Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  US public opinion and the American judiciary have developed a schizophrenic approach to terrorism. Instinctively Americans abhorred the use of terror even before 9/11; in many ways it represented the polar opposite to the democratic values on which the United States is assumed to have been built. But there have always been exceptions in practice. In 1976 a Cuban aircraft exploded after taking off from Barbados, killing all seventy-three on board. Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent based in Venezuela, was accused of being the terrorist mastermind behind the bombing, but in 1985 he escaped from jail in Caracas and fled to the United States, where he successfully rebuffed attempts by Venezuela to extradite him for more than twenty years. Irish terrorists responsible for atrocities at home were allowed to live openly in the United States. Long after 9/11, and despite pleas from the families of those killed in the terrorist Omagh bombings, Bush II refused to shut down the websites run by the ‘political wing’ of those responsible, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement. The scandal over the use by the Reagan regime of funds from Iranian arms sales to fund Nicaraguan Contras focused on the legality of the scheme, not the fact that the Contras were one of the most sadistic terrorist organisations in the western hemisphere.

  Since Mystic and the slave raids in Georgia, Americans – like Russians – have implicitly distinguished good terror (ours) from bad (yours). A clear demonstration of this came when John Negroponte was appointed by Bush II to head counter-terrorism activities after 9/11. Investigative reporters for the Baltimore Sun had previously established that the military commanders of one of Latin America’s most vicious death squads, Battalion 3-16 in Honduras, had been on the CIA payroll during Negroponte’s time as ambassador to Honduras. Negroponte has consistently denied knowledge of any wrongdoing by the Honduran military forces.

  The most notorious twentieth-century example of America’s use of terror occurred during the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese started to transport troops and materials through neutral Cambodia, and President Johnson ordered the US Air Force to bomb the jungle tracks that were being used by the enemy. Initially the raids were restricted to a narrow band of territory within 30 miles of the frontier. Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon went much further. According to transcripts published forty years later he ordered a ‘massive bombing campaign’ deep into Cambodia, with the incantation ‘anything that flies on anything that moves’.

  Just as Stalin’s bureaucrats carefully documented the awful work of the Gulags, so the United States recorded the bombing raids on Cambodia. Documents declassified at the end of the century revealed that 2,756,941 tons of explosive had been dropped on to the villages and countryside of a nation with which the United States was nominally at peace – more explosives than the allies had dropped in the entire Second World War, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen later estimated that as many as 800,000 people died in US bombing. (Survivors were pushed into the arms of the one group that promised to protect them from the terror raining down on their homes – the Khmer Rouge, which in turn went on to murder an estimated 1.7 million in a further orgy of blood-letting.) After the initial raids on North Vietnamese supply lines there was no military rationale for the bombing, which served only to terrorise the rural population. The moral implications of Nixon’s orders are open to argument. Noam Chomsky calls them genocide, just as others labelled Stalin’s mass deportations in the Second World War genocide. To others both actions could be regarded as unfortunate consequences of modern war. The point is that the terror experienced by peasant families cowering as wave after wave of bombs descended on them (some villages were subject to raids lasting up to eight hours) can have been no less than that of families waking to the knock on the door that signalled the arrival of Stalin’s secret police and the call of the Gulag.

  Historians have pored over the psychology of mass murderers like Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, but have not usually put Richard Nixon in the same category. Although the Cambodian men, women and children who died in their thousands may have considered him as evil as his Russian counterparts, the fact is he was no psychotic sadist. America’s actions were not the result of one deranged individual. America’s democratic values and the Constitution’s checks and balances would constrain such overtly psychotic behaviour. Although the full scale of the raids was kept secret from the American people, thousands were in the know and actively supported the bombing, despite knowing full well what it implied for those innocent civilians on the ground. What was the psychology of these people? Was there a collective psychosis? The answer may be seen in the parallels with two more recent events: the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada immediately after the totally unrelated killing of US troops in Lebanon, and the second invasion of Iraq after the totally unrelated 9/11 attack. In all three cases the US, the most powerful empire in the world, found itself powerless against an enemy that in theory it should have been able to dispose of in an instant. The terrorist attacks in Lebanon and on 9/11 were bad enough – but that there was no immediate way to retaliate was unforgivable. Something had to be done; someone had to be hurt. Terror was unleashed not out of a lust for power like Stalin or a love of pain like Ivan the Terrible but out of simple frustration. Terror was made prosaic.

  Terror remains a controversial weapon in the American imperial armoury; simple military might is a different matter. For most of their histories military force has been a key part of Russian and American foreign policy. Without it neither nation would have expanded its borders to anything like their current dimensions; neither would have gained an empire. Since US marines invaded Libya in 1805 American troops have on average intervened somewhere abroad more than once a year. War was also an inherent part of the ideology of autocracy; autocracy developed as warlords promised protection and glory to their followers. America was born in revolutionary struggle, and war was an inherent part of the young nation’s ideology as it fought to impose democracy on a land populated by heathen ‘savages’ or inferior ‘latinos’. As democracy evolved this militaristic emphasis diminished; in an age of human rights the crude application of military might became less acceptable.

