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"Man wants to forget the bad stuff and believe in the made-up good stuff. Its easier that way."
--Rashomon, Kurosawa
"He (Reagan) may have forgotten us.
But we have not forgotten him."
-- Angolan refugee and landmine victim"Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force....Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; acts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved. Indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside.... So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive...."
Following last week's prolonged national memorial to President Reagan, the most elaborate in US history, most Americans have turned their attention back to the troubled present. But we cannot resist continuing down the revisionist path that we started to clear in Part One of this series.
Contrary to Henry Ford, history is not "bunk," nor is it "just one damn thing after another." In fact, it is one of our most valuable possessions. But unless we take the time to learn from it, it can easily come back to haunt us -- as it is doing right now. At the very least this exercise will prepare us to evaluate President Clinton's new autobiography, which is due out next week.
As noted in Part One, most recent discussions of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy legacy have focused almost entirely on the Cold War. Even there, as we argued, his legacy is decidedly mixed. While he may have helped to pressure the Soviets to reform, he also took incredible risks with the balance of nuclear forces, including some risks that we are still living with to this day.
When we turn from superpower relations to Reagan's impact on developing countries, the legacy is even starker. In The Blood Bankers, we've detailed how the Reagan Administration's lax policies toward country lending and bank regulation exacerbated the 1982-83 Third World debt crisis. And then the administration did very little to help developing countries fundamentally restructure their debt burdens and recover. By the end of the 1980s, most country debt burdens were higher than ever.
Here we will focus on another long-term legacy of Reagan's relations with the developing world -- the consequences of his support for a plethora of reactionary dictatorships and contra armies all over the globe.
Most Americans are probably not aware of it, but this bloody-minded policy fostered several nasty wars in developing countries that have cost literally millions of lives -- and are still producing fatalities every day, by way of wounds, continuing conflicts, unexploded ordnance, and landmines.
Furthermore, as described below, the Reagan Administration was also responsible for several of the clearest examples in history of state-sponsored terrorism.
Unfortunately, it turns out that very little of this was really necessary, either from the standpoint of defeating the Soviets, pushing the world toward democracy and free markets, or enhancing US security.
Indeed, in the long run, Reagan's policies basically destabilized a long list of developing countries and increased their antagonism towards the US. Combined with the policies of "benign neglect," stop-go intervention, and ineffective neoliberal reforms that characterized the Clinton Administration's policies toward developing countries, and the neoconservative policies pursued by both Bushes, it is no accident that America's reputation in the developing world is now at a record low.
Unfortunately, like some of the risks that Reagan's policies introduced into the nuclear balance, these effects may have a very long half-life. Surely they will be with us long after Ronald Reagan has met his Maker. We just hope for the Gipper's sake that his Maker does not read this article before pronouncing judgment upon him.
There is an abundance of examples of the Reagan Administration's strong negative impacts on developing countries. To cite just a few:
In the case of the Philippines, the Reagan Administration was a staunch ally of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos right up to their last helicopter ride to Hawaii in February 1986. Vice President George H.W. Bush visited Manila in March 1981, soon after Reagan was elected, to thank him for his generous support. He toasted Marcos in glowing terms: "We love your adherence to democratic principles and democratic process....." The thousands of political opponents who were tortured, imprisoned, or died fighting this corrupt conjugal dictatorship and the millions of Filipinos who have spent the last twenty-five years servicing the couples' unproductive foreign and domestic debts would probably disagree.
In the case of Iran and Iraq, Reagan helped arm and finance Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s, encouraged the Saudis and Kuwaitis to finance his invasion of Iran when it bogged down, helped to equip him with chemical and biological weapons, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to assure close relations and propose a new pipeline to Saddam to help him export his oil, and even provided a team of 60 Pentagon analysts who sat in Baghdad, using US satellite imagery to target Saddam's chemical weapons against the Iranians.
At the same time, as the Iran-Contra arms scandal later disclosed, Reagan also helped Iran buy spare parts and advanced weapons for use against Iraq. He also looked the other way when Saddam decided to turn his US-supplied Bell Helicopters and French-supplied Mirage jets and chemical weapons on the defenseless Kurds at Halabja. Of course, the fact that the UN, under strong US pressure, did nothing at the time to condemn Saddam for this behavior did not exactly discourage further aggression.
This bipolar policy contributed to prolonging the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, one of the largest and bloodiest land wars since World War II. It cost 500,000 to 1 million lives and 1-2 million wounded, and created more than 2.5 million refugees. It also caused a huge amount of damage to both countries' economies, and left Iraq, in particular, broke and heavily indebted. As we've argued in The Blood Bankers, that destabilization, in turn, contributed significantly to Saddam's 1991 decision to invade Kuwait in 1991 -- and ultimately, our current Iraq fiasco.
In the case of South Africa, the Reagan Administration steadfastly opposed any US or UN sanctions on international trade and investment. Indeed, it continued to work closely with the apartheid regime on many different fronts, including the civil wars in Angola (see below), Namibia, and Mozambique.
It also now appears that both Carter and Reagan turned a blind eye to South Africa's development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, in collaboration with Israel, which purchased its uranium from the Pretoria regime. Fortunately, no thanks to Reagan, Bush I, or for that matter, Bill Clinton, apartheid came to an end in the early 1990s, and South Africa became the first nuclear power ever to dismantle its nuclear weapons.
Rios Montt
In the case of Guatemala, Reagan gave a warm embrace to the brutal dictatorship of General Efrain Rios Montt in the early 1980s. Rios Montt, a graduate of Fort Benning's School for the Americas, was also an ordained "born-again" minister in California-based Gospel Outreach's Guatemala Verbo evangelical church. Evidently that combination endeared him to the Reagan Administration -- US Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders praised him for his "effective counter-insurgency," and President Reagan called him "a man of great personal integrity," "totally dedicated to democracy," someone who Amnesty International had given "a bum rap."
This cleared the way for hundreds of $millions in World Bank loans and US aid that helped to make Rios Montt and his generals rich. Meanwhile, the junta implemented a genocide that a UN-backed Truth Commission later found was responsible for the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalan peasants, mainly Mayan Indians.
General Galtieri
In the case of Argentina, Reagan turned a blind eye to the "dirty war" waged by the military junta against its opponents, at a cost of 30,000 lives and many more destroyed families.
When this junta launched the April 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands to deflect public attention from its political and economic woes, Reagan and Secretary of State Al Haig ultimately decided to side with the UK's Margaret Thatcher, a fellow neoconservative. However, key Reagan aids Jeane Kirkpatrick and Michael Deaver worked behind the scenes to support the fascist junta, encouraging it to believe that the US might stay neutral. The very evening that the invasion was launched, Kirkpatrick was the guest of honor at an elaborate Washington D.C. banquet that was sponsored by the junta.
In the case of Panama, Reagan's CIA subsidized and promoted the rise of General Manual Noriega, another graduate of the notorious US School of the Americas. The US made extensive use of Noriega's intelligence gathering capabilities during the contra war with Nicaragua (see below).
This encouraged Noriega to believe that he could get away with anything. For a while he did: in the early 1980s, he became one of the most important cocaine wholesalers in the region, shipping a ton of coke per month to Miami on INAIR, a Panama airline that he co-owned, literally under the US Customs' nose. By 1989, even George H.W. Bush was embarrassed, and he had the dictator forcibly removed -- at a cost of the lives of 23 US troops, 314 Panamanian Defense Forces, and several hundred Panamanian civilians.
In the case of tiny Honduras, the poorest country in Central America, the Reagan administration turned another of its many blind eyes to the rise of death squads in the early 1980s. John Negroponte, the former US Ambassador to the UN and our new "proconsul" in Iraq, served as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. As this author knows from first-hand experience, reports of human rights abuses in Honduras were rampant during this period. It is hard to believe that Negroponte, who cultivated close relations with the Honduran military, was simply unaware of all these reports.
One of the key offenders was Battalion 3-16, the CIA-trained and funded Honduran military unit that was responsible for hundreds of disappearances and torture cases, including several that involved Americans.
