Why I Empathize with Anti-Anti-Communist Rage
It’s hard not to when you read about the political history of Guatemala. This comes to mind in the context of Francisco Goldman’s new book, but I’m reminded of Corey Robin’s incendiary review of The Last Colonial Massacre.
I’ll stress a few things: yes, this doesn’t mean there was any moral equivalence between the US and the Soviets. That goes without saying. But US involvement in Guatemala, over a period of decades, has had a baleful and extremely uneven effect on that country. While I’m firmly in the Pax Americana camp, there’s no getting around the fact that the history of US interventionism has not been a happy one. We insist that the highly peculiar occupations of Germany and Japan are broadly emblematic of how US power can remake societies. But let’s not forget Guatemala, which is still racked by violence that can be characterized in some sense as made in the USA.
How do I reconcile this view with my support for current efforts in Iraq? That’s a hard question to answer. I suppose I sense that we’re now trying to right a wrong.
If you hold the view of American foreign policy that I do, you are in the disquieting position of being cast as an ultra-leftist, an extremist, simply for accurately recounting American history. No extremist thinks his views are extreme, I know. But I’m not talking about analysis or prescription. I’m talking about simply stating what the vast majority of historical scholarship asserts to be true. If you tell the truth, about Nicaragua or Iran or Indonesia or Guatemala or the Congo or Romania or Turkey Panama or Cambodia or Laos— if you simply recount the history, as it is routinely understood by even conservative historians, you’re referred to as an extremist.
There’s been a shift, I find, in the way that views like mine are confronted, and it’s a major one. Because the historical evidence of the massive damage America has inflicted in the world is so overwhelming, and so often confirmed by the CIA’s own declassified documentation, arguments against the “ultra-left” have shifted from denial to justification. You have to read long and wide to find even a conservative scholar who will suggest that the CIA did not, for example, orchestrate the coup against Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstall the shah. It’s pretty close to undeniable, especially with the reams of CIA documentation, now declassified, detailing precisely what and how they did. So rather than deny, people now try to justify. They say that the democratic process which elected Mossadegh, for example, was flawed (which is true), or that Mossadegh was a communist (not true), or that it just was too damaging to the British and the west in general for the Iranian oil fields to be nationalized. It’s kind of amazing, when people who have been arguing against the factual accuracy of what you say for years suddenly drop those arguments in favor of an affirmative defense.
I find two things striking about your post. The first (and it’s common, but still striking) is the sense I get from it that you find our unhappy interventions to be only historical. At what point, I always wonder, do people suppose the United States suddenly saw the light and became righteous in the application of its foreign policy and intelligence apparatus? We are, I’m told, in the business now of spreading freedom and democracy to the peoples of the world, which I imagine must come as a surprise to the people of, say, Uzbekistan, who live under a brutally repressive regime (far harsher than the current Iranian one), a regime supported massively by the United States. We are, right now, helping that regime murder dissidents and stamp out resistance movements. Do you disagree with that policy, now? Why does this stuff only become topical when it becomes history? The American public’s knowledge of the various brutal autocracies of the 20th century is woefully uneven, for reasons tied, I think, to your own inability to assess the current crimes of the United States as you do the historical ones. (What’s the difference between, for example, the Khmer Rogue and the Suharto regime? Suharto was our guy. So Americans know about the horrors in Cambodia, but are ignorant to those in Indonesia.)
The other thing I find telling is how quick you are to jump on the idea of moral equivalence. This happens all the time. Telling the truth about American foreign policy tends to elicit cries like “You’re saying the United States is as bad as the USSR!” or similar. But, well, no, I’m not. Appeals to relative morality aren’t compelling in any other context, and I don’t find them compelling here. It’s a pretty elementary moral principal that no one is more or less moral in comparison to anyone else. A thief isn’t made moral by virtue of the fact that he is not a rapist. And whatever the morality of the United States in comparison to the USSR or any other country, the question is immaterial compared to the basic question: is the United States moral in its foreign policy?
— Freddie · Nov 19, 07:47 PM · #
Freddie, I am quick to jump to moral equivalence because I am anticipating an objection to my post, an objection that I fear will undermine the core point — that US involvement in Guatemala (in particular) exacerbated and perhaps sparked massive bloodshed.
My sense is that you don’t identify as a right-of-center American nationalist. Many of our readers fall in this camp, and my intention is to engage them.
Re: your historical point: no, I actually don’t think all US interventions are created equal and it seems clear to me that invading Iraq was a mistake. But I also reject what some call “the immaculate conception theory of American foreign policy.”
