhi in 1971 as a way both to provide law students with real-world experience and to raise the prestige of law schools among the population. After several years of educational experiments of mixed success, Menon proposed a new type of law school in 1982. He suggested a grueling five-year program that would yield students both a B.A. and a law degree, emulating the demanding and highly regarded engineering and medical schools in India. He proposed mixing in experience at legal aid clinics. He tried to sell his idea to universities all over India, but they universally turned him down. The Ford Foundation considered his proposal, but having been burnt once already, it declined to get involved again.
Fortunately for Menon, others within the Indian legal profession were disenchanted with the state of legal education in India, and began to advocate a new independent law school. Menon’s dream finally came to pass when, on September 1, 1986, the Bar Council of India and the state government of Karnataka appointed him to a new National Law School of India, in Bangalore, Karnataka. The new school drew on some American ideas, such as the use of the case study method, but Menon made sure the school was mostly Indian. The first class to enroll was a big success, and Menon now sought funding to build new facilities to replace the school’s ramshackle buildings in Bangalore. He later got a large grant—from the Ford Foundation.
Today the National Law School is the leading law school in India, with huge numbers of applications for every slot in its entering class. As India has embraced globalization, National Law School graduates are in high demand in the private sector. The school has steadily expanded to keep up with demand. Menon reached the mandatory retirement age in 1998, but the school has continued to thrive since.
The leaders of other Indian states soon came calling to have Menon set up law schools in their states. Menon started a similar school in Calcutta, West Bengal. Besides West Bengal, four other Indian states imitated the Menon model with new law schools. Today Professor Menon is heading up a National Judicial Academy in Bhopal to train judges beginning their careers.
CHAPTER NINE
INVADING THE POOR
As our commerce spreads, the flag of liberty will circle the globe and the highway of the ocean—carrying trade to all mankind—will be guarded by the guns of the republic. And as their thunders salute the flag, benighted peoples will know that the voice of liberty is speaking, at last, for them…that civilization is dawning at last, for them.
UNITED STATES SENATOR ALFRED BEVERIDGE, 189.1
THE NEO-IMPERIALISM of the previous chapter has been possible only because of another important aspect of the Western quest to save the poor, military force. The U.S. Army occupies Iraq and Afghanistan to spread democracy and capitalism and create benevolent states. The U.S. government justifies its military interventions to promote development as part of the “war on terror,” “nation-building,” or “regime change.”
In post-invasion Iraq, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in 2003 drew up one of the most radical free-market reforms ever attempted anywhere. Stanford economist John McMillan likened it to the “big-bang” free-market programs that had failed in the ex-Communist countries. The Economist wrote in 2003 that the intention of the CPA for Iraq was to “abruptly transform its economy into a virtual free trade zone.2 Naomi Klein wrote in September 2004 in Harper’s magazine about the attempt to transform Iraq from the blank slate of post-invasion “Year Zero” into a “neocon utopia.” CPA chief Paul Bremer announced the layoffs of five hundred thousand soldiers and state workers, the privatization of two hundred state enterprises, no restrictions on foreign investment in the nonoil sector, minimal taxes, and no import tariffs. USAID gave a contract in 2003 to the KPMG consulting firm Bearing Point to create a free market from scratch in Iraq. A twenty-four-year-old American named Jay Hallen was put in charge of launching Iraq’s new stock exchange. A twenty-one-year-old college senior named Scott Erwin, a former intern to Dick Cheney, wrote home that he was “assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security forces.3 This is what structural adjustment looks like when it has an army and a navy.
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson suggested in a 2001 book (and quoted this suggestion again in his 2004 book) that:
the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…. Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defense budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded..4
If it were not for the U.S. Army trying to promote economic development, it would seem presumptuous for me as an economist to comment on military interventions. Yet even without recent rhetoric, military intervention is too perfect an example of what this book argues you should not do—have the West operate on other societies with virtually no feedback or accountability. The military is even more insulated from the interests of the poor than aid agencies are. People don’t give reliable feedback at gunpoint. Invading soldiers and covert destabilization are not great ways to ascertain local peoples’ interests. The poor on the receiving end have few votes on whether they want the Americans to save them. Military interventionists are inherently Planners; armies do not have Searchers.
Economists must protest against military policies when they make it even more unlikely that Western economic assistance will achieve benefits for the poor. During the Guatemalan civil war, USAID gave aid to train rural leaders in order to give more political voice to peasants. At the same time, the CIA supported the military’s counterinsurgency campaign, which suppressed peasant activism in the name of fighting the Marxist guerillas. A later study found that the U.S.-trained Guatemalan military murdered more than 750 of the U.S.-trained rural leaders.
