Londons Falling

US in Latin America: Then and Now

Rating: 5/5
Comments:
The Roman (see Chalmers Johnson below) and British empires are usually brought to presence as setting the pattern for both Bush regimes' hostile and antagonistic foreign policy. However, America's imperial project and modus operandi was really formulated shaped, according to Greg Grandin in Empire's Workshop, much nearer to our shores. In an examination of what should be obvious but has become an undiscussed history, Empire's Workshop shows how Latin America has become the testing ground for American foreign policy, containment strategies and imperial projects abroad - culminating in what Grandin calls, the "global war on terror" (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 8-9). During the time of Grandin's research and writing, much of the Americas - both Central and South - were engaged in open revolt against U.S. hegemony (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 57, 64, 96, 123, 140, and 213). On this premise, Grandin inquires: If the Washington Consensus failed to bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to the America, its own "Empire Workshop," how can it be trusted to be the beacon for the world?

Grandin articulates the United States' imperial project from Jefferson's ambition for an "empire of liberty" in Cuba and Spanish Florida to Ronald Reagan's support Central American dictatorships and banana republics friendly to American economic interests (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 2-3, 15-16, 198, 210, and 221). Grandin looks at the genesis of George Herbert Walker Bush's current policies back to Latin America (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 156, 190-193, 217, and 227). According to Grandin - much like William Appleman Williams - argues that several of the administration's leading minds first used their current techniques and deployed their extensive arsenal to advance free market economics (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 8, 36, and 38). This same core group also enlisted the aid, much nostalgic for a sense of "Sentimental Imperialism," the evangelical movement to promote their agenda (Grandin, Empire's Workshop 81-82, 128, and 177).

An Ambitious but Sloppy Polemic That Misleads More Than Enlightens

Rating: 2/5
Comments:
This book is ambitious, attempting to periodize the history of US foreign policy from the 1930s through the administration of George W. Bush. The main argument of the book is that the Reagan foreign policy in Central America presaged much of the interventionism of George W. Bush in his middle eastern wars. The comparison is more one of ideological flavorings of both regimes rather than their concrete strategic concerns.

Yet, the book spends a very long time on other administrations--perhaps in an attempt to place the two main administrations in context. The problem is that the dimes that the author turns on as divisions between one period and the next are very very unconvincing, and --especially in the treatment of JFK-- almost barbarically one sided. The author will protest that the Kennedy administration is not the main focus of his work, to which I would respond, look at how much of the
book is devoted to contextless JFK bashing. It is almost as much as Reagan and Bush, and the absurd thing is that JFK is compared to Reagan with just one word: idealism. We are told that both Reagan and JFK changed from FDR's more reserved level of interventionism to the almost fanatic interventionism of JFK and Reagan and Bush. Just that one word, "idealism", and little other detail of the JFK administration is given. Furthermore there is very little attention given to the nature of W. Bush's "idealism" in his quest to spread "democracy" to the middle east. Was this idealism ever anything other than a PR strategy? Also what about the opposition party and the permanent military and intelligence bureaucracies? Does the president really have that much power to leave a personal imprint anymore? The author would be well served to read the excellent Perils of Dominance by Gareth Porter which argues that the permanent unelected bureaucracies really were ultimate variable in determining the Vietnam War and that JFK was actively subverted by this unelected and permanent force.Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam

