Reviewed by Zia Mian, a physicist with the Program on Science and Global Security [5], Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.
Full Article:
It is June 2006. Two and a half thousand American soldiers have now died in the US conquest and occupation of Iraq, and eighteen and a half thousand have been injured. In December 2005, President Bush said that perhaps 30,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed. An independent study in The Lancet medical journal suggested 100,000 Iraqi civil-ian deaths due to the invasion and occupation and possibly many more. There are hundreds of US military personnel and thousands of civilians dead and injured in Afghanistan. There is massacre, murder, torture, and looting. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost some $420 billion so far. This year alone, they will cost as much money as the United States spends on its departments of Education, Justice, and Homeland Security combined. Afghanistan and Iraq may take generations to recover.
Why? In his invaluable new book, Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent and bureau chief of The New York Times, has offered a perspective that can help us understand. He observes, “The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not an isolated episode. It was the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological, political and economic reasons…. No nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places so far from home.” He then describes vividly the US interventions, coups, occupations and carnage in Hawai'i, the Spanish-American War (which brought the Philippines, Guam, Yap, Puerto Rico, and Cuba under US control), Nicaragua, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In every case, Kinzer asks why and charts the consequences. The why, Kinzer suggests, is because “For more than a century, Americans have believed they deserve access to markets and resources in other countries. When they are de-nied that access, they take what they want by force, deposing governments that stand in their way. Great powers have done this since time immemorial. What distinguishes Americans from citizens of past empires is their eagerness to persuade themselves that they are acting out of humanitarian motives.” Kinzer calls this a “unique combination of beliefs that give Americans a messianic desire to combat evil forces in the world, a conviction that applying military power will allow them to reshape other countries in their image, a certainty that doing so is good for all humanity, and a fervent belief that this is doing what God wants the United States to do.” The consequences, as he describes, have been “more pain than liberation.”
Movements for peace and justice have not been strong enough to hold back and reform the institutions that rule the US economy, politics, and culture. We are still far from this goal despite the heroic struggles of US activists for the past century (see Lawrence Wittner’s Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement 1933-1983).
For five decades, America did not whole-heartedly pursue its interests, ambitions and ideals, not because it was able to restrain itself, but because it was forced to be restrained. It found a peer-competitor in the Soviet Union, a society also forged in revolution, with its own dreams of historical purpose, its own economic and social model for the world, and equal willingness to build and sustain limitless armed force. Their struggle for advantage was political, economic, cultural, and military; it was relentless and encompassed every continent, the oceans, and even spread to space. Both sides built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and threatened to end the world.
There is much to learn from the Cold War about the coming years. It is not just because the US is preparing to confront China as its next great rival. As part of the “War on Terror” the 2006 US National Security Strategy [7] declares, “The United States is in the early years of a long struggle, similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War.” They are already calling it “the Long War”!
Odd Arne Westad, the Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics [8], has written what may be the first true history of the Cold War. The Global Cold War uses American, Russian, Chinese and other Third World sources, and the amazing documentation collected as part of the Cold War International History Project. The book goes beyond the simple us and them, good versus evil, stories written so far by most Cold War historians in the US. It shows how the core conflicts of the Cold War were really about which superpower would prevail in the Third World.
Westad describes in detail the US and Soviet interventions in Guatemala, Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Yet the story is larger than US and Soviet military intervention. The Cold War experience in the Third World was “a continuation of European colonial interventions and of European attempts at controlling Third World peoples… For the Third World... the Cold War... did not start in 1945, or even 1917, but in 1878 – with the conference of Berlin that divided Africa between European imperialist powers, – or perhaps in 1415, when the Portuguese conquered their first African colony.”
Political and economic interests and institutions (especially including ideas of social and economic development, ideas about “progress”), were central to Cold War struggles in the Third World. Here the advantage lay with the United States. Westad writes, “At the beginning of the Cold War era the institutions of the world economic system were redesigned to fit American purposes of defeating Communism and promoting capitalist growth… the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund came to have signal importance for the way the Cold War was fought in the Third World, and the trade regime that accompanied them was to become the determining factor for economic development of most Third World countries…. The US control of the World Bank and the IMF was a potent weapon in the Cold War, in many cases determining which countries could receive international loans and credits and which could not, even as far as loans from individual governments and private banks were concerned.” The poor became pawns. Aid became a way to send a message. Poverty became geo-politics.
Both the United States and Soviet Union found allies in Third World elites. Few could resist the promises of power, guns, money, and a model of the future. Wars for liberation soon became wars for “progress” under new leader-ship. Westad chronicles the tragedies of post-colonial independence for so many Third World societies: “The wars fought in the Third World were despairingly destructive. Since they were mostly wars against the peasantry, the best way of winning them was through hunger and thirst rather than through battles and bombing. The methods of these wars were to destroy lives rather than to destroy property… peasants were taken off their land and put off their villages, and given the choice between submission and starvation… The cultural violence was as bad as the physical: millions were forced to change their religion, their language, their family structure, and even their names in order to fit with progress.”
Westad quotes Aime Cesaire, the great poet from Martinique and a major voice of the anti-colonial movement: “They talk to me about progress, about achievements, diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw at my head statis-tics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks … I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life.”
It is in these histories and the contemporary reality of life for so many in the Third World that we must look for an-swers to the questions raised in two new books about what has been loosely termed anti-Americanism: Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes in America Against the World: How We are Different and Why We are Disliked and Julia Sweig’s Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century.
Andrew Kohut is Director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. Bruce Stokes is a journalist and Pew consultant. They try to understand both global opinion and American public opinion and the result is a fascinat-ing collection of insights, based in part on over 90,000 interviews in fifty countries from 2002 to the end of 2005.
The topics covered include attitudes about democracy, individualism, the economy and government, religion and social norms, and the use of force. Contradictions abound and offer puzzles and challenges to peace activists – for in-stance, how are we to understand and respond to the finding that since 1993 (i.e. since the end of the Cold War) no more than one in eight US residents (13%) have wanted their country to be the ”single world leader” but about two-thirds of the public want their country to be the sole military superpower? Or, the finding that while many people in the US tend to ignore the world and the role their government and economy play in it, and know relatively little about it, about 80% think that the spread of “American” ideas and customs is a good thing?
Kohut and Stokes show just how different are the opinions held by majorities in many other countries. When asked if they thought that the US takes the interests of other countries into account when deciding its foreign policy, while about two-thirds of the US public believed it did, less than a third of people agreed in allied nations including Britain, Canada, France, Spain, and Holland.
Understanding the flowering of anti-Americanism among US allies is the task taken up in Friendly Fire by Julia Sweig, the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She looks at South Korea, Britain, Germany, Turkey, and Latin America, and finds that the only way forward is “to declare the death of American exceptionalism.” But, she does not ask, what would be left! Ω