CubanFox
15th August 2004, 07:43
This essay has it all. It's lengthy, mind you, but is backed up with sources, proving that America's intervention in Nicaragua was imperialism, that the left wing is on the higher moral ground, among other things.
The seemingly out of place numbers (for example, the 6 at the end of 'The fate of Kurds left behind did not concern the U.S. As Kissinger said Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work.6') refer to footnotes at the bottom.
And now, on to the essay.
Originally posted by Bill ([email protected]) at IMAO (http://imao.us/), on May 8, 2004
First things first, you said:
“93 million [people killed by communists during] the entirety of the Cold War.”
What??? I was under the impression that the cold war was not actually a war and that the two superpowers, Russia and America, were threatening each other but didn’t actually attack each other. The closest they got to all out nuclear war, which was why it was called the cold – nuclear winter – war, was the Cuban missile crisis.
Well, maybe that’s my misguided notion of history – but until you can back your argument up with some substantial evidence, and by this I mean something coming from a respectable source, then I’m going to have to treat your statement as a belief and nothing more.
Another thing I noticed established in your argument was that you assumed the Soviet Union, because of its communist name, was actually a communist society. On the contrary, the Soviet Union achieved power – as many parties do nowadays – by claiming to be left-of-centre, and by claiming to champion ‘the people’. Unfortunately, ‘the people’ believed them. However, the infamous Soviet Union we know today was not based on communism, rather on a system of state capitalism. If you consider the repression of free speech (not a communist ideal), the secret police (not a communist ideal) and the totalitarian political system (communism is based on democracy) then you can’t claim the Soviet Union is, by any definition, communist.
This is probably why our friend Pete or Jamie (I get confused) will not respond because he feels he has nothing to apologise for. If you’re going to believe that every country’s named political system is the genuine political system they have, you might as well believe in fairies. You only have to look at China to see how “uncommunist” the state really is. I mean if you really do think every state that bears the name of communism is actually communist you might as well believe the Nazis were socialists: NAZI stands for National Socialists!
Moving on, from my reckoning, the recurring theme in your argument was that firstly, the left never apologize and secondly Chomsky and other left sympathisers support genocide.
First things first, the reason why the left never apologize is because, in comparison with the right, the left has nothing to apologise for. Of course, there are instances where the left gained power and almost immediately became crooked (alas this is actually a common trend) like the case of Soviet Russia – but to move from this observation to the one that claims the left never apologize is meaningless because these so-called left states were in no way representative of left-of-centre political ideology. Thus there should be no reason for the left to apologise for something that didn’t concur with their ideology. Moreover, just because you believe all lefties supported the Soviet Union – with all this implies politically and socially – this doesn’t make it so. A true lefty is one that supports emancipation.
Even so, now that I have said that and thought about it for a while, if the left don’t apologise, they have good reason to.
The right have yet to apologise for capitalism, and all the social and political implications this has brought upon all societies, globalisation, imperialism, colonialism, the 14 hour working day, class privilege, the seven day working week, the opium wars, children in coal mines, the massacre at the Paris commune, slavery, the Spanish American war, the Boer war, starvation, apartheid, anti-union laws, the First World War, Flanders, trench warfare, mustard gas, aerial bombing, the soviet intervention, the armed genocide, chemical weapons, fascism, the great depression, hunger marches, Nazism, the Spanish civil war, radiation death, the massacre of Nanking, Belsden, Dresden, Hiroshima, the Second World War, racism, nuclear weapons, the rape of the third world, the arms race, McCarthyism, environmental degradation and the military suppression of Greece, India, Malaya, Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Turkey (to name but a few of the rights’ errors).
So don’t try and claim you have the moral high ground when I have not heard one apology from you or any other right-winger for all of these substantial errors. This brings me onto the other theme you had underlying in your argument, the left support genocide.
Well, last time I checked the right was the side that promoted a “fend for yourself” and a “survival of the fittest” approach on affairs of state. The supposed goodness of the right is totally undermined when you compare it to the left and, as I pointed out in the previous paragraphs, the left stand for emancipation – regardless of some states bearing the guise of communism, socialism, etc. – so to bring in morality into your post is, how can I put it, ridiculous. The right is famous, or infamous, for the reluctance to support the minority and needy groups of society, so don’t try and bring morality into an argument that puts a premium on rationality and objectivity.
Again, until you can give me some reliable evidence that points to Noam Chomsky supporting the deaths of over a million people then I will treat you belief as totally unjustified.
Anyway, you said:
“Every single instance you cite was part of the KGB-funded "revolution" your lefty forfathers sympathized with. Utter hypocrisy by the never-apologize left.”