One US embassy official later reported that in 1982, Negroponte had ordered any mention of such abuses removed from his annual Human Rights reports to Congress. Negroponte has denied any knowledge of this, and has skated through several confirmation hearings to arrive at the very top of the US diplomatic corps, where he will soon be running the world's largest US embassy. 
In the case of El Salvador, the Reagan Administration also sharply increased economic and military support to a brutal oligarchical regime that was also deeply involved in death squads. President Carter had also provided military aid to the regime -- indeed, Archbishop Oscar Romero's condemnation of that aid was one key factor in his assassination in March 1980. After Reagan's November 1980 election, the Salvadoran military felt it had a "green light" to become even more aggressive with its opponents in the Church and unions, as well as the FMLN rebels.
One immediate byproduct of the "green light" was the murder of four US Maryknoll nuns in December 1980. Reagan's first Secretary of State Al Haig, later suggested that the nuns might have been killed in a "crossfire" when they "ran a roadblock. " But their murders were later attributed to five Salvador National Guard members, who, in turn, appear to have acted on orders from senior members of the Salvador military.
A law suit was eventually brought on behalf of the nuns against the commanders to whom these guardsmen ultimately reported -- Jose Guillermo Garcia, El Salvador's Minister of Defense from 1979-1983, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the former head of the National Guard, the Reagan Administration's key allies in the early 1980s, who were now living in Florida.
But in 2000 a jury ruled that even though they had given the orders, they did not have "effective control" over their subordinates, given the instability in the country. However, in July 2002, another jury in West Palm Beach found the duo liable for torture and other human rights abuses against three other victims, and ordered them to pay $54.6 million in damages.
Meanwhile, their many collaborators in the Reagan Administration have of course gotten off scot free. Reagan's insistence on a military solution to the conflict in El Salvador helped to perpetuate the civil war throughout the 1980s, at a cost of more than 75,000 lives.Ultimately, under Bush I and Clinton, the long-delayed negotiated solution was achieved.
As for Archbishop Romero's assassin, he has never been found. There are credible reports, however, that his actual triggerman now lives -- naturally enough -- in Honduras.
In the case of Lebanon, Reagan was responsible for a broken promise to the Palestinians that ultimately contributed to the 1982 massacres at the Sabra/ Shatila refugee camps. To get the PLO to withdraw from Beirut, Reagan promised to protect Palestinian non-combatant refugees in those camps. Indeed, the PLO fighters left on August 24, 1982, and US Marines landed on August 25. But they were withdrawn just three weeks later, on September 10, after the PLO fighters left. Ariel Sharon,Israel's Defense Minister at the time, promptly ordered the Israeli Defense Forces to surround the camps. They refused to let anyone leave, and then permitted his Lebanese allies, the rightist Christian Phalangists, to move in.
The result was the slaughter of at least 900 to 3000 unarmed Palestinians, including many women and children, on September 16-18, 1982. As former Secretary of State George Schultze later commented, "The brutal fact is, we are partially responsible." Israeli's own Kahan Commission later found Sharon "indirectly responsible" for the massacre, but imposed no penalties, other than forcing him to resign as Defense Minister.
In the case of Angola, Reagan, in cooperation with South Africa's apartheid regime and Zaire's dictator Mobutu, helped to sponsor UNITA, Joseph Savimbi's rebel band, against the left-leaning MPLA, which also happened to have far stronger support from the Angolan people. Reagan hailed the power-hungry Savimbi as a "freedom fighter," and enlisted wealthy arch-conservatives like beer merchant Joseph Coors and Rite-Aid owner Lewis E.Lehrman to organize assistance and lobby Congress for millions in aid.
In fact Savimbi turned out to be one of the world's most lethal terrorists. Even after UNITA lost UN-supervised elections in September 1992, he continued the war, financing his operations by trafficking in "blood diamonds."
The resulting guerilla war cost the Angolan people up to 1 million dead, turned a quarter of Angola's 12 million people into refugees, and devastated health and education programs and the domestic economy. It also left an estimated 6 to 20,000,000 land mines scattered all across the country, one of the world's most heavily mined countries, with more than 80,000 amputees as a byproduct. Only with Savimbi was finally killed in May 2002 was the country finally restored to peace.
Savimbi
In the case of Afghanistan, Reagan considerably expanded aid to the Afghan rebels in the early 1980s, providing them more than $1 billion in arms and sophisticated weapons like Stinger missiles to fight the Soviets. The resulting battle ultimately cost the Soviets 15,000 lives. But the price to Afghanistan was much higher -- the Afghan people lost more than 1 million dead and wounded, plus millions of refugees. Furthermore, after the Soviets finally left in the 1989, the country became a stomping ground for opium-dealing warlords, religious fanatics like the Taliban, and al-Qaeda's global terrorists.
Furthermore, we now know that Gorbachev had offered to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in 1987, in exchange for reduced US arm shipments to the rebels. However, he was rebuffed by the Reagan Administration, which wanted to prolong the Soviets' agony. This not only cost a great many more Afghan (and Soviet) lives, but also helped turn Osama Bin Laden from a nobody into a folk hero. All this helped to pave the way to 9/11, the continuing war in Afghanistan, and the even more dangerous global terrorist war.
All told, then, the Reagan Administration clearly has a lot to answer for with respect to the developing world. And this is even apart from one of the most perfidious examples of Reagan's brutilitarian policies, that of Nicaragua -- as the following excerpt from The Blood Bankers makes clear.
NICARAGUA'S COUNTERREVOLUTION
By the end of 1980, with Nicaragua's civil war concluded, General Anastasio Somoza deBayle dead in Paraguay, and the country''s debt settlement with its foreign banks concluded, many Nicaraguans were looking forward to rebuilding their economy and finally achieving a more peaceful society. Alas, it was not to be.
Anastasio Somoza DeBayle
Undoubtedly the Sandinistas deserve some of the blame for the way things turned out, though, as we will see, the odds were clearly stacked against them. As the strongest faction in the winning coalition, and “the boys with the guns,” at first they commanded overwhelming popular support for having rid the country of the world’s oldest family dictatorship outside of Saudi Arabia and Paraguay. However, like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, they were torn between leading a social revolution and building a multi-party democracy.
Their hero, Augusto “Cesar” Sandino, “the general of free men,” had fought the US military and the Nicaraguan army for six years to a standstill, before he was betrayed and murdered by General Anastasio Somoza Garcia in 1934. After a decade of insurgency in the 1970s, the Sandinistas’ most important experiences to prepare them for the job of running the country were limited to armed struggle, clandestine organizing, and some very rough times in Somoza’s jails. Unhappily, one of their most accomplished political leaders, Carlos Fonseca, had been murdered by the National Guard in 1976.
Sandino
On the other hand, as South Africa demonstrates, it is not impossible for committed revolutionaries to lead a fairly peaceful transition to a multi-party democracy. After all, the ANC had waged just as long a struggle against a state that was no less repressive as Somoza’s. Many of the ANC’s supporters were also just as radical as the Sandinistas, and it also sourced most of its weapons and advisors from radical watering holes like the Soviet Union, East Germany and Libya.
However, ironically, South Africa was not as easy for the US to push around as Nicaragua. South Africa accounted for two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s economy and most of the world’s gold, diamonds, platinum, and vanadium. By 1982, with some help from the UK and Israel, it had acquired nuclear weapons. Compared with Nicaragua, South Africa’s economy was actually in pretty good shape when the ANC came to power. While there had been a protracted low-intensity war against apartheid, South Africa managed to avoid the full-blown civil war that Nicaragua was forced to undertake in the 1970s to rid itself of the Somoza dictatorship.
Nicaragua was also objectively a far less strategically important target. To Washington’s national security planners, however, that made it an ideal opportunity for a relatively low-cost “demonstration." Its population was the same as Iowa’s. Its entire economy was smaller than Des Moines’s. It had few distinctive natural resources. Its only “weapons of mass destruction” were volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes. It was surrounded by other countries that were also of modest strategic value – except for whatever symbolic value was associated with repeatedly crushing the aspirations of impoverished peasants into the dirt.
