Having already written an article on an often overlooked objective in US Cold War foreign policy, namely the maintenance of corporate interests in vast regions of the world, I thought I might make an entry now on examples of that aim being pursued. I was partly inspired to do so by the fact that it is now about 50 years ago that US involvement in Vietnam more or less reached its peak, 500 000 American soldiers being stationed there after decades of direct and indirect intervention in the affairs of the region. Though rightly one of the best remembered occasions of an abuse of US power in foreign affairs, the Vietnam War is far from an isolated moment in history, the early Cold War being riddled with such events that ought be remembered. Not only do these incidents go further to dispel notions that the US was acting in pure interests of national security, but many among them are in fact recognisable as war crimes that have long gone without proper condemnation by international law. It is for these reasons that it is worth discussing them.
To begin, we can look at the broad region closest to home for the United States: Latin America. The affirmation of US economic control over this region as an almost mini-empire goes as far back as the 1820s, with President Munro’s Munro Doctrine, which somewhat sets the stage for later events. An article on Cold War foreign policy by the University of Texas notes that:
“Latin America and the United States have reacted in different ways to the end of the Cold War. For Latin Americans, coming to terms with the meaning of the Cold War has been an ongoing process that has stretched into the twenty-first century. Latin Americans have established commissions to establish the facts of what happened to their societies during the forty-five year confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. For more than two decades, Latin Americans have been looking to locate their dead and find their missing children… U.S. officials have issued scattered apologies for Cold War decisions that destroyed the lives of Latin Americans. But no agency of the U.S. government has conducted a systematic assessment of the U.S. role in Latin America during the Cold War… The release of records has not, however, prompted a public discussion about the past. Discussion of the U.S. war in Latin America is largely confined to the scholarly community.”
A public discussion is certainly merited as “the Cold War proved a gruesome time for Latin Americans,” as the author notes. One of the earliest occasions of US intervention here was in the 1954 Guatemala coup. A 1944 revolution overthrew existing government in the country and established democratic elections, which eventually put into power President Jacobo Arbenz, a leader who was not a Communist though he held a left-wing political stance. His activities caught the attention of the US government and of the United Fruit Company (UFC), a US corporation that dominated Guatemalan agriculture, in particular his policy of land reform which nationalised much agricultural land so that unused fields could be redistributed to poor labourers who could thereafter establish their own businesses – a project which went on to benefit 500 000 people. After intense lobbying by the UFC, the CIA began making steps to act. A 1953 CIA memo states disapproval of Arbenz’s
“…persecution of foreign economic interests, enactment and implementation of a confiscatory agrarian reform law, court packing and conduct of an aggressively anti-American, pro-Communist publicity campaign…”
Similarly, a 1952 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) notes that
“…there has developed a strong national movement to free Guatemala from the military dictatorship, social backwardness, and “economic colonialism” which had been the pattern of the past. These aspirations command the emotional loyalty of most politically conscious Guatemalans and the administration of President Arbenz derives corresponding strength from its claim to leadership of the continuing national Revolution…
In the longer view, continued Communist influence and action in Guatemala will gradually reduce the capabilities of the potentially powerful anti-Communist forces to produce a change.”
In other words, those steps to reversing the “social backwardness” of Guatemala’s past must be stopped because they represent a threat to the control of “anti-Communists”, which signifies quite importantly, in these early CIA documents, anyone willing to pursue the economic objectives the US government envisaged in the early 1940s. (Giving some limited historical source analysis, while the NIE is written with the purpose only of assessing the situation in Guatemala and not of arguing for or against the actions of any parties in the country, making it less reliable as a source on the US government’s opinions of Arbenz, its lament over the loss of “anti-Communist” power certainly allows us to make an inference as to the prevalent stance on events that was held by members of the CIA, as does the 1953 memo.)
The CIA subsequently enacted Operation PBSUCCESS, a military coup which overthrew Arbenz and put in place Carlos Castillo Armas, a violent dictator more sympathetic to the desires of the UFC and other US corporations. Armas would go on to arrest and to kill thousands of Guatemalan civilians under pretense of a “Communist-purge”, his government receiving large sums of US aid money all the while. Guatemala thereafter continued to be run by a succession of ultra right-wing dictators, all backed with US support. This included Efrain Rios Montt, whose military regime enacted a campaign of rape, murder, and torture against the population of Guatemala in the 1980s. By the 1990s, it is estimated that this line of regimes had killed approximately 200 000 civilians.