Well that sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory coming from the daily edition of right-winger magazine, or possibly a tabloid, doesn’t it?
The KGB did not fund Indonesia in the sixties when General Suharto’s army killed 600,000 people. Nope, the World Bank and the IMF funded that one with the support of the British, Australian and American governments.
The KGB did not fund the Nicaraguan death squads, oh no, that was funded by America. When the sadistic and merciless rule of Somoza was challenged by the Sandinistas in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called "Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza"-that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn't work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza's National Guard as a base for US power.
The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighbourhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be "ill advised" to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out.
The US ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favour of "Somocismo without Somoza," but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed.
The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime – and by the way, while we’re on the subject of war crimes, the US is the only state on record to be charged and convicted of War crimes in the international court, Nicaragua), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua's borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help re-establish the Guard-soon to be re named the contras, or "freedom fighters.")
Reagan used them to launch a large-scale terrorist war against Nicaragua, combined with economic warfare that was even more lethal. America also intimidated other countries so they wouldn't send aid either.
And yet, despite astronomical levels of military support, the United States failed to create a viable military force in Nicaragua. That's quite remarkable, if you think about it. No real guerrillas anywhere in the world have ever had resources even remotely like what the United States gave the contras. You could probably start a guerrilla insurgency in mountain regions of the US with comparable funding...
Why did the US go to such lengths in Nicaragua? The international development organization Oxfam explained the real reasons, stating that, from its experience of working in 76 developing countries, "Nicaragua was...exceptional in the strength of that government's commitment...to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process."
Of the four Central American countries where Oxfam had a significant presence (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua), only in Nicaragua was there a substantial effort to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational and agricultural services to poor peasant families.
Other agencies told a similar story. In the early 1980s, the World Bank called its projects "extraordinarily successful in Nicaragua in some sectors, better than anywhere else in the world."
In 1983, The Inter-American Development Bank concluded "Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying the basis for long-term socio-economic development."
The success of the Sandinista reforms terrified US planners. They were aware that-as Jose Figueres, the father of Costa Rican democracy, put it-"for the first time, Nicaragua has a government that cares for its people." (Although Figueres was the leading democratic figure in Central America for forty years, his unacceptable insights into the real world were completely censored from the US media.)
The hatred that was elicited by the Sandinistas for trying to direct resources to the poor (and even succeeding at it) was truly wondrous to behold. Just about all US policymakers shared it, and it reached virtual frenzy.
Back in 1981, a State Department insider boasted that we would "turn Nicaragua into the Albania of Central America"-that is, poor, isolated and politically radical-so that the Sandinista dream of creating a new, more exemplary political model for Latin America would be in ruins.
George Shultz called the Sandinistas a "cancer, right here on our land mass," that has to be destroyed. At the other end of the political spectrum, leading Senate liberal Alan Cranston said that if it turned out not to be possible to destroy the Sandinistas, then we'd just have to let them "fester in [their] own juices."
So the US launched a three-fold attack against Nicaragua. First, they exerted extreme pressure to compel the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank to terminate all projects and assistance.
Second, they launched the contra war along with an illegal economic war to terminate what Oxfam rightly called "the threat of a good ex ample." The contras' vicious terrorist attacks against "soft targets" under US orders did help, along with the boycott, to end any hope of economic development and social reform. US terror ensured that Nicaragua couldn't demobilize its army and divert its pitifully poor and limited resources to reconstructing the ruins that were left by the US-backed dictators and Reaganite crimes.
One of the most respected Central America correspondents, Julia Preston (who was then working for the Boston Globe), reported "Administration officials said they are content to see the contras debilitate the Sandinistas by forcing them to divert scarce resources toward the war and away from social programs." That's crucial, since the social programs were at the heart of the good example that might have infected other countries in the region and eroded the American system of exploitation and robbery.
The US Government even refused to send disaster relief. After the 1972 earthquake, it sent an enormous amount of aid to Nicaragua, most of which was stolen by our buddy Somoza. In October 1988, an even worse natural disaster struck Nicaragua-Hurricane Joan. The US didn't send a penny for that, because if it had, it would probably have got to the people, not just into the pockets of some rich thug. The US also pressured our allies to send very little aid.
This devastating hurricane, with its welcome prospects of mass starvation and long-term ecological damage, reinforced our efforts. The US wanted Nicaraguans to starve so we could accuse the Sandinistas of economic mismanagement. Because they weren't under our control, Nicaraguans had to suffer and die.
