By Richard Heinberg
Santa Rosa, Calif. Resident

  
  The U.S. is engaged in a self-declared war on terrorism. That war has already entailed extraordinary measures that include the domestic curtailment of civil liberties, the spending of billions of dollars on military operations overseas, and the killing of hundreds or perhaps thousands of non-combatant civilians in Afghanistan. Officials have stated that the heavy bombing of other nations, such as Iraq, is being contemplated.

If polls are to be trusted, most Americans think this war on terrorism is a good thing. Nobody wants to be terrified, after all. And the horrors inflicted on innocents in New York and Washington on Sept. 11 surely require some response that would ensure that no similar attacks will follow. Moreover, the war seems to be going well: the Taliban are on the run and it appears that arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden is on the verge of being taken.

But if the U.S. government is to oppose terrorism in the long run, one would think that an important early step would be for its officials to publicly renounce the use of terror by the United States as an instrument of foreign policy. Such a gesture would have the immediate benefit of drawing a clear moral line distinguishing the actions of the 9-11 perpetrators from those of the American government in rounding up the evil-doers.

As simple and obvious a suggestion as this might at first seem, it in fact raises a number of thorny issues.

What is terrorism?

Before terrorism can be renounced it must first be defined. My dictionary  suggests that it is “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” However, this is neither a legal nor a universally accepted meaning for the term. Indeed, no international standard definition exists. As recently as Oct. 2, during debate at a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, nations including Saudi Arabia, Britain, Algeria, the Netherlands, Mongolia, and Burkina Faso joined Secretary General Kofi Annan in calling for a clear, consistent international definition. Thus far, one has not emerged to which all can agree.

In the U.S., terrorism is defined by the Code of Federal Regulations as “... the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85) According to the U.S. State Department, terrorism is “Pre-meditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant* targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” (If we follow the asterisk, we find that the word “noncombatants” includes both civilians and military personnel who are unarmed or off duty.)

The term terrorism was first used in 1795 to refer to Robespierre’s famous “reign of terror” in post-revolutionary France. Thus the word originally meant actions undertaken by the state to terrorize its own citizenry. Ironically, that meaning is carefully exempted from the current State Department definition quoted at left, as only “subnational groups” or “clandestine agents” are capable of committing terrorism.

This deliberate exclusion of government violence from the official definition of terrorism seems peculiar, especially in light of the word’s origin, until we examine the record of America’s own use of violence as a means of coercion.

The U.S. and terrorism

By the State Department definition, the U.S. has clearly been guilty of “sponsoring” terrorism on a number of occasions. Its support of the Contras — who used mass murder, torture, and kidnappings in their attempts to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua during the 1980s — is one instance; others include CIA support of Jonas Savimbi’s ruthless UNITA faction in Angola from 1975-1990, and of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Each of these subnational groups committed acts undeniably classifiable as terrorism, and did so with financing and arms supplied by the U.S. government.

If a broader definition of the term were to be adopted — one that included violence perpetrated directly by governments upon noncombatant civilians during peacetime — then many more instances of U.S. “terrorism” could be cited.

If we include the “terrorist” actions of U.S.-supported states, we confront another long list. Recall the Shah of Iran, installed and supported by the U.S., whose Savak secret police routinely killed and tortured political dissidents; and Indonesian President Suharto, whose brutal military invasion and occupation of East Timor ultimately led to the deaths of between a quarter and a third of that nation’s people. Also, let us not forget the CIA role in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Allende government in Chile in 1973, and subsequent U.S. support for the dictator General Pinochet. Of current interest is America’s ongoing economic and military support for Israel, despite its use of assassination and torture as standard tools in its military occupation of Palestinian territories. A complete tally would have to mention American complicity in “terrorist” actions by the governments of South Vietnam, Guatemala, Zaire, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Laos and Haiti, among others.

To the extent that the U.S. justifies these past and ongoing actions, its current “war on terrorism” is meaningless in the minds of large numbers of people throughout the world. However, when the question comes up domestically (as it seldom does, given the American media’s hesitancy about discussing potentially embarrassing matters like these), officials typically justify violence against noncombatant civilians as a necessary tool of statecraft. One still-chilling example was a statement by Madeleine Albright, recently the U.S. Secretary of State, during a May 1996 interview for the TV program Sixty Minutes. Inquiring about the human consequences of U.S.-UN economic sanctions on Iraq, interviewer Leslie Stahl noted that, according to independent reports, the preventable deaths of a half-million children are attributable directly to U.S. actions. “Is the price worth it?”, asked Stahl. Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but, the price, we think the price is worth it.” Not only officials, but media commentators — from across most of the political spectrum — offer such justifications. In his 1992 book Deterring Democracy , Noam Chomsky devoted several pages to a discussion of media apologetics for state terror; noting that, “It is superfluous to invoke the thoughts of Jeane Kirkpatrick, George Will, and the like.” Chomsky focused on political commentator Michael Kinsley, represents ‘the left’ in mainstream commentary.” Chomsky wrote:

When the State Department publicly confirmed U.S. support for terrorist attacks on agricultural cooperatives in Nicaragua, Kinsley wrote that we should not be too quick to condemn this official policy. Such international terrorist operations doubtless cause “vast civilian suffering,” he conceded. But if they manage “to undermine morale and confidence in the government,” then they are “perfectly legitimate.” The policy is “sensible” if “cost-benefit analysis” shows that “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in” yields “democracy.”