Now I know where all "good leftists" are going here. Only naive liberals would try to defend Camelot etc etc. It has become almost an identity requirement of the American McLeft to bash Kennedy more than any other president, and it is getting more and more curious why that is the case. Sure the author will jump to the death squads of Salvador and Guatemala. I am no liberal and I to have read the classic texts on the early 1960s origins of these murderous US created organizations for state terror. The factor that the author repeatedly ignores, however, is the incredible growing institutional pressure on JFK from the very far right as embodied on the First Strike dreaming JCS and CIA. The author ignores how these volk wanted immediate interventions in Laos and how Kennedy prevented it. The author ignores how Kennedy prevented a land invasion of Cuba that would have very likely lead to World War III. The author ignores how JFK was making a real back channel diplomatic initative to Castro in favor of the trimmed down Langley version of events that is as bad as that of Seymour Hersh and his Richard Helms mouthpiece Sam Halpern. The author also ignores JFK's very concrete overtures to Moscow that were very close to the "threat of detente" -- at least thats how the CIA perceived it-- ten years before Nixon's far more machiavellian detente. Yes Kennedy deserves SOME blame for the centralization of Security forces that became the death squads. Yet he never would have tolerated the dictators who later commanded these ORDENs. Indeed, the author fails to mention that JFK is the only president since WWII that actively refused to recognize a right wing coup in Latin America. Remember Peru in 1962! Yes the decision was reversed, but how does that compare to LBJs record with the fanatical interventionist Thomas Mann in Latin America. Oh stay away from that one! No dont! The best book to show how how far right LBJ was in comparison to the yes PROGRESSIVE BY COMPARISON JFK is the truly amazing text: They Will Be Done: Nelson Rockefeller, Evangelism, and the Conquest of the Amazon in the Age of Oil by Colby and Dennett. Even that title fails to capture the amazing ambition detail and scope of this opus!! Must reading!!Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil

This neglect of deeper structural bureaucratic and economic determinants of foreign policy cause the author to concentrate on the various administrations rhetorical flourishes far more than he should. There are some worthy contrasts in the book but overall he gives some presidents a free ride (think LBJ the real right turn in US foreign policy) and compares presidents that have nothing in common because he so frequently fails to transcend the various PR strategies of the administrations he compares.

There is almost no mention of the CIA in this book. Such was not always the case with the US left. I cannot help but think that this gelding has much to do with its current political irrelevance in the florid cages of pricey academia.

Pretty sound analysis

Rating: 5/5
Comments:
This book describes what the author regards as the roots of the Republican imperialist ideology that came to the forefront after 9/11. Those roots were nurtured by the American campaign of aggression and state terror in Central America in the 1980's. The author makes use of scholarly secondary sources and primary sources, including congressional reports. Dr. Grandin finds many similarities between American involvement in Central America in the 80's and the US war on Iraq this decade.

Grandin points out that with the Kennedy administration's commencement of the so-called Alliance for Progress, the US concentrated on training the internal security forces of Latin American countries. In 1962, Grandin notes, US General William Yarborough privately advised the Colombian military to, in Yarborough's words, form irregular units to "execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." I think Grandin should have explained here that "known communist proponents" encompassed not simply Communist Party members and sympathizers but peasants expressing grievances against landowners, union leaders, journalists or anybody else who spoke for an amelioration of the extreme mal-distribution of political and economic power in Latin America. In countries like Guatemala, the death squads that Yarborough referred to began attempting to kidnap, torture, and "disappear" any political activist to the right of Barry Goldwater. Death squads organized by military units trained and equipped by the US were behind the "mysterious" killings of political activists in Guatemala in the late 1960's, according to US embassy cables quoted by Grandin.

