How White House Warmongers Learned to Love Empire

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 27, 2006.

Long before President Bush articulated his Middle East doctrine, an earlier Republican administration argued that a different region was so corrupt, so in need of reform, and was saddled with such oppressive and backward rulers that bringing about stability and the potential for prosperity for its citizens was beyond the realm of politics or diplomacy.

Ronald Reagan smilingly asserted that only U.S.-backed violence and American-style nation building could give the benighted people of Central America a chance to join the modern world.

He followed the claim with his infamous "dirty wars," and his administration framed the bloodshed in the loftiest and most idealistic terms. The Reagan administration launched an intensive public relations campaign to convince Americans that the tens of thousands of civilian deaths that resulted were regrettable but necessary, not only because of the United States' mission to promote human rights and democracy around the world but also in order to defeat terrorism.

Clearly, there are differences between Reagan's wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua two decades ago and Bush's debacle in Iraq today. But there are also threads that bind the two.

In his new book, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, historian Greg Grandin pulls those threads together and argues that U.S. intervention in Latin America, especially during the 1980s, served as a laboratory in which a group of neocons -- many of whom served both administrations -- distilled their unique and lethal worldview.

AlterNet caught up with Grandin recently to get the scoop on his new book.

Joshua Holland: Your book looks at the United States’ long history with Latin America, and you argue that during Reagan’s dirty wars in the 1980s in Central America, much of the ideology and the tactics and -- how should I put it? -- the sales pitch for supporting aggressive military action back home that we’ve come to associate with the Bush Doctrine were developed, and you say that it was possible precisely because Central America wasn’t important, that it wasn’t a focus of the international community and wasn’t caught up in the competition of the Cold War.

Greg Grandin: Of course Latin America as a whole has been extraordinarily important in terms of the development of both American foreign policy and our own domestic politics. What I try to do with the book is look at how U.S. corporate elites -- the Guggenheims, the Rockefellers and so forth -- first established themselves in Latin America with their overseas subsidiaries and how U.S. political elites viewed the region as the first place to project American power.

But Central America in the 1980s, I argue, was really a backwater and securely within the U.S. sphere of power. Washington could act there without fear of real consequences.

When Reagan came to power, despite his rhetoric as a Cold Warrior, he actually carried out a policy of moderation, and even conciliation, in much of the rest of the world; he pulled out of Lebanon, in the end he agreed to sanctions against South Africa and he negotiated with Gorbachev. And this is where Central America’s unimportance comes in. He gave the region to conservative movement cadres – it was a form of “wish fulfillment,” the place where they could match words to deeds, where they could carry out their fantasy of not just rehabilitating aggressive American militarism after our defeat in Vietnam, but of hitching that militarism to a reinvigorated sense of American purpose. This I argue is the core of the Bush Doctrine, or what I call in the book “punitive idealism.”

Holland: Let me pull that apart a bit. After Vietnam there was a lot of opposition to the kind of militarism that dragged us into that war, and many in the New Right reacted to that backlash by adopting some of the rhetoric of democratization and human rights that the war's critics had used. That's something we see from the Bush administration as well -- the idealistic wrapping. But one thing isn't clear to me: At times you seem to credit them with being true believers in the benevolence of American power, and at other times you suggest it was just pure spin.

Grandin: Well, obviously it’s a big question in the way one thinks about the motivation of what propels the Bush administration and what propels U.S. foreign policy more broadly. On one level, it was pure manipulation -- I mean you can look at memos from people like [formerly convicted Iran-Contra figure and current deputy national security advisor] Elliott Abrams in which he discusses in a very calculated manner how the concept of human rights should be appropriated to re-establish American policy on a more moral footing. Or you can look at [Bush’s former special envoy to the western hemisphere] Otto Reich’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which was set up in 1983 to sell the wars in Central America using modern PR techniques -- his PR experts polled Americans and found out that concepts like human rights and democracy played well.

So on that level, it’s certainly very calculated, but on another, the reason that it works is that it taps into a deep and abiding strand of American political culture -- of American nationalism -- this sense of having a special providential purpose in the world and having a kind of moral mission to bring freedom or democracy to benighted lands. So, yes, it’s calculated, but it wouldn’t be effective if it didn’t have real resonance, including among policy makers.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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