Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…

Chomsky on Reagan’s Legacy

The network and newspaper coverage of the death of Ronald Reagan has brought forth a chorus of praise from Democrats and Republicans alike. Much of the reporting and commentary, under the guise of respecting the dead, has represented a dramatic rewriting of the history of the Reagan years in office.

Looking back at the Reagan presidency doesn’t mean we actually have to look back. Many of the same people who populated his administration are in the George W. Bush administration as well: James Baker, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, John Poindexter, John Negroponte, just to name a few.

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman asked leading dissident Noam Chomsky to reflect on the policies of Reagan’s administration during his 8 years in power and Reagan’s influence on the current Bush Administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, can you talk about this, the people that are now running the administration are some of the very people who ran the Reagan administration more than 20 years ago?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s quite true. The Reagan administration is either the same people or their immediate mentors for the most part. I think one can say that the current administration is a selection of the more extremist and arrogant and violent and dangerous elements of the Reagan administration. So on things like – I mean, that is true on domestic and international policy they are, both in the Reagan years and now, they are committed to dismantling the components of the government that serve the general population — social security, public schools and so on and so forth, but in a more extreme fashion now. Partly because they think they have achieved a sort of higher stage from which to launch the attack, and internationally it’s pretty obvious. In fact, many of the older Reaganites and Bush, number one people have been concerned, even appalled by the extremism of the current administration in the international domain. That’s why there was unprecedented elite criticism of the national security strategy and the implementation in Iraq – narrow criticism, but significant.

So, yes, they’re there, in fact, you cannot — some of the examples are remarkable, including the ones that you mentioned. And very timely they picked Negroponte, who of course has just been appointed, the new ambassador to Iraq where he will head the biggest diplomatic mission in the world. The pretense is that we need this huge diplomatic mission to transfer full sovereignty to Iraqis and that’s so close to self-contradiction that you have to admire commentators who sort of pretend not to notice what it means, also to overlook, consciously, what his role was in the Reagan administration. He also provided — he was an ambassador in the Reagan years, ambassador to Honduras where he presided over the biggest C.I.A. station in the world, and the second largest embassy in Latin America, not because Honduras was of any particular significance to the U.S., but because he was responsible for supervising the bases from which the U.S. mercenary army was attacking in Nicaragua, and which ended up practically destroying it. By now, Nicaragua is lucky to survive a few generations. That was one part of the massive international terrorist campaign that the Reaganites carried out in the 1980’s under the pretense they were fighting a war on terror.

They declared a war on terror in 1981 with pretty much the same rhetoric that they used when they re-declared it in September 2001. It was a murderous terrorist war. It devastated Central America, had horrendous effects elsewhere in the world. In the case of Nicaragua, it was so extreme that they were condemned by the World Court, by two supporting Security Council Resolutions that the U.S. had to veto, after which, of course, they rejected the court judgment and then escalated the war to the point where finally the effects were extraordinary. By the analysis of their own specialists, the per capita deaths in Nicaragua would be comparable to about 2.5 million in the United States, which as they have pointed out is greater than the total number of casualties in all U.S. wars, including the Civil War and all wars in the 20th century, and what’s left of the society is a wreck. Since the U.S. took over again, it’s gone even more downhill.

Now the second poorest in the hemisphere after Haiti and not coincidentally, the second major target of U.S. intervention in the 20th century after Haiti, which is first. The recent health administration statistics show that about 60% of children under two are suffering from severe anemia caused by malnutrition and probable brain damage. Costa Rica, the United States is trying to – doing enough low-level work so that they can send back some remittances to keep the families alive. It’s a real victory. You can understand why Colin Powell and others are so proud of it. But Negroponte was charge of it in the first half the decade directly, and in the second half more indirectly in the State Department and National Security staff where he was Powell’s adviser. And now he is — he is supposed to undertake the same role and similar role in Iraq. He was called in Nicaragua “The Proconsul,” and the “Wall Street Journal” was honest enough to run an article in which they headlined “Modern Proconsul” on which they mentioned his background in Nicaragua without going into it much and said, yes he will be the proconsul of Iraq. Now, that’s a direct continuity, but there’s a lot more than that. What you mentioned is correct.