The Dominican Republic, Cuba, and El Salvador are just few of the other nations of Latin America that saw the US pursue a similar objective: actions in Guatemala were evidently done with the intention of constructing a large international political system in which US corporate interests could flourish, democracy and human rights being deliberately abandoned in the process if required. On the other hand, protecting the people of Guatemala from a tyrannous regime, usually “Communism” in such an interpretation of the Cold War, seems to have played little role in US decisionmaking.
Another region which occupied the attention of those directing US foreign policy was the Middle East. In 1951, Iran saw the election of President Mohammad Mosaddegh, widely remembered as a champion of secular democracy who sought to modernise Iranian society so that it should be fairer and more just. As with Arbenz, without being a Communist, Mosaddegh introduced a wide range of social and land reforms, in particular legislation regarding workers’ rights, and opposed the extensive domination of his country by the Western powers. This culminated in his nationalising the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP), a decision which went poorly with the British government. MI6 subsequently co-ordinated with the CIA to plot a military coup which would overthrow Mosaddegh and reinstate Iran’s Shah regime.
One archived CIA document called “Campaign to install a pro-western government in Iran” refers to the US government’s planning “to effect the fall of the Mosaddeq [sic] government; and to replace it with a pro-western government under the Shah’s leadership…” This the CIA did shortly thereafter in 1953, removing an effective democracy that has since not returned and reversing some of the most meaningful political progress that Iran ever achieved.
As with Latin America, there’s a broad pattern as to American motives: the US was willing to eschew real concern for the preservation of democracy in the developing world if it was required to secure the economic interests of itself and its allies. Regarding the Communist threat, Ervand Abrahamian, a scholar in modern Iranian history, makes the interpretation that:
“there was never really a fair compromise offered to Mosaddeq, what [the UK and the US] wanted Mosaddeq to do is to give up oil nationalisation and if he’d given that… the national movement would have been meaningless…
My argument is that there was never really a realistic threat of communism.”
A third and final region which, as mentioned, is greatly remembered for the US’ intervention there during the Cold War is of course South East Asia. Vietnam saw a large and fast growing communist movement shortly around WWII, which resisted the then ruling French imperialists in a successful campaign that forced a French withdrawal. in 1954, the US played a significant role in the Geneva Agreements which decided to partition the country of Vietnam into a North ruled by the Communist political leaders and a south that eventually fell into the hands of Ngo Dinh Diem, with the intention that democratic elections eventually decide which institution should rule a unified Vietnam. Diem’s cancellation of the elections in 1959 led to a rise in terrorist activity by the Vietcong (VC) Communist guerillas, which unnerved the US and led it to intervene militarily.
Even quite aside from considerations of economic vs. security motives in the US’ motivations in Vietnam, its conduct in the war is particularly striking for the intense levels of aggression which it possessed. I recently finished reading an essay by Noam Chomsky entitled “The Rule of Force in International Relations”, a review of a work by a historian by the name of Telford Taylor who argues that there is strong reason to consider US actions as war crimes in the context of international law.
In particular, American conduct lies within the definition of what the Nuremburg laws defined as “crimes against peace”, : “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.” This is codified still in the UN Charter, whose Article 51 essentially defines all engagement in war as illegal unless it is done in self-defense or for the preservation of international security, it being necessary that the UN Security Council (UNSC) determine whether a situation meets such criteria beforehand. Not only did the US fail to consult the UNSC, but there is considerable evidence that it’s entry into Vietnam was principally an act of aggression. As Chomsky notes,
“The fundamental problem in establishing the United States case [that it is engaged in self-defence from Communist North Vietnam] is that American military intervention preceded and has always been far more extensive than North Vietnamese involvement…”
“All in all, the case that the United States was merely exercising the inherent right to collective self-defence against an armed attack from North Vietnam is frail indeed.” A 1965 White Paper reported on the little over 100 weapons the North Vietnamese Army possessed, as opposed to the $860 million given to South Vietnam by the US since 1961 and US officials by March 1962 already conducting regular air strikes in South Vietnam.
