Chomsky

Why is it in the interest of the United States to drive Nicaragua into the hands of the Soviet Union? That is transparent, actually. First, let us establish again that that was the policy of the United States. Simply to review the record, the Carter administration tried very hard -- first of all, supported Somoza until virtually the end, long after the Nicaraguan business community, our natural allies, turned against him, and after other Central American allies turned against him. When it became impossible to support Somoza, because he was obviously gone, the Carter administration tried to maintain the National Guard in power. In fact, it called upon the Organization of American States to intervene to maintain the National Guard in power, in a policy that Latin Americans called "Somocismo without Somoza." That failed, the Latin American countries refused to go along. After that, the Carter administration tried in every way, first, to rescue the National Guard, for example, they sent American planes under Red Cross markings -- a violation of the laws of war, incidentally, into Managua to take National Guard officers out. The Contras were reconstituted on the border, they were quickly picked up by the Reagan administration, and turned into a terrorist force to attack Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Carter administration offered aid, but not to the Sandinista government, let me repeat that: that aid went to the private sector. It was again a last-ditch effort to try and prevent the Sandinista from coming into power. Maybe the Carter administration would have made some arrangement, we can not tell, but the Reagan administration came in, that was finished. They launched an attack against Nicaragua almost immediately, both a military attack and an economic attack. They prevented our allies from sending aid to Nicaragua, so for example there was pressure put on France to stop them providing arms -- the story about arms in El Salvador, I can go into it if you would like, but there is nothing to it. Both economic warfare and military warfare increased, international lending institutions were pressure to stop giving aid. An embargo was called at a time when Nicaraguan trade with the entire Soviet block was roughly comparable to ours. Again, I say it does not take a genius to realize that the result of this policy will be to force them to rely on the only group we allow them to rely on to defend themselves against our attack. So assuming something short of total stupidity, that was the purpose, since it was obviously the perfectly predictable consequence, and the consequence that, to a limited extent, took place. Now why did we want to do it? Well, that is obvious. In fact, it is a consistent pattern: we did it when we wanted to overthrow Guatemalan democracy, we did it when we wanted to overthrow Dominican democracy in 1965. If you want to attack and destroy a political system, there is a way to do it within our political culture: try to show that it is an agency of the Soviet Union. When you have succeeded in establishing that, then you can attack and destroy. This is a record that has been replayed so many times since 1947, when Dean Acheson pioneered it with a totally fabricated account, as he more or less conceded, of the Soviet intervention -- which did not exist -- in Greece. At the time of the Truman doctrine, as he knew and as we now know, the Soviet intervention was an attempt to get the Greek to stop interfering with an imperial settlement that they had made with Britain, which granted Britain control over Greece -- that is not even debatable anymore. That record has been replayed over and over. The Soviet Union, incidentally, does exactly the same thing when they want to invade Hungary or Czechoslovakia or whatever: they argue that they are defending it from CIA machinations, and they try to show that they are working for the CIA, etc. Other powers do the same thing, so it is obvious why we should do it.
Now was US policy as inept as Mr. Perle suggest? On the contrary, it was extremely successful. The policy of liberal internationalism reconstituted Europe and Japan on the old, conservative order. Remember what that meant: that meant eliminating, destroying, often by violence, the antifascist resistance in much of the world. It meant destroying labor unity. It meant blocking efforts at radical democracy that had substantial support in both Europe and Japan -- it is particularly striking in Japan with the reverse course in 1947. It meant reconstituting something like the old order, under US control, with enormous profits for US corporations, a huge expansion of investment, of exploitation of the Third World, and so on -- all of this an enormous and maybe unprecedented success.
The Third World, remember, had a very definite role in that system. Its role was to fulfill its function as a source of raw materials and markets for this conservative, quasi-democratic order that we had reconstructed, by pressure and force in fact, in Europe and Japan. And it did that. When I mentioned Honduras, that is just a symbol. That is a symbol of US development policies everywhere. I mentioned Honduras because it was only one minute, but the point is not that Honduras is exporting snow peas, the point is that Honduras is not producing food. The effect of the Alliance for Progress policies in Honduras, in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, everywhere was to lead to what American economists call an economic miracle. Gross national product went up, and so did child malnutrition, the death toll, misery and suffering. And the reason is, when you impose -- by force of course -- a development model, in which production for domestic used is replaced by agro-export for foreign use, people starve. And you make profits. So you take land that was used for subsistence agriculture, you turn it over to ranchers linked to American agro-business or the Hanover Company and so on, to produce specialized vegetables and flowers and beef for pet food for the American markets, GNP goes up. Profits go up. A small sector of the local economy profits and the population plummets into disaster. That is why there have been hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Honduras in the last years, and in fact, pretty much the same story was true throughout most of Central America. Take Nicaragua. Nicaragua did have an economic miracle in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, child malnutrition doubled and general misery vastly increased. That laid the basis of the crisis of Central America. And similar things are true in much of the Third World, that is the effect of this development model.

HERMANN: Let us ask Mr. Perle about that. You gave me a response. The international liberalism that you said you like, he is saying produces an economic model that produces crops for export, which profit only a small sector and produces indigenous wide-scale poverty and starvation.