During the late 19th century, Nicaragua had been selected several times over by US Canal Commissions for a canal across Central America, until Teddy Roosevelt finally opted to create Panama and build a canal across it in 1902, for reasons that had more to do with Wall Street than engineering. After that, Nicaragua’s canal plans went nowhere, especially after the US Marines landed in 1910 to collect debts owed to British and US banks and to depose a nationalist leader who, among other things, made the fatal mistake of seeking European funding for an alternative to the Panama canal.
The ANC also had one other weapon that the Sandinistas clearly lacked. This was the extraordinary wisdom and good fortune of 72-year old Nelson Mandela, who had earned everyone’s respect during his 27 years in prison. He had also learned survival skills like patience, diplomacy, and the capacity for making adroit compromises with bitter enemies. Under his influence, the ANC set out to build a mass party. It agreed to hold new elections within two years of his release. It went out of its way to commit itself publicly to multi-party democracy, a market economy, civil liberties, and peaceful reconciliation.
Most of the Sandinistas’ top leaders – the so-called cupola -- were not really interested in building a mass party, much less a multi-party democracy, at least not initially. They saw themselves as a vanguard party, leading the masses toward a social revolution. As Sergio Ramirez, a leading FSLN member who served as Nicaragua’s Vice President under Daniel Ortega from 1984 to 1990, wrote in his 1999 book, Adios Muchachos,
The FSLN was not prepared...to assume its role of party of opposition inside a democratic system, because it had never been designed for this. Its vertical structure was the inspiration of Leninist manuals, of the impositions of the war and of caudillismo, our oldest cultural heritage.
To be fair, the FSLN leadership also believed that the first priority was to attack the country’s dire health, literacy, land ownership, and education problems, and to build “direct democracy” through civic organizations, not through party politics and national elections. Given the country’s emergency and the need to recover from the civil war, this was entirely understandable. But it did provide cheap shots for the FSLN’s opponents and the mainstream US media, which basically wrote Nicaragua off very early as a reprise of Castro’s Cuba.
The Sandinistas were also widely criticized for lacking the soft touch when it came to domestic politics. Among their many ham-handed moves was their May 1980 decision to expand the Council of State to include “mass organizations,” the August 1980 decision to postpone elections until 1984, the rough way they dealt with the Miskito Indians, the 1986 decision to shut down the (by then, CIA-subsidized) La Prensa, and Daniel Ortega’s various high-visibility trips to Havana, Moscow, Libya and Gucci’s eyeglass counter in New York They were also criticized for implementing a compulsory draft, detaining alleged contra sympathizers without trial after the contra war heated up, permitting the FSLN’s National Directorate (Daniel Ortega, Tomas Borge, Victor Tirado, Henry Ruiz, and Bayardo Arce) to remain an unelected (all-male) body until 1991, and seizing a huge amount of property from ex-Somocistas, even middle-class ones, for their own use during the “pinata” period after Ortega lost the 1990 election -- including more than a few beach houses.
At the same time, they were not given much credit for preserving a mixed economy, reforming the health and education systems, pursuing aid from numerous non-Communist countries in Latin America and Europe, implementing a badly-needed land reform, tolerating the virulent La Prensa, which supported the contras and called for their overthrow, until they finally reached the limit and shut it down in 1986, ultimately holding free elections in November 1984 and February 1990, and respecting the outcome of those elections even when, as in 1990 (...and 1996, and 2001..) they lost.
The basic reality is that from at least 1981 on, Nicaragua’s new government was operating in an increasingly hostile international environment, where the Western media and the USG, as well as the Miami-based Somocistas, were predisposed to seize upon the slightest departures from Roberts’ Rules of Orders to consign them to hell – and if no such departures were readily at hand, to invent them out of whole cloth. These hostile attitudes had much less to do with the FSLN’s behavior than with the USG’s new aggressive stance with respect to the Soviet Union – actually dating back at least to President Carter’s initiation of a contra-like war against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan in July 1979.
STATE-FUNDED TERRORISM - REAGAN STYLE
So, despite all the FSLN’s undeniable missteps, it would probably have taken divine intervention to save Nicaragua from the wrath of Ronald Reagan, who decided almost immediately upon taking office to single tiny Nicaragua out for a replay of the Carter/ Brzezinski strategy in Afghanistan.
As former CIA analyst David MacMichael testified at the International Court of the Hague’s hearings on a lawsuit brought by Nicaragua against the US in 1986, from early 1981 on, the US Government set out to create a “proxy army” that would “provoke cross-border attacks by Nicaraguan forces and demonstrate Nicaragua’s aggressive nature,” forcing the Sandinistas to “clamp down on civil liberties.....arresting its opposition, (and) demonstrate its allegedly inherent totalitarian nature.”
In other words, if they were not totalitarian enough to begin with, we would see to it that they became totalitarian – and then blame them for making the switch.
President Reagan offered several different justifications for this ultimately rather bloody-minded policy. In March 1983, in a speech to Congress, he presented his subversion theory, Congress, warning that the Sandinistas had already “imposed a new dictatorship…supported by weapons and military resources provided by the Communist bloc, (that) represses its own people, refuses to make peace, and sponsors a guerrilla war against El Salvador. (emphasis added).”
At other times, he emphasized the beachhead theory, according to which the Sandinistas provided a “Soviet beachhead… only two hours flying time away from our borders…with thousands of Cuban advisors…camped on our own doorstep…close to vital sea-lanes.” He offered similar characterizations of the threat posed by left-wing guerillas in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's hawkish UN Ambassador, also promoted this beachhead theory with her own profound geographical analysis:
I believe this area is colossally important to the US national interest. I think we are dealing here not...with some sort of remote problem in some far-flung part of the world. We are dealing with our own border when we talk about the Caribbean and Central America and we are dealing with our own vital national interest.
Other elements were also sometimes thrown into the mix. On November 6, 1984, just two days after the Sandinistas won a decisive 67-percent victory in the country’s freest elections in history, there was a huge media flap in the US press over their alleged attempt – later proved false – to buy Soviet MiGs for air defense. This story later turned out to be a wholesale concoction of the State Department’s “Office of Public Diplomacy,” and of Oliver North, Otto Reich, and Robert McFarlane in particular, just one of many US propaganda efforts that were designed to distract attention from the FSLN’s victory in those elections.
Together, the subversion theory and the beachhead theory added up to a revival of the time-worn domino theory, transposed from Southeast Asia to Central America. Apparently, the notion was that since Nicaragua bordered on Honduras and El Salvador, which bordered on Guatemala and Belize, which bordered on Mexico, the Red Army might soon be drinking margaritas on the banks of the Rio Grande. Or the Reds might just jet in to El Paso in their MiGs from Managua, “only two hours away.” The fact that “they” were already 90 miles away in Havana, armed with brand new MiG 23 Flogger bombers and MiG 29s, did not get much mention from the Gipper. After all, Cuba had already demonstrated that it could stand up to a US invasion, and the Bay of Pigs was not a happy memory.
This rather strained analysis of Nicaragua’s purported threat to US national security was later endorsed, with only slight variations, by the January 1984 Bipartisan National Commission on Central America chaired by Dr. Henry Kissinger. One might have expected Kissinger to reach a different conclusion, given his long personal experience with Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and China, whose leftist regimes spent most of the 1970s fighting with each other, demonstrating conclusively the power of nationalism over solidarity. But he was performing the assignment to ingratiate himself with the Republican Party’s conservative wing. And unlike the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, which he resigned from in December 2002, it did not require him to identify his consulting firms’ private clients.
In any case, well into the 1990s, long after there were peace settlements in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and long after the Sandinistas had handed over political power to their opponents, hawkish Republicans like Senators John McCain and Jesse Helms were still seeing ghosts in Nicaragua, trying to make hay out of the Sandinistas’ potential subversive threat. Indeed, as we’ll see, these charges even played a role in Daniel Ortega’s defeat in Nicaragua’s Presidential elections in 2001, even when his running mate was Violeta Chamorro’s son-in-law!
