Tom Hull: Greg Grandin: Empire's Workshop

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Greg Grandin: Empire's Workshop

Greg Grandin's book, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006, Metropolitan; recently reprinted in paperback) provides a rather cursory overview of US domination over Latin America. The emphasis here is on "New Imperialism" -- how the US kicked Vietnam Syndrome to flex muscles as the world's sole superpower. Grandin argues that the path passed through Central America, where Reagan's "new morning in America" is linked to 300,000 deaths and a legacy of subterfuge of American and international law, orchestrated by many of the same people who under Bush moved on to the Middle East.

Grandin starts off with a chapter called "How Latin America Saved the United States From Itself"; a section called "The Porcupine Problem" suggests some reservations against outright empire (p. 24):

But if expansion enjoyed broad support, the idea of direct colonialism did not. A nativist racism, unlike the imperialist variant expressed by Joseph Strong, led many in the United States to refuse the responsibilities of presiding over large populations of nonwhite peoples. William Jennings Bryan's declaration that the the "Filipinos cannot be citizens without endangering our civilization" reflected this sentiment, but it also signaled a wish to protect America's working class from the competition of cheap labor. Republicans like Beveridge and Taft promoted first a mighty navy and then a commanding air force as a way of protecting American shores and projecting American power but fought against the expansion of the army, which, they felt, would inevitably lead to overseas wars and increasinging involvement in the messy waters of international poitics. Sequential invasions and military occupations did indeed prove costly -- particularly in the Philippines, where a bloody insurgency killed 4,000 American soldiers and 200,000 Filipinos -- turning the public and many political leaders, including eventually Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, against formal empire. When an aide suggested to Roosevelt that he annex the Dominican Republic to quell political disorder and head off the threat of a German invasion to collect debt, the president replied that he was no more inclined to do so "than a gorged boa constrictor would be to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to."

The Cold War added an ideological dimension to the gunboat-reinforced Monroe Doctrine and Open Door Policy (pp. 41-42):

One reason for this turnaround was, of course, the Cold War. Washington found that it greatly preferred anti-Communist dictatorships to the possibility that democratic openness might allow the Soviets to gain a foothold on the continent. Because of a "growing awareness of Soviet Russia's aggressive policy," wrote the State Department's Division of the American Republics, the United States now "swung back toward a policy of general cooperation [with dictators] that gives only secondary importance to the degree of democracy manifested by [Latin America's] respective governments." Another reason was to protect investment, as democracy led to a wave of strikes calling for more humane standards of living, better wages, health care, social security, and land and labor reform. Threatened by escalating labor unrest, U.S. corporations demanded protection from Washington and stepped up their patronage of local conservative movements. For their part, Latin America's landed class, Catholic Church, and military took advantage of the United States's new Cold War policy to launch a continental counterrevolution, overturning newly democratic governments and forcing those constitutional regimes that survived to the right. By 1952, when Fulgencio Batista took power in a military coup in Cuba, nearly every democracy that had come into being in the postwar period was upended.

Moreover, by the early 1950s, Washington found that it was increasingly difficult merely to support dictators from the sidelines. The frustration of postwar democracy combined with increased political repression to radicalize a generation of young nationalists, who began to identify the United States not as a model but as an obstacle to reform. In the face of such growing opposition to its hemispheric authority, the United States began to take the lead in efforts to "arrest the development of irresponsibility and extreme nationalism," as Thomas Mann, Eisenhower's assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, wrote in 1952. The first "arrest," as it were, carried out directly by the United States came two years later [overthrowing Arbenz in Guatemala].

On Nixon vs. Chile (pp. 59-60):

The overthrow of Allende [in September 1973] was a quintessential expression of détente, which sought to eliminate any and all threats to the bipolar world then being designed by the United States and the USSR. Allende's Popular Unity government rejected both Soviet-style suppression of civil liberties and American economic dominance, believing it could steer Chile down a peaceful road to socialism while maintaining political freedoms. Chile's challenge, therefore, was not that it would be turned into another Castro-style dictatorship but that it wouldn't. "I don't think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry [Kissinger] saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro," remarked one NSC staffer. "If Latin America ever became unraveled, it would never happen with a Castro. Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America. All kinds of cataclysmic events rolled around, but Chile scared him." Another aide recalled that his boss feared that the effects of Allende's election would spill over into Western Europe, particularly into Italy, where the Communist Party had broken with Moscow and was trying to chart a middle path similar to Allende's. "The fear," according to Seymour Hersh in his biography of Kissinger, "was not only that Allende would be voted into office, but that -- after his six-year term -- the political process would work and he would be voted out of office in the next election. Kissinger saw the notion that Communists could participate in the electoral process and accept the results peacefully as the wrong message to send Italian voters."

