Iraq [2003] actually is a perfect example of the way the whole system works. So we economic hit-men are the first line of defense. We go in and try to corrupt governments, and get them to accept these huge loans which we then use as leverage to basically own them. If we fail, as I failed ... with men who refuse to be corrupted, then the second line of defense is we send in the jackals. And the jackals either overthrow governments or they assassinate. And once that happens, when the new government comes in, boy, it’s going to tow the line because the new president knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t. And in the case of Iraq, both of those things failed. The economic hit-men were not able to get through to Saddam Hussein; we tried very hard, we tried to get him to accept a deal very similar to what the House of Saud had accepted in Saudi Arabia, but he wouldn’t accept it. And so the jackals went in to take him out. They couldn’t do it. His security was very good. After all, he had one time worked for the CIA; he’d been hired to assassinate a former president of Iraq, and failed. But he knew the system. So in ’91 we send in the troops. And we take out the Iraqi military. So we assume at that point that Saddam Hussein is going to come around. We could have taken him out, of course, at that time, but we didn’t want to, he’s a kind of strong man we like; he controls his people; we thought he could control the Kurds, and keep the Iranians in their border, and keep pumping oil for us, and that once we took out his military, now he’s going to come around. So the economic hit-men go back in in the ’90s without success. If they’d had success, he’d still be running the country. We’d be selling him all the fighter jets he wants and everything else he wants, but they couldn’t. They didn’t have success. The jackals couldn’t take him out again. So we sent the military in once again, and this time we did the complete job – we took him out, and in the process created for ourselves some very very lucrative construction deals and to reconstruct a country that we’d essentially destroyed, which is a pretty good deal if you own construction companies [Halliburton], big ones. So Iraq shows the three stages – the economic hit-men failed there, the jackals failed there and as a final measure the military goes in. And in that way we really created an empire; but we’ve done it very very subtly; it’s clandestine. All the empires of the past were built by the military. And everyone knew they were building them ... The majority of the people in the United States had no idea that we’re living off the benefits of a clandestine empire. Today there’s more slavery in the world than ever before. Then you have to ask yourself, well, if it’s an empire, then who is the emperor? ... The Corporatocracy. John Perkins, author Confessions of an Economic Hitman, economist Chas T Main Inc
If most of those who took part in this one-dimensional debate were honest with themselves, they would admit that they do not in principle believe that the United States can do any good overseas for anyone but the American government, its armed forces, or privileged American elites. Christopher Hitchens, Never Trust Imperialists (Especially When They Turn Pacifist)
So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wire-tapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanor for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept. Christopher Hitchens
In my lifetime in Washington, which is now a quarter of a century, the most amazing thing I have ever seen is to see the oil-bearing wing of the Republican party – particularly identified with Mr Bush and Mr Cheney – change its mind completely, having run against Al Gore, against nation-building, against humanitarian intervention, against this kind of co-operation, change its mind completely and go to war with the status quo. Christopher Hitchens, lecture Islam and the West
George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as evil. Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America’s peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the lesser evil. This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, lesser evil is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today’s Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton’s bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright’s veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was US ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism – the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it – is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than ‘cowboy’ language. Christopher Hichens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left
East Timor: The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States ... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon – when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. Christopher Hitchens
You have to separate two things: on is the safety of Americans and the second thing is the right to invade another country. Now even if it could be proved that the American students on the island were in danger, and that is very much disputed by everybody and by the students themselves … President Reagan’s concern was to overthrow the government of Granada. Christopher Hitchens, interview C-Span
The Grenadans have known for a long time that an invasion was coming. Christopher Hitchens, interview C-Span
Let me get this straight: are you telling me that if you mess around with an American oil company, we take away aid? But if you have a military takeover, outlaw political parties and deny basic freedoms, you can have all the American aid you want? Robert Kennedy and His Times starring Brad Davis & Veronica Cartwright & Cliff de Young & Ned Beatty & Joe Pantoliano & Harris Yulin & Jeffrey Tambor & Jack Warden & River Phoenix & Jason Bateman et al, director Marvin J Chomsky, RFK, CBS 1985
It is immoral to attempt to change by military force the destiny of another country. ibid. RFK
Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons – specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference. Stephen Kinzer
There is nothing puzzling ... about America’s gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about the oligarchs’ successful efforts to drag the Republic into five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperilled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope. Walter Karp
For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites. Cornel West
For the third time in the last hundred years, the US has invaded and occupied Haiti. Working behind the scenes the US conducted a destabilization campaign aimed at toppling the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This is a message to the rest of the region: If you don’t obey, the US will impose sanctions, overthrow your government, install a client regime, and support death squads to crush any resistance. Ashley Smith
The United States is the greatest threat to world peace, and has been for a long time, and not merely because it is the world’s only superpower. Equally important, the United States is also far more disposed to use its power than any other powerful nation currently is. Though Americans are culturally and emotionally blind to the fact, the mere intrusion of US power is, in and of itself, destabilizing. T D Allman
With unfailing consistency US intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, US leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests. Michael Parenti
With each newly minted crisis US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably ‘anti-American’ and ‘anti-West’. Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along. Michael Parenti