Third, the US government used diplomatic fakery to crush Nicaragua. As Tony Avirgan wrote in the Costa Rican journal Mesoamerica, "the Sandinistas fell for a scam perpetrated by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and the other Central American Presidents, which cost them the February [1990] elections."
For Nicaragua, the peace plan of August 1987 was a good deal, Avrigan wrote: they would move the scheduled national elections forward by a few months and allow international observation, as they had in 1984, "in exchange for having the contras demobilized and the war brought to an end...." The Nicaraguan government did what it was required to do under the peace plan, but no one else paid the slightest attention to it.
Arias, the White House and Congress never had the slightest intention of implementing any aspect of the plan. The US virtually tripled CIA supply nights to the contras. Within a couple of months the peace plan was totally dead. As the election campaign opened, the US made it clear that the embargo that was strangling the country and the contra terror would continue if the Sandinistas won the election. You have to be some kind of Nazi or unreconstructed Stalinist to regard an election conducted under such conditions as free and fair- and south of the border, few succumbed to such delusions.
If anything like that were ever done by our enemies...I leave the media reaction to your imagination. The amazing part of it was that the Sandinistas still got 40% of the vote, while New York Times headlines proclaimed that Americans were "United in Joy" over this "Victory for US Fair Play."
Ah well, life’s to short to rebut all the other instances you mentioned in their entirety (and I can assure you I could provide just as much, if not more, evidence to involve the US and other Western governments to all the atrocities that were cited). What you should do is use some evidence if you’re going to want to sound the least bit objective. Until then I will treat your argument as mere ideological rhetoric…
Anyway, with that thought in mind, while I hope your preparing some evidence, and in the spirit of being consistent, I’ll me give you a little evidence on one of the countries you claimed was funded by the KGB, Iraq. This information comes from a former US attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and provides a brief but comprehensive outline of the history of Iraq.
Iraq has been a target of U.S. covert actions since at least 1958, when a popular revolution led by Abdel Kassem overthrew the Iraqi monarchy, which was installed by Britain in 1921. In 1960, the new government helped found the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, to resist Western oil monopolies.1
The CIA plotted Kassem's assassination and U.S. generals in Turkey devised a military plan, called "Canonbone," to invade northern Iraq and seize its oil fields.2 In 1963, Kassem and thousands of supporters were massacred in a CIA-backed coup.
In 1968, the Baathist Party came to power. In 1972, it nationalized the U.S./U.K.-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company under the slogan "Arab oil for the Arabs." After a meeting with President Nixon, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the shah of Iran, the CIA urged Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to rebel against the Iraqi government. The U.S. promised to back them all the way. The House Select Committee on Intelligence Pike Report described it as a "cynical enterprise, even in the context of clandestine operations."3 The Shah funnelled U.S.-supplied arms to the Kurds.4 The Pike Report stated that neither the Shah "nor the President and Kissinger desired victory for [the Kurds]. They hoped the insurgents would [maintain] a level of hostilities to sap the resources of [Iraq]."5
In 1975, Iraq agreed to share the Shatt-al-Arab waterway with Iran. Support for the Kurds was terminated. The fate of Kurds left behind did not concern the U.S. As Kissinger said "Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work."6
In 1979, the Iranian people to overthrew the shah's despotic regime. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski then publicly encouraged Iraq to attack Iran and take back the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.7
In 1980, the U.S. provided Iraq with intelligence reports that Iran would quickly collapse in the face of an Iraqi advance. At the urging of U.S.-backed Arab rulers in Kuwait, Egypt and elsewhere, Saddam Hussein unleashed a war with Iran in which hundreds of thousands died.8
The attack served U.S. interests by weakening Iran, where U.S. embassy personnel were still kept hostage. The U.S. did not want either side to win. "We wanted to avoid victory by both sides," a Reagan official told the New York Times.9 Kissinger was more blunt: "I hope they kill each other" and "too bad they both can't lose."10
Iraq could not have sustained the eight year war without massive assistance, direct and indirect, from the U.S.S.R., Eastern bloc countries, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, the U.S., U.K., France, and West Germany. The Pentagon and CIA provided Iraq with satellite and AWACS intelligence on Iranian forces.11 The U.S. sent CIA and Special Forces to train Iraqi commandos and the U.S. helped funnel billions of dollars worth of arms to Iraq.12
Egypt, a major recipient of U.S. military aid, sent troops, tanks and heavy artillery to Iraq.13 In 1980, the military dictatorship in Turkey - a major recipient of U.S. military aid - sent troops to fight rebels in Iraqi Kurdistan, freeing Iraq's army to concentrate on fighting Iran.