The bulk of the book is on Reagan's Central America policies (p. 71):

Once in office, Reagan came down hard on Central America, in effect letting his administration's most committed militarists set and execute policy. In El Salvador, over the course of a decade, they provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal counterinsurgency campaign. In Nicaragua, they patronized the Contras, a brutal insurgency led by discredited remnants of the deposed dictator's national guard designed to roll back the Sandinista revolution. In Guatemala, they pressed to reestablish military aid to an army that was in the middle of committing genocide, defending the country's born-again president even as he was presiding over the worst slaughter in twentieth-century Latin America. All told, U.S. allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.

On El Salvador (p. 104):

Yet despite all the talk of modernization, the Reagan White House was ideologically disinclined to promote the kind of state-managed development that could create employment or to break up Salvador's extreme concentration of political and economic power. By 1983, the United States had all but abandoned its celebrated land reform -- by that point planters and their military allies had already executed hundreds of individuals who tried to take advantage of its provisions, rendering the reform dead in all but name. Far from promoting industrialization and a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth, the Reagan administration insisted that Duarte orient the economy toward free trade while at the same time cutting back on social spending, which only served to estrange the Christian Democrats further from their working-class supporters. By 1986, the Salvadoran government was spending less on schools and health care than it had a decade earlier.

This turned into a neocon workshop (pp. 118-119):

It was in the exercise of Central American policy that conservative militants turned statesmen learned how to maneuver around their more cautious colleagues in the State Department and most consistently disregarded the opinion of multilateral institutions. When the International Court of Justice ordered the United States to pay Nicaragua billions of dollars in reparations for mining its harbor and conducting an illegal war of aggression, Washington balked and withdrew from the court's jurisdiction -- a "watershed moment," according to legal scholar Eric Posner, in the United States's relationship with the international community, one that Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has cited as evidence for why the United States should not support the new International Criminal Court. It was in Central America that unconventional warriors learned to bypass congressional oversight by creating a semiprivate, international network to carry out a clandestine foreign policy and to undermine post-Vietnam efforts to limit the use of military power for other than clearly defined, limited objectives. And it was there that the New Right, now in power, began to instill a culture of loyalty to the cause and incuriosity about the world: "To raise a question was to be a negative thinker," complained CIA agent Nestor Sanchez of the administration's fixation on Central America.

On the politics of the new imperialism (pp. 121-122):

For many of the policy and opinion makers who seized on 9/11 to promote their vision of an imperial America, placing the nation on a permanent war footing was as much a form of domestic collective therapy as it was an international crusade to reshape the world. "Nothing less than an unambiguous victory will save us from yet another disappointment in ourselves and another despairing disillusion with our leaders." The attacks provided a chance for Americans who "crave 'a new birth' of the confidence we used to have in ourselves and in 'America the Beautiful.'" Such desires to overcome the factionalism and disenchantment that had plagued America since the 1960s were not confined to the political right, as many liberals likewise hungered for a renewed sense of national purpose. The New Republic's Peter Beinart, for instance, called on Democrats to join the struggle against Islamic fascism and to rediscover their "fighting faith" in political liberalism. For their part, essayists Max Boot and Charles Krauthammer have expressed optimism that the brutality of the protracted global war on terrorism would finally form a callus over the national psyche, dulling the undue sensitivity to pain that spread in the wake of Vietnam.

More on politics, the roots of the later cynical manipulations practiced by the second Bush administration (pp. 130-131):

The point of all this activity was not to create majority support for Reagan's Central American policy. White House director of communications Patrick Buchanan admitted as much at a 1986 Low-Intensity Warfare Conference when he said that the consensus that existed between 1941 and 1966 was gone and was not coming back: "There are many Americans out there . . . that will tell you that the great enemy of America is our support for right-wing dictatorships. . . . We do not have agreement among ourselves. We are not going to have agreement. We haven't had it for 20 years. And it seems to me that there is no sense waiting for that agreement before acting." The goal, rather, was to prevent an oppositional consensus from forming.