Elliot Abrams is an extreme case. I mean, he’s now the head of the Middle East section of the National Security Council. He was — as you know, he was sentenced for lying to Congress. He got a presidential pardon, but he was one of the most — he was in charge in the State Department of the Central American atrocities, and on the Middle East, he is way out at the extreme end of the spectrum. This does reflect the — in a way the continuity of policies, but also the shift towards extremism within that continuity.

AMY GOODMAN: There was a very little critical comment about President Reagan this weekend on his death perhaps explained by his death, what happens when a person dies, and what people say or perhaps also because there is a kind of rewriting of history that has been going on. But one of the few people who were quoted in the mainstream media was the Mexican foreign minister, Jorge — the former Mexican Jorge Castenada, whose father served as foreign minister as well in 1979 to 1982 who said Reagan was extremely unpopular in Mexico when he was president because of his policies in Central America, and what was viewed in Mexico as a Mexico-bashing campaign over drug trafficking. Reagan’s involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador, viewed in Mexico, he said was unwarranted meddling that was “interventionist, rooted in cold war rivalries and disrespectful of international law.” Castenada conditioned, “not only were his policies viewed negatively, but he pressured Mexico enormously to change its foreign policies.”

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s correct. Casteneda is being diplomatic. He’s understating with regard to the international law and with regard to the intervention. It was – it ended up with a couple hundred thousand people being killed and four countries ruined. And even the world – the US – the people now in office in Washington have the unique honor of being the only ones in the world who have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism. That’s a little more than what he said, but that’s what he’s aiming at.

The unpopularity continues. The latest figures show that this George Bush, number two, latest Latin American figures, among Latin American elites, the ones who tend to be more supportive of the United States, I think it was about close to 90% opposition throughout the hemisphere and approximately, if I remember, 98% opposition to him in Mexico. But to be accurate, we should say that this goes way back. So, John F. Kennedy was — tried very hard to get Mexico to line up in his anti-Cuba crusade. A famous comment by a Mexican foreign minister when Kennedy tried to convince him that Cuba was to join in the terrorist war against Cuba and the economic embargo strangulation, in fact on the grounds that Cuba was a threat to the security of the hemisphere and the Mexican ambassador said he had to decline, the prime minister had to decline because if he tried to tell people in Mexico that Cuba was a security threat, 40 million Mexicans would die laughing, which is approximately the right answer.

Here not so. The one point on which I think Casteneda’s comment that you quote is really misleading is when he refers to cold war thinking and rivalries. There were no Russians in Latin America. In fact, the U.S. was trying very hard to bring them in. Take, say, Nicaragua, when the terrorist war against Nicaragua really took off, Nicaragua tried to get some military aid to defend itself. And they went first to European countries, France, others. The Reagan administration put extreme pressure on them not to send military aid because they were desperately eager for Nicaragua to get military aid from Russia or indirectly through Cuba. So they could then present it as a cold war issue. Nicaragua didn’t fall into the trap as Guatemala had in 1954, basically the same scenario. So, they didn’t get jet planes from Russia to defend their airspace against the U.S. attacks. They had every right to do it, but the responsibility to do it, but they understood the consequences.

So, the Reagan administration had to float constant stories about how Nicaragua was getting MIG jets from Russia in order to try to create a cold war conflict. Actually it’s very revealing to see the reaction here to those stories. Of course, Nicaragua had every right to do it. The C.I.A. had complete control over Nicaragua’s airspace and was using it. It was using it to send communications to the guerrilla army, which was — guerrilla is a funny word for it, computers and helicopters and so on to send them instructions so that they could follow the U.S. command orders to avoid the Sandinista army, the Nicaraguan army and to attack what are called soft targets, undefended civilian targets. It’s a country that doesn’t have a right to defend its airspace to protect that, I don’t know what you can say. So obviously, they are a right to do it, but they didn’t. They allowed the U.S. to have control of the airspace and to attack — to use it to attack undefended targets.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, you have written about the U.S. as being only country in the world to be convicted in the World Court of terrorism. And this had to do with the bombing of the Nicaraguan harbor, which took place under Reagan. Can you talk about that?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. That, too, is a little misleading. Nicaragua was hoping to end the confrontation through legal means, through diplomatic means.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean the mining of the harbor.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, the mining of the harbors. They decided to — they asked a legal team headed by a very distinguished American international lawyer, A. Chayes, professor of law at Harvard who had long government service, and that legal team decided to construct an extremely narrow case. So, they kept to matters that were totally uncontroversial, as the U.S. conceded like the mining of the harbors, but it was only a toothpick on a mountain. They picked the narrowest point in the hope that they could get a judgment from the World Court, which would lead the United States to back off from the whole international terrorist campaign, and they did win a judgment from the court, which ordered the U.S. to terminate any actions, any violent actions against Nicaragua, which went way beyond mining of the harbors. That was the least of it.