The U.S.-supported regimes in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also supported Iraq's war effort. Kuwait's contributed over $30 billion. The U.S. sold over $20 billion worth of arms to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states during this period and allowed Saudi Arabia to transfer large quantities of U.S. arms to Iraq during the war.
In 1984, the U.S. became Iraq's principal trading partner by increasing its purchases of Iraqi oil while encouraging Europe and Japan to do likewise.14 The Reagan administration increased intelligence-sharing with Iraq. Vice President Bush, the State Department and the CIA lobbied for large-scale financing of U.S. exports to Iraq.15 In 1986, the U.S. sent a CIA team to advise the Iraqi military.16
But the U.S. was supporting both sides. In 1983, U.S. and Turkish generals were preparing to re-implement the 1958 "Cannonbone" plan.17 Until 1986, the U.S. funnelled arms to Iran through Oliver North, Israel and Pakistan.18 In 1985, Oliver North told Iranian officials that the U.S. would try to engineer the overthrow of Hussein.19
In 1987, the U.S. became directly involved in the war on Iraq's side by protecting the passage of Kuwaiti tankers with a major military presence in the Persian Gulf. Some U.S.-escorted, Kuwait tankers carried Iraqi oil while Iraqi planes attacked Iranian tankers. The U.S. sank Iranian patrol ships and destroyed their oil platforms.
In 1987, Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. became commander of the U.S. Central Command. He had a unique background for the assignment.20 In the 1953, his father assisted in the CIA's coup in Iran.
When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, U.S. war contingency plans made Iraq the enemy.21 In January 1990, CIA Director William Webster testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on growing Western dependency on Middle East oil.22 In February, Schwarzkopf told the committee that the U.S. should increase its military presence in the region and described new intervention plans.23 In 1990, the U.S. conducted at least four war games directed at Iraq, some premised on an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The U.S. wanted a new war in the Middle East: the Pentagon, to maintain its tremendous budget; arms industries, to feed their Middle East and U.S. military contracts; oil companies, for increased profits; and the Bush administration, which saw the USSR's disintegration as a chance to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East to control of its oil resources.
The challenge was to force Iraq, a country more interested in rebuilding than expansion, to take action that would justify U.S. military intervention. To create this crisis, the U.S. invoked its special relationship with the Kuwait. In his book Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War, Pierre Salinger observed that Kuwait drastically increase oil production one day after the Iran-Iraq ceasefire.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait seized 900 square miles of Iraq's Rumaila oil field. Using U.S. drilling technology, Kuwait was also stealing oil that was indisputably inside Iraq. When Iraqi troops amassed on the border, Hussein summoned U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to his office to clarify the U.S. position. Glaspie assured him: "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. [Secretary of State] James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction."24
Footnotes:
1. Middle East Economic Survey, May 12, 1961.
2. New Statesman, July 15, 1983.
3. Gerard Chaliand and Ismet Seriff Vanly, People Without A Country, 1980, 184.
4. Will Safire, New York Times, Feb.12, 1976.
5. See Chaliand and Vanly.
6. See Chaliand and Vanly
7. Christopher Hitchens, Harper's Magazine, Jan.1991, 70.
8. Dilip Hiro, The Longest War, 1991.
9. S. Hersh, New York Times, Jan.26, 1992, 1.
10. Shahram Chubinl and Charles Trip, Iran and Iraq at War, 1988, 207.
11. The Christic Institute, "Covert Operations, the Persian Gulf War and the New World Order."
12. The Economist, May 6, 1982.
13. Francis Boyle, "International Crisis and Neutrality: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward the Iraq-Iran War," in Neutrality: Changing Concepts and Practices, 1986.
14. Leslie Gelb, "Bush's Iraqi Blunder," New York Times, May 4, 1992
15. "'Nightline' on the Bush-Iraq Connection," in Israel and Palestine Political Report, June 1991, 5.
16. Toward 2000, Mar.16, 1991.
17. Far Eastern Economic Review, Dec.19, 1991.
18. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix A: vol. 1, Tape 12, 1500.
19. Fred Halliday, Arabia Without Sultans: A Political Survey of Instability in the Arab World, 1975.
20. Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran, 1979.
21. William Webster, Senate Cttee. on Armed Services, Jan.23, 1990, 60.
22. Norman Schwarzkopf, Senate Cttee. on Armed Services, Feb.8, 1990, 577-579.
23. U.S. Army, "A Strategic Force for the 1990s and Beyond," Jan.1990, 1-17.
24. Stewart M. Powell, San Fransisco Examiner, Sept. 24, 1990, A12.
Of course this was the fault of the KGB wasn’t it???
