a Crumbling Society...And the Big Kahuna..
Patterns of Intervention
excerpted from the book
Intervention and Revolution
The United States in the Third World
by Richard J. Barnet
World Publishing,
1968, paperback edition
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Insurgency_Revolution/Intervention_Revolution.htmlThe United States has become increasingly outspoken in claiming the unilateral right to make the determination whether a conflict anywhere in the world constitutes a threat to its national security or international order and what should be done about it. Only those states "with enough will and enough resources to see to it that others do not violate" the rules of international law, Secretary of State Rusk has declared, are the ones to be entrusted with enforcing the peace. When he was under secretary of state, George Ball suggested that such responsibility '`may in today's world be possible . . . only for nations such as the United States which command resources on a scale adequate to the requirements of leadership in the twentieth century.''
In other words, power is the basis of legitimacy. Conceding that the "world community" has not granted the United States the warrant to police the world in any legal sense-the United Nations Charter gives the Security Council the primary responsibility for dealing with threats to the peace-those in charge of United States national-security policy nonetheless assert that because of the deep divisions in the United Nations, which render that organization immobile, the United States must act alone. John Foster Dulles recognized that "most of the countries of the world" did not share his ideological view of international politics-"the view that communist control of any government anywhere is in itself a danger and a threat." Pointing out that it was not difficult "to marshal world opinion against aggression," he noted in the midst of the 1954 Indochina crisis that "it is quite another matter to fight against internal changes in one country. If we take a position against a communist faction within a foreign country we have to act alone."
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It Never HappenedBy Harold Pinter
Z magazine, February
1997http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/Never_happened.htmlSometimes you look back in recent history and you ask: Did all that really happen? Were half a million "Communists" massacred in Indonesia in 1965? Were 200,000 people killed in East Timor in 1975 by Indonesian invaders? Have 300,000 people died in Central America since 1960? Has the persecution of the Kurdish people in Turkey reached levels approaching genocide? Are countless Iraqi children dying every month for lack of food and medicine brought about by UN sanctions? Did the military coups in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile result in levels of repression and depth of suffering comparable to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Khmer Rouge? Has the U.S. to one degree or another inspired, engendered, subsidized, and sustained all these states of affairs? The answer is yes. It has and it does. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest . The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them. No body ever has . Of course, it' s probably more than a newspaper or TV channel's life is worth to do so. It must be said, that as the absolute necessity of economic control is at the bottom of all this, any innocent bystander who happens to raise his / her head must be kicked in the teeth. This is entirely logical---------
Lastly, an elegy. Curtains are drawn, lights go out. It never happened. In 1979 the Sandinistas triumphed in a remarkable popular revolution against the Somoza dictatorship. They went on to address their poverty stricken country with unprecedented vigor and sense of purpose. They introduced a literacy campaign and health provisions for all citizens which were unheard of in the region, if not throughout the whole continent. The Sandinistas had plenty of faults but they were thoughtful, intelligent, decent, and without malice. They created an active, spontaneous, pluralistic society. The U.S. destroyed, through all means at its disposal and at the cost of 30,000 dead, the whole damn thing. And they're proud of it.
The general thrust these days is: "Oh, come on, it's all in the past, nobody's interested any more, it didn't work, everyone knows what the Americans are like, but stop being naive, this is the world, there's nothing to be done about it and anyway fuck it, who cares?" But let me put it this way-the dead are still looking at us, waiting for us to acknowledge our part in their murder.
The Mega-Pentagon: A Bush-Enabled Monster We Can't Stop
The Pentagon has developed a taste for unrivaled power and unequaled access to the treasury that won't be easily undone by future administrations.
by Frida Berrigan, Tomdispatch.com
www.alternet.org/, May 28, 2008
The Pentagon's "footprint" was to be firmly planted, military base by military base, across the planet, with a special emphasis on its energy heartlands. Top administration officials began preparing the Pentagon to go anywhere and do anything, while rewriting, shredding, or ignoring whatever laws, national or international, stood in the way. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld officially articulated a new U.S. military posture that, in conception, was little short of revolutionary. It was called -- in classic Pentagon shorthand -- the 1-4-2-1 Defense Strategy (replacing the Clinton administration's already none-too-modest plan to be prepared to fight two major wars -- in the Middle East and Northeast Asia -- simultaneously).
Theoretically, this strategy meant that the Pentagon was to prepare to defend the United States, while building forces capable of deterring aggression and coercion in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East). It would be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously and "win decisively" in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing." Hence 1-4-2-1.
And that was just going to be the beginning. We had, by then, already entered the new age of the Mega-Pentagon. Almost six years later, the scale of that institution's expansion has yet to be fully grasped, so let's look at just seven of the major ways in which the Pentagon has experienced mission creep -- and leap -- dwarfing other institutions of government in the process.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Military_Budget/Mega_Pentagon.htmlttp://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/intervention/generalindex.htm
US Empire Will Survive Bush
By Arno J Mayer
Le Monde diplomatique
October 2008
The United States may emerge from the Iraq fiasco almost unscathed. Though momentarily disconcerted, the American empire will continue on its way, under bipartisan direction and mega-corporate pressure, and with evangelical blessings. It is a defining characteristic of mature imperial states that they can afford costly blunders, paid for not by the elites but the lower orders. Predictions of the American empire's imminent decline are exaggerated: without a real military rival, it will continue for some time as the world's sole hyperpower.
But though they endure, overextended empires suffer injuries to their power and prestige. In such moments they tend to lash out, to avoid being taken for paper tigers. Given Washington's predicament in Iraq, will the US escalate its intervention in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia or Venezuela? The US has the strongest army the world has ever known. Preponderant on sea, in the air and in space (including cyberspace), the US has an awesome capacity to project its power over enormous distances with speed, a self-appointed sheriff rushing to master or exploit real and putative crises anywhere on earth. In the words of the former secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld: "No corner of the world is remote enough, no mountain high enough, no cave or bunker deep enough, no SUV fast enough to protect our enemies from our reach."
The US spends more than 20% of its annual budget on defence, nearly half of the spending of the rest of the world put together. It's good for the big US corporate arms manufacturers and their export sales. The Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, purchase billions of dollars of state-of-the-art ordnance. Eyes and ears of a borderless empire
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