The goals of U.S. foreign policy

The assumption that appears to lie at the heart of the American attitude toward the use of deadly force in statecraft is that we live in a violent and dangerous world; and given that fact, horrible acts are sometimes needed for the accomplishment of noble ends.

This is an assumption worth examining. Few would claim that we do not live in a violent and dangerous world; but can further violence, even on the part of noble and enlightened governments, succeed in making the world more peaceful and less dangerous? The advocates of state violence as a means of fostering democracy point to the examples of the American and French revolutions, and events in Germany, Japan, and Italy in the 1940s. In these instances, war was indeed followed (at least temporarily) by the formation of democratic governments. Malaya and Bangladesh offer other possible examples. However, a good argument can be made that these are exceptions to the general trend of recent history.

During the past century, the majority of democratic reforms around the world was won through the exercise of nonviolent direct action. This was true both within existing democracies (such as the U.S., in which the civil-rights movement put an end to many kinds of legal discrimination against minorities) and within brutal dictatorships (as in Poland, where the Solidarity movement defeated the well-armed, repressive communist regime without firing a shot). Throughout the twentieth century, nonviolent movements arose by the hundreds throughout Central and South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, resulting in the collapse of communism and the end of formal European colonialism. Most successful independence movements — from Kwame Nkrumah’s campaign for the independence of Ghana, to Kenneth Kaunda’s leadership of the Zambian movement for self-rule — have relied on nonviolent methods. Even in the case of the ANC’s struggle against apartheid in South Africa, success came after a strategic shift from violent to nonviolent tactics in the early 1980s. In very few cases have independence or pro-democracy movements adopted nonviolence because those movements’ leaders were pacifists. In virtually every instance, leaders settled on nonviolent tactics (strikes, pickets, boycotts, marches, and civil disobedience) because such tactics proved more effective than violence.

Against this backdrop, the American government’s repeated attempts to replay World War II (i.e., seeking peace and democracy through bombing) appears unimaginative at best and cynically misleading at worst. After all, of the nineteen nations the U.S. has bombed since 1945, not one adopted a democratically elected government, respectful of human rights, as a direct result.

Repeatedly, the American people are told that their nation’s current target is a leader who is the equivalent of Hitler, and that this villain du jour can only be gotten rid of through massive use of force. This despite the fact that even the Shah of Iran, whose regime was one of the most despotic and most militarily intimidating of the century, was overthrown nonviolently.

Since the U.S. continues to use violence to achieve its ostensible political ends (peace, freedom, justice, and democracy), two conclusions are possible; either the news hasn’t reached America’s leaders that nonviolent action undertaken primarily by oppressed populations themselves is the most effective means of achieving these goals, or the stated U.S. goals are not the real ones.

If the actual goal of U.S. action were not peace and freedom but control of global resources, then a frequent resort to violent means would be more understandable.

While it is easy to see how nonviolent means can be successful in rallying the support of vast numbers of people to a popular cause like independence or economic justice, it is not so easy to envision how truly peaceful methods could be employed by one nation to gain control of another nation’s resources.

Given that U.S. officials are well-educated and intelligent people (or employ well-educated and intelligent people) who are unlikely to be ignorant of the historical trends, observers throughout the world can perhaps be forgiven for concluding that the second option is the correct one.

However, for the most part, the American people have not reached the same conclusion. This is no doubt partly because they wish to believe that their country has admirable motives, but also because their government and news media tend to obscure the results of American foreign policy. Within the past 15 to 20 years, according to a survey published by the Los Angeles Times, American newspapers and television networks have reduced foreign coverage by 70 to 80 percent in response to corporate advertisers’ economic priorities.

All of this leads to two long-term trends that have become more obvious since September 11.

First: If the goal of U.S. foreign policy is to gain and maintain control by American-based corporations of global resources (e.g., oil), such efforts would seem likely to engender resistance that might take violent forms. The U.S. might even find itself acting in opposition to local nonviolent pro-democracy movements. Second: If Americans are being misinformed about U.S. foreign policy, this prevents them from understanding why people elsewhere resent them.

From the perspective of many people in the less-consuming countries, the U.S. is the world’s bully, insisting on getting its way through propaganda, bribes, and skewed elections; and if those measures don’t work, through bombs and bullets.

Thus the “war on terrorism” represents a widening schism between worldviews.

It is probably unrealistic to think that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban could have been neutralized solely by U.S. support of nonviolent action on the part of the Afghani people.