To that end, Public Diplomacy, much like rational-choice counterinsurgency, helped shift the debate in favor of the White House not by winning over domestic hearts and minds but by making it too costly for mainstream journalists and politicians to challenge policy.

By flooding the media with questionalble facts and allegations, the Office of Public Diplomacy forced Reagan's opponents to dissipate their energies disproving allegations rather than making their own positive case for nonintervention. Confronted by government spokespeople and sympathetic experts ready to rebut unfavorable coverage, no matter how slight the criticism or how marginal the source, reporters came to dread the amount of fact checking it took to cover Central America. "I work for a network very concerned with cost and image," complained Karen Burnes of ABC News in 1987. "It takes months and months," she said, to do a critical story on Reagan's Central American policy. Spending that much prep time on a story that would take up only five minutes of airtime, she said, was "not a way to be successful."

By offering alternative interpretations, no matter how far-fetched, to discredit charges of atrocities committed by U.S. allies, Public Diplomacy muddied the waters and made it difficult, if not impossible, for human rights organizations to establish the facts of a case.

This same media dominance eventually paid off in wearing down the Iran-Contra investigation, allowing Reagan-Bush officials to escape punishment.

More on the media (pp. 134-135):

It was on the front line of the Central American conflicts that the Pentagon learned how to finesse the news at home by controlling reporters at the source. Defense strategists had analyzed the relationship between the press and the military after Vietnam and concluded that the problem in Southeast Asia was that journalists had become too independent in developing their own channels of information. In response, the Pentagon and the CIA granted privileged access to certain reporters in Central America, laying the groundwork for protocols that would be developed further in Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. John Waghelstein recounts that when he first arrived in El Salvador in the early 1980s he found that "many of the stories were written from within guerrilla-controlled areas and some of the eye-witness accounts had a pro-guerrilla bias." He took "serious steps" to change this, conducting a "series of one-on-one backgrounders with a few of the more respected journalists" and holding an "informal weekly press session." "Good Salvadoran commanders were highlighted" and "problems were discussed candidly." He also authorized network camera crews to film the Salvadoran army in action. Such controlled access gave U.S. military advisers a way to establish cordial, respectful relations with the in-country press corps, allowing them not only to present their side of the war but to accustom select mainstream reporters to that access and make them loath to write anything that might jeopardize it.

It also created a bonding experience in which privilege was transformed into sympathy for the institution granting the access. Fred Barnes, now of the Weekly Standard but then of the New Republic, was even allowed to don a uniform and play "Contra for a Day." The only critical note in his chronicle of life among the anti-Communist insurgents was that the "coffee wasn't hot enough" and he had to sleep on a "plywood slab."

Iran-Contra ends with a whimper, allowing its malefactors to return (p. 136):

The fallout from the [Iran-Contra] scandal itself had largely been contained, as the Senate refused to investigate the assumptions driving the policy and instead focused on procedural violations. The special prosecutor's inquiry dragged on for years with little result, stonewalled by the Department of Justice -- with John Bolton taking the lead in playing defense -- and increasingly ignored by a press unwilling to bring down another president. Not only were those convicted or indicted pardoned, but many of the key players in the affairs -- Abrams, Negroponte, Weinberger, and Reich -- went on to take jobs in George W. Bush's administration. The anti-imperial moment was over.

In opposition to "liberation theology" the neocons offered their own fundamentalism (pp. 147-149):

As did their mainstream coreligionists, fundamentalists formulated their free-market moralism as a quarrel with liberation theology -- which they described as a "theology of mass murder" and the "the single most critical problem that Christianity has faced in all its 2000-year history." They of course dismissed [Michael] Novak's liberalism but like him saw capitalism as an ethical system, one that corresponded to God's gift of free will. Man lives in a "fundamentally scarce world," Christian economist John Coper argued, not an abundant one only in need of more equitable distribution, as the liberation theologians would have it. The profit motive, rather than being an amoral economic mechanism, is part of a divine plan to discipline fallen man and makes him produce. Where Christian humanists contended that people were fundamentally good and that "evil" was a condition of class exploitation, Christian capitalists such as Amway's Richard DeVos, head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, insisted that evil is found in the heart of man. Where liberation theology held that humans could fully realize their potential here on earth, fundamentalist economists argued that attempts to distribute wealth and regulate production were based on an incorrect understanding of society -- an understanding that incited disobedience to proper authority and, by focusing on economic inequality, geneated guilt, envy, and conflict. God's Kingdom, they insisted, would be established not by war between the classes but by a struggle between the wicked and the just.

