Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?

Chapter 3: Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?
by Michael Parenti



"The exercise of U.S. power is intended to preserve not only the
international capitalist system but U.S. hegemony of that system..."

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.


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