Current arguments for intervention forces, as in the National Security report, reveal that the ideological system is running out of pretexts for the resort to subversion and overt force in international affairs, and military Keynesian measures at home. ibid. p32
When Woodrow Wilson invaded Mexico and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) – where his warriors murdered and destroyed, reestablished virtual slavery, demolished the political system, and placed the countries firmly in the hands of US investors – these actions were in self-defence against the Huns. ibid. p34
From an early stage in the Cold War, and for deep-seated reasons, the United States was set on a course against self-determination and democracy, rhetorical commitments aside. ibid. p48
In the Middle East, the major concern was (and remains) the incomparable energy reserves of the region, primarily in the Arabian peninsula. These were to be incorporated within the US-dominated system. ibid. p53
The United States did not then need Middle East oil for itself. Rather, the goal was to dominate the world system, ensuring that others would not strike an independent course. ibid.
The Nixon Doctrine had established Iran under the Shah and Israel as the ‘cops on the beat’ in the region. ibid.
Few issues in world affairs are so important as control of the world’s energy system – or so threatening to world peace ... As long as it was possible, the ‘Soviet threat’ was brandished to justify US actions to ensure its dominance over Middle East oil. ibid.
One is the striking correlation between US aid and human rights abuses that has been noted in several studies. The reason is not that US policymakers like torture. Rather, it is an irrelevance. What matters is to bar independent development and the wrong priorities. For this purpose it is often necessary (regrettably) to murder priests, torture union leaders, ‘disappear’ peasants, and otherwise intimidate the general population. ibid. p58
The third consequence is the extreme elite hostility to democracy. The reason is plain: a functioning democracy will be responsive to appeals from the masses of the population, and likely to succumb to excessive nationalism. ibid. p58
Its apparent termination is an ideological construction more than a historical face, based on an interpretation that masks some of its essential functions. For the United States, much of the basic framework of the Cold War remains intact. ibid. p59
The removal of the limited Soviet deterrent frees the United States in the exercise of violence. Recognition of these welcome effects has been explicit in public discourse since the early stages of the Soviet withdrawal from the international arena. ibid. p59
We should not move on, however, without at least a word on how easily we refrain from seeing piles of bones and rivers of blood when we are the agents of misery and despair. ibid. p70
One persistent problem is that the enemy is hard to take seriously. In takes some talent to portray Greece, Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, or Grenada as a threat to our survival. ibid. p91
1985-6, the US and its Israeli ally was responsible for the most serious acts of international terrorism in this region, not to speak of the leading role of the United States in international terrorism elsewhere in the world, and in earlier years. The worst single terrorist act in the region in 1985 was a car-bombing in Beirut that killed 80 people and wounded 250. ibid. p113
The World Health Organization estimates that eleven million children die every year in the world of the Cold War victors (‘the developing world’) because of the unwillingness of the rich to help them. The catastrophe could be brought to a quick end, the WHO study concludes, because the diseases from which the children suffer and die are easily treated. Four million die from diarrhea; about two-thirds of them could be saved from the lethal dehydration it causes by sugar and salt tablets that cost a few pennies. ibid. p241
El Salvador, of course, declared no cease-fire. On the contrary, when the FMLN declared a unilateral cease-fire as a gesture of good faith during the peace talks they had initiated a few weeks earlier, the Salvadorian military responded by launching operations into most of the guerrilla base areas and stepping up arrests of union activists and other repression. ibid.
We see here the ultimate achievement of thought control, well beyond what Orwell imagined. Large parts of the language are simply determined to be devoid of meaning. It all makes good sense. In a Free Society, all must goose-step on command, or keep silent. Anything else is just too dangerous. ibid. p317
The Communist Party was labelled ‘extremist’ and ‘undemocratic’ by US propaganda ... The Vatican announced that anyone who voted for the Communists in the 1948 election would be denied sacraments, and backed the conservative Christian Democrats under the slogan O con Cristo o contro Cristo. (Either with Christ or against Christ). A year later, Pope Pius excommunicated all Italian Communists. ibid.