Like Novak, evangelicals sought to rebut liberation theology's critique of the global political economy. Third-world poverty, according to evangelical economist Ronald Nash, has a "cultural, moral, and even religious dimension" tha t reveals itself in a "lack of respect for any private property," "lack of initiative," and "high-leisure preference." Some took this argument to its logical conclusion. Gary North, another influential Christian economist, insisted that the "Third World's problems are religious: moral perversity, a long history of demonism, and outright paganism." "The citizens of the Third World," he wrote, "ought to feel guilt, to fall on their knees and repent from their Godless, rebellious, socialistic ways. They should feel guilty because they are guilty, both individually and corporately."

Evangelical Christianity's elaboration of a theological justification for free-market capitalism, along with its view of an immoral third world, resonated with other ideological currents within the New Right, laying the groundwork for today's embrace of empire as America's national purpose. In a universe of free will where good work is rewarded and bad works are punished, the fact of American prosperity was a self-evident confirmation of God's blessing of U.S. power in the world. Third-world misery, in contract, was proof of "God's curse."

More theology (pp. 154-155):

This transformation of conservative activists into world revolutionaries entailed adopting an ethics of absolutism, sacrificing any qualms they may have had about means at the altar of ends. The violence of counterinsurgent war stoked the fires of evangelical Manichaeanism, leading Falwell, Robertson, and others to ally with the worst murderers and torturers in Central and Latin America. "For the Christian," wrote Russ Walton, a fundamentalist activist, "there can be no neutrality in this battle: 'He that is not with Me is against Me' (Matthew 12:30)." Robertson befriended Roberto D'Aubuisson -- who was behind the murder of, among untold others, Archbishop Oscar Romero -- celebrating both men on his Christian Broadcasting Network. And more than a dozen New Christian Right organizations, including the Moral Majority and Pro-Life Action Committee, presented D'Aubuisson with a plaque in 1984, honoring his "continuing efforts for freedom."

On to Iraq (pp. 159-160):

Immediately after his arrival (and before handing the reins to old Contra hand John Negroponte), L. Paul Bremer, America's proconsul during what was hoped would be the consolidation stage of the occupation, imposed a package of economic reforms that institutionalized corporate power. He eliminated or lowered tariffs to no more than 5 percent, reduced the top personal income and corporate tax rate to a flat 15 percent, curtailed the right of labor to organize and strike, removed restrictions on foreign corporate ownership, allowed foreign businesses unlimited repatriation of profits, laid off public-sector employees, and privatized state industries. The U.S. occupation has imposed on Iraq a massive state intervention on behalf of multinationals, insured by U.S. taxpayers an dsubsidized by the U.S. defense budget. Not for nothing is the U.S. First Cavalry Division in Iraq carrying out "Operation Adam Smith," aimed at teaching Iraqis -- despite their centuries-long fame as entrepreneurs, traders, and merchants -- business practices that conform to the new global corporate order. Bremer's "Iraqi Order 81" even prohibited Iraqi farmers from saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next, obliging them to buy them anew each season from corporations like Monsanto and Dow Chemical -- so much for the 2002 National Security Strategy's promise that free trade would "unleash the productive potential of individuals in all nations."

It was a "stunning example" of free-market nation building, wrote the Wall Street Journal, one that made "Iraq's economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor." Whatever the motivations of either the occupation or the insurgency, the dismantling of state industries, abolition of food subsidies, and throwing open of Iraq to imports and foreign capital stoked the fires of resentment, conscripting thousands of unemployed men into the ranks of the armed opposition.