AUC paramilitary
Eventually, in fact, all the stockpiles of AK47s, landmines, rocket launchers, and surface-to-air missiles acquired by the Sandinistas to defend Nicaragua against the contras did end up posing a security threat to the US. But it was not precisely the one that that the Sandinistas' right-wing critics had predicted. In November 2001, Colombia’s 11,000-strong nasty, right-wing, drug-dealing paramilitary group, the AUC, procured 3,500 AK47’s from Nicaragua’s military stockpiles, by way of Israeli arms merchants based in Panama and Guatemala. The arms were part of a five-shipment package that included 13,000 assault rifles, millions of bullets, grenade and rocket launchers, machine guns, and explosives. The AUC, which was on the G.W. Bush’s administration’s official list of terrorist groups, was supported by landlords who wanted to combat Colombia’s leftist guerillas, the ELN and the FARC. The AUC was also supposedly fighting Colombia’s Army. From 2000 to 2003, Colombia received $2.5 billion of US military aid, plus more than 400 Special Forces troops, making it the world’s third largest recipient of US aid. The AUC also reportedly purchased arms from army stockpiles in El Salvador and Guatemala. In 2002, a OAS study also revealed that a Lebanese arms broker with al Qaeda links had tried to purchase 20 SA-7 missiles from Nicaragua’s stockpiles. The US starting pressuring Nicaragua’s President Bolanõs, a neoliberal businessman, to reduce these stockpiles – but hopefully not by selling more of them to the AUC.
In the long run, therefore, by forcing the comparatively-harmless Sandinistas to stockpile all these weapons to defend themselves, and by also arming the right-wing militaries of El Salvador and Guatemala to the teeth, the US had set a trap for itself.
In reality, of course, Nicaragua’s leftists, even if they had been so inclined, were neither necessary nor sufficient to “subvert” their neighbors. Those neighbors with the most serious liberation movements, like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia, had long since done a perfectly good job of subverting themselves. Their rebel movements developed over many decades from within, on the basis of incredibly-unbalanced social structures. For example, El Salvador’s catorce, its top 14 families, controlled 90-95 percent of that country’s land and finance capital, while in Guatemala, just 2 percent of the population controlled more than 70 percent of arable land. These situations were only a slightly more anonymous version of Nicaragua, where the Somoza family alone had laid claim to a quarter of the country’s arable land. And the resulting social conflicts were similar -- in the 1980s, El Salvador’s class war claimed more than 80,000 lives, while Guatemala’s claimed 200,000, with the vast majority due to their own brutal armed forces and paramilitaries.
On the other hand, Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s good neighbor to the south, had long since inoculated itself against revolution by developing an old-fashioned middle-class democracy, with lots of small farms and more teachers than police, having completely abolished its military in 1948.
Furthermore, while the Reagan Administration asserted over and over again in the early 1980s that the Sandinistas had shipped arms to leftist guerillas in El Salvador, two decades later, these allegations have been shown to be as spurious as the MiG purchases. In fact, the Sandinistas’ aid to El Salvador’s rebels, the FLMN, was miniscule, and it was terminated in 1981, as the World Court concluded in 1986. The claim that El Salvador’s FLMN had acquired several hundred tons of weapons from the East Bloc, Arafat and Libya (!), had also been pulled out of thin air. In fact, the rebel armies in El Salvador and Guatemala were poorly armed, except for Galil rifles and rocket launchers they managed to steal or purchase from corrupt army officers. Leading Sandinistas like Tomas Borge also explicitly rejected the notion of “exporting revolution,” except by way of the FSLN’s own example. After all, the FSLN had not needed Soviet or Cuban backing for their own revolution. They also had their hands full rebuilding Nicaragua. The last thing they needed was another war with El Salvador or Guatemala, in addition to the contra war.
Finally, while the Sandinistas were not liberal democrats, and, as noted, committed many political blunders, they were scarcely in a position to run a “dictatorship,” even within Managua’s city limits. To their credit, they had greatly increased the amount of popular involvement in the country’s governance. In November 1984, they held national elections that most international observers, including Latin American scholars and Western European parliaments, agreed were reasonably clean, despite the Reagan Administration’s provision of $17 million to opposition candidates, its systematic efforts to discredit the elections, and the fact that by then Nicaragua was already under steady assault from US-backed contras. Certainly by comparison with the Somozas’ rigged elections, other countries in post-war situations, and El Salvador and Guatemala in particular, Nicaragua’s degree of political freedom was tolerable, if not beyond reproach.
Yet when 75 percent of registered voters turned out for the November 1984 elections, and the FSLN received a commanding 67 percent of the vote, capturing the Presidency and 61 of 96 seats in the new National Assembly, Nicaragua was again accused by the Reaganites of being a “dictatorship.” As former New York Times Editor John Oakes remarked at the time, “The most fraudulent thing about the Nicaraguan election was the part the Reagan Administration played in it.”
The other troubling fact for Reagan’s Nicaraguan policy was that, objectively, the Soviet Union really did not have much interest in acquiring yet another dependent, state-socialist backwater like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Cuba -- which by the early 1980s was already costing the USSR about $3 billion a year in aid. In hindsight, we now know that, far from being an expansionist Evil Empire, at this point, the USSR was really just hanging on for dear life -- a wounded giant, obsessed with its own serious economic problems, which were even forcing it to import grain from Argentina’s fascist junta! Internationally, it had its hands full just trying to stave off an embarrassing defeat in Afghanistan on its own southern border. It was also pressing existing client states in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia hard to practice self-reliance.
Finally, in 1980-81, before the US made it absolutely clear that it was seeking “regime change” in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas tried to restore good economic relations, plus access to World Bank and IDB loans. But for the US intervention, this access would have been maintained. And that, in turn, would have significantly reduced Nicaragua’s dependence on East-Bloc aid. After all, as a senior World Bank official noted in 1982, “Project implementation has been extraordinarily successful in Nicaragua, perhaps better than anywhere else in the world.”
About that time, Nicaragua also sought aid from many non-Soviet countries, including Venezuela, Mexico, and France. It was most successful with Mexico, which resisted US pressure and became Nicaragua’s largest aid provider until 1985. Nor did Nicaragua turn immediately to the Soviet Bloc for aid. When it tried to buy $16 million of arms from France in early 1982, however, President Reagan got the French President, Francois Mitterand, to delay the sale “indefinitely.” Only then – under increasing attack from the contras -- did Nicaragua turn to the Soviet Union and Cuba for significant quantities of arms and advisors.
Of course, as noted, many Sandinistas were undoubtedly committed radicals, dedicated to policies like land reform, free health and education, and the seizure of Somocista-owned properties. But these policies were entirely defensible, given Nicaragua’s economic conditions and its need to play catch-up with basic social justice. These are, after all, policies that the US has itself supported, or at least tolerated, in other times and places, when they happened to serve its interests.
The Sandinistas may have been mulish and full of radical bravado, but they were far from anyone’s pawns. These characterizations were 1950-vintage hobgoblins, left over from the days when Ronnie ran the Commies out of the Actors Guild in LA. At best, they reflected a desire to show the Evil Empire who was boss, by making an example of some weak little pinko regime.
On this view, then, in the early 1980s, the USG basically succeeded in pushing tiny Nicaragua into relying heavily on Soviet and Cuban arms and economic aid for its own survival– as, indeed, the USG may have also done with Fidel’s Cuba back in 1959-60. The USG then used that reliance as an excuse to expand its own provocations into a full-scale war that ultimately claimed 30,000 lives. In the historical record books, this is surely one of the clearest examples of state-funded terrorism ever.
SAYING "UNCLE"?
All these inconvenient little details were brushed aside by the Reaganites when they took office in January 1981, raring, in President Reagan’s words, to make the Sandinistas “say uncle.” Say uncle they never did -- in fact, by 1988, they’d “whupped” Olly North’s contras pretty good. But that was not for want of US efforts.
In March 1981, President Reagan signed an Executive Order that mandated the CIA to undertake covert operations in Central America, to interdict arms shipments “by Marxist guerillas.” By November 1981, the US focus had shifted from arms interdiction to regime change. That month, the Administration provided an initial $19 million to mount a pretty transparent “covert” effort to destabilize Nicaragua. The strategy, implemented by the now-famous gang of Presidential pardonees, was the classic scissors tactic that had been employed by the US and its allies in many other 20th century counterrevolutionary interventions, notably Russia (1918), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959-60), and Chile(1973).