PERLE: Well, this is garbage of course, as is the whole notion that American policy consists of a group of people sitting in the State Department and figuring out how we can exploit the rest of the world, which is, in essence, what Professor Chomsky is asserting. It ignores the fact -- I do not know what development model he has in mind, I imagine it is a Marxist development model...
If you want to know what I have in mind, it is very simple: independence.
PERLE: Wait a minute...
CHOMSKY: I would like to say...
PERLE: That's not a development model.
CHOMSKY: No, because I don't think...
PERLE: Is there any country that installed the development model that you would recommend?
CHOMSKY: I think you're missing my point. Neither the United States, nor the Soviet Union, nor Britain or anyone else has a right to ram some development model down somebody's throat.
PERLE: That is... I'm not...
CHOMSKY: I can tell you what I think, and in an academic seminar we could talk about how development should take place, but that's not to the point here. The question is, whether the countries of the world and the peoples of the world are allowed to pick their own development model. That's the question.
PERLE: Of course they are, and in fact, if you look at the countries that have been most prosperous and most successful, that have picked their own path, and whose people have prospered and whose institutions are democratic and flourishing, they are for the most part countries that have maintained close and friendly relations with the United States. And if you look at the Pacific basin, for example, the success stories in the Pacific basin are countries like Taiwan and Japan and Korea, you can look at Singapore, you can look at Hong Kong, the development model that has worked there has worked with very substantial results for the benefit of the people. They are independent in every sense. I noticed how you slipped in "quasi-democratic" as a description of Europe.
CHOMSKY: Yes.
PERLE: I don't know exactly what you have in mind...
CHOMSKY: I'll explain. 
PERLE: The quasi... But it was a relevant question that you dodged: what development model you have in mind, because I think what I detect underneath all of it is a simple equation of independence with a development model that you happen to prefer, that is something other than a capitalist model of development. And I think you ought to tell us what it is!
CHOMSKY: Well, you see, you're assuming that I have your values, and I don't have your values.
PERLE: I'm quite sure you don't.
CHOMSKY: I have my own ideas about how development takes place, but my point is that neither I, nor you or the US government or the Soviet government or anyone else has the right to ram those ideas down someone else's throat.
PERLE: No one's quarreling about that.
CHOMSKY: Now if you want to have this discussion on development models, I'd be perfectly happy to have it. It's just irrelevant here. I mean, in fact, let's take a look at the development models you say have worked. If you look at them you'll notice something very interesting. The ones you mentioned are the right ones. They worked in a particular way, the Pacific basin. But in order to understand those development models, you have to look at the history of those regions. History and documents and so on really are important. You can't just make this stuff out of your head. Now the countries that have developed in the Pacific basin are in fact the countries that are former Japanese colonies. And there's a reason for that: Japanese colonialism was very brutal, but was quite different from European colonialism. If you look back at the record, you'll find that it operated in a different way. Japanese colonialism, while extremely brutal, actually carried out development. And in fact, if you look at the history of these countries since the period of Japanese colonization, you'll find that development took place -- industrial development, in fact, under conditions of extraordinary brutality. It then of course stopped during the second world war and post-world war period, and then took off again where it was under pretty much the same model, namely, a state-controlled, directed economy. What they have, we call it capitalism, has in fact very little to do with capitalism. Well, that's a particular kind of development model. It didn't just come by free choice. I mean, in Korea, say, it came after ten years of war: the Korean war started in 1945, remember. In 1945, when the United States intervened in South Korea, and the Soviet Union came into North Korea, what happened was that a civil war began. And in South Korea, about a hundred thousand people were killed before what we call the Korean war broke out, with plenty of conflicts across the borders -- the Russians pulled out, incidentally. That's the basis for the Korean war, then came the fighting, the destruction of Korea, the control over it by the conquerors. You may say it's good or bad or whatever, it certainly wasn't free. In Taiwan, the development was carried out under, in fact, a conquering army, he Kuomintang army. And similarly, in Indonesia, let's say, the development again wasn't just free. In Indonesia there was a military coup in 1965, strongly supported by the United States. 700,000 people, approximately, were slaughtered within four months, mostly landless peasant. That destroyed the only mass-based political party in the country, with US enthusiastic support, I should say. Then came a certain kind of development model, one which opened up the country to exploitation by Canada, by Japan, by the United States, and a certain kind of development, if you like.
All of these are forms of development, but they didn't come by free choice: they came by forceful imposition. Just as the development in Hungary didn't come by free choice, it came by forceful imposition. Of a different kind, undoubtedly: the forms of US intervention are different from the forms of intervention of other countries, for all sorts of reasons, but it's rammed down people's throats, it's not their choice.
When moves began to take place in a way inconsistent with our officially stated goals, namely the threat of ultra-nationalism began to develop, independent regimes responsive to the demands of the population for improvement in their living standards and diversification of production, we have repeatedly intervened by force to block it. We did so in Guatemala since 1954, over and over again, we did it in the Dominican Republic, we've done it in the Southern Cone, we've done it extensively throughout Central America. In the current period, we're doing it now in the Philippines. There's case after case after case.