May 4, 2003

Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies shed light on America’s perception of its own role in world affairs 

AMERICA is thus not so much an old-fashioned imperial power seeking its ‘spheres of influence’ and competing with other imperial powers: it is a hyperpower with no equivalent. Hardly surprising, then, that “Alias” (ABC’s television series about a student moonlighting as a secret agent) perceives the world as America. America is the world; and the world is America.

If the world is America, then it follows as a natural corollary that the interests of America should be the interests of the world. And all those who act against the interests, or culture, or world-view, of America are in fact acting against the welfare and security of the world. These states and groups of people are like so many muggers, scoundrels and criminals that one finds in any American ghetto; and they have to be brought to justice wherever they are as speedily and efficiently as possible.

This has been the logic of American military interventions for well over a century. Indeed, America has militarily intervened in other countries with as much ease and frequency as Sydney, the super double agent, goes on her overseas missions. The US has sent its troops to places as far off as China, Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia, and as close to home as Costa Rica, Guatemala and Grenada.

As early as 1823, President James Monroe established what became known as the Monroe Doctrine — that the American hemisphere was, henceforth, off limits to European adventurism, any example of which America would view as ‘dangerous to our peace and safety’. What happened in the Americas was of direct concern to the United States, and on this premise there is hardly a Latin American country that has not suffered at the hands of America.

Most recently in Chile in 1973, the US brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and installed the right-wing military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Allende was not some newly-invented iconoclast: he had long been part of the internal political process of Chile. Not only was Allende assassinated, but thousands of left-wing supporters were rounded up, tortured and murdered — American citizens among them — with the connivance and support of the US government.

Then there is Nicaragua, where in the 1980s the US fought a bitter, protracted war against the left-wing Sandinistas. This intervention was an almost exact re-run of 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge authorized the twelfth military incursion in Nicaragua in less than a century to overthrow the Liberal Party...

The rationale for opposing the Sandinistas and supporting the Contras (who were renowned for their intimidation, murder and torture of innocent Nicaraguans) was that, as ‘Bolshevists’, the Sandinistas were the antithesis of democracy. And yet, in February 1990 the ‘undemocratic’ Sandinistas were defeated in national elections in Nicaragua and left office. Furthermore, on three subsequent occasions Daniel Ortega has led the Sandinista party in elections and three times accepted the negative verdict of the Nicaraguan electorate.

A majority of Nicaraguans, beyond the immediate issues of their domestic politics, also calculate that their country is safer and more likely to enjoy peace, whatever else it may lack, without Ortega in government to provoke the US into further intervention.

In October 1983, the US launched an invasion against the tiny island of Grenada; and so the list goes on. The United States has repeatedly intervened both militarily and through covert action in almost every Latin American state: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay. Ostensibly, these interventions have been in defence of ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’, but somehow they always end up securing markets for America.

They have taken place to support or bring to power some of the most noted violators of ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’. Those who have paid the price for securing the vital interests of the United States have been ordinary, innocent citizens of these countries who have been slaughtered, imprisoned, tortured and maintained in illiberal economic structures inherited from Spanish colonialism that perpetuate abject poverty and all the ills consequent on lack of equal opportunity.

Immediately after the tragedy of September 11, Zoltan Grossman, an American peace activist and regular contributor to the radical magazine Counterpunch, published a list of ‘A century of US military interventions from Wounded Knee to Afghanistan’, based on Congressional Records and the Library of Congress Research Service. Grossman lists 134 interventions, small and big, global and domestic, covering 111 years between 1890 and 2001.

Up to the end of the second world war, the list shows, the US made an average of 1.15 interventions per year; that increased to 1.29 during the cold war. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the interventions increased further to 2.0 per year. So, as US hyper-imperialism expanded, the interventions increased to protect its ‘interests’. Moreover, as Johan Galtung, director of Transcend (a network for peace and development) shows in “Searching for Peace” (2002), the spatial patterns of the interventions also changed drastically in the post-war period.

The first focus of US intervention was on East Asia (Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia; but also Iran), and was extremely violent. The second was on Eastern Europe (including the Soviet Union), but due to the presence of a counter superpower, the interventions were not overtly violent. The third phase was in Latin America, starting in Cuba and reaching most of the continent. The violence this time was both micro and macro, but did not reach the extent of the violence in East Asia.