US support for Central American death squads reached its apex in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan under cover of a crusade for anti-communism and democratic reform. Jimmy Carter had banned US aid to the Guatemalan military but, according to Grandin, aid actually continued to flow under Carter to the military through, among other sources, arms deals and training contracts agreed to before Carter's ban came into effect. The Reaganites eventually succeeded in completely eliminating restrictions on military aid to Guatemala. Between late 1981 and early 1983 the Guatemalan military roamed the countryside, raped, pillaged, burned villages and killed about 100,000 people. The Guatemalan dictator through most of this genocidal burst was General Efrain Rios Montt, a born again Protestant who had very friendly relations with Pat Robertson and other American evangelical Christian leaders. Reagan met with Rios Montt in late 1982 and declared that the general was totally committed to human rights and that criticisms of him were unfair. In December 1981, at least 750 men, women and children were stabbed and shot at the El Salvadoran village of El Mozote by the US trained Altacatl battalion. Raymond Bonner of the New York Times reported on the massacre and was subjected to a vilification campaign by the Reagan administration and right wing media outlets and, under such pressure, the Times reassigned him out of Latin America. Of course the mass graves at El Mozote were opened a decade later, an event which confirmed that the massacre had indeed happened. In Guatemala and El Salvador, the military and death squads conducted regular extrajudicial executions, tearing off people's arms and legs, mutilating genitalia, tearing off women's' breasts, etc. Roberto D'aubisson, the Salvadoran death squad leader who engineered the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, received an award in 1984 from the organizations of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other so-called pro-life groups. The eventual "pacification" of El Salvador was brought about, according to a RAND corporation report for the Pentagon in 1991 quoted by Grandin, not because of the bogus "reform" measures the Reagan administration supported for PR purposes but the murder of tens of thousands of people. The situation was hardly different in Nicaragua where the "freedom fighter" Contras behaved exactly like a death squad. Grandin notes how the creation of the Contras was formulated by an American lumber baron in Nicaragua and Jesse Helms's aid John Carbaugh in 1980. Carbaugh and the lumberman secured the services of military trainers from the neo-Nazi military dictatorship in Argentina which was at the tail end of its campaign of killing 30,000 of its citizens. The remnants of the Somoza National Guard were formed into the contras by the Argentines and the Americans took full control of the operation in 1982-83 after the military dictatorship collapsed. In Honduras, military units like the American trained Battalion 316 conducted torture and hundreds of murders and John Negroponte covered up their crimes while he was US ambassador to Honduras.

Support amongst the American public for Central American intervention was rather lukewarm. Grandin uses internal administration records and congressional reports to discuss the Reagan administration's illegal Office of Public Diplomacy.....Meanwhile the FBI conducted surveillance of members of CISPES and burglarized dozens of CISPES offices across the country.....

By the beginning of the 1990's the threat of social reform had abated to where the US could tolerate relatively free democratic elections (Grandin does not discuss the free election held in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas in 1984 or the elections held under conditions of death squad terror in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980's). Nicaraguans voted out the Sandinistas in 1990 after the US threatened to continue funding the terrorist contras if they did not do so. After the 1980's, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala were nominally democratic. But since the 80's gang violence, extreme poverty, malnutrition, disease, corruption, etc. have greatly increased in those societies, as the US successfully imposed un-regulated free markets on them and they reeled from the effects of the US's death squad wars of the 80's.

Grandin discusses the model of un-regulated free market capitalism (neoliberalism) that the US Treasury and IMF have forced on Latin America (and the rest of the third world). Chile under Pinochet's dictatorship was the laboratory for this and is usually pointed to as a marvelous free market success story, though the facts are a bit different, as Grandin shows. As advised by Milton Friedman, Pinochet privatized state industries, slashed public spending, de-regulated capital movement and the banking industry, slashed taxes, eliminated tariffs, allowed 100 percent repatriation of profits for foreign corporations, etc. But in the early 80's, under the weight of reckless piling up of debt and speculation, the Chilean economy collapsed into a serious economic depression. Free Market ideologues turned their eyes away as their hero Pinochet was forced to nationalize most of Chile's banks and much of its private sector in order to prevent Chile from being totally destroyed. Since 1990, Chile has maintained a relatively low poverty level compared to the rest of Latin America, with tax increases on its wealthy to pay for social programs and strict regulation of capital flows in and out of the country. One might also add, though Grandin does not mention it, that Chile's leading export, copper, is dominated by a government run company. Grandin surveys some of the other disasters of unregulated free market capitalism. Argentina collapsed into near anarchy in 2001 after spending much of the 1990's touted as an "economic miracle." Free market reforms in Bolivia in the mid-80's ravaged Bolivia's domestic economy and drove many poor Bolivians into the coca growing business, making drug exports a leading pillar of Bolivia's economy and laundered drug money propping up its de-regulated banking system. Now this free market model has been imposed by the US on Iraq........