“It's official: The U.S.
is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it.”
That should have been the headline for the lead story
in the New York Times on
October 15, which was more politely titled “CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled
Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels.” The article reports on a
CIA review of recent U.S. covert operations to determine their effectiveness.
The White House concluded that unfortunately successes were so rare that some
rethinking of the policy was in order. The article quoted President Barack Obama
as saying that he had asked the CIA to conduct the review to find cases of
“financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually
worked out well. And they couldn't come up with much.” So Obama has some
reluctance about continuing such efforts.
The first paragraph of the Times article cites three major examples of “covert aid”:
Angola, Nicaragua and Cuba. In fact, each case was a major terrorist operation
conducted by the U.S. Angola was invaded by South Africa, which, according to
Washington, was defending itself from one of the world's “more notorious
terrorist groups”—Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. That was 1988. By
then the Reagan administration was virtually alone in its support for the
apartheid regime, even violating congressional sanctions to increase trade with
its South African ally. Meanwhile, Washington joined South Africa in providing
crucial support for Jonas Savimbi's terrorist Unita army in Angola. Washington
continued to do so even after Savimbi had been roundly defeated in a carefully
monitored free election, and South Africa had withdrawn its support. Savimbi
was a “monster whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his
people,” in the words of Marrack Goulding, British ambassador to Angola.
The consequences were horrendous. A 1989 U.N. inquiry
estimated that South African depredations led to 1.5 million deaths in
neighboring countries, let alone what was happening within South Africa itself.
Cuban forces finally beat back the South African aggressors and compelled them
to withdraw from illegally occupied Namibia. The U.S. alone continued to
support the monster Savimbi. In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in
1961, President John F. Kennedy launched a murderous and destructive campaign
to bring “the terrors of the earth” to Cuba—the words of Kennedy's close
associate, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his semiofficial biography of
Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the terrorist war. The
atrocities against Cuba were severe. The plans were for the terrorism to
culminate in an uprising in October 1962, which would lead to a U.S. invasion.
By now, scholarship recognizes that this was one reason why Russian Premier
Nikita Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba, initiating a crisis that came
perilously close to nuclear war. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later
conceded that if he had been a Cuban leader, he “might have expected a U.S.
invasion.”
American terrorist attacks against Cuba continued for
more than 30 years. The cost to Cubans was of course harsh. The accounts of the
victims, hardly ever heard in the U.S., were reported in detail for the first
time in a study by Canadian scholar Keith Bolender, Voices From the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism
Against Cuba, in 2010. The
toll of the long terrorist war was amplified by a crushing embargo, which
continues even today in defiance of the world. On Oct. 28, the U.N., for the
23rd time, endorsed “the necessity of ending the economic, commercial,
financial blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba.” The vote was 188
to 2 (U.S., Israel), with three U.S. Pacific Island dependencies abstaining. There is by now some opposition to the embargo in high
places in the U.S., reports ABC News, because “it is no longer useful” (citing
Hillary Clinton's new book Hard Choices). French scholar Salim Lamrani reviews the bitter
costs to Cubans in his 2013 book The Economic War Against Cuba.
Nicaragua need hardly be mentioned. President Ronald
Reagan's terrorist war was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the U.S.
to terminate its “unlawful use of force” and to pay substantial reparations. Washington
responded by escalating the war and vetoing a 1986 U.N. Security Council
resolution calling on all states—meaning the U.S.—to observe international law.
Another example of terrorism will be commemorated on November 16, the 25th
anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador by a
terrorist unit of the Salvadoran army, armed and trained by the U.S. On the
orders of the military high command, the soldiers broke into the Jesuit
university to murder the priests and any witnesses—including their housekeeper
and her daughter. This event culminated the U.S. terrorist wars in Central
America in the 1980s, though the effects are still on the front pages today in
the reports of “illegal immigrants,” fleeing in no small measure from the
consequences of that carnage, and being deported from the U.S. to survive, if
they can, in the ruins of their home countries.
Washington has also emerged as the world champion in
generating terror. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar warns of the
“resentment-generating impact of the U.S. strikes” in Syria, which may further
induce the jihadi organizations Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward
“repairing their breach from last year and campaigning in tandem against the
U.S. intervention by portraying it as a war against Islam.” That is by now a
familiar consequence of U.S. operations that have helped to spread jihadism
from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world. Jihadism's most
fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has
established its murderous caliphate in large
This is a record to be contemplated with some awe.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of
Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the
author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column
for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
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