On the rise of the new right (pp. 178-179):

The death of New Deal liberalism came in 1973, when the United States was hit by the twin blows of sharply rising oil prices and a seventeen-month recession, described by political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers as "the longest and deepest economic downturn the United States had experienced since the great Depression." The contraction led to a sharpened sense of class consciousness and unity of action among corporate leaders -- many of whom had previously supported the New Deal coalition but now rapidly increased their funding of conservative political action committees, advocacy advertising, ad hoc lobbying groups, and right-wing policy and legal think tanks dedicated to the dismantling of economic regulations and social entitlements. The number of pro-business political action committees jumped from 248 in 1974 to 1,100 in 1978. The Olin, Smith Richardson, and Scaife funds, representing chemical, pharmaceutical, and petrochemical interests, paid scholars and journalists to produce, as corporate activist William E. Simon, Nixon's undersecretary of the Treasury, put it, "books, books, and more books" to rejoin the "relationship between political and economic liberty."

Again (p. 180):

With détente offering no relief from the crunch generated by increased global competition and a third world hostile to U.S. capitalist investment, the Forbes 500 knights of the Business Roundtable made their peace with the renascent right and set out to retake the third world. Putting aside their qualms about a potential inflationary risk, non-defense industry CEOs joined in the call for a renewed arms buildup. Executive officers from corporations that used to be squarely in the Democratic camp began to work closely with right-wing think tanks and policy institutes such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which promoted both a dramatic expansion of America's military might abroad and the shredding of the New Deal at home.

The right's promotion of inequality (p. 182):

Reagan's policies halted and then began the reversal of what some economists had identified as a dangerous trend -- namely, the democratization of wealth brought about by union power, a progressive corporate and personal tax code, education spending, low unemployment, and social welfare programs. Over the course of the previous three decades, the amount of income claimed by the nation's top 1 percentile dropped from 16 to 8 percent. Reagan's tax cuts and increased defense spending reversed this process, creating permanent budget shortfalls and slowing bleeding New Deal and Great Society programs. When unsustainable deficits compelled Reagan to raise revenues, he did so by largely shifting the burden to payroll taxes, which only helped to further weaken support for government programs -- understandably so since real wages had begun to decline for many working-class families. Tight money led to rising unemployment and to the gutting of organized labor's bargaining power. Automatic cost-of-living salary increases, job security, and guaranteed pensions were thereby consigned to the ash heap of history. Corporations began the scuttling of America's industrial base, moving production to the Southwest and overseas.

The link between Reagan and Bush (pp. 230-231):

It was in Central America that the public relations people who advised the Reagan administration first made an important rhetorical shift when they polled the public and found that the word terrorism, intangible as it is, generated more negative connotations than did Communism to describe America's enemy. After 9/11, terrorism gave way to the even more gossamer evil, a word that, whatever role it plays in the specific cosmology of the president and his New Christian Right base, resonates broadly with America's sense of itself as a purpose-driven nation. Bush's ability to stay incuriously on message, like Reagan's communicative skills, is undoubtedly high on the list of PR "exploitable assets." The combination of big-money power, Madison Avenue expertise, and grassroots energy with which to intimidate political opponents into supporting a hard line in Central America is replicated in any number of campaigns, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth broadsides against John Kerry, which were as much about imperial policy as they were about a domestic presidential election.

The military's success at establishing cordial and respectful relations with journalists covering Central America, while at the same time cultivating their loyalties through promises of privileged access, paved the way for the tight control the Pentagon exercised over the media in Iraq. Likewise, the appointment of Negroponte, associated as he is with Reagan's Contra war, as director of national intelligence is a reminder that many of the post-9/11 intelligence "reforms" were first proposed in the 1980s to monitor the Latin American solidarity movement. Oliver North's plant o place dissenting Americans in detention centers in the event of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, along with the FBI investigation and harassment of CISPES activists, is today ratified by the Patriot Act and other successful efforts to restrict constitutional guarantees and human rights in the name of national security, such as the practice of "extraordinary rendition." Rendition allows suspects in the war on terror to be swept off the street in whatever country they find themselves and whisked, without record of their capture, to a third country, where they can be held and interrogated indefinitely in secret prisons -- a globalization of the system of disappearances that reigned in Latin America during the Cold War.

In fact, all of George W. Bush's abuses of power -- the manipulation of intelligence and the media, the building of an interagency war party that operated autonomously from Washington's foreign policy establishment, the illegal wiretaps, and the surveillance of antiwar activists -- have their most immediate antecedents in Reagan's Central American policy, which in retrospect has to be understood as the first battle in the New Right's crusade to roll back restrictions placed on the imperial presidency in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, COINTELPRO, and other scandals of the 1970s.