Democracy, Human Rights, and Empire

This week Colin Powell made a solemn visit to a mass grave of Kurdish
victims of gassing by Saddam’s regime in 1988. The Secretary of
State’s pilgrimage followed recent visits to the same site by Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld in now ritualized selective mourning
directed toward turning the growing Iraq quagmire into a paean to
human rights - detracting attention from daily casualties and
staggering costs of an occupation which has failed to find weapons of
mass destruction and has failed to bring measurable self-rule to the
Iraqi people.

With all other rationales imploding, the claim that Iraq has finally
been freed from the horrors of mass murder and repression by a
benevolent intervention has now become the primary argument for this
costly, destructive venture. However, such claims are belied by a
disturbing recent report on ABC. In response to a reporter’s question
put to a "high US government official" about why Washington in the
first gulf war encouraged the Shiites in southern Iraq to rebel, only
to later facilitate the killing of tens of thousands of them by a
vengeful Saddam, the official replied: "It’s better to have [in
power] the devil we know than the devil we don’t know."

That chilling statement underscores that fact that "human rights" and
freedom from terror are invariably trumped by the larger strategic,
political and economic interests that drive Washington’s foreign
policies - even at the price of committing or abetting mass murder.
At a deeper level, human rights are ultimately subverted by nation
states operating within a global social system motivated by objectives
and interests which at their essence cannot and do not accommodate the
needs "liberated" peoples but must exploit them and suppress their
quest for self-determination.

To demonstrate that democracy and human rights are advancing in Iraq,
Rumsfeld and others point to the emergence of scores of newspapers
liberated from Saddam’s repression (while the administration seeks to
tighten the flow of information in the US) and a flowering of the arts
– under occupation. Trapped by their rhetoric, the occupiers, have
little short-term choice but to countenance such developments. But the
acid test of movement toward a self-determining, democratic system is
ascension to power by the Iraqi people over their country’s wealth and
polity. A free press and a blossoming culture may yet have unintended
consequences for the "coalition," but at present they are tolerated as
a confirmation of the Bush-Rumsfeld mantra that Iraq, five months
after the declaration of the end of "major combat" is better off than
under Saddam’s heel.

But such claims of democratic revival are negated by the often brutal
and arbitrary behavior of occupation forces unhinged by resistance.
The creation of a "governing council" scripted and controlled by L.
Paul Bremer, the "civil administrator" of Iraq and former managing
director of the Kissinger Group hardly constitutes a vehicle for
participatory democracy. A question persists: what would Washington
(and London) do if the two best organized forces in Iraq, the Shiites
and an alliance of left groups, were to attain a majority of votes in
an ultimately unavoidable election? There can be little doubt that
Washington and its acolytes would not allow the emergence of a
popularly elected government which would order the withdrawal of
foreign military forces, the dismantling of bases that had been built
for permanence, and the removal of US political leverage over the
entire Middle East and its resources. Washington’s stubborn resistance
to UN administration over Iraq is at its core aimed at preservation of
its imperial ambitions and is targeted at frustrating democratic rule
in Iraq.

US opposition to popularly elected governments and popular movements
seen as inimical to its strategic and economic interests is deeply
rooted in the history of the nation’s foreign and military policies.
Its actions in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, The
Philippines, Vietnam are among the most visible examples of over 130
military mainly bloody interventions in the last century.
Less widely recognized perhaps is the long history of imperial
ambition cloaked in the raiment of advancing democracy, human rights
and open markets. The US’s first major foray onto the world imperial
stage was in the late nineteenth century when Washington, facing
already consolidated European and Japanese spheres of influence in
China, called for an "Open Door" to that promising market. The Open
Door was cloaked in opposition to imperial spheres; it was "anti-
colonial colonialism" pressed by a power late to the imperial game,
but rapidly surpassing its competitors in economic and military
strength. Such power, US ruling groups believed, would soon overwhelm
the imperial spheres and establish US hegemony over all of China
through open markets, free trade and demagogic embrace of the anti-
imperialist longings of native populations. The US Open Door venture
in Asia foundered in the face of European and Japanese resistance,
while in the same period the Spanish-American war ended in a more
direct and brutal US suppression of indigenous rebellion in the
Philippines as well as in a half century of domination of Cuba through
bogus regimes under thinly disguised US control.