This chapter will ask questions such as: Did this military intervention done by Planners promote peace, democracy, and development? Were our guys the good guys? I use a mixture of episode analysis and case studies to shed light on these questions.
Cold War
The laboratory this chapter will use to study such interventions is the cold war. Various American presidents felt they had to fight the cold war in poor countries. Anyone fighting a Soviet-backed regime was a “freedom fighter” to be supported by American military aid. Some regimes considered too sympathetic to the Soviets were overthrown through CIA engineering.
I focus on the cold war because the interventions are old enough for an evaluation of long-run consequences. People who discuss military intervention today often dismiss the cold war as an aberration. Today advocates of Western military intervention see it as trying to introduce democratic capitalism. In the cold war, by contrast, the Americans tried to convince third world nations that a better system than communism was…democratic capitalism. In the bad old days of the cold war, Americans embraced some dictators as allies. In today’s war on terror, the Americans embrace some dictators as allies. The various military interventions of the United States even involve some of the same people: for example, Vice-President Dick Cheney was chief of staff to Gerald Ford during the Angola intervention of 1975, and was influential as a congressional leader in support of the Contras in Nicaragua and Jonas Savimbi in Angola in the 1980s. John Negroponte
was on the front line of the war against Nicaragua Contras as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in 1981–85 and was U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2004–5. Perhaps the cold war experience offers some lessons for today. I will briefly review today’s humanitarian military interventions at the end of the chapter to see if they are a dramatic improvement on cold war interventions.
The advocates of American military intervention during the cold war had good intentions. Communism was an evil economic and political system. The Soviets did their own meddling in poor countries, which could have required meddling by the Americans in response. Perhaps military action may have been necessary to get rid of some evil governments imposed by the Soviets.
However, even political opponents of evil governments show little gratitude for American invasion to modernize them. I won’t comment on how necessary military intervention was for American security or for winning the cold war, just as I have nothing to say about whether today’s military interventions are necessary for American national security. I will comment on the consequences of cold war interventions for the poor countries themselves, which may have some lessons on the likely consequences of today’s military interventions. Given the reality that the White Man’s Burden weights the interests of the rich more than the poor, slight benefits for the West were enough to justify high costs to the Rest. The following list will help get us started:
Let me be a little more systematic and document how much peaceful democratic capitalism these countries have today. As of 2004, the typical nation described in table 8 was in the bottom 15 percent on democracy, the bottom 18 percent on rule of law, the bottom 22 percent on economic freedom. Statistically, the cold war countries in table 8 have far worse institutional outcomes than other developing countries on all six dimensions that World Bank researchers measured in 2004: democracy, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption.
There is a selection problem with cold war interventions, just as there is in other aspects of the White Man’s Burden. The countries the Americans selected for intervention during the cold war were already messed up—they were already at war, already under the threat or reality of Communist revolution, or might have been at war anyway without American intervention. Moreover, since both sides of the cold war intervened in many of these cases, it’s hard to tell if it’s the Americans’ or the Communists’ fault that the countries wound up how they did. But, remember, Americans say we won the cold war. Whose victory is it when most of the poor countries where (and allegedly, on whose behalf) the Americans fought the cold war are still in such bad shape? A cursory reading of table 8 makes it hard to believe that things would have been even worse without American intervention.
Still, to try to get beyond the limitations of a superficial survey of interventions and outcomes, I turn to two more detailed case studies to see how American intervention worked out.
NICARAGUA
You…will know how to read the bitterness in my verses…. my grief for remote memories and black misfortunes…
NICARAGUAN POET RUBEN DARIO, “NOCTURNE,” TRANSLATED BY LYSANDER KEMP, 1983
Both the Right and the Left adopted the Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s as one of their defining achievements. To the Right, Reagan’s support for the “freedom fighters” eventually forced the Communist Sandinistas from power, achieving a victory in the last days of the cold war. The Left saw itself as successful in cutting off Reagan’s military aid for the thugs murdering the Nicaraguan peasants. Soon after the cutoff, the Contra war in Nicaragua ended. In the left’s view, the heroic nationalists, the Sandinistas, stayed in power until they surrendered it voluntarily after losing an election. Both the Left and the Right were correct about part of the situation—the Left that the United States should not have intervened, and the Right that the Soviet-backed Sandinistas were bad. Conversely, neither the American Left nor the Right was well qualified to decide for Nicaraguans what was best for them—the Left wished the Sandinistas on them, while the Right wished on them the equally appalling Contras. Nicaragua was left only with the kind of woes described decades earlier by its national poet Darío.