Here are some sources I have used and copied from:
http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/..._Nicaragua.html (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Nicaragua.html)
The seemingly out of place numbers (for example, the 6 at the end of 'The fate of Kurds left behind did not concern the U.S. As Kissinger said Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work.6') refer to footnotes at the bottom.
And now, on to the essay.
Originally posted by Bill ([email protected]) at IMAO (http://imao.us/), on May 8, 2004
First things first, you said:
“93 million [people killed by communists during] the entirety of the Cold War.”
What??? I was under the impression that the cold war was not actually a war and that the two superpowers, Russia and America, were threatening each other but didn’t actually attack each other. The closest they got to all out nuclear war, which was why it was called the cold – nuclear winter – war, was the Cuban missile crisis.
Well, maybe that’s my misguided notion of history – but until you can back your argument up with some substantial evidence, and by this I mean something coming from a respectable source, then I’m going to have to treat your statement as a belief and nothing more.
Another thing I noticed established in your argument was that you assumed the Soviet Union, because of its communist name, was actually a communist society. On the contrary, the Soviet Union achieved power – as many parties do nowadays – by claiming to be left-of-centre, and by claiming to champion ‘the people’. Unfortunately, ‘the people’ believed them. However, the infamous Soviet Union we know today was not based on communism, rather on a system of state capitalism. If you consider the repression of free speech (not a communist ideal), the secret police (not a communist ideal) and the totalitarian political system (communism is based on democracy) then you can’t claim the Soviet Union is, by any definition, communist.
This is probably why our friend Pete or Jamie (I get confused) will not respond because he feels he has nothing to apologise for. If you’re going to believe that every country’s named political system is the genuine political system they have, you might as well believe in fairies. You only have to look at China to see how “uncommunist” the state really is. I mean if you really do think every state that bears the name of communism is actually communist you might as well believe the Nazis were socialists: NAZI stands for National Socialists!
Moving on, from my reckoning, the recurring theme in your argument was that firstly, the left never apologize and secondly Chomsky and other left sympathisers support genocide.
First things first, the reason why the left never apologize is because, in comparison with the right, the left has nothing to apologise for. Of course, there are instances where the left gained power and almost immediately became crooked (alas this is actually a common trend) like the case of Soviet Russia – but to move from this observation to the one that claims the left never apologize is meaningless because these so-called left states were in no way representative of left-of-centre political ideology. Thus there should be no reason for the left to apologise for something that didn’t concur with their ideology. Moreover, just because you believe all lefties supported the Soviet Union – with all this implies politically and socially – this doesn’t make it so. A true lefty is one that supports emancipation.
Even so, now that I have said that and thought about it for a while, if the left don’t apologise, they have good reason to.
The right have yet to apologise for capitalism, and all the social and political implications this has brought upon all societies, globalisation, imperialism, colonialism, the 14 hour working day, class privilege, the seven day working week, the opium wars, children in coal mines, the massacre at the Paris commune, slavery, the Spanish American war, the Boer war, starvation, apartheid, anti-union laws, the First World War, Flanders, trench warfare, mustard gas, aerial bombing, the soviet intervention, the armed genocide, chemical weapons, fascism, the great depression, hunger marches, Nazism, the Spanish civil war, radiation death, the massacre of Nanking, Belsden, Dresden, Hiroshima, the Second World War, racism, nuclear weapons, the rape of the third world, the arms race, McCarthyism, environmental degradation and the military suppression of Greece, India, Malaya, Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Turkey (to name but a few of the rights’ errors).
So don’t try and claim you have the moral high ground when I have not heard one apology from you or any other right-winger for all of these substantial errors. This brings me onto the other theme you had underlying in your argument, the left support genocide.
Well, last time I checked the right was the side that promoted a “fend for yourself” and a “survival of the fittest” approach on affairs of state. The supposed goodness of the right is totally undermined when you compare it to the left and, as I pointed out in the previous paragraphs, the left stand for emancipation – regardless of some states bearing the guise of communism, socialism, etc. – so to bring in morality into your post is, how can I put it, ridiculous. The right is famous, or infamous, for the reluctance to support the minority and needy groups of society, so don’t try and bring morality into an argument that puts a premium on rationality and objectivity.
Again, until you can give me some reliable evidence that points to Noam Chomsky supporting the deaths of over a million people then I will treat you belief as totally unjustified.
Anyway, you said:
“Every single instance you cite was part of the KGB-funded "revolution" your lefty forfathers sympathized with. Utter hypocrisy by the never-apologize left.”
Well that sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory coming from the daily edition of right-winger magazine, or possibly a tabloid, doesn’t it?