On the one hand, the USG tried to cut off Nicaragua’s cash flow, reducing access to new loans from the IMF, the World Bank, and the IDB, as well as all EXIM Bank funding and OPIC risk insurance. In September 1983, the US slashed Nicaragua’s sugar quota. In November 1985, it added a total embargo on all trade with the US, Nicaragua’s main trading partner and foreign investor up to then. Given the country’s dire economic straits, this had the practical effect of cutting off all US private investment and bank lending.
At the same time, the Reagan Administration was stubbornly opposing all efforts to embargo trade or investment with respect to South Africa’s racist apartheid regime. In September 1983, for example, the State Department approved a Westinghouse application to bid on a $50 million ten-year contract to maintain and supply South Africa's two nuclear power stations. The US also continued to support World Bank and IDB loans to the right-wing regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador throughout the 1980s.
The other half of the scissors strategy was the USG’s effort to create, finance, arm, and determine strategy and tactics for an 18,000-person contra army, financed with $300 million of taxpayer money, in-kind military assistance, another $100-$200 million raised from private donors like the Sultan of Brunei, and an untold amount of cocaine proceeds. The main faction, the Frente Democrático Nacional (FDN), consisted of 3,000 ex-Somocista National Guard members and another 12-13,000 assorted mercenaries, anti-Castro Cubans, Israeli trainers, Argentine interrogators, and cocaine traffickers of several different nationalities. The Reaganites knew they were not dealing with angels here. As the CIA’s Inspector General later admitted in 1998, the agency made sure to get a statement from the US Department of Justice in 1982, waiving the CIA’s duty to report drug trafficking by any contra contractors.
From 1982 to 1989, this murderous scalawag army stoked a war that ultimately took about 30,000 lives, including those of 3,346 children and more than 250 public school teachers. Another 30,000 people were wounded, and 11,000 were kidnapped, according to the National Commission for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights. Another half million fled the country to avoid the chaos. With the help of Harvard Law School Professor Abram Chayes, Nicaragua later successfully sued the US for launching these and other terrorist attacks and causing all this damage. In November 1986, the International Court at the Hague found the US liable for several clear violations of international law – notably, for launching an unprovoked war that was not justified by any “right of self defense.” The Court suggested that appropriate damages for the resulting property damage were on the order of $17 billion. But the Reagan Administration declined to appear in court, and refused to recognize the judgment.
THE WORLD'S HEAVIEST DEBT BURDEN
The detailed history of Nicaragua’s contra war has been told elsewhere, at least those parts of it that are not still classified, like much of the record of US knowledge about the contras’ extensive cocaine trafficking activities, and President Reagan’s confidential discussions with his aides, kept off limits for an indefinite period by a Executive Order signed in 2001 by President G.W. Bush.
Our main interest here is in the war’s devastating impact on Nicaragua’s economy and its crushing foreign debt burden. Ultimately, the FSLN soundly defeated the contras with a combination of adroit military tactics – for example, heavily-mined “free-fire” zones along its northern border with Honduras – and a large standing army, raised by draft. To pay for all this, however, the FSLN had to boost military spending, from 5 percent of national income in 1980 to 18 percent in 1988, when the first in a series of armistices was finally signed. By then, more than half of Nicaragua’s government budget was devoted to paying for an army that numbered 119,000 regular soldiers and militia – 7 percent of all Nicaraguans between the ages of 18 and 65.
Early on, the Sandinistas had made a strong commitment to building new health clinics and schools in the county. These social programs, plus land reform, were among their most important accomplishments. Even in the midst of the war, with the help of 2500 Cuban doctors, they managed to increase spending on health and education, open hundreds of new medical clinics, and sharply reduce infant mortality, malnutrition, disease, and illiteracy. They also implemented a land reform that redistributed more than 49 percent of Nicaragua’s arable land to small farmers.
But the war made it very hard to sustain these undeniable social accomplishments Despite the FSLN’s military “victory,” Nicaragua’s regular economy took a direct hit. Trade and investment plummeted, unemployment soared to 25 percent, and inflation reached more than 36,000 percent by 1988-89. From 1980 to 1990, Nicaragua’s average real per capita income fell 35 percent, and the incidence of poverty rose to 44 percent. To deal with shortages in the face of soaring inflation, the FSLN had to implement a rationing system for food and other basic commodities. As the Nixon Administration had done to the Allende regime in Chile a decade earlier, so the Reaganites did to Nicaragua – they made the economy “scream.”
All told, by 1990, Nicaragua had displaced Honduras as the poorest country in Central America. It had also become the world’s most heavily indebted country. To fund the defense budget and their other commitments in the face of declining tax revenues, trade, investment, and multilateral funding, the FSLN partly relied on inflationary finance, by having the Central Bank just print more cordobas. But for vital foreign purchases, including oil and weapons, it required dollar loans from sympathetic countries, mainly the Soviet Union ($3.3 billion), Mexico ($1.1 billion), Costa Rica, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, and Guatemala (!), plus more than $500 million from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, one multilateral institution that the US did not control.
When the newly-elected government of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro took office in April 1990, the debt stood at $10.74 billion – more than 10 times its level in 1980, and nearly 11 times Nicaragua’s national income.
This was by far the highest foreign debt burden in the world, thirty times the average debt-income ratio for all developing countries. And it was not derived from “technical policy errors,” “economic accidents,” or “geographic misfortune. ” Part of it was the $1.5 billion of dirty debt left over from the Somoza years. The rest derived from the ruthless persecution by world’s most powerful country of a tiny, stubborn Central American nation that was determined to finally make its own history.
CONCLUSION - REAGAN'S IMPACT ON NICARAGUA
In the 1980s, against all odds, and woefully ignorant of economics, politics, business, and diplomacy, a handful of rather foolhardy Nicaraguans dared to challenge the Reagan Administration's attempt to prevent them from controlling their own destiny.
They made many mistakes, and they required much on-the-job training. But at least they tried to stand up.
When they did so, they were attacked, and when they defended themselves, they were portrayed as the aggressors. Ultimately they won a victory of sorts, but it left their country a shambles.
Then their successors, worshipers of the latest fashions in neoliberal economic theology, came to power promising reform and freedom, and ended up turning the country into a bantustan.
Perhaps Nicaragua will need another revolution.
***
(c) James S. Henry, SubmergingMarkets.com(tm) 2004. Not for reproduction or other use without express consent from the author. All rights reserved.
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He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!"
- Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
Whatever we may think about the purported security benefits of the Iraq War, does anyone doubt that a lasting peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians would make us all instantly feel a whole lot safer, by defusing one of the world’s most prolonged sources of military conflict, political violence, ethnic hatred, anti-Americanism, and global terrorism?
Yet we listened in vain to President Bush’s State of the Union message last week for one single mention of Israel or the Palestinians. We also failed to find any vision on this basic homeland security issue from any of the Democratic Party’s top Presidential candidates in their recent speeches and debates. Instead, this year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have become a kind of “Third Rail” issue in American politics, best avoided at all costs.
This is certainly not because the problem has gone away. Indeed, quite the contrary. In Israel, the West Bank/ Gaza, and Lebanon the tit-for-tat killings continue, with, for example, eight Palestinians killed on January 28, followed by ten Israelis killed on January 29.
As discussed below, the two sides now appear to be farther apart than ever, with no peace negotiations in sight, the Sharon Government entangled in a messy corruption scandal, the Palestinians about to re-elect the equally duplicitous, embunkered Yasser Arafat as their President, and Israel accelerating the construction of a $3 billion “security barrier” that could turn any future “Palestinian state” into an unworkable archipelago of checkpoint- and bypass-ridden Bantustans.
At the current pace, by the time a new US President takes office in 2005, more than two-thirds of this barrier will already be complete. To the Israelis, who are sick and tired of suicide bombings, the barrier may appear to be a rational defensive measure. To the Palestinians, the barrier is neo-apartheid, and the introduction of defacto political boundaries for their pathetic new "state" that will be very hard to modify once it is in place.