The fourth phase focused on West Asia, starting with Palestine and Iran, then Libya and Lebanon/Syria, and moved on in the 1990s to Iraq, and at the beginning of the 21st century to Afghanistan. So the interventions move from Confucian-Buddhist societies to Orthodox Christian and Catholic Christian cultures, and finally to Islamic civilization.

The rest of the world acquires much of its popular perception of America, and of what America thinks of the rest of the world, through a television series like “Alias” and Hollywood films like “Executive Action” and “The Siege”. But this perception is also based on concrete experience — for example, how the US behaves at international forums such as the United Nations. Indeed, US behaviour at the UN is not far removed from that of SD-6 in “Alias”: since we control the world, we can do very much as we like.

As the former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes in his book Unvanquished: a US-UN Saga, the UN is now the sole property of a single power — the US — which, through intimidation, threats and the use of its veto, manipulates the world body for the benefit of its own interest. When it suits the US, it uses the UN to seek legitimacy for its actions, to build coalitions and impose sanctions on ‘rogue states’. When world opinion goes against the US, it treats the UN with utter contempt.

In the aftermath of the second world war, the US was a prime mover in establishing the UN — and such UN initiatives as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — as an institution to further ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ on the Western model as a global norm. Throughout the history of the UN, America has consistently vetoed any resolution or declaration that did not reflect US priorities or business interests.

“With noteworthy regularity,” writes William Blum in Rogue State (2001), “Washington has found itself — often alone, sometimes joined by one or two other countries — standing in opposition to the General Assembly resolutions aimed at furthering human rights, peace, nuclear disarmament, economic justice, the struggle against South African apartheid and Israeli lawlessness and other progressive causes.” Blum lists some 150 incidence between 1984 and 1987 when the US cast a solitary ‘no’ vote against General Assembly resolutions.

This despite the fact that the US did not pay its UN dues for decades. When it finally agreed to pay past dues in return for a reduction in its assessments, it refused to fulfil the promise. The resentment against the US at typical UN meetings is so intense that it can be felt in the air. It was this resentment that led the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to oust the US from the 53-member Human Rights Commission (HRC) in May 2001.

It was the first time this had happened since the Commission was created in 1946. The ECOSOC voted in a secret ballot, and one would expect such a move to be led by Third World nations with long lists of grievances. In fact, it was the vote of a number of European and ‘friendly nations’ that eventually ousted America. The US suffered a similar defeat in 1998 when it was ejected from, but later reinstated to, the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), a key committee that deals with funding in the whole body.

The US has consistently opposed the important human rights initiatives of the United Nations. It is one of only two countries — the other being Iraq — that has still not ratified the 1989 landmark UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It also held back ratifications on the treaty to ban landmines and the treaty to establish an International Criminal Court.

According to the UN Committee against Torture, which oversees and monitors actions of parties to the Convention, the US has consistently violated the World Convention against Torture: the Green Berets routinely tortured their prisoners in Vietnam during interrogation, the CIA frequently tortured suspected infiltrators of Soviet emigre organizations in Western Europe, the US trained and maintained SAVAK, the notorious secret service of the Shah of Iran, and trained and equipped the intelligence services of Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and Israel with techniques and technologies of torture — to give just a few examples.

As Blum notes, in 1982 and 1983 the US was alone in voting against a declaration that education, work, healthcare, proper nourishment and national development are human rights. It would appear that even 13 years later, official American attitudes had not ‘softened’. In 1996, at a UN-sponsored World Food Summit, the US took issue with an affirmation by the summit of the ‘right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food’. The United States insisted that it does not recognize a ‘right to food’.

For the people of developing nations, these rights — set out and championed by the world community as global norms — are part of their defence against tyranny, corruption and injustice practised within their nations and by agencies and corporations from foreign nations. Within the context and history of Third World nations, establishing these principles as rights opens debates about the legacy of injustices that still create inherent inequalities, poverty and lack of equal opportunity; and it offers the prospect of change. Washington, instead, has championed just one cause: free trade.

If America is the world, it does not need the world’s institution to run its foreign and economic policies. In general, the US takes little interest in bodies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). One institution in which America maintains total control is the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Indeed, it has been suggested that the WTO is a major instrument for maintaining American ‘neoimperialism’.

 

Excerpted with permission from

Why Do People Hate America

By Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies

Alhamra Publishing, Saudi Pak Tower, Jinnah Avenue, Islamabad. Tel: 051-2800248, 2800253.

Email: contact@alhamra.com  Website: www.alhamra.com

ISBN 969-516-118-9

287pp. Rs350

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