Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 7 No. 3 | Fall 1985 (Seattle) /// Issue 13 of 24 /// Master# 61 of 73

INTERVENTION IN VIETNAM AND CENTRAL AMERICA: PARALLELS AND DIFFERENCES By Noam Ghomsky Illustrations by Garel Moiseiwitsch f n the real world, U.S. global planning has always been sophisticated and careful, as A you'd expect from a major superpower with a highly centralized and class conscious dominant social group. Their power, in turn is rooted in their own ownership and management of the society and economy, as is the norm in most societies. During World War II, American planners were very well aware that the United States was going to emerge as a world-dominant power in a position of hegemony that had few historical parallels and they organized and met in order to deal with this situation. From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies were conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. One group was called the War- Peace Studies Group, which met for six years and produced extensive geopolitical analyses and plans. The Council on Foreign Relations is essentially the business input to foreign policy planning. These groups also involved every top planner in the State Department with the exception of the Secretary of State. The conception that they developed is what they called “Grand Area” planning. The Grand Area was to be a region that was subordinated to the needs of the American economy. As one planner put it, it was to be the region that is “strategically necessary for world control.” The geopolitical analysis held that the Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over ourselves. This is what is called “anti-imperialism” in American scholarship. The Area was also to include Western and Southern Europe and the oil-producing regions of the Middle East, and in fact, it was to include everything, if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions that were to organize and police it, essentially in the interests of this subordination to American domestic needs. With respect to the Far East, the plans were roughly as follows: Japan, it was understood, would sooner or later be the industrial heartland of Asia once again. Since Japan is a resource-poor area, it would need Southeast Asia and South Asia for resources and markets. All of this, of course, would be incorporated within the global system dominated by the United States. With regard to Latin America, the matter was put most plainly by Secretary of War Henry Stimson in May 1945 when he was explaining how we must eliminate and dismantle all regional systems dominated by any other power, particularly the British, while maintaining and extending our own system. He explained with regard to Latin America as follows: “I think that it’s not asking too much to have 6ur little region over here which never has bothered anybody.” The basic thinking behind all of this has been explained quite lucidly on a number of occasions. (This is a very open society and if one wants to learn what’s going on, you can do it; it takes a little work, but the documents are there and the history is there also.) One of the clearest and most lucid accounts of the planning behind this was by George Kennan, who was one of the most thoughtful, humane, and liberal of the planners, and, in fact, was eliminated from the State Department largely for that reason. Kennan was the head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s.dn the following document, PPS23, February 1948, he outlined the basic planning: We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. ... We should cease to talk about vague and. . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. There are some questions that one can raise about Kennan’s formulation, a number of them, but I’ll keep to one. One is whether he is right in suggesting that “human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization” should be dismissed as irrelevant to American foreign policy. Actually, a review of the historical record suggests a different picture, namely that the United States often has opposed with tremendous ferocity, and violence, these elements—human rights, democratization, and the raising of the living standards. This is particularly the case in Latin America and there are very good reasons for it. The commitment to these doctrines is inconsistent with the use of harsh measures to maintain the disparity, to insure our control over 50 percent of the resources, and our exploitation of the world. In short, what we might call “the First Freedom” (there were Four Freedoms, you remember, but there was one that was left out), the Freedom to Rob, and that’s really the only one that counts; the others were mostly for show. And in order to maintain the freedom to rob and exploit, we do have to consistently oppose democratization, the raising of living standards, and human rights. And we do consistently oppose them; that, of course is in the real world. This Top Secret document referred to the Far East, but Kennan applied the same ideas to Latin America in a briefing for Latin American ambassadors in which he explained that: “One of the main concerns of U.S. policy is the protection of our raw materials.” Who must we protect our raw materials from? Well, primarily, the domestic populations, the indigenous populations, which may have ideas about raising living standards. And that’s inconsistent with maintaining the disparity. How will we protect our raw materials from the indigenous population? Well, the answer is the following: The final answer might be an unpleasant one, but. . . we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful, since the Communists are essentially traitors. .. . It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists. Well, who are the Communists? “Communists” is a term regularly used in American political theology to refer to people who are committed to the belief that “the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people.” I’m quoting the words of a 1949 State Department intelligence report which warned about the spread of this grim and evil doctrine, which does, of course, threaten “our raw materials” if we can’t 30 Clinton St. Quarterly

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