The KGB did not fund Indonesia in the sixties when General Suharto’s army killed 600,000 people. Nope, the World Bank and the IMF funded that one with the support of the British, Australian and American governments.
The KGB did not fund the Nicaraguan death squads, oh no, that was funded by America. When the sadistic and merciless rule of Somoza was challenged by the Sandinistas in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called "Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza"-that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn't work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza's National Guard as a base for US power.
The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighbourhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be "ill advised" to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out.
The US ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favour of "Somocismo without Somoza," but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed.
The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime – and by the way, while we’re on the subject of war crimes, the US is the only state on record to be charged and convicted of War crimes in the international court, Nicaragua), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua's borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help re-establish the Guard-soon to be re named the contras, or "freedom fighters.")
Reagan used them to launch a large-scale terrorist war against Nicaragua, combined with economic warfare that was even more lethal. America also intimidated other countries so they wouldn't send aid either.
And yet, despite astronomical levels of military support, the United States failed to create a viable military force in Nicaragua. That's quite remarkable, if you think about it. No real guerrillas anywhere in the world have ever had resources even remotely like what the United States gave the contras. You could probably start a guerrilla insurgency in mountain regions of the US with comparable funding...
Why did the US go to such lengths in Nicaragua? The international development organization Oxfam explained the real reasons, stating that, from its experience of working in 76 developing countries, "Nicaragua was...exceptional in the strength of that government's commitment...to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process."
Of the four Central American countries where Oxfam had a significant presence (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua), only in Nicaragua was there a substantial effort to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational and agricultural services to poor peasant families.
Other agencies told a similar story. In the early 1980s, the World Bank called its projects "extraordinarily successful in Nicaragua in some sectors, better than anywhere else in the world."
In 1983, The Inter-American Development Bank concluded "Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying the basis for long-term socio-economic development."
The success of the Sandinista reforms terrified US planners. They were aware that-as Jose Figueres, the father of Costa Rican democracy, put it-"for the first time, Nicaragua has a government that cares for its people." (Although Figueres was the leading democratic figure in Central America for forty years, his unacceptable insights into the real world were completely censored from the US media.)
The hatred that was elicited by the Sandinistas for trying to direct resources to the poor (and even succeeding at it) was truly wondrous to behold. Just about all US policymakers shared it, and it reached virtual frenzy.
Back in 1981, a State Department insider boasted that we would "turn Nicaragua into the Albania of Central America"-that is, poor, isolated and politically radical-so that the Sandinista dream of creating a new, more exemplary political model for Latin America would be in ruins.
George Shultz called the Sandinistas a "cancer, right here on our land mass," that has to be destroyed. At the other end of the political spectrum, leading Senate liberal Alan Cranston said that if it turned out not to be possible to destroy the Sandinistas, then we'd just have to let them "fester in [their] own juices."
So the US launched a three-fold attack against Nicaragua. First, they exerted extreme pressure to compel the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank to terminate all projects and assistance.
Second, they launched the contra war along with an illegal economic war to terminate what Oxfam rightly called "the threat of a good ex ample." The contras' vicious terrorist attacks against "soft targets" under US orders did help, along with the boycott, to end any hope of economic development and social reform. US terror ensured that Nicaragua couldn't demobilize its army and divert its pitifully poor and limited resources to reconstructing the ruins that were left by the US-backed dictators and Reaganite crimes.
One of the most respected Central America correspondents, Julia Preston (who was then working for the Boston Globe), reported "Administration officials said they are content to see the contras debilitate the Sandinistas by forcing them to divert scarce resources toward the war and away from social programs." That's crucial, since the social programs were at the heart of the good example that might have infected other countries in the region and eroded the American system of exploitation and robbery.
The US Government even refused to send disaster relief. After the 1972 earthquake, it sent an enormous amount of aid to Nicaragua, most of which was stolen by our buddy Somoza. In October 1988, an even worse natural disaster struck Nicaragua-Hurricane Joan. The US didn't send a penny for that, because if it had, it would probably have got to the people, not just into the pockets of some rich thug. The US also pressured our allies to send very little aid.
This devastating hurricane, with its welcome prospects of mass starvation and long-term ecological damage, reinforced our efforts. The US wanted Nicaraguans to starve so we could accuse the Sandinistas of economic mismanagement. Because they weren't under our control, Nicaraguans had to suffer and die.
Third, the US government used diplomatic fakery to crush Nicaragua. As Tony Avirgan wrote in the Costa Rican journal Mesoamerica, "the Sandinistas fell for a scam perpetrated by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and the other Central American Presidents, which cost them the February [1990] elections."