So, yes, that was the narrow content of the court decision, although, if you read the decision, the court decision that goes well beyond, they’re all conscious of the much wider terrorist campaign, but the Harvard – the Chayes run legal team didn’t bring it up for good reasons. Because they didn’t want any controversy at the court hearings about the facts. There was no controversy about that, since it was conceded. However, it should be read as a much broader indictment, and a very important one. I mean, the term that was used by the court was “unlawful use of force,” which is the technical term for the informal notion, international terrorism. There’s no legal definition of international terrorism in the international domain. So I bet it was in effect a condemnation of international terrorism over a much broader domain.

However, we should bare in mind, it’s important for us, that horrible as the Nicaragua war was, it wasn’t the worst. Guatemala and El Salvador were worse. I suggest that in Nicaragua, the reason was that in Nicaragua, the population at least had an army to defend it. In El Salvador and Guatemala, the terrorist forces attacking the population were the army and the other security forces. There was no one to bring a case to the World Court that can be brought by governments, not by peasants being slaughtered.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Chomsky, I wouldn’t want to end this discussion without talking about the Reagan years and Africa, particularly southern Africa.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the official policy was called “constructive engagement.” I recall it during the 1980s, by then there was enormous pressure to end all support for the apartheid government. Congress passed legislation barring trade and aid. The Reagan administration found ways to evade the congressional legislation, and in fact trade with South Africa increased in the latter part of the decade. This is incidentally the period when Collin Powell moved to the position of national security adviser.

The U.S. was strongly supporting the apartheid regime directly and then indirectly through allies. Israel was helping get around the embargo. Rather as in Central America where the clandestine terror made use of other states that served as — that helped the administration get around congressional legislation. In the case of South Africa, just look at the rough figures. In Angola and Mozambique, the neighboring countries, in those countries alone, the South African depredations killed about million-and-a-half people and led to some $60 billion in damage during the period of constructive engagement with the u.s. support. It was a horror story.
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Another Contra Scandal?

by Garry Leech

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration became mired in the Iran-Contra scandal following revelations that it illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the proceeds to covertly arm and fund Nicaraguan Contra forces attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government. Last year, Israeli arms dealers bought 3,000 assault rifles and ammunition from the Nicaraguan security forces and covertly sold them to Colombia’s counter-revolutionaries (Contras), the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). The fact that President George W. Bush’s Latin American policymaking team includes former Reagan administration Contra war warriors Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, raises questions regarding the possibility of a Washington connection to the purchasing, selling and shipping of these weapons to Colombian paramilitaries who are on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

While the Reagan administration had the audacity to illegally sell arms to Iran, an archenemy of the United States, the Colombian arms deal involved a cast of far more likely characters. The principal brokers of the deal were Israelis working for a Guatemalan-based company, GERSA, which is a representative of the Israeli government’s arms industry. The weapons, mostly Soviet-era AK-47 assault rifles, were purchased from the government of Nicaragua, which, like Israel, is a U.S. ally.

The arms entered Colombia on November 10, 2001, and were delivered to right-wing paramilitaries closely allied with the U.S.-supported Colombian military. According to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, Oliver P. Garza, was informed about the sale of the weapons beforehand, but denies knowing they were destined for Colombia.

