David Slater
In the aftermath of the atrocities of September 11, the geopolitical future of the world has been transformed. In that transformation the position of the United States in the world and the relations between West and non-West will become increasingly central. At the same time, what is emphasized as being crucial today will always be a reflection of the complex interweaving of a politics of memory with a politics of forgetting. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes recently commented in a debate on US foreign policy that the United States of Amnesia might be a more appropriate term for the USA. But to what extent is this an accurate depiction? Perhaps it might be more relevant to distinguish an official memory which recalls events such as the Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbour, the end of the Vietnam War, from events which are customarily consigned to oblivion. Clearly, what is vital here is the struggle over what is remembered and for what purpose, and what is forgotten and why. This might relate to specific events or to the re-assertion of a particular vision. When, for example, Berlusconi underlines what he sees as the superiority of Western values, or when Francis Fukuyama declares that 'the West has won' in his end of history fable, an older colonial vision of world truth is being re-activated and re-fortified. 1
What remains vital to the deployment of any geopolitical power is the construction of an ensemble of meanings, values and aspirations to legitimize that deployment. In this moment, notions of 'civilization', 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'justice' are welded into place to justify a war against terror. That terror is immanently ascribed to the other, either as a shadowy network of 'Islamic fundamentalists' or a US -defined list of 'rogue states'. 2 'Terror' is what is done to 'us in the West' , whilst we endure in our beneficent mission of transferring our superior values and practices to the recipient non-West. To wage war against the other that dares to terrorize back is intrinsic to that mission.
Against this official backdrop, one of the ways we can respond is by critically contextualizing the effects of power and the forms of terror, so that we re-activate realities that reveal another reading of global politics. In this short intervention I want to consider two examples. First, I want to refer to some key effects of the United States acting in the world - to the effects of its geopolitical interventions, and second I want to take one or two historical dimensions of the Palestine/Israel question and relate these dimensions to the imperial role played by Britain, now the lone superpower's 'junior partner'. In both cases my aim is to problematize questions of power, terror and memory, and in so doing help to locate the antagonism towards Western dominance that is so justifiably rooted across the diverse regions of the global South.
Empire and its Invasive Effects
'Empire became so intrinsically our American way of life that we rationalized and
suppressed the nature of our means in the euphoria of our enjoyment of the ends'
(W.A.Williams, Empire as a Way of Life , Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1980, p.ix)
'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people'
(Henry Kissinger, New York Times, September 11 1974, p.14, quoted in L.Schoultz, National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1987, p.284)
It is never too late to remember and analyse the arrogance of power. When a New Yorker on the day after the 11th of September looked into the camera and exclaimed -"We are the Superpower: how dare they do this?" we were presented with one quotidian response to the reality of an invaded pride. But the antagonism towards the United States is not rooted in a posited envy of its way of life, but in an opposition to the detrimental effects of its state's global strategy of enduring invasiveness.
However, unlike the Europe of Empire and colonialism, the United States from its anti-colonial inception has always officially supported the self-determination of peoples and the struggle against European colonialism. With the exception of the Philippines, colonial annexation has never been the preference of the 'Empire of Liberty' , but the creation of protectorates, as in the cases of Cuba and Haiti, and a regularity of military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean were characteristic features of US imperial power in the earlier part of the twentieth century, to be modified in the 1930s under Franklin D Roosevelt's 'Good Neighbor Policy'. 3 . Rather than through territorial annexation, the geopolitical power of the United States has been rooted in its varied capacities (military, economic, political), and always with the cooperation of the internally dominant sectors of peripheral societies, to penetrate and to re-configure the modes of governance within these societies. The illustration of these various modalities of intervention is needed not only to counter the myths of governmental narrative, but also as part of our attempt to nurture an alternative politics of memory, and another vision of terror - the terror of sanctioned power. It is possible to identify seven types of action which taken together represent a comprehensive strategy of geopolitical intervention.
i) In contrast to the well-rehearsed argument that the West and in particular the United States has diffused and continues to diffuse democracy to third world societies, it needs to be recalled that the United States has intervened to terminate democratic governments that sought to develop policies that were independent of US power. In Iran in 1953, the democratically-elected government of Mossadegh ,who was a conservative nationalist and a supporter of the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company , was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup. The coup restored the Shah to power, initiating a 25 year period of severe repression, while the oil industry was restored to foreign(essentially Anglo-American) ownership. 4 Similarly, in 1954 in Guatemala, a CIA-backed coup overthrew the democratically-elected goverment of Arbenz, who had initiated a programme of land reform which was strongly opposed by the United Fruit Company. The United States preferred the installation of a military regime to the possibility of a reforming, redistributing government acting as a possible example for other Latin American countries. The coup initiated a 40-year period of state terror, death squads, torture, disappearances and executions. 5 Other interventions which overturned democratically-elected governments took place in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973, for which the arrogance of US power is captured in the Kissinger quotation cited above. In the case of the Nicaraguan Revolution, the Sandinista government which had won an election in 1984, an election which was judged by independent observers to be fair and legitimate, was destabilized by the Reagan Administration and subsequently lost the 1990 elections. In the present media coverage of the 2001 elections the 1984 Sandinista victory is predominantly forgotten - erased from the record.
ii) Other interventions which constituted transgressions of national sovereignty but which did not represent the overthrow of democratically-elected governments as such took place in Cuba in 1961(unsuccessfully), Grenada in 1983 and in Panama in 1989. In the Panamanian case, the US invasion , which included the landing of 13,000 troops , was code-named 'Operation Just Cause' and its primary objectives were to 'defend democracy in Panama' and 'combat drug trafficking'. In thirteen hours, more than four hundred bombs were dropped by US war planes, large areas of Panama City were burned to the ground and over 10,000 people were left homeless. In the end the Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega, a previous CIA agent, was arrested and sentenced by a court in Miami to forty years in prison for conspiring to smuggle drugs into the United States. In the case of Grenada, conflicts within the radical New Jewel Movement regime which culminated in the murder of Maurice Bishop, plus the presence of a small number of Cuban construction workers, provided a pretext for US intervention and the landing of 6,000 marines. The Reagan Administration justified its invasion in relation to article 6 of the Rio Pact of 1947 which it claimed legitimizes intervention when regional security is threatened by an extra-continental conflict or any other situation that might endanger the peace of America. The United States acted unilaterally in accordance with its own strategic imperatives, and failed to convene a meeting of the Organization of American States as was required by article 6 of the Rio Treaty. As one author put it: 'the invasion.. was meant to set an example to those who were deemed to threaten the national security of the United States' . 6
iii) The termination of independent democratic government and the transgression of national sovereignty has its reverse side - a historical record of support for pro-Western dictatorships . In South America, military regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay were not destabilized and undermined but supported. 7 In Africa, the repressive political and social order Mobutu imposed on