  Between the two world wars America rarely needed to flex its military muscle. The Second World War changed that, and a new philosophy emerged in which people could be killed in the name of human rights. The war had been necessary, it was argued, to stop the horrors of the concentration camps – although in fact nobody had declared war for that purpose. Wars could be justified to prevent greater evils.

  War is always horrific, but in the twentieth century a mirage of sanitised atrocity-free conflict appeared in which ‘the west’ played by Geneva Convention rules. Such perceptions are once again distorted by the prisms of ideology. For example, on 8 November 2004 US forces attacked the city of Fallujah in Iraq. One of their main objectives was the town’s main hospital, which they said had been used by insurgents. The hospital had been treating a stream of civilians injured in earlier US attacks, and thus was a powerful propaganda weapon for the rebels. US officials announced that the hospital had been successfully captured; they denied insurgent claims of casualties during the attack and reported that many of the staff and patients taken prisoner were later released. Article 19 of Geneva Convention I signed in 1949 is unambiguous. ‘Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict. Should they fall into the hands of the adverse party, their personnel shall be free to pursue their duties.’ Legally the US attack on Fallujah Hospital was a war crime. Few Americans would see it that way.

  Today technology allows unseen men, women and children to be incinerated at the push of a button, and images of war on television screens segue into the banal world of video games. War a century ago seemed more horrific. In the First World War it was common for prisoners on both sides to be butchered, but by the Second World War Nazi Germany alone was the barbarian exception �
�� utterly condemned by nations like France and the Netherlands, who then went on to commit appalling atrocities in vain attempts to keep their colonies. In the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars similar atrocities were repeatedly carried out by the troops of the rival dictators. US forces carried out a few of their own. The Korean War had only just started when US Air Force pilots strafed South Korean refugees escaping on foot near No Gun Ri south-east of Seoul, killing around a hundred. The survivors took cover under a nearby railway bridge, where they were subject to three days of machine gun attacks from soldiers of the First Cavalry Division; over 300 civilians – men, women and children – died. More than 500 Vietnamese civilians were similarly massacred in the village of My Lai in 1968. There was no systematic barbarism like that practised by Russian troops in their conquest of eastern Germany, although in Korea US troops were ordered to fire on refugee columns if they even suspected an enemy presence, but nor were American troops the possessor of some moral superiority that made them behave in a more ‘democratic’ manner: a message reinforced in Iraq.

  Killing people in other countries – whether deliberate acts, accidental ‘collateral damage’ or unauthorised abuse – is the inevitable corollary of imperial ideologies. Any nation, be it Britain, Russia or America, that gives itself the right to intervene militarily overseas implicitly accepts that innocents will suffer.

  Today the Monroe doctrine, which laid down that the United States had the unique right to intervene in the affairs of countries in the western hemisphere, has been extended to cover the whole world. In the so-called Carter Doctrine enunciated on 23 January 1980 America’s self-declared policing role was explicitly extended to the Middle East. President Carter declared that the flow of Gulf oil was a ‘vital interest’ to the United States, and that as a consequence the US was empowered to use ‘any means including military force’ to keep the oil flowing. Objectively the Carter Doctrine was a classic statement of America’s imperial right to intervene in the affairs of other nations, but seen through the prism of his own ideology it certainly did not appear so to Carter himself. Indeed, writing in the Los Angeles Times in November 2005 he attacked the regime of Bush II for what he called its ‘revolutionary policies’, under which ‘There are determined efforts by US leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.’

  The fracturing of the Russian empire coincided with increased tensions in the Middle East and stepped up oil exploration around the Caspian. The United States found that its access to Middle Eastern oil was increasingly jeopardised but that new opportunities were arising in former Russian colonies like Azerbaijan and especially Kazakhstan. Just as the Second World War provided Roosevelt II with an opportunity to develop an alliance with Saudi Arabia, so the ‘war on terror’ provided an opportunity to beef up US military presence in this area, a presence initiated in 1997, well before 9/11, with joint military exercises in Kazakhstan.

  Possessing overwhelming military force remained a cornerstone of American foreign policy even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in Russia. The US navy currently has nearly 300 ships and half a million personnel, making it larger than the navies of the next seventeen nations put together. Its primary role is not to defend the homeland but to protect American imperial interests around the globe, a role that began with the attacks on Libya half a century after American Independence. American military forces are available to go where commercial priorities demand. For example, in 2003, despite tensions in the Middle East, it was announced that the aircraft carriers that had previously patrolled the Mediterranean would spend half their time off west Africa, reflecting increased US reliance on oil supplies from that region.

  One of the clearest statements of current US policy was contained in a 1992 Defense Department draft entitled ‘Defense Planning Guidance’. This laid down that the primary objective of US foreign and military policy was to stop the development of any regional power that might threaten the global supremacy of the United States, including any ‘European-only security arrangements’. The United States must remain ‘the predominant outside power’ in those regions like the Middle East and south-west Asia, whose resources the United States needed to exploit. When this document was leaked US senator Joseph Biden attacked it as an attempt to impose ‘Pax Americana’ on the world. He was right, but rather than being a sudden change in America’s relationship with the rest of the world it was the logical continuation of the centuries-long spread of Pax Americana from its birthplace on the eastern coastline of North America. The Carter doctrine merely recognised an imperial imperative that American corporations had long anticipated.