Washington has provided more than $1.3 billion in mostly military aid to Colombia over the past two years–making Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid behind Israel and Egypt. The United States has provided weapons, helicopters and training to a Colombian military that is closely-allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads responsible for more than 70 percent of the country’s human rights abuses, especially civilian massacres.

Critics of U.S. military aid have repeatedly called for stronger human rights conditions, including an end to the collaboration between Colombia’s security forces and the paramilitaries. The Clinton and Bush administrations have ignored such demands. Former-president Clinton dismissed a State Department report that Colombia had failed to meet six of the seven human rights conditions stipulated by Congress when he issued a “national security” waiver that allowed $1.3 billion in aid to be delivered.

President Bush continued his predecessor’s blatant disregard for human rights in Colombia when he appointed Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams to his Latin American policymaking team. Reich, who is now the top U.S. official for Latin American affairs, was chief of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), which served as the propaganda office for the Reagan White House, from 1983 to 1986 (see, The Colombian Contras). He was responsible for fomenting fear among the U.S. public of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and promoting the U.S.-backed Contras, a counter-revolutionary group consisting primarily of thugs and soldiers loyal to deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Elliot Abrams was also instrumental in the Reagan administration’s illegal Contra war, which caused the deaths of more than 40,000 Nicaraguans during the 1980s. Abrams was convicted of perjury as a result of his testimony during the Iran-Contra hearings, although Bush Senior later pardoned him.

The younger Bush appointed a third Contra player to a key post when he made John Negroponte the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Negroponte also played an important role in the Contra war as ambassador to Honduras, the country from which the Contras launched their attacks against Nicaragua.

The presence of three prominent former-Contra players in the Bush administration raises questions regarding the possibility of the Colombian arms deal being another Iran-Contra affair. While there are many unanswered questions regarding Washington’s role in the deal, it is clear that several close allies of the United States supplied arms to a terrorist group whose goals coincide with U.S. political and economic interests in Colombia.

There have been numerous statements made by the various parties involved in the deal. GERSA’s director claims that another Israeli arms dealer in Panama, Shimon Yelenik, told his company that the weapons were destined for Panama. Nicaraguan military officials also say that they were told the arms were being sold to Panama’s police force, but Panama says it knew nothing about the deal. The Panamanian government’s claims of ignorance have been buttressed by a Nicaraguan army colonel who says the assault rifles were unfit for police duty. Meanwhile, a recent statement by U.S. State Department spokesman Wes Carrington claimed that Ambassador Garza believed the weapons were being shipped to gun collectors in the United States.

The deal between the Israeli arms dealers and Colombia’s paramilitary forces is not the first military link between the two countries. In the past, AUC fighters have received training from Israeli mercenaries.

At the very least, Washington bears some responsibility for the arms deal because of the militaristic policies of the Reagan administration, which led to the inundation of Nicaragua and other Central American countries with weapons. One of the legacies of U.S. military support for the Nicaraguan Contras, as well as the Salvadoran and Guatemalan militaries, is a massive surplus of weaponry that has contributed to record-high crime rates in these countries and a lucrative black market arms trade that has helped fuel Colombia’s ongoing civil conflict.

The worst-case scenario would have the Bush White House directly arranging the Colombian arms deal through the Israeli arms dealers, which is exactly what occurred during the Iran-Contra affair when covert arms shipments to Iran were brokered by Israel. Another possibility is that U.S. officials, including Ambassador Garza, were not directly involved in arranging the arms deal, but that they merely turned a blind eye upon discovering the weapons were destined for paramilitary death squads fighting against Colombia’s leftist guerrillas.

Clearly, many questions regarding the Colombian arms deal remain unanswered. Furthermore, they may never be answered. It is unlikely that the Bush administration will be forthcoming regarding its role in this affair and given the current post-September 11 political climate, doubtful that Congress has the stomach to confront the Bush White House. Washington’s inability to police itself became evident during the farcical Iran-Contra hearings when it was obvious that the Reagan administration had blatantly broken the law and violated the Constitution. If a U.S. connection to the Colombian arms deal is ever established, we must ensure that the Bush White House does not enjoy the same level of impunity.