[Marxism] A Global Military Empire by Michael Parenti

["Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On William Blum's website are archived a great many brilliant essays
chronicling American imperialist ventures after world war II.
<http://members.aol.com/bblum6/American_holocaust.htm>

Chapter three of Michael Parenti's book *Against Empire* ( the beginning of
which is below) is on Blum's website here:

<http://members.aol.com/bblum6/parenti.htm>

Against Empire
by Michael Parenti

Chapter 3: Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?

Today, the United States is the foremost proponent of recolonization and
leading antagonist of revolutionary change throughout the world. Emerging
from World War II relatively unscathed and superior to all other industrial
countries in wealth, productive capacity, and armed might, the United States
became the prime purveyor and guardian of global capitalism. Judging by the
size of its financial investments and military force, judging by every
imperialist standard except direct colonization, the U.S. empire is the most
formidable in history, far greater than Great Britain in the nineteenth
century or Rome during antiquity.

A Global Military Empire

The exercise of U.S. power is intended to preserve not only the
international capitalist system but U.S. hegemony of that system. The
Pentagon's "Defense Planning Guidance" draft (1992) urges the United States
to continue to dominate the international system by "discouraging the
advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even
aspiring to a larger global or regional role." By maintaining this
dominance, the Pentagon analysts assert, the United States can insure "a
market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-
thirds of the world's economy". This global power is immensely costly.
Today, the United States spends more on military arms and other forms of
"national security" than the rest of the world combined. U.S. leaders
preside over a global military apparatus of a magnitude never before seen in
human history. In 1993 it included almost a half- million troops stationed
at over 395 major military bases and hundreds of minor installations in
thirty-five foreign countries, and a fleet larger in total tonnage and
firepower than all the other navies of the world combined, consisting of
missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, destroyers,
and spy ships that sail every ocean and make port on every continent. U.S.
bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can reach any target, carrying
enough explosive force to destroy entire countries with an overkill capacity
of more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 22,000 tactical ones. U.S.
rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly
superior to any other nation's, with an ability to slaughter with
impunity--as the massacre of Iraq demonstrated in 1990-91. Since World War
II, the U.S. government has given more than $200 billion in military aid to
train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3 million troops and internal
security forces in more than eighty countries, the purpose being not to
defend them from outside invasions but to protect ruling oligarchs and
multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic
anti-capitalist insurgency. Among the recipients have been some of the most
notorious military autocracies in history, countries that have tortured,
killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of
their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan,
Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba
(under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), the
Philippines
(under Marcos), and Portugal (under Salazar). U.S. leaders profess a
dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically
elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic,
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Argentina,
Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist
militaries that were funded and aided by the U.S. national security state.
The U.S. national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy
mercenary wars against revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola,
Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western
Sahara, and elsewhere, usually with dreadful devastation and loss of life
for the indigenous populations. Hostile actions have been directed against
reformist governments in Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Zaire, Jamaica,
South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, and elsewhere. Since World War II, U.S.
forces have directly invaded or launched aerial attacks against Vietnam, the
Dominican Republic, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama,
Libya, Iraq, and Somalia, sowing varying degrees of death and destruction.
Before World War II, U.S. military forces waged a bloody and protracted war
of conquest in the Philippines in 1899-1903. Along with fourteen other
capitalist nations, the United States invaded socialist Russia in 1918-21.
U.S. expeditionary forces fought in China along with other Western armies to
suppress the Boxer Rebellion and keep the Chinese under the heel of European
and North American colonizers. U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua
in 1912 and again in 1926 to 1933; Cuba, 1898 to 1902; Mexico, 1914 and
1916; Honduras, six invasions between 1911 to
1925; Panama, 1903-1914, and Haiti, 1915 to 1934.

Why Intervention?

Why has a professedly peace-loving, democratic nation found it necessary to
use so much violence and repression against so many peoples in so many
places? An important goal of U.S. policy is to make the world safe for the
Fortune 500 and its global system of capital accumulation. Governments that
strive for any kind of economic independence or any sort of populist
redistributive politics, who have sought to take some of their economic
surplus and apply it to not-for-profit services that benefit the
people--such governments are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of U.S.
intervention or invasion. The designated "enemy" can be a reformist,
populist, military government as in Panama under Torrijo (and even under
Noriega), Egypt under Nasser, Peru under Velasco, and Portugal under the
MFA; a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas;
a social democracy as in Chile under Allende, Jamaica under Manley, Greece
under Papandreou, and the Dominican Republic under Bosch; a Marxist-Leninist
government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; an Islamic revolutionary
order as in Libya under Qaddafi; or even a conservative militarist regime as
in Iraq under Saddam Hussein--if it should get out of line on oil prices and
oil quotas. The public record shows that the United States is the foremost
interventionist power in the world. There are varied and overlapping reasons
for this: Protect Direct Investments. In 1907, Woodrow Wilson recognized the
support role played by the capitalist state on behalf of private capital:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on
having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and
the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down.
Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of
state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the
process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful
corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

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