by Jacob G. Hornberger, 2005
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| kaitlinlandrethspols100w.blogspot.com |
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| suburbanpermaculture.org |
Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson has stirred
up a firestorm with his call for “taking out” Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
What’s all the fuss about? All that Robertson has done is state publicly what
has long been an important part of U.S. foreign policy — assassination of
foreign rulers who behave independently of Washington.
John Perkins described how U.S. foreign policy works in his
book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to
Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions. In order to place foreign rulers under
Washington’s thumb, the first step is to ply them with foreign loans and
foreign aid, oftentimes funneled through the IMF or World Bank. While such
funds are sometimes billed as “money to help the poor,” the reality is that
they are nothing more than bribes to line the pockets of grateful and dependent
foreign officials in return for loyalty to Washington.
Sometimes a ruler goes “independent” of Washington, refusing
to follow its orders or suggestions. That brings in the State Department and
the U.S. Congress, which, in the name of “promoting democracy,” starts
funneling millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to foreign candidates and
parties who are opposing the recalcitrant ruler, with the aim of ousting him
from office and replacing him with someone who is loyal to Washington.
If interference with foreign political processes doesn’t
work, then the next step is an economic embargo or sanctions, whose aim is to
squeeze the foreign citizenry into such misery and poverty that they will take
up arms and violently overthrow their ruler and replace him with someone who is
loyal to Washington. That of course has been the aim of the 40-year-old
unsuccessful embargo against Cuba. It was also the aim of 12 years of brutal
sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousand
of Iraqi children, again without success, after Saddam Hussein went independent
after having received WMDs and military assistance from the United States in
his war against Iran.
If the embargo or sanctions don’t succeed, the CIA steps in.
Its job is to carry out either a coup or an assassination of the recalcitrant
ruler, or both. As Perkins points out, that’s why the Ecuadoran president Jaime
Roldos and the Panamanian president Omar Torrijos were assassinated. It’s also
the reason for the CIA-supported coups in Chile, Guatemala, and Iran.
Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro, provides a good example of
where independence of U.S. rule can get a foreign dictator in hot water with
U.S. officials. While U.S. officials claim that the reason they oppose Castro
is that he is a communist dictator, nothing could be further from the truth.
After all, as a socialist Castro embraces Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
public schooling, income taxation, welfare, and equalization of wealth — that
is, the same socialist programs that U.S. officials embrace. Castro also treats
suspected terrorists the way that U.S. officials do — military tribunals,
denial of due process, no independent criminal defense attorneys, no jury
trials, and swift punishment. Castro even favors the war on drugs, despite its
decades of failure.
So what’s their real beef with Castro? Unlike his
U.S.-favored predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, another brutal Cuban dictator,
Castro has long kept his country independent of Washington, a cardinal sin as
far as U.S. officials are concerned. If Castro had behaved with the
obsequiousness toward Washington that Batista did, he would be as big a hero to
the United States as, say, Pervez Musharraf, the unelected military dictator of
Pakistan and former ally of the Taliban who decided to toe the official U.S.
line after receiving millions of dollars in U.S. grants after 9/11.
What happens if assassination fails? That’s when the Pentagon
steps in, as the people of Cuba, Panama, Grenada, and Iraq have discovered. But
as Robertson correctly points out, military invasions are much more expensive
than assassination, in terms of both blood and treasure.
Pat Robertson has done the nation a service by bringing to
the surface a reality of U.S. foreign policy that all too many Americans have
preferred not to confront, a policy that has long relied on foreign bribes,
interference with foreign democratic processes, coups and assassinations, and
military invasions to extend the power and influence of the U.S. government
overseas.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of
Freedom
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