So Israel is become Pharaoh, and the Palestinians have become the world's new Jews -- wretched, despised, stateless, and divided, strangers in a strange land indeed. And the world's most powerful nations are apparently content to sit by idly once again, washing their hands of the situation.
Indeed, it now appears that all these developments are already beginning to induce a slow-motion version of the population transfer that an increasing share of the Israeli public may support, and that many Israeli militants and security strategists have long been seeking as a (...ahem..)"final solution" to the Palestinian problem. But this would hardly be a just solution, or one that is worthy of the best traditions of these two great peoples. Nor is it one that the US and Europe would have any business whatsoeversubsidizing, supporting, or trading with.
This is the first in a series of articles that will examine several aspects of the current Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, including (1) divisions among Palestinian leaders, (2) the “demographic Intifada,” (3) Israel’s security barrier, (4) the negative effects that the prolonged conflict and occupation are having on Israeli and Palestinian values and culture, and (5) the tremendous “upside” potential that Israel and Palestine both have if only peace could be reestablished once and for all.
Obviously these are complex issues, and this is a controversial subject that already has more than its share of professional partisans and "regional experts." But too much is now at stake for us to relegate the debate to such “embedded” observers. After all, it is not as if all the armies of professional partisans and region-watchers have brought us peace.
FOR THIS WE FOUGHT A WAR?
Of course, in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, the war was marketed and sold to the people of the US and the UK mainly as a matter of their own national security. But most astute observers -- at least those outside our vaunted "intelligence" agencies -- knew full well that the best case for this adventure had little to do with Saddam’s purported direct threat to the US or the UK, much less ending Saddam’s tyranny, reconstructing Iraq’s entire political system, fomenting Arab democracy in general, or even securing our oil supplies.
The best case for the war – as put by the UK’s Tony Blair -- was that it might actually contribute to overall peace in the Middle East, by removing Saddam as a direct threat to Israel and encouraging Israel’s many other enemies in the region to become less hostile.
The hope was that this, in turn, would make the Palestinians more reasonable about contentious issues like Jerusalem and the “right of return.”
It might also make Israel feel more secure and undermine its own influential minority of religious extremists, many of whom view the Palestinians quite frankly as violent aborigines and the continued occupation of “Judea and Samaria” -- the 22 percent of “Palestine” that Israel did not control prior to 1967 -- as a G-d-given birthright.
From this angle, one of Iraq War’s greatest disappointments is that it has not so far brought an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement any closer. Instead:
- On top of the US Presidential election race, the Iraq War appears to have completely distracted the US media, the public, and our political leaders from the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
- The War has also proved astronomically expensive, squandering at least $166 billion that might have been better spent on other things, including the costs of a Middle East peace settlement.
- The War may have had some salutary effects on Iran, Syria, and Libya. But the Sharon Government has, if anything, recently hardened its stance toward these countries, rejecting Syria’s recent feelers, threatening unilateral strikes against Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities, and making a series of confusing statements about its plans to double the number of Israeli settlers on the Golan Heights.
- The Iraq War has also reinforced American hostility toward Muslims in general, and encouraged the tendency to lump all Palestinian militants together with al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists, Ba’ath loyalists, and Iranian fundamentalists. According to one recent poll, 67 percent of US adults now believe that the Palestinians do not deserve an independent state. A year earlier, before the war, only about 44 percent felt this way. Admittedly, the later poll was sponsored by a right-leaning Israeli organization, and may be exaggerated. But both polls contrast sharply with opinion in Europe as a whole, where almost 60 percent now believe that Israel itself is the "number one threat" to global security, and two-thirds favor an independent Palestinian state. US politicians may simply be following the advice of the cowardly fellow who once remarked, “I am their leader; I will follow them anywhere.”
Overall, these attitudes have discouraged the US from playing the kind of hands-on, “honest broker” role that is necessary for any progress to be made in this seemingly-interminable dispute. And that has only played into the hands of the rejectionists on both sides -- and the continuation of the “global terrorist threat.”
While the conventional wisdom is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be settled by voluntary negotiations, if one thing is absolutely clear from the last decade, it is that, left to their own devices, these two particular parties will never reach a final peace settlement on their own.
Now more than ever, they have both become what the Israeli historian Bennie Morris has termed “righteous victims.” Both sides perceive that there is no one on the other side who can be trusted to pursue good-faith negotiations. Given the US' recent passivity, they may also perceive that there is no mediator with the moral authority and independence to guide them toward an enforceable deal. This is a recipe for escalating violence.
So, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, nearly a year after President Bush’s endorsement of the Quartet’s “road map” and a two-state solution, three years after the start of the al-Iqsa Intifada in September 2000, and more than ten years after the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, it seems that the Bush/Quartet road map is leading nowhere.
This situation cries out for a tough outside mediator – a role that, historically, only the US has been equipped to play. Unfortunately, this is an election year, an inconvenient time. But if President Bush really wants to justify his Iraq invasion, boost homeland security, and show that he can make peace as well as war, he should locate his mislaid “road map” before it is too late. Should he ignore this "intelligence," we will not need to convene a national commission to determine whether it was provided.
***
© James S. Henry, SubmergingMarkets.Com, 2004
"Neither the armed men, nor the weapons smuggled through the tunnels, are a strategic threat to Israel. But the danger posed by the armed men and the tunnels is so exaggerated, that the statistics of destruction and death sown by Israel in Rafah go largely ignored - in Israel. In Rafah, on the other hand, it feeds the conclusion reached by a religious lawyer: "Everyone in Israel -opposition, left, Labour - bears responsibility for what their government is doing."
Amira Hass, Haaretz
The recent furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal notwithstanding, the fact is that most of our erst-while political and religious leaders continue to relentlessly look the other way at the many war crimes that are now being committed on an almost daily basis by the two US-backed armies of occupation in the Middle East, Israel's troops in Gaza and the West Bank, and the US troops in Iraq.
Despite our current deficit of courageous leadership, it is simply not morally acceptable for ordinary Americans and Israelis who supply all the arms and troops and foot all the bills for this misbehavior to dodge this issue. It is our moral blind spot, and we must work hard to see through it. Let's start with this week's ugly events in Gaza and Ramadi.
GOLIATH IN GAZA
The preciptating event for the recent upsurge in Gaza violence was last week's sudden decision by the Israeli Army to enter southern Gaza with the largest incursion in years. That unprovoked incursion into this dense urban areas cost the Israelis dearly -- two of its tanks were destroyed and at least 13 IDF soldiers died.
Evidently, that only made the Israeli Army madder than ever to teach the Palestinians one of their unending lessons. So, just as the US was, oddly enough, trying to "sell" Sharon's new plan to withdraw from Gaza to our European allies, Sharon was ordering the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to plunge in even deeper, take off the gloves, search for tunnels, and blow up houses.
Earlier this week, Amnesty International issued a detailed report explaining precisely why the resulting "collective punishment" -- especially the mass destruction of Palestinian houses, which left hundreds of families homeless -- was nothing less than a blatant war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention, not justified in any way by Israel's own purported security needs.
That report had little effect on the Israelis. Indeed, it was followed the very next day by the deaths of 20 Palestianians, the highest one-day death toll since 2001, including at least 7 children under the age of 16. There were also scores of wounded. And this was followed by 10 more Palestinians killed on May 19, as the IDF turned its modern tanks and helicopter gun ships and missiles on a crowd of 3000 largely unarmed protesters -- or, in Israel's version of the facts, on the houses all around them.
Already the UN Security Council has voted 14-0 to condemn the Israeli actions, which were so indefensible that even the US refrained from exercizing its veto power, for the first time since 1992.
The European Union condemned the attack as "completely disproportionate," stating that it showed "a reckless disregard for human life. " Ireland's Foreign Minister, speaking on behalf of the EU, said that "The killing of children does not serve any legitimate cause and degrades any purpose which it purports to advance." The UN Commission on Human Right's special rapporteur, the noted South African international law professor John Dugard, condemned the attack as a clear war crime. The UK's Tony Blair, otherwise our loyal ally in the Iraq War, for once pulled a way from the tepid US position, condemning Israel's behavior in no uncertain terms as "unacceptable and wrong."
