U.S. global aggression neglects home: destroyer is being destroyed from Edward Herman's article “Manufacturing Failed States”
Excerpt,
minor edit, ending one-sentence comment by Carolyn Bennett
Failed
states manufacturer
The
United States has been a “manufacturer of failed states for a long time, as in
the cases of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and those
Indochinese states (Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia) where ‘killing was so good.’” Edward Herman writes. “But we have seen
a dramatic resurgence in more recent times.…[T]here has been a fresh stream of
failed states brought about by U.S. and NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ and
regime change, carried out more aggressively in the wake of the death of the
Soviet Union (and thus the end of an important if limited force of containment’).
The
Soviet Union as threat to the United States and allies, Herman notes in another context, was fiction:
“ideology” and “propaganda.”
 |
| Chemical killing U.S. over Vietnam |
In reality the Soviet Union was always
far less powerful than the United States, had weaker and less reliable allies,
and was essentially on the defensive from 1945 till its demise in 1991. The
Soviet Union was an obstruction to U.S. expansion, with sufficient military
power to constitute a modest containing force, but it also served U.S.
propaganda as an alleged expansionist threat.
The United States, on the other hand, was
aggressively on the march outward from 1945, with the steady spread of military
bases across the globe, numerous interventions, large and small, on all
continents, engaged in building the first truly global empire.
William Jefferson Clinton - Barack Obama: “Humanitarian intervention in
Yugoslavia has been a model, with Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo turned into failed
states, with several other weaklings broken out, all of them Western clients or
supplicants, plus a huge U.S. military base in Kosovo, replacing one formerly
independent social democratic state. …
“…Manufactured
failures have often had common features that show them to be a product of
imperial policy and the projection of imperial power.
- “One frequent feature is the rise and/or recognition of ethnic group rebels who claim victimhood, fight their government with terroristic acts, sometimes designed to provoke a violent government response, and who regularly appeal to the imperial powers to come to their aid.
- “Sometimes foreign mercenaries are imported to aid the rebels, and both the indigenous rebels and mercenaries are often armed, trained and given logistical support by the imperial powers.
- “The imperial powers encourage these rebel efforts as they find them useful to justify destabilizing, bombing, and eventually overthrowing the target regime.
This
process was evident throughout the period of the dismantlement of Yugoslavia
and creation of the resultant set of failed states.…[And] …this demonstration
of the merits of imperial intervention set the stage
for further failed-state manufacturing efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Somalia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Libya, with a similar
program well advanced today in Syria and one obviously in process for some
years in the Free World’s treatment of a threatening Iran ─ following its
happy relationship with the Western-imposed Shah dictatorship.”
Note: The United
States’ Shah of Iran was the oldest son of Reza Shah Pahlavi, an army officer
who became the ruler of Iran and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925). Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi (b. October 26, 1919, Tehran, Iran, d. July 27, 1980, Cairo,
Egypt) was Shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979.
“…
During the Vietnam War, a sign over one of the U.S. army bases read ‘Killing Is
Our Business, and Business Is Good.’ …It was a very good business in Vietnam
(and Cambodia, Laos, and Korea as well), the number of civilian deaths running
into the millions. And it has been quite respectable in the years after
Vietnam.
“The killings have been carried out both directly and via proxies on every continent, as U.S. ‘national security’ has required bases, garrisons, assassinations, invasions, bombing wars, and the sponsorship of killer regimes, real terror networks, and programs everywhere in response to terrorist threats and challenges to the ‘pitiful giant.’ [Herman quotes Jan Knippers Black]:
‘National
security’
is a wonderfully elastic concept, expanding in accord with ‘what a nation,
class or institution…thinks it should have,’ with the result that it is those ‘whose
wealth and power would appear to make them most secure who are, in fact, most
paranoid, and who, by their frenetic attempts to ensure their security, bring
on their own destruction.’
Herman defines Failed State as
…One that has
been crushed militarily or rendered unmanageable by political and/or economic
destabilization and a resultant chaos and is unable (or is not permitted) for
long periods to recover and take care of its citizens’ needs.
USA Failed, Failing State
“There
is a good case to be made that the United States itself is a failed or failing
state,” Herman writes.
“It
obviously has not been crushed militarily by any foreign power, but its
underlying population has been hugely damaged by its own permanent war system.
In this case the military elite, with its contractor, banker, political, media
and intellectual allies has
…greatly enlarged poverty and mass
distress, shriveled the public services, and impoverished the country, making
it impossible for the hamstrung and compromised leadership to properly service
its ordinary citizens, despite steadily rising per capita productivity and GDP.
The surpluses are drained into the war
system and the consumption and ownership of a small minority, who, … are
aggressively striving to go beyond mere surplus monopolization to transfers
from the incomes, wealth and public claims of the great (and struggling)
majority.
“As
a failed state as well as in other ways the United States of America is surely
an exceptional nation!”
Try
swallowing that without choking.
Sources
and notes
“Manufacturing
Failed States” (MADE BY THE USA) by Edward S. Herman, VOLTAIRE NETWORK September
23, 2012, http://www.voltairenet.org/article175898.html
“‘Responsibility
to Protect’ (R2P): An Instrument of Aggression” by Edward S. Herman, November
9, 2013 VOLTAIRE NETWORK, http://www.voltairenet.org/article180927.html
Edward
S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the
media. His books include Corporate Control, Corporate Power (1981); The Real
Terror Network (1982); Manufacturing Consent (2002); and The Political Economy
of Human Rights (co-author 1979),
http://www.voltairenet.org/article175898.html
Professor
Jan Knippers Black, Ph.D., Monterey Institute of International Studies: A
Graduate School of Middlebury College; expert in Human rights, international
and comparative politics of the Western Hemisphere, international and
grassroots development, women´s rights and roles, globalization
Professor
Jan Knippers Black, according to one biographical note, “has had a passion for
freedom, fairness and social justice ever since she traveled to Chile as part
of the very first class of Peace Corps Volunteers in 1962.”
Her
books include The Politics of Human Rights Protection (2009, pbk 2010), and
Latin America, Its Problems and Its Promise, 5th ed, rev (2010). United States Penetration of Brazil (1977,
Portuguese edition published by Brazil’s Editora Massangana, Fundacao Joaquim
Nabuco, 2010); Sentinels of Empire: The United States and Latin American
Militarism (1986); Development in Theory and Practice: Paradigms and Paradoxes,
2nd ed, rev (1999); and Inequity in the Global Village: Recycled Rhetoric and
Disposable People (1999). Dr. Black has
edited and co-authored three books, co-authored 14 more, and published more
than 200 chapters or articles in reference books, anthologies, journals,
magazines and newspapers.
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