Some sort of international police action was necessary. But those calls were scarcely heard in the U.S., where Mr. Bush’s immediate demand for war went virtually unchallenged. Equally silenced have been calls for nonviolent reforms that would reduce or erase motivations for terrorism — i.e., the removal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia; the ending of military support for Israel; forgiveness of debts owed by less-consuming nations to the World Bank, IMF, or international investment banks; etc.

It is as though Americans are wearing blinders. For them, Afghani civilian casualties are largely unknown (See news brief on Page 7). Americans are likewise uninterested in the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan as a result of the war’s interruption of relief efforts. According to UN estimates, up to seven million Afghans face starvation.

None of this is to deny the dedication and bravery of Americans who earnestly serve their country in various ways — the firefighters and rescue workers in New York, and even the enlisted troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

Slipping toward fascism

It would be nice to think that all one need do in order to change U.S. foreign policy is politely to point out inconsistencies between stated goals and real actions. The chilling truth may be that, in the U.S., democracy is for all practical purposes a mere catchword, and that the American government has been quietly commandeered by parties who have no interest whatever in freedom, peace, or justice. This is hardly news to those who have, for the past few decades, been following the growing influence of corporations on elected officials. However, corporations are not the only ones pulling the strings. The national security apparatus, consisting of the war department and several super-secret agencies able to act well outside the scrutiny of elected officials, appears to have been guiding U.S. policy in a consistent and identifiable direction at least since World War II.

A clue to the nature of that plan is the anti-terrorism legislation, approved with little debate or media discussion (See “Defending the Constitution,” P. 7). This legislation includes proposals that the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA seem to have been quietly assembling for years.

Human rights lawyer Michael Ratner, in his essay “Fortress America: Will It Make Us Safer?,” www.humanrightsnow.com, warns that “The new legislation is filled with many other expansions of investigative and prosecutorial power, including wider use of undercover agents to infiltrate organizations, longer jail sentences and lifetime supervision for some who have served their sentences, more crimes that can receive the death penalty and longer statutes of limitations for prosecuting crimes. Another provision of the new bill makes it a crime for a person to fail to notify the FBI if he or she has “reasonable grounds to believe” that someone is about to commit a terrorist offense. The language of this provision is so vague that anyone, however innocent, with any connection to anyone suspected of being a terrorist can be prosecuted.

One of the most troubling aspects of the USA Patriot Act, is that it, according to Ratner, “creates a number of new crimes. One of the most threatening to dissent is the crime of “domestic terrorism.” It is loosely defined as acts that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law and “appear to be intended” to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” Under this definition, a protest demonstration that blocked a street and prevented an ambulance from getting by could be deemed domestic terrorism.

Likewise, the demonstrations in Seattle against the WTO could fit within the definition. As bad as the USA Patriot Act is, it is easily matched in its insidiousness by two recent executive orders — one enabling eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations in cases where terrorism might be involved; the other authorizing the use of both secret military courts to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts, and of secret, summary executions. And if Americans are still feeling insecure after reading about these new developments, they can take comfort in Bush’s creation of the Office of Homeland Security, a cabinet-level agency headed by Tom Ridge, the execution-friendly former governor of Pennsylvania.

All of these chilling developments have occurred in the context of an extraordinary spate of press self-censorship.

.Virtually overnight, public tolerance for any criticism of President Bush, not to mention discussion of America’s role in the post-Vietnam world,  seemed to vanish.

Seen in isolation, these developments might appear merely to be momentary responses to a single, unexpected, horrific assualt upon the nation. From another perspective, it is difficult to avoid seeing legislation, executive orders and corporate press self-censorship as aspects of a larger plan whose goal can be summarized in a single word: fascism.

Historians typically define fascism by the characteristics it assumed in Italy, Germany, and Spain during the second, third, and fourth decades of the 20th century: authoritarian capitalism, superpatriotism, militarism, state secrecy, xenophobia, scapegoating, totalitarian suppression of dissent, and dictatorship. Of these, only the last has not yet appeared on the American scene — though, as Bertram Gross argued in his 1980 book Friendly Fascism, it may be possible for a nation to become fascistic while maintaining formal elections.

We live in a time when ruling elites, foreseeing a peak in global petroleum production, together with a consequent economic crash and resource wars, must be developing various strategies for controlling an unwieldy populace. All evidence suggests that the wealthy and powerful will go to any lengths to survive and prosper — even as the rest of humanity suffers and starves — by financing an awesome military machine to put down uprisings.

The alternative to this grim prospect would be a transparent, cooperative, international plan to conserve and share existing fuel stocks while making the transition to a post-petroleum regime as painlessly as possible. Between the two paths lies all the difference in the world.

  A longer version of this article is available at www.museletter.com.

U.S. bombing
targets since
World War II
The following is a roster of the countries that the U.S. has bombed from the end of World War II through 1999, either openly or in covert operations, as compiled by historian William Blum:

China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999