Cold War in Quilalí
None of the conservatives or liberals in Washington had ever heard of Quilalí, a small municipality in the mountains of northeastern Nicaragua, near the Honduran border. During the war, a CIA-supplied land mine laid by the Contras, whom Reagan called “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers,” blew up a passenger bus in Quilalí. Seventeen people died: ten men, two women, and five children. The youngest victim was four-month-old Juan Carlos Peralta. At the wake in Quilalí, relatives surrounded the table on which Juan’s corpse was laid out, wrapped in a white cloth. Flowers surrounded his body and a candle burned at his feet. His father could not attend the wake—he had died when the Contra land mine blew up the bus. Juan Carlos Peralta’s mother could not attend either—the same explosion had left her in critical condition.5
The killing of innocents was not an accident. The human rights organization Americas Watch in the 1980s talked about abuses by both Sandinistas and Contras, but singled out the Contras for the “deliberate use of terror” in the countryside. This terror campaign included sowing CIA-supplied land mines without regard for civilian lives. The Contras wanted to bring home to the peasants that the Sandinistas had brought a war upon them and could not protect them. Not all Contra violence was at a distance; the Contras executed on the spot any civilian associated with the Sandinistas, including schoolteachers and coffee bean pickers.
A lot of the Contras’ military victories consisted of overrunning peasant cooperatives, when their spies indicated the enemy soldiers were away, and opening up on the dwellings with AK-47s. Inés Delgado remembers the attack on El Coco cooperative in Quilalí on December 18, 1983: “People were killed when they ran out of ammunition and the Contras slit their throats. They sprayed gunfire inside one house and killed the children hiding under the bed. They cut out the eyes of a visiting doctor.6
The American government knew about Contra atrocities. Somehow they needed the homicidal Contras to defend against the “mounting danger” to the “security of the United States.7 The president did not specify how this nation of 3.4 million people with an average annual income of $420 could threaten the world’s most powerful nation, although he did mention they might “interdict our vital Caribbean sea lanes” (impoverished Communists hassling cruise ships?.8
The bereaved family of the infant Juan Carlos Peralta could have sympathized with their neighbors in Quilalí, the Galeano family. During the war, State Security agents of the Sandinista government took away the Galeanos’ adult son, Catalino Galeano, from the family home in Quilalí. He was never seen again. This disappearance was not the only one that happened during the Sandinista years. The Sandinistas, idealized as nationalists by the American and European Left, invested a lot in their State Security apparatus, with Cuban, Soviet, and North Korean advice. The former dictator Somoza had about three hundred secret police; the Sandinistas had more than three thousand.9
The Galeano family in Quilalí was unpopular with State Security (the national head of which was the aptly named Lenin Cerna) because it included many Contra sympathizers. The clan had even more Contra sympathizers after Francisco Galeano, who had fought with the Sandinistas against Somoza, was arrested by State Security, tortured at a prison known as La Perrera, and castrated after watching his wife being gang-raped by their captors. Juan Carlos Peralta and Catalino Galeano of Quilalí were two of the 30,865 Nicaraguans who died during the Contra war.10
Contrary to the legend of the American Left that the Contras were CIA mercenaries from the ranks of the former National Guard, the Contras had significant popular support in the northeastern mountains (despite their violence against civilians). Besides the land question, the population’s grievances included forced sales to the state of their grains and livestock at cheap prices (nice to maintain cheap food for those more politically influential pe
ople in the cities) and long lines for rationed goods that were often unavailable (the hallmark of Soviet economic systems everywhere).
However, the Left was right that the CIA made a bad situation worse. Injecting lethal weapons into this fracas was not a great boon to the people of Nicaragua. According to one of the founding Contras, the CIA made them “capable of inflicting great harm on Nicaragua.” The CIA trained the Contras “in guerrilla warfare, sabotage, demolitions, and in the use of…assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, grenade launchers, and…Claymore mines.” The CIA accomplished this even though CIA director William Casey mangled the name of the country, saying something like “Nicawawa,” prompting an outburst from an aide: “You can’t overthrow the government of a country whose name you can’t pronounce!.11
President Ronald Reagan’s vision of Central America didn’t reflect reality in the mountains: “If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy…. Since the exodus from Egypt, historians have written of those who sacrificed and struggled for freedom—the stand at Thermopylae, the revolt of Spartacus, the storming of the Bastille, the Warsaw uprising in World War II.12
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