by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-01-29
© 2011 Peter Belmont

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The USA has supported dictators for years.

USA support (if not installation) of South American and Central American dictators is so well known and so numerous that I will merely list some of them: Hernández: El Salvador 1932; Somoza: Nicaragua 1935; Armas et al.:Guatemala 1954; Suazo Córdova: Honduras in 1985 aiding the USA support the Nicaraguan “contras”; Pinochet: Chile 1973 (see below); Noriega: Panama 1983.

In a famous statement in relation to one of these dictators, President Franklin D. Roosevelt supposedly remarked in 1939 that ‘Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’”

The USA helped defeat the democratic Mossadegh government in Iran and installed the vicious dictator, the Shah of Iran (1953). When the Shah was later ousted, the regime of the ayatollahs was the USA’s (and, of course, Iran’s) “reward” for this so unhelpful and unwelcome “regime change”.

The USA helped remove the democratically elected (Marxist) Allende government of Chile and installed the dictator Pinochet (1973).[1]

The USA helped Israel destroy the democratically elected, and Hamas dominated, government of the Palestinian Authority (2005) (the USA treats Hamas as “terrorists”, although it does not treat Israel as “terrorists” despite the latter’s far greater terror-inspiring activities).

The USA is now wondering how long to continue to support the dictatorial Mubarak government of Egypt, having supported the dictatorial government of Tunisia until that government was threatened or removed (removal in progress as I write: January 28, 2011) by a popular uprising.

Although Israel is a democracy of sorts within its pre-1967 borders,[2] Israel acts like a cruel tyrant to the Syrians and Palestinians who live within the territories that Israel captured in 1967 and continues to occupy. And, as all know, the USA supports this tyrannical behavior with gifts of $3B/year, military cooperation and support and gifts, and the free and unrestrained use of the USA veto in the UN Security Council (this veto being used rather as if it were Israel, and not the USA, casting the USA veto there).

USA support for dictators is not democratic.

When the USA supports tyrants and dictators, it cannot be said to be acting “democratically” in the sense of doing what the American people requested it to do, because the American people are largely decent people who would not knowingly support any dictator or tyrant. We recall the USA going to war against German, Japanese, and Italian tyranny in World war II. We approved of that war. We have never told our leaders to support dictators.

USA support for dictators is not paternalism.

A paternalistic government does what it believes is good for the people, even if the people are not equipped (by knowledge, education, analytic skill, or otherwise) to know what is best for them. There is no way that USA installation and support of dictators can be viewed as good for Americans, and, indeed, no USA government has ever offered a suggestion that such was the case. In fact, USA support for dictators has not benefited Americans, but only USA companies and other USA special interests such as the pro-Israel lobby.

However, USA support for dictators is corruption.

Whenever the USA has installed or supported a dictator—rather than fighting the dictator, as with Hitler, Musolini, the Japanese militarists in WWII, and Castro in Cuba (the latter always called a dictator))—it has done so to create opportunities for profits for American corporations—United Fruit Company, various mining and oil companies, or to satisfy powerful lobbies such as the pro-Israel lobby. (The military-industrial-Congressional-university-think tank-complex is another special interest which benefits when the USA goes to war or instigates wars or induces foreign governments to prepare for war. Dictators often arm to protect themselves from their own people.) The usual name for an action which costs a lot of money—such as establishing, elaborately arming, and using USA’s armed forces—in order to facilitate a much smaller benefit to a private entity—such as a corporation—is “corruption.”

Just as the pro-Israel lobby has achieved a 62-year USA subservience to the desires of the state of Israel, the oil-lobby and mining-lobbies and a variety of other pro-business lobbies have achieved a USA subservience to the desires of a variety of USA corporations. While such USA behavior has undoubtedly made huge profits available to a variety of corporations (including many that are not “American” and/or which do not pay much in the way of taxes to the USA), the cost of this behavior (that is, the cost of maintaining a military which each year spends as much as the total spent by all the other militaries in the world combined) far exceeds whatever taxes may be collected by the USA from the corporations and others benefitted. The trillion(s) of dollars so far spent by the USA on its ridiculous wars[3] in Iraq and Afghanistan are costs not to be recovered. To the extent—a very large extent many believe—that these wars were started because of Al-Q’aeda’s resentment of the USA’s presence in the Arab/Muslim world and support for Israel’s tyranny over the Palestinians, we may say that these huge costs are a direct result of the USA’s long term foreign policy of supporting dictatorships and tyrannies and maintaining an imperial structure of world-wide military bases which cast the shadow of USA military intervention world-wide.

But the mechanism which got us where we are is the pervasive USA pattern of governance (oligarchy) by the very rich, that is, corruption, whereby the resources of the USA are used to further the interests of the very rich without regard to whether those interests are of any benefit whatever to the American people.

The American people derive no benefit from Israel’s tyranny over the Palestinians living under military occupation since 1967. The American people derive no benefit from USA’s support for the dictatorial regime of Mubarak in Egypt.

The government of the USA does these things, quite simply, because it is corrupt. And in this it is little different from most of the dictatorial and tyrannical governments which it supports.

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[1] General Augusto Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations in his native Chile on 10 October 1998 by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón. He was arrested in London six days later and finally released by the British government in March 2000. Authorized to freely return to his native Chile, he was there first indicted by judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, and charged of a number of crimes, before dying on 10 December 2006, without having been convicted in any case. His arrest in London made the front-page of newspapers worldwide as not only did it involve the head of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, but it was the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former heads of state, despite local amnesty laws.discussed here.

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[2]  If a country which expelled 1/2 its voters in a civil war, Israel’s war of 1948-1950, can be considered a democracy.

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[3] Not just ridiculous, of course, but also illegal. As Talleyrand once said, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”

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