United States Foreing Policy

and turned them over to the army, which then hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands," said one U.S. diplomat. "But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment. "

Chile, 1964-73:

Salvador Allende was the worst possible scenario for a Washington imperialist. He could imagine only one thing worse than a Marxist in power-an elected Marxist in power, who honored the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook the very foundation stones on which the anti-Communist tower was built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.

After sabotaging Allende's electoral endeavor in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process.

They closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown into bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that "In Chile women wear dresses!"; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check- books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands more tortured or disappeared.

Greece, 1964-74:

The military coup took place in April 1967, just two days before the campaign for j national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece. The 1967 coup was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "Communist takeover." Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory.

It was torture, however, which most indelibly marked the seven-year Greek nightmare. James Becket, an American attorney sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that "a conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand" the number of people tortured, usually in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States.

Becket reported the following: Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: "You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans."

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-Communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

When looked at only superficially, US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has seemed directionless at best, inconsistent at the worst. Why do we celebrate the Chinese government one moment, berate it the next? Why did we intervene in Somalia, but not Rwanda? Why Panama but not Colombia, Iraq but not Iran, Kosovo but not Kurdistan? A closer examination of those policies, however, going back to the end of World War II and even before, reveals a very definite and consistent pattern, but one that is painful for American citizens to reflect upon deeply because of the brutalities committed in our names.

The US has intervened well over 100 times in the internal affairs of other nation states since 1945. The rhetoric has been that we have done so largely to preserve or restore freedom and democracy, or for purely humanitarian reasons. The reality has been that our policies have not done so, but on the contrary, have been consistently designed and implemented to further the interests of US (now largely transnational) corporations, and the elites both at home and abroad who profit from corporate depredations. These policies- often illegal, always unjust-have been enormously successful, so long as we ignore the incalculable suffering endured by tens of millions of innocent peoples the world over as the price paid for "success."

Results of Intervention

Lest this claim be dismissed at the outset as too strong, attempt the following: from among our 100-plus interventions, try to find one in which the great majority of the people in the affected states were not far worse off after than before the intervention. Where have freedom and democracy been strengthened rather than stifled? Where have the "humanitarian" efforts been successful?

Certainly not in those countries where we saw to the overthrow of democratically elected governments-e.g., Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1973-and installed reactionary royalty and murderous military in their stead: the Shah, right-wing generals, and Augusto Pinochet. And surely no sane person would maintain that even in those countries whose governments we sought to replace which were not democratically elected were their peoples in any way better off for our efforts, including such