  US oil companies had been interested in the Middle East since the 1920s, grabbing stakes in the British-discovered Iraqi fields and establishing themselves in Saudi Arabia. During the Second World War America moved to consolidate its position at Britain’s expense by ‘persuading’ the beholden British government to share Iraq and Kuwait, while keeping Saudi Arabia to itself (and incidentally promising to leave Iran to Britain). The pressure to gain preferential access to oil pushed the US to intervene in ever more distant parts of the world. In 1992 Bush I intervened militarily in Somalia when the pro-American government was toppled and exclusive oil concessions held by four US oil corporations were threatened.

  Military force and covert operations form one facet of the American way of empire-building. Far more important are other factors – economic, cultural and ideological. In the case of Russia, on the other hand, although ideology is what its proponents claimed was holding the Soviet empire together, the reality is that military force was by far the empire’s most important glue. And it was the absence of other factors that ultimately signalled its collapse.

  More Dissidents

  Russian and American territorial aggrandisement in the nineteenth century was made possible by military might. Lots of other factors played their parts but Chechens and Apaches, Moldovans and Mexicans succumbed to overwhelming military force. The crushing superiority of the US navy in the Spanish-American War and the pathetic inferiority of the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese War were litmus tests of the state of the two empires. Militarily enfeebled, the Romanov regime headed for oblivion; militarily omnipotent, the regimes of Roosevelt I and his successors walked softly along new paths confident that they were carrying a big stick.

  The US stopped taking the land of others and embarked on a new form of corporate empire-building. In doing so it discovered that economic wealth created its own virtuous circle – the wealthier it became, the more its corporations could expand abroad and so the wealthier they became. Scale was as much an advantage to the nation as to the individual corporation. It seemed that the empire could thrive on dollars alone with no need for brute force. Russia never had that economic advantage. Its empire could only be held together by wielding a big stick. Stalin’s Red Army provided that stick, but in the changing world – and changing metaphors – Stalin’s successors discovered they needed guns and butter. Just as America was discovering that its economic interests in a post-war world needed the protection of secret police and US marines, so Russia discovered that secret police and military force alone could not sustain its empire.

  From George Washington through Andrew Jackson and Dwight Eisenhower to Colin Powell American political life has been leavened with generals providing a different and purportedly action-orientated perspective from that of the political apparatchiks. In Russia since the death of Stalin this leavening has been added by secret policemen, culminating with Vladimir Putin. After Beria was arrested and shot, power in Russia passed to party men who through sycophancy and luck had survived Stalin’s perpetual purges. In 1982 the crown passed to someone different. Yuri Andropov had headed the KGB and masterminded its continuing crackdown on dissidents. Where many in the FBI seemed to see reds under every bed, Andropov imagined Zionists under his. He was convinced there was an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union and devoted great effort to rooting it out. But like Beria h
e recognised that the Soviet economy had to change if the empire was to survive. Andropov moved power away from central planners to local managers, introduced incentive schemes for workers and attacked some of the corruption of the Brezhnev era that preceded him. His reign was another of those great might-have-beens of Russian history, but kidney disease did for him what bullets had done for Beria. The party gerontocracy then tried to stifle change by placing one of their own on the ‘throne’ but he soon died, and there came the final break with Stalinism.

  It is said that corporate chief executives are best judged by the quality of the appointments they make. Andropov’s most significant contribution to world history was his appointment to the inner circle of the man who arguably would produce the most massive change in Russian society since Peter the Great, greater even than the changes effected by Lenin – who had merely replaced one autocracy with another. In the summer of 1967 Yuri Andropov celebrated his promotion to head the KGB by holidaying at a spa near Stavrapol in the Caucasus. There he met a local party official who would become his protégé and who, thanks largely to Andropov’s unstinting support, would eventually join him in the Kremlin: Mikhail Gorbachev.

  When Gorbachev came to power in 1985 even he had no idea of how much the empire he was about to rule would be transformed. He recognised that wholesale economic modernisation was essential, but the far-reaching implications of his reforms were not at all apparent. Every aspect of Russian society needed restructuring (what he called perestroika), particularly its industrial base, but that could not be achieved without an unheard-of degree of honesty. For new economic policies to be developed and implemented there needed to be honest debate, for incentives to work there needed to be honest evaluation of performance, for corruption to be weeded out there needed to be honest admission of its existence. For perestroika to work there had to be openness: glasnost. Gorbachev understood that his reforms required objective reporting of what was happening in the country, but glasnost implied not just open reporting but open debate. For the first time political decisions, from top to bottom, were to be subject to scrutiny. It was then a small step from ‘scrutiny’ to ‘critical scrutiny’. Intentionally or not Gorbachev was inviting open dissent.