A combination of violence, manipulation of aid and other threats, and a huge propaganda campaign sufficed to determine the outcome of the critical 1948 election, essentially bought by US intervention and pressures. ibid.
Italy: The US planned military intervention in the event of a legal Communist political victory in 1948 ... Washington’s intention to resort to violence if free elections came out the wrong way is not very easy to deal with, so it has been generally suppressed, even in the scholarly literature. ibid. p345
The CIA operations to control the Italian elections, authorized by the National Security Council in December 1947, were the first major clandestine operation of the newly formed Agency. As noted earlier, CIA operations to subvert Italian democracy continued into the 1970s on a substantial scale. ibid.
And with popular organizations weakened or eliminated, isolated individuals are unable to participate in the political system in a meaningful way. It will, over time, become largely a symbolic pageant or, at most, a device whereby the public can select among competing elite groups and ratify their decisions, playing the role assigned to them by progressive democratic theorists of the Walter Lippmann variety. ibid.
Throughout the decade, and well after ‘democracy’ was established, the Salvadoran Church and human rights groups continued to describe how the security forces of the ‘fledgling democracy’ with the full knowledge and cooperation of their US sponsors, imposed upon Salvadoran society a regime of ‘terror and panic, a result of the persistent violation of basic human rights’, marked by ‘collective intimidation and generalized fear, on the one hand, and on the other the internalized acceptance of the terror because of the daily and frequent use of violent means’. ibid.
Fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in the murder of large numbers of civilians. ibid.
In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which hundreds of civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape, and burning – over 1000, according to the Church legal aid office. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and the murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning, and other methods, the vast majority being women, children, and the elderly. This has been the systematic pattern of special warfare in El Salvador since the first major military operation in May 1980, when six hundred civilians were murdered and mutilated at the Rio Sumpul. ibid.
The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights alleged in a letter to Defense Secretary Cheney that the killers of the Jesuits were trained by US Special Forces up to three days before the assassinations. ibid.
The Russians served the purpose for many years; their collapse has called for innovative and audacious tactics. As the standard pretext vanished, the domestic population has been frightened – with some success – by images of Qaddafi’s hordes of international terrorists, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Grenada interdicting sea lands and threatening the homeland itself, Hispanic narcotraffickers directed by the arch-maniac Noriega, and crazed Arabs generally, most recently, the Beast of Baghdad, after he underwent the usual conversion from favoured friend to Attila the Hun after committing the one unforgivable crime, the crime of disobedience, on August 2 1990. ibid.
Since each foreign triumph is in fact a fiasco, the aftermath must be obscured as the government-media alliance turns to some new crusade. ibid. p408
The notable rise in the moral and cultural level of the general population since the 1960s, including the unwillingness to tolerate atrocities and aggression, a grave disease called ‘the Vietnam syndrome, has further limited the options’. ibid. p408
The US has no problem with murderous thugs who serve US interests, and will attack and destroy committed democrats if they depart from their service function. ibid. p409
Those who do not follow the rules must be severely punished, and others must learn these lessons – but not the American public, who are to be regaled with tales about the nobility of our aspirations, the grand achievements of our leaders, and the moral depravity of others. ibid. p413
For many years, the US has stood virtually alone in blocking a diplomatic settlement in the Middle East ... Given US power, its opposition amounts to a veto. Accordingly, the peace process has been effectively deterred. ibid.
The prevailing judgement has been that enhancement of Israeli power contributes to US domination of the region. For such reasons, the US has always blocked attempts at diplomatic resolution. ibid.
The basic terms of the international consensus on the Arab-Israeli conflict were expressed in a resolution brought to the Security Council in January 1976, calling for a settlement on the pre-June 1967 borders. ibid.
Lying behind these gambits is the belief that US-backed Israeli violence has finally brought the Palestinians to heel. ibid.
The US veto effectively terminated any UN role in the peace process. ibid.
The Israeli rejection clearly showed that the basic problem is not Palestinian rights per se, but rather the fact that recognizing them would end Israeli control over the territories. ibid.