Woodrow Wilson was the prime architect of US empire in the name of
"democracy, human rights and self-determination." His vision of free
elections and parliamentary rule was patterned on the US model —
calculating that such institutions imposed on underdeveloped regions
would discourage participation by the poor and assure rule by educated
middle and upper classes who would serve as factotums for US business
– protecting foreign property and investments and obliging their
infrastructures to depend on US technology. Interventions in Haiti,
Mexico and Central America under Wilson often embraced the rhetoric of
human rights while constituting violent aggrandizement of big business
interests Wilson pressed the US into World War I not to prevent an
imperial re-division of the world, nor to pursue universal self-
determination, but to guarantee a place at the postwar bargaining
table for pursuit of US strategic and economic objectives. Wilson
sought to impose open markets globally - but settled for a share of
"trusteeships" over the defeated central powers’ colonies when the
other great powers rejected the dismantling of the colonial system.
His losing battle to take the US into the League of Nations was based
on a belief that US imperial interests could be best realized under an
ordered international system. Wilson’s victorious senatorial opponents
sought maximum freedom of action unencumbered by commitment to an
international formation. They won - and this turned out to be the
first clear expression of a split in ruling circles between
"multilateralists" and "unilateralists."

Unilateralism tended to predominate during the supposedly
"isolationist" twenties with a vast expansion of US investments in
underdeveloped countries and with repeated military interventions -
especially in the Caribbean and Central America. Multilateral
engagement did not clearly reemerge until FDR was confronted with the
need to form a grand alliance against fascism - an alliance which
laid the groundwork for the United Nations. However, the
disintegration of that alliance into a bipolar cold war ushered in one
of the most unsavory and painful chapters in US history. While
Roosevelt had edged toward a vision of an Open Door world which
defined human rights in terms of political freedom and the essential
right to food, shelter, medical care and work — the US in the cold
war fomented the ascension of dictators, subversion of popular
moments, bloody coups and major wars, all in the name of stopping
communism.

Postwar parliamentary governments in Germany and Japan are often
pointed to as successful US "nation building" anchored on respect for
human rights. But those countries were reconstructed after WWII on
advanced industrial foundations which keyed strong recoveries. They
were programmed as bulwarks against the spread of communism in Europe
and Asia and as markets for an expansive postwar US economy. The
Marshall Plan obligated recovering Europe to purchase US products and
allow US capital to penetrate its economies. In West Germany the first
parliamentary elections were rigged to give advantage to rural
conservatives; the country’s industries and political structures were
honeycombed with former Nazis, some of whom were quickly freed after
conviction for war crimes; throughout the fifties the German Communist
Party was denied legal status. Japanese recovery was predicated on the
re-imposition of a voracious capitalism and against considerable
popular opposition to permanent US military bases.

The collapse of the USSR and the East bloc diminished the need for
"authoritarian" anti-communist regimes that were staples of US cold
war alliances. The price of sponsoring the likes of Pinochet,
Fujimori, Somoza, was no longer worth paying - especially when
Washington, unencumbered by cold war competition, could revive the old
Wilsonian vision of a mirror-image world of a stable "democratic"
states open to corporate plunder buttressed by unchallenged US
military power. It was no accident that Pentagon guru Paul Wolfowitz
emerged in the early 1990s under Dick Cheney’s sponsorship to promote
yoked concepts of preemptive attack on any who challenged US hegemony
along with promotion of allegedly democratic regimes as alternatives
to Jean Kirkpatrick’s outmoded alliances with authoritarians. The
dissolution of the states of eastern Europe erased the minimal
multilateral arrangements for constraining the risk of nuclear war and
reawakened, with qualitatively new ugliness and menace, the imperial
unilateralism of former times.

In the wake of Vietnam, Jimmy Carter emphasized human rights as a way
to erase the stain of the war while also seeking to strengthen
dissident movements in socialist states. After 1991, "human rights"
was more clearly directed toward becoming an inseparable lever for
corporate global integration. Yet, on the left, "humanitarian
intervention" became a contentious issue. Bill Clinton’s use of
military force to reinstall Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti (after he
had been ousted in a military coup) and two US-NATO interventions in
Yugoslavia to allegedly halt ethnic cleansing became major sources of
confusion and division.

Aristide, a populist ex-priest and his Family Lavalas party had risen
to power in Haitian politics while earning the enmity of the country’s
small privileged elite which along with armed remnants of the Duvalier
dictatorship overthrew the exponent of liberation theology in 1990.
Clinton’s return of Aristide to power in 1994 seemed to suggest even
to some on the left that perhaps a new post-cold war epoch of US
enlightenment was dawning. To put it mildly: that was not the case. As
a price for returning, Aristide was forced to accommodate to
Washington’s agenda: vowing to include elements of the right wing in
his resurrected government to preserve stability, accepting the
dictates of global financial institutions - including acceding to
IMF demands for dismantling what little remained of the public sector,
maximizing the profitability of Haiti’s free trade zones, assuring a
compliant non-striking flow of cheap labor controlled by security
forces, and allowing the US Coast Guard to patrol Haitian waters.
Under these circumstances Clinton’s "humanitarian" intervention had
locked Haiti into its grinding poverty with two out of three jobless,
a per capita annual income of $250, and 4.7 million out of 7.7
suffering from severe malnutrition.

In 1980, Yugoslavia’s debt to western institutions was twenty-billion
dollars. But due to cold war strategic considerations, it was not
dealt with harshly. However, the collapse of the USSR changed all
that: Washington’s assistance ended; the crushing weight of the IMF
now came down on Yugoslavia with demands for expedited debt payments
and increased marketization. The country was gripped by severe crisis;
its state sector was starved of capital while production and
employment tumbled. Germany orchestrated the breakup of the prosperous
northern states of Croatia and Slovenia, further aggravating a
gathering catastrophe. With the economic vise tightening, a vicious
war for spoils broke out between Croatia and Serbia, the two major
ethnically based states among the six forged into a national entity by
Josef Tito in 1945. Slobodan Milosevic, the former communist Serb
leader seized the dubious banners of Serb nationalism, allying with
rightist military forces, while Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian
president, engaged in similar tactics. The war was fought over the
resources and strategic worth of ethnically diverse Bosnia with both
sides engaging in the killing or removal of ethnic groups perceived as
enemies.

The United States, abetted by NATO, determined that a fragmented
Yugoslavia reshaped into weaker client states would constitute the
best road to the extension of US and NATO influence into the Balkans
and to reducing the danger that two NATO members, Greece and Turkey,
might intervene on opposing sides. Serbia, the fulcrum of a formerly
coherent Yugoslavia, with perhaps the most deeply rooted remnants of
socialism, became the principal target. Milosovic had attempted to
accommodate the demands of the IMF and other creditors. But grass
roots resistance and accelerating economic collapse made it too late.
Serbia also drew the strongest spotlight on its ethnic violence and
removals while a weaker but no less culpable Croatia won a public
relations battle. In 1994, the Clinton administration armed and
trained a combined Croat-Muslim force to drive Serbs out of Croatian
border areas with Bosnia, killing 10,000 and making 200,000 homeless
in a human rights disaster. In August 1995, NATO at US urging launched
a devastating bombing campaign against the Serbs. The Clinton
administration cobbled together the Dayton Accords which effectively
partitioned Bosnia and ultimately broke up Yugoslavia. Orthodox Serbs
and Muslim Bosnians who had coexisted for many years, had intermarried
and had shared the landscape, were now sundered and thrown into
grating and virtually permanent poverty.

While this carnage was going on, the economy of Kosovo in the south
was collapsing. Under growing economic and social pressures, a bitter
struggle broke out between competing Albanian and Serb nationalisms.
Like the Bosnia war, Washington imposed sanctions on Serbia, launched
"humanitarian" bombing campaigns, and forced a short-term settlement
that eventually came apart and obliged the UN to enter the picture.
Today, the killing in Kosovo is no longer on the front pages - but
it goes on with at least 1200 killed since a brokered truce took
effect and with spreading social and economic misery.
The consequences of "humanitarian interventions" driven by the
requirements of corporate globalization were summed up in a Boston
Globe article (6/22/03) a few months ago: "In the postwar, post-
Milosevic Serbia, the notion of ’truth and reconciliation’ runs far
behind pressing economic concerns. Life is hard, with rising prices
matched by high unemployment and stagnant wages. Some state-run
factories have closed, disemploying whole villages. And the real
shocks of privatization lie ahead."

It is not possible for present US global policies to pursue and
accommodate any reasonable standards of democracy and human rights.
Interventions in the core interests of corporate globalization and in
defiance of international law ultimately worsen the living conditions
and liberties of those whose rights are allegedly being upheld. That
is the heart of the matter - and this is what must be recognized and
addressed in the struggle for a better life for all.
Genuine pursuit of human rights must embrace principles of ending
imperial un ilateralism and respecting the equality of nations;
respecting the values, traditions, and beliefs of all countries and
peoples; resolving conflicts through equal discussion and cooperation;
redistributing wealth to close the gap between rich and poor; ending
environmental degradation, and accepting the principle that the well
being of humanity is the basic goal of human endeavor. That is a big
order. But impressive global movements to fulfill those and similar
objectives are already in motion. And, here in the citadel of empire,
all who care about human rights and democracy should demand
enlightened and effective policies toward those ends. They should be
part of the present electoral process; they should be incorporated
into the efforts of all who seek progress to build a polity that
addresses human rights within the framework of economic justice and
international cooperation. That can be done.

[Mark Solomon is a national co-chair of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He can be contacted
through the CCDS website http://www.cc-ds.org ]