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3448336.html
As actors in the world, we will inevitably do harm. There are predictable and unpredictable consequences to our actions. There are costs to nonintervention as well as costs to intervention. So yes, I do think the US needs to be far more “humble” and far more reluctant to engage in armed interventions. But I have no illusions about what will happen to Iraq, for example, if we suddenly withdrew US forces.
I find your comments extremely interesting and smart. If you ever want to be a guest-poster, let me know: reihan at gmail dot com.
— Reihan · Nov 19, 09:26 PM · #
Reihan,
That’s a nice reply to Freddie about your audience, but I think Freddie would say that treating your “right-of-center” readers as <A href=“http://slate.com/id/2176564/:>the children in Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook</A> does them a disservice. I mean, if your readers can’t engage reality unless they’re spoonfed the history of U.S. involvement in Guatemala, all mashed up and hidden in a “no moral equivalence” taco, then you’ve left them with one sort of healthy meal and never given them the tools to make one for themselves.
They, as well as yourself, would do well to try to answer Freddie’s questions without appeals to relative morality. Would you, or one of your “right-of-center” readers care to take a stab at it:
<i>At what point, I always wonder, do people suppose the United States suddenly saw the light and became righteous in the application of its foreign policy and intelligence apparatus? We are, I’m told, in the business now of spreading freedom and democracy to the peoples of the world, which I imagine must come as a surprise to the people of, say, Uzbekistan, who live under a brutally repressive regime (far harsher than the current Iranian one), a regime supported massively by the United States. We are, right now, helping that regime murder dissidents and stamp out resistance movements. Do you disagree with that policy, now? Why does this stuff only become topical when it becomes history? The American public’s knowledge of the various brutal autocracies of the 20th century is woefully uneven, for reasons tied, I think, to your own inability to assess the current crimes of the United States as you do the historical ones. (What’s the difference between, for example, the Khmer Rogue and the Suharto regime? Suharto was our guy. So Americans know about the horrors in Cambodia, but are ignorant to those in Indonesia.)”</i>
I think Freddie was ultimately trying to say that in the United States sugar-coating is the problem. It leads, inevitably, to a populace that becomes the child who refuses to eat his veggies.
— keatssycamore · Nov 20, 12:08 AM · #
Reihan, the problem with what Garfinkle proposes as an alternative vision for U.S. foreign policy is that it sweeps away the idea of countries being responsible for their own affairs only to replace it with us, the good and benevolent and kind, as the natural stewards of good government. It is particularly galling that Garfinkle refers to the sinister “neo-imperial” influence of the Soviets even as the justification of our own foreign policy he offers is, under any reasonable definition of the term, out of the playbook of the 19th century British and French. (You don’t have to comb through Noam Chomsky’s writings to see this; Niall Ferguson, on the other end of the spectrum of approval, will do.)
I also take issue with his account of the immaculate conception theory: “When a talented but untutored journalistic mind focuses on a foreign policy issue, particularly one that editors will pay to have written about, an amazing thing sometimes happens: All of a sudden, crystalline truth rises from the clear flame of an obvious logic that, for some unexplained reason, all of the experts and practitioners thinking and working on the problem for years never saw.” Yet the problem is not that all the experts and practitioners averted their eyes from the information critics highlight in retrospect or that those same critics simply take later events to justify their moral intuitions. The problem, as the Bush administration has amply demonstrated, is that only people who see the world in a certain way—more often than not, the way Garfinkle seems to see the world—tend to rise to positions of influence because decision-makers don’t have many incentives to surround themselves with people who will advise them not to use and expand the powers their posts give them.
— Ashish George · Nov 20, 01:38 AM · #
If we believe that power corrupts, it’s hard to see how the exercise of American power throughout the world hasn’t also had a corrupting influence on ourselves.
— The Reticulator · Nov 20, 06:45 AM · #
I am in substantial agreement with Freddie. I’m always struck at how different the story that we Americans tell ourselves about our interventions in other countries is from the stories that these countries tell themselves. I’m not only, or even principally, referring to anti-American elites but ordinary people who, in many cases, are repeating what their parents and grandparents told them.
This is especially true in Latin America — or at least I’m most familiar with their stories. I have family members or in-laws from a half-dozen Latin countries and, in every instance, there is a noteworthy difference in the American versus the, for instance, Colombian or Chilean accounts.
The opening anecdote in Robin’s review is very telling: whether or not Reagan knew that Central America is divided into seven countries plus Mexico, most Americans probably don’t and scarcely give them any thought. Yet we have insinuated ourselves into these people’s lives — whether they like or not — repeatedly. But what do we care? They are, what in different imperium, might have been called wogs.
What this has to do with Iraq beats the hell out of me except that a little more self-awareness might keep us from doing the same thing over and over again.
— Roberto · Nov 20, 11:02 PM · #