In his 2006 book Overthrow, the former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer tries to get to the bottom of what has motivated the US politicians who have ordered and orchestrated foreign coups d'etat over the past century. Studying US involvement in regime change operations from Hawaii in 1893 to Iraq in 2003, he observes that there is often a clear three-stage process that takes place. First, a US-based multinational corporation faces some kind of threat to its bottom line by the actions of a foreign government demanding that the company "pay taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell off some of its land or assets," Kinzer says. Second, US politicians hear of this corporate setback and reinterpret it as an attack on the United States: "They transform the motivation from an economic one into a political or geo-strategic one. They make the assumption that any regime that would bother an American company or harass an American company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and probably the tool of some foreign power or interest that wants to undermine the United States." The third stage happens when the politicians have to sell the need for intervention to the public, at which point it becomes a broadly drawn struggle of good versus evil, "a chance to free a poor oppressed nation from the brutality of a regime we assume is a dictatorship, because what other kind of regime would be bothering an American company?" Much of US foreign policy, in other words, is an excercise in mass projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.
Kinzer points out that this tendency has been especially pronounced in politicians who move directly from the corporate world into public office. For instance, Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, worked as a high-powered international corporate lawyer for most of his life, representing some of the richest firms in the world in their conflicts with foreign governments. Dulle's various biographers have concluded, like Kinzer, that the secretary of state was simply incapable of distinguishing between the interest of corporations and the interests of his country. "Dulles had two lifelong obsessions:fighting Communism and protecting the rights of multi-national corporations," writes Kinzer. "In his mind they were...'interrelated and mutually enforcing.'" That meant he didn't need to choose between his obsessions: if the Guatemalan government took an action that hurt the interests of the Untied Fruit Company, for instance, that was a de facto attack on America and worthy of a military response.
As it pursues its twin obsessions of fighting terrorism and protecting the interests of multi-national corporations, the Bush administration, packed with CEOs fresh from the boardroom, is subject to the same confusions and conflations. But there is a significant difference. The companies with which Dulles identified were multi-nationals with large international investments in foreign countries-in mining, agriculture, banking and oil. these companies generally shared a straightforward objective: they wanted stable, profitable environments in which they could do business-loose investments laws, pliant workers and no nasty expropriation sursprises. Coups and military interventions were a means to that end, not the goal itself.
As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecessors, one for whom wars and other diasters are indeed the ends in themselves. When Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld conflate what is good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and Gilead with what is good for the United States and indeed the world, its a form of projection with uniquely dangerous consequences. That's because what is unquestionably good for the bottom line of these companies is cataclysm-wars, epidemics, natural diasters and resource shortages-which is why all their fortunes have improved dramatically since Bush took office. What makes their acts of projection even more perilous is the fact that to an unprecedent degree, key Bush officials have maintained their interest in the diaster capitalism complex even as they have ushered in a new era of privatized war and diaster response, allowing them to simultaneously profit form the diasters they help unleash.
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