For Nicaragua, the peace plan of August 1987 was a good deal, Avrigan wrote: they would move the scheduled national elections forward by a few months and allow international observation, as they had in 1984, "in exchange for having the contras demobilized and the war brought to an end...." The Nicaraguan government did what it was required to do under the peace plan, but no one else paid the slightest attention to it.
Arias, the White House and Congress never had the slightest intention of implementing any aspect of the plan. The US virtually tripled CIA supply nights to the contras. Within a couple of months the peace plan was totally dead. As the election campaign opened, the US made it clear that the embargo that was strangling the country and the contra terror would continue if the Sandinistas won the election. You have to be some kind of Nazi or unreconstructed Stalinist to regard an election conducted under such conditions as free and fair- and south of the border, few succumbed to such delusions.
If anything like that were ever done by our enemies...I leave the media reaction to your imagination. The amazing part of it was that the Sandinistas still got 40% of the vote, while New York Times headlines proclaimed that Americans were "United in Joy" over this "Victory for US Fair Play."
Ah well, life’s to short to rebut all the other instances you mentioned in their entirety (and I can assure you I could provide just as much, if not more, evidence to involve the US and other Western governments to all the atrocities that were cited). What you should do is use some evidence if you’re going to want to sound the least bit objective. Until then I will treat your argument as mere ideological rhetoric…
Anyway, with that thought in mind, while I hope your preparing some evidence, and in the spirit of being consistent, I’ll me give you a little evidence on one of the countries you claimed was funded by the KGB, Iraq. This information comes from a former US attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and provides a brief but comprehensive outline of the history of Iraq.
Iraq has been a target of U.S. covert actions since at least 1958, when a popular revolution led by Abdel Kassem overthrew the Iraqi monarchy, which was installed by Britain in 1921. In 1960, the new government helped found the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, to resist Western oil monopolies.1
The CIA plotted Kassem's assassination and U.S. generals in Turkey devised a military plan, called "Canonbone," to invade northern Iraq and seize its oil fields.2 In 1963, Kassem and thousands of supporters were massacred in a CIA-backed coup.
In 1968, the Baathist Party came to power. In 1972, it nationalized the U.S./U.K.-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company under the slogan "Arab oil for the Arabs." After a meeting with President Nixon, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the shah of Iran, the CIA urged Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to rebel against the Iraqi government. The U.S. promised to back them all the way. The House Select Committee on Intelligence Pike Report described it as a "cynical enterprise, even in the context of clandestine operations."3 The Shah funnelled U.S.-supplied arms to the Kurds.4 The Pike Report stated that neither the Shah "nor the President and Kissinger desired victory for [the Kurds]. They hoped the insurgents would [maintain] a level of hostilities to sap the resources of [Iraq]."5
In 1975, Iraq agreed to share the Shatt-al-Arab waterway with Iran. Support for the Kurds was terminated. The fate of Kurds left behind did not concern the U.S. As Kissinger said "Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work."6
In 1979, the Iranian people to overthrew the shah's despotic regime. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski then publicly encouraged Iraq to attack Iran and take back the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.7
In 1980, the U.S. provided Iraq with intelligence reports that Iran would quickly collapse in the face of an Iraqi advance. At the urging of U.S.-backed Arab rulers in Kuwait, Egypt and elsewhere, Saddam Hussein unleashed a war with Iran in which hundreds of thousands died.8
The attack served U.S. interests by weakening Iran, where U.S. embassy personnel were still kept hostage. The U.S. did not want either side to win. "We wanted to avoid victory by both sides," a Reagan official told the New York Times.9 Kissinger was more blunt: "I hope they kill each other" and "too bad they both can't lose."10
Iraq could not have sustained the eight year war without massive assistance, direct and indirect, from the U.S.S.R., Eastern bloc countries, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, the U.S., U.K., France, and West Germany. The Pentagon and CIA provided Iraq with satellite and AWACS intelligence on Iranian forces.11 The U.S. sent CIA and Special Forces to train Iraqi commandos and the U.S. helped funnel billions of dollars worth of arms to Iraq.12
Egypt, a major recipient of U.S. military aid, sent troops, tanks and heavy artillery to Iraq.13 In 1980, the military dictatorship in Turkey - a major recipient of U.S. military aid - sent troops to fight rebels in Iraqi Kurdistan, freeing Iraq's army to concentrate on fighting Iran.
The U.S.-supported regimes in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also supported Iraq's war effort. Kuwait's contributed over $30 billion. The U.S. sold over $20 billion worth of arms to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states during this period and allowed Saudi Arabia to transfer large quantities of U.S. arms to Iraq during the war.