But President Bush, fresh from a rousing campaign speech before a leading pro-Israel lobbying group, only managed the rather toothless request that Israel "respect innocent life."
Leading Democrtats were, if anything, even more timid. Senator Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senator Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that the US should veto the UN resolution. Nothing at all was heard on the subject from the cautious and inscrutable John Kerry. Earlier this week, however, South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings, who is retiring from the US Senate this year and can now afford to say what he likes, did issue a surprisingly candid appraisal of Ariel Sharon's untoward influence over US foreign policy.
Still, at this point, with most of the key American lapdogs still in thrall, the shameless Sharoniks are continuing the incursion. Countering the usual policy of never apologizing for anything, one Israeli general did say that the IDF was "sorry that civilians got hit," and that it "doesn't aim at civilians" -- even though it fired live tank shells dangerously close to a crowd of 3000 people. No apology was issued for firing from gunships into the crowd. The IDF claimed that there were "armed men" among the protestors, and that this justified firing on the entire group. Israel's UN spokesman Dan Gillerman also claimed that there was, in effect, no other way to contain the weapons that were allegedly flowing into Gaza from Egypt -- a claim that leading Israeli journalists quickly discounted. Soon after the UN resolution was passed, three more Palestinians were killed in Rafah by yet another Israeli missile.
Apparently some Israelis really must believe, as Sharon himself reportedly shouted to the Labor Party's Shimon Peres during a heated Cabinet debate back in 2001, "Don't worry about America. We control America."
GOLEM IN IRAQ
Meanwhile, as if the US needed another human rights fiasco in Iraq right now, the US military today stands accused of having wiped out an entire forty-person wedding party at Makr al-Deeb, near the Syrian border town of Qaim, on Tuesday night. The US claims that it took "hostile fire" from the area. But the villagers reported that they had only been firing celebratory shots in the air, as is customary at weddings in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The locals' version rings true. After all, this is hardly the first such wedding party that the US has mistakenly shot up or blown to smithereens.
In September 2003, US troops in Falluja killed a 14-year old boy and shot six other people at a wedding party, when they mistakenly thought celebratory gunfire was directed at them.
In July 2002, it wiped out up to 40 people at a wedding party in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, an incident for which it also refused to apologize.
On December 29, 2001, the US bombed another wedding in the village of Qalai Niazi in eastern Afghanistan, "vaporizing" at least 62 to 107 wedding guests, according to the UN.
True to form, an unapologetic Donald Rumsfeld claimed in January 2002 that there had been "multiple secondary explosions’ in the area -- perhaps from all the bomblets secreted in wedding cakes.
In early May 2002, Britain’s Royal Marines and Australian troops called in US bombers on yet another Afghan wedding party, when they again mistook celebratory AK-47 shots for hostile fire.
No wonder the latest polls from Iraq show that 88 percent of Iraqis regard the US troops as "occupiers," more than half want the US troops to leave the country now, and Moqtada al-Sadr, the young radical Shia cleric whose been fighting US troops for the last month, is now the second most influential figure in the country -- second only to 70-year old Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Needless to say, all this does not bode well for the "transition" that is supposed to take place in just 40 days.
SUMMARY
Even in the case of Israel's recent behavior in Gaza, the episodes described above were probably not "intentional" in the narrow sense of the word. But in some ways that makes things even worse.
To "intend" to kill an enemy, you actually have to recognize his existence, at least for an instant. In the case of the gross negligence described above, it is almost as if the IDF and the US military have lost the ability to perceive Arabs as people.
Nor were these isolated episodes. In Israel's case, the record of careless behavior stretches back decades, as many leading Israeli historians have themselves documented. Of course it has been reciprocated on the other side. But the endless Hatfield-McCoy arguments about who is "to blame" are childish. The real issue is, who will be courageous enough to break the cycle? At the end of the day, most of the so-called "tough" guys have turned out to be moral cowards.
In the case of the US troops in Iraq, "Israelification" of battlefield conduct is relatively new. It has involved the systematic destruction of civilian housing, the use of tanks, bombs, and gunships in civilian areas, various forms of collective punishment (including the loss of employment for political opponents), mass detentions without trial, and rough treatment during interrogations.
As the US has learned the hard way, all these clever tactics have produced precisely the same results in US-occupied Arab territories that they have produced in Israeli-occupied territories -- overwhelming hostility to continued occupation, and an increasingly- militant national resistance movement.
It is high time for Americans to stand up and say -- to Kerry, Bush, and all the other "leaders" who have somehow lost their powers of speech on these matters -- that enough is enough, and that the only way to peace is to put these poisonous, self-defeating occupations behind us.
***
© James S. Henry, Submerging Markets ™, 2004
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Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has had quite an energetic last two weeks. On the cusp of Passover as well as Easter, it is especially appropriate to consider the potentially catastrophic impacts of his recent tough words and actions on the future of Israel, as well as the Palestinians.
IN YOUR FACE
On March 23, reportedly on Sharon's direct orders, the IDF assassinated 66-year old Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, igniting huge protests throughout the Arab world and also contributing significantly to the cancellation of last week's Arab League meetings in Tunisia.
Next, Sharon spent a full day answering questions from Israeli prosecutors, who are reportedly on the verge of charging him with bribery, in connection with a corruption-ridden real estate development project in Greece. According to Israeli political analysts, the chance that Sharon will be charged with at least one of three possible corruption charges in the next few months is "95 percent." And that, in turn might make it very difficult for him to continue to serve as Prime Minister.
This short fuse and the risk of prosecution may account for part of Sharon's recent behavioral imbalances. Just yesterday, he became embroiled in an incredible shouting match with right-wing members of his Cabinet over his plans to unilaterally withdraw from all 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza, plus 4 minor settlements in the northern West Bank.
To placate these opponents, he also repeated the threats that he made last October, that Israel reserves the right to assassinate Yasser Arafat and Hez'Bollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as well. The comments provoked a sharp response from US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitrage. But they received no comment at all from other senior Bush administration officials, much less President Bush, who is under a great deal of stress himself, and is probably afraid to alienate Israel's US-based supporters in the midst of this year's tight Presidential election.
Nor, for that matter, did we hear any condemnation of the threats from Senator John Kerry, who, depending on the day of the week and the issue, has been running wide-right and wide-left at the same time, trying to be all things to all people.
"ENDING THEIR DREAMS"
Finally, just today, in interviews in Hebrew with leading Israeli newspapers, Sharon made it very clear just how far from President Bush's "road map" he has wandered. If he is to be taken seriously, his "unilateral" plan for disengaging from Gaza is the death knell of the two-state solution. In the interview, Sharon openly proclaimed what many critics of his "apartheid security barrier" have accused him of believing all along:
"In the unilateral plan, there is no Palestinian state. This situation could continue for many years...It will bring their [the Palestinians'] dreams to an end....When you fence areas and communities in the West Bank, you end a lot of their dreams...My plan is tough on the Palestinians. A mortal blow."
What are we to make of this belligerence? Some pundits may argue that Sharon is just be grandstanding for a domestic audience. Others may say that all his threats are just calculated to scare the Palestinians back to the bargaining table. After all, the Bush Adminstration, obsessed with mounting anarchy in Iraq, is now just making very faint noises about a "two-state solution," and has otherwise dropped the ball. And the Palestinians have so far not responded to Sharon's other threats, so what else can he do but escalate?
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Those who genuinely care about the future of Israel, as well as those who care about the Palestinian people, have a solemn duty to speak out now, to reject the path that Sharon is taking...
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If Sharon were really sincere about pursuing a two-state solution, however, why did he choose precisely this moment, on the verge of a trip to Washington to defend his "unilateral" plan, to assassinate Sheikh Yassin? After all, the 66-year old clerical paraplegic made the same wheelchair ride to the mosque five times a day, and most observers agree that he played no operational role in planning Hamas' terrorism. The strike did nothing to weaken Hamas, but it did infuriate the Palestinian street and probably made Hamas more popular than ever. So why did Sharon bother, just now? And why has Sharon (and the US) continued to ostracize and humiliate the hapless Arafat, one of the few Palestinian leaders who still supports a two-state solution?
One suspects that there are darker motives at work here. We are witnessing the frustrated outbursts of an aging warhorse, who has lost much of his popularity and may be about to be prosecuted for bribery. He never has had much time for diplomacy, much less for his old nemisis Arafat, who Sharon probably regrets not having terminated back in Beiruit.
We also recall that Sharon was also the only member of the Israeli Cabinet who voted against the 1979 Peace Accord with Egypt. Nor has he ever had much time for the notion of a "Palestinian state" anywhere west of the Jordan River. And with his own era in Israel coming to an end, he probably cannot abide the thought that old enemies like Arafat and younger, far more dangerous ones like Nasrallah might actually survive him in power.
Sharon also probably cannot abide the thought that whoever succeeds him as Prime Minister may be tempted to sit down with the Palestinians -- perhaps with the strong support of the newly-elected President Kerry -- and try to undo all the damage that Sharon has wrought since he first set foot on the Temple Mount in September 2000.
THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL?
So Sharon is probably just up to his old tricks. First and foremost, the objective is to create "facts on the ground" that will make a negotiated two-state solution virtually impossible. In his view, it is far better to carve the West Bank into pieces that will effectively undermine the viability of an independent state, and, over time, lead the Palestinians to conclude that their only future as a people lies in Jordan.
The main risk to Israelis and Palestinians alike is that Sharon may actually achieve this objective, in the waning moments of his long career. Because then the future would look something like this:
- Slowly but steadily the rest of the world -- especially the EU, but also Latin America, Africa, and even Asia -- will disconnect from Israel, perhaps even more so than it eventually did with South Africa in the 1980s.
- Israel's relations with "moderate" Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey, will also become much more problematic.
- The West Bank and Gaza will become a "population bomb," filled with millions of impoverished, hopeless, angry people, whose numbers will continue to growing at 4-5 percent a year as far as the eye can see. Meanwhile, contrary to Israel's current forecases, Israel's own population growth will tend to stagnate. After all, the Palestinians have no place else to go -- Arab "solidarity" notwithstanding. That's hardly true of Israelis, a growing proportion of whom now spend at least part of the year living abroad.
- The Palestinian people, long among the most enlightened and secularized in the Arab world, may turn to radical Islam in far larger numbers than ever before. Over time, they may well decide to integrate with Jordan and perhaps Syria. But this victory for "Islamic democracy" will hardly be a victory for Israel. The Hashemite dynasty in Jordan and perhaps the secular Ba'athist regime in Syria may be toppled, replaced by a Palestinian version of the Islamic state. Egypt's corrupt regime and Saudi Arabia's family dictatorship will also have increased difficulties holding on to power.
Israel's only response to all this will be try and keep the growing collection of "failed states" in the region off balance, and to induce the US to play an ever-larger role there. How long the US public is prepared to heavily subsidize such ventures, as well as Israel's own economy, is an interesting unknown, especially in light of the current difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clearly it depends in part on the future diet of "terrorist threats," which Israeli intransigence and aggressive military tactics have not necessarily reduced.
- By 2010-2015, Israel will probaby still have its wall/fence and its powerful military. Just like the South African apartheid regime, which was outnumbered 10 to 1, it retains confidence that from a purely military standpoint, it can hang on forever, so long as it avoids being entangled in foreign wars. If it adopts Sharon's approach, from a purely technical standpoint it may well be able to survive indefinitely as a kind of Spartan demoracy, engaged in a permanent state of war.
- However, many young Israelis are already complaining this is not a very enjoyable way to live or raise a family. . Over time, unless one is a refugee, a true believer, or -- oddly enough -- a Palestinian, Israel may simply not be the kind of place that anyone wants to live for very long. . Like white South Africans, it is likely that unless there is a peace settlement, more and more secular Jews will simply find it "more convenient" to resettle in New York or LA or Florida, where they do not have to be so obsessed with security, where they are not compelled to subsidize the true believers, and and are tortured by their confused feelings about all the angry poor people in the neighborhood.
Since the big pools of oppressed Jews living in parts of the Diaspora, like the former Soviet Union, have by now basically dried up (except France's 500,000, most of whom have little affinity for life in Israel), this means that Israel's own population -- contrary to its own projections -- may stagnate.
- From this standpoint, one gains quite a different perspective on the many US-based “loyal supporters” of Israel who vehemently proclaim their fealty to the country of their ancient ancestors. No doubt many of them contribute heavily to the cause, and are delighted that some other Jews -- increasingly, the more Orthodox Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern origins are willing to actually live in such a difficult, dangerous place. there. But what rational person would seriously consider abandoning the security, comforts, and cosmopolitan culture of Cambridge, New York, Washington DC., or LA to live in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, much less in a beleagured West Bank settlement, if the whole country is nothing but a heavily armed inverse ghetto?
In short, even if Israeli is able to wall the Palestinians out forever, it will never be able to wall the Israelis in.
Already it appears that they are quietly leaving in droves. US law makes it relatively easy for Israelis to reside in the US and move back and forth to Israel, or even hold dual citizenship. Official data on the volume of emigration since the al-Aqsa intifada began is sketchy, but informal evidence suggests that the number of Israelis living "temporarily" in the US has skyrocketed.
In the US, the evidence also suggests that Jews are vulnerable to much higher rates of intermarriage and assimilation than those who live in Israel, though this is partly a matter of self-selection. In the US, for example, from 1990 to 2002, the Jewish population in the US, which now accounts for nearly 40 percent of world Jewry, actually declined from 5.5 million to 5.2 million, mainly because of low birth rates and high assimilation.
Ironically enough, therefore, it may be Sharon's very own policies that will constitute one of the most serious threats to world Jewry. Those non-Jews who have always cherished this great people's profound contributions to enlightenment and social justice can only contemplate this flickering flame with sadness.
At a certain point, Israel may recognize these trends, and start looking around for a Mandela figure among the Palestinians, someone who is willing to try reconciliation one more time, and yet has not lost the respect of his own people. But by then, unlike South Africa, it may be too late. The short-sighted, vindictive policies that are being pursued by Sharon and his supporters, supposedly in the interests of "Israeli security," have already eliminated many of these figures, and the Islamic radicals are taking care of the rest.
Indeed, the situation is as if, in a South African context, the crazy, anti-white PAC had managed to acquire a huge popular following, while Mandela were kept under permanent house arrest after his release from prison, and isolated and humiliated. In that context, it would not have mattered very much whether Mandela lived or died.
In 2002, Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's Minister of Water Affairs, who participated actively in the struggle against apartheid during the 1980s, and who also happens to be Jewish, was asked about the comparison between Israel and South Africa by the leading Egyptian newspaper, al-Ahram. He replied as follows:
"Personally, I do not think it fair to compare what is happening now to the Palestinians and any excesses going on in the world. Nor is it fair to compare apartheid rule in South Africa with the conduct of Israel and those who support it. The South African apartheid regime never engaged in the sort of repression Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians. For all the evils and atrocities of apartheid, the government never sent tanks into black towns. It never used gunships, bombers, or missiles against the black towns or Bantustans. The apartheid regime used to impose sieges on black towns, but these sieges were lifted within days. Soldiers used to search homes and conduct a variety of punitive measures, but none of these can be compared with Israel's repressive actions, and its siege of entire towns and villages for months on end....." 1
Those who genuinely care about Israel's future, as well as those who care about the Palestinians, have a solemn duty to speak out now, to reexamine these issues carefully, and to consider rejecting the path that Sharon is taking before it is too late. Israel itself needs to listen carefully to these voices, understanding that not all critics are enemies, and not all "loyal supporters" and aging generals are true friends.
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© James S. Henry, SubmergingMarkets™, 2004
1 Ronnis Kastrils, interview with Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 28 March - 3 April 2002, Issue No.579.
While most major US drug dealers get prison terms of at least 15 years to life for selling a few kilos of coke or a few hundred pills of the Class A illegal drug Ecstasy (MDMA), the world's ecstasy king-pin, Israel-based Russian mobster Ze'ev Rosenstein, has apparently just learned to skate. 