Most striking, however, is the manner in which US military strategy represented a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions through extensive attacks on civilians. It is often argued that this done without intention and out of necessity, the target of American the American military being Communist forces that infiltrated South Vietnam and were often sheltered by the largely sympathetic South Vietnamese peasantry. However, there is considerable evidence of real motives being subtly different and with ominous implications. Chomsky cites the work of Neil Sheehan, a journalist who covered the Pentagon Papers – military documents regarding the Vietnam War that were released to the public in 1971 – as observing that the US vetoed all reconsideration of intensive civilian bombing campaigns in the 1960s because it was part of their main military strategy, namely “obliterating [the Communists’] strategic base, the rural population.” In other words, the targeting of civilians was not an unfortunate by-product of the US’ pursuit of its military aims, but fulfilled the true aim of terrorising the South Vietnamese peasantry, which was largely in support of the Communist forces by this time, so that they could not mobilise to put in power their desired political institutions.
The consequences were often severe. Referred to as “forced-draft urbanisation and modernisation” by military planners, the US routinely sought to make the lives of the Vietnamese insupportable as a matter of course: “Refugees, reporters, and other observers have presented voluminous substantiating evidence. What is particularly important is that these episodes appear to be quite routine,” notes Chomsly. The Citizen’s Commission of Inquiry on United States War Crimes in Washington DC saw men testify to cases including 27 civilians gathered in a peaceful meeting being killed by US tanks, as well as US soldiers shooting at “starving civilians” scavenging in a garbage dump in 1966 after their food was destroyed by chemical weapons. The New York Times reported on the particularly poor case of the village of Phuqui in 1969: 12 000 peasants were shipped to interrogation centres after a bombing sweep – peasants who had lived in caves and bunkers for months before due to American bombing having deprived them of shelter and food.
The US routinely acted in a similar fashion in South East Asia, supporting directly and indirectly regimes that neglected human rights and and seeking to undermine those that did in Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, and other nations. In Vietnam, however, the examination of US actions in the light of international law is particularly striking.
To make some concluding remarks now, I think it would be a good idea to soften the judgements this article makes regarding the nature of the Cold War US political leadership. While I’ve written previously that I believe aims of a largescale political system geared towards American corporate interests certainly a large role in the Cold War that goes understated in much existing literature, I do recognise the still highly convincing interpretation that fears of an expanding Soviet threat and a desire to maintain national security from it were objectives as well. For example, though evidence seems to suggest that the Vietnamese Communists were themselves no real security threat to the United States, it is convincing to say that they represented a latent threat in that they may turn Vietnam into a nation closely allied with the USSR, thereby extending Soviet political power. I do not claim to be an expert with indepth knowledge of the records of this period. Similarly, the historian Richard H Immerman makes the interpretation that the US government was predisposed by paranoia in the early Cold War to believe sincerely that the Arbenz government was a Communist military threat. (It seems to me all the more fascinating that one at this point is obliged perhaps to transition from an examination of history to one of biography, taking into account the understandings of the US political leadership on the level of individuals in order to understand their decisions.)
Nonetheless, if one is to make considerations solely of history, the incidents covered in this article lead to important conclusions about US objectives in the Cold War and about the nature of its conduct. It is not a convincing interpretation that the US sought to uphold “democracy” in the conventional sense of the word in its international affairs, nor that it was acting in legitimate direct self-defense or with care for the standards of international law. In this context, whatever the objectives, the international military intervention pursued by the US was quite evidently illegitimate in this period, and I believe that this a fact to remember in looking back now on the Cold War.
References:
Stephen G Rabe, Cold War Memories: Latin America vs. The United States (Texas University)
CIA Memos from the Office of the Historian
More CIA Memos from the Office of the Historian
Neil Sheehan, Should We Have War Crime Trials? (New York Times, 1971)
On the town of Phuqui: Vietnam Peasants Return to a Hamlet, Hungry and Bitter Toward Regime (New York Times, 1971)
Edgar Roberts 