In 1984, the U.S. became Iraq's principal trading partner by increasing its purchases of Iraqi oil while encouraging Europe and Japan to do likewise.14 The Reagan administration increased intelligence-sharing with Iraq. Vice President Bush, the State Department and the CIA lobbied for large-scale financing of U.S. exports to Iraq.15 In 1986, the U.S. sent a CIA team to advise the Iraqi military.16
But the U.S. was supporting both sides. In 1983, U.S. and Turkish generals were preparing to re-implement the 1958 "Cannonbone" plan.17 Until 1986, the U.S. funnelled arms to Iran through Oliver North, Israel and Pakistan.18 In 1985, Oliver North told Iranian officials that the U.S. would try to engineer the overthrow of Hussein.19
In 1987, the U.S. became directly involved in the war on Iraq's side by protecting the passage of Kuwaiti tankers with a major military presence in the Persian Gulf. Some U.S.-escorted, Kuwait tankers carried Iraqi oil while Iraqi planes attacked Iranian tankers. The U.S. sank Iranian patrol ships and destroyed their oil platforms.
In 1987, Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. became commander of the U.S. Central Command. He had a unique background for the assignment.20 In the 1953, his father assisted in the CIA's coup in Iran.
When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, U.S. war contingency plans made Iraq the enemy.21 In January 1990, CIA Director William Webster testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on growing Western dependency on Middle East oil.22 In February, Schwarzkopf told the committee that the U.S. should increase its military presence in the region and described new intervention plans.23 In 1990, the U.S. conducted at least four war games directed at Iraq, some premised on an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The U.S. wanted a new war in the Middle East: the Pentagon, to maintain its tremendous budget; arms industries, to feed their Middle East and U.S. military contracts; oil companies, for increased profits; and the Bush administration, which saw the USSR's disintegration as a chance to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East to control of its oil resources.
The challenge was to force Iraq, a country more interested in rebuilding than expansion, to take action that would justify U.S. military intervention. To create this crisis, the U.S. invoked its special relationship with the Kuwait. In his book Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf War, Pierre Salinger observed that Kuwait drastically increase oil production one day after the Iran-Iraq ceasefire.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait seized 900 square miles of Iraq's Rumaila oil field. Using U.S. drilling technology, Kuwait was also stealing oil that was indisputably inside Iraq. When Iraqi troops amassed on the border, Hussein summoned U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to his office to clarify the U.S. position. Glaspie assured him: "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. [Secretary of State] James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction."24
Footnotes:
1. Middle East Economic Survey, May 12, 1961.
2. New Statesman, July 15, 1983.
3. Gerard Chaliand and Ismet Seriff Vanly, People Without A Country, 1980, 184.
4. Will Safire, New York Times, Feb.12, 1976.
5. See Chaliand and Vanly.
6. See Chaliand and Vanly
7. Christopher Hitchens, Harper's Magazine, Jan.1991, 70.
8. Dilip Hiro, The Longest War, 1991.
9. S. Hersh, New York Times, Jan.26, 1992, 1.
10. Shahram Chubinl and Charles Trip, Iran and Iraq at War, 1988, 207.
11. The Christic Institute, "Covert Operations, the Persian Gulf War and the New World Order."
12. The Economist, May 6, 1982.
13. Francis Boyle, "International Crisis and Neutrality: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward the Iraq-Iran War," in Neutrality: Changing Concepts and Practices, 1986.
14. Leslie Gelb, "Bush's Iraqi Blunder," New York Times, May 4, 1992
15. "'Nightline' on the Bush-Iraq Connection," in Israel and Palestine Political Report, June 1991, 5.
16. Toward 2000, Mar.16, 1991.
17. Far Eastern Economic Review, Dec.19, 1991.
18. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix A: vol. 1, Tape 12, 1500.
19. Fred Halliday, Arabia Without Sultans: A Political Survey of Instability in the Arab World, 1975.
20. Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran, 1979.
21. William Webster, Senate Cttee. on Armed Services, Jan.23, 1990, 60.
22. Norman Schwarzkopf, Senate Cttee. on Armed Services, Feb.8, 1990, 577-579.
23. U.S. Army, "A Strategic Force for the 1990s and Beyond," Jan.1990, 1-17.
24. Stewart M. Powell, San Fransisco Examiner, Sept. 24, 1990, A12.
Of course this was the fault of the KGB wasn’t it???
Here are some sources I have used and copied from:
http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/..._Nicaragua.html (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Nicaragua.html)