America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

364 Pages·2013·2.44 MB·English

by  William Blum

About this book
For over sixty-five years, the United States war machine has been
on automatic pilot. Since World War II we have been conditioned
to believe that America’s motives in ‘exporting’ democracy are
honorable, even noble. In this startling and provocative book,
William Blum, a leading dissident chronicler of US foreign policy
and the author of controversial bestseller Rogue State, argues
that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, unless
this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the
worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never
be able to stop the monster.
About the Author
William Blum is one of the United States’ leading non-mainstream
experts on American foreign policy. He left the State Department
in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service
Officer because of his opposition to what the US was doing in
Vietnam. He then became a founder and editor of the Washington
Free Press, the first ‘alternative’ newspaper in the capital.
Blum has been a freelance journalist in the US, Europe, and
South America. His stay in Chile in 1972–73, writing about the
Allende government’s ‘socialist experiment,’ and then its tragic
overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal
involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his
government was doing in various corners of the world.
His book Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II has received international acclaim. Noam
Chomsky called it ‘Far and away the best book on the topic.’ In
1999 he was one of the recipients of Project Censored’s awards for
‘exemplary journalism.’ Blum is also the author of Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident:
A Cold War Memoir, and Freeing the World to Death: Essays on
the American Empire. His books have been translated into 27
foreign-language editions. In January 2006, a tape from Osama
bin Laden stated that ‘it would be useful’ for Americans to read
Rogue State, to gain a better understanding of their enemy.
Blum currently sends out a monthly Internet newsletter, the
Anti-Empire Report.
Zed Books
london | new york
Blum_TitlePage.indd 1 26/09/2012 14:01
America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy – the Truth about
US Foreign Policy and Everything Else was first published in 2013
by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf,
uk and
Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa
www.zedbooks.co.uk
Copyright © William Blum 2013
The right of William Blum to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Typeset in Monotype Bulmer
by illuminati, Grosmont
Cover designed by Rogue Four Design
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available
isbn 978 1 78032 447 0
Contents
Introduction 1
1 US foreign policy vs the world 15
2 Terrorism 39
3 Iraq 53
4 Afghanistan 79
5 Iran 88
6 George W. Bush 106
7 Condoleezza Rice 111
8 Human rights, civil liberties, and torture 114
9 WikiLeaks 131
10 Conspiracies 146
11 Yugoslavia 154
12 Libya 161
13 Latin America 170
14 Cuba 186
15 The Cold War and anti-communism 199
16 The 1960s 226
17 Ideology and society 230
18 Our precious environment 243
19 The problem with capitalism 247
20 The media 269
21 Barack Obama 285
22 Patriotism 304
23 Dissent and resistance in America 314
24 Religion 323
25 Laughing despite the empire 329
26 But what can we do? 334
Notes 339
Index 353
introduCtion
The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is
no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the
United States strives to dominate the world, for which end it is
prepared to use any means necessary. Once one understands that,
much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity
surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this
striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since
the end of World War II the United States has
• endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments,
most of which were democratically elected;1
• grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30
countries;2
• attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders;3
• dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;4
• attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in
20 countries.5
The impact on world consciousness in recent decades of
tragedies such as in Rwanda and Darfur has been more conspicu-
ous than the American-caused tragedies because the first two each
took place in one area and within a relatively short period of time.
Despite the extensive documentation of the crimes of US foreign
2 AmeriCA’s deAdliest export
policy, because of the very breadth of American interventions and
the time period of sixty-eight years it’s much more difficult for the
world to fully grasp what the United States has done.
In total: since 1945, the United States has carried out one or
more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in
seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of
the world),6 in the process of which the US has ended the lives
of several million people, condemned many millions more to a
life of agony and despair, and has been responsible for the torture
of countless thousands. US foreign policy has likely earned the
hatred of most of the people in the world who are able to more
or less follow current news events and are familiar with a bit of
modern history.
Oderint dum metuant – ‘Let them hate so long as they fear’
– was attributed to one or another prominent leader of Ancient
Rome.
Shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, career
diplomat John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the US
embassy in Athens, resigned over the Iraq policy. ‘Has “oderint
dum metuant” really become our motto?’ he asked in his letter
of resignation, referring to the fact that more than one member
of the Bush administration had used the expression.7
Following the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001,
former CIA director James Woolsey commented about worries
that storming Baghdad would incite Islamic radicals and broaden
support for them: ‘The silence of the Arab public in the wake
of America’s victories in Afghanistan,’ he said, proves that ‘only
fear will re-establish respect for the U.S. … We need to read a
little bit of Machiavelli.’ (In the same talk, Woolsey further estab-
lished himself as a foreign policy pundit by stating: ‘There is so
much evidence with respect to [Saddam Hussein’s] development
of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles … that I
consider this point beyond dispute.’8)
introduCtion 3
Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the US Military
Academy in West Point, New York, in June 2002, President
George W. Bush told America’s future warriors that they
were ‘in a conflict between good and evil’ and that ‘We must
uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries.’9 The United
States institutional war machine was, and remains, on automatic
pilot.
When the plans for a new office building for the military,
which came to be known as The Pentagon, were brought before
the Senate on August 14, 1941, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of
Michigan was puzzled. ‘Unless the war is to be permanent, why
must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of
such size?’ he asked. ‘Or is the war to be permanent?’10
‘Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human
individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors,’ observed
The Black Commentator in the fourth year of the war in Iraq.
‘American society is unique in having been formed almost
wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal
Others.’11
It can be said that American history is the history of an empire
in the making, since the first British settler killed the first native
American.
All countries, it is often argued, certainly all powerful
countries, have always acted belligerent and militaristic, so why
condemn the United States so much? But that is like arguing
that since one can find anti-Semitism in every country, why
condemn Nazi Germany? Obviously, it’s a question of magni-
tude. And the magnitude of US aggression puts it historically
into a league all by itself, just as the magnitude of the Nazis’
anti-Semitism did. Is the world supposed to uncritically accept
terribly aggressive behavior because it’s traditional and ex-
pected? Somehow normal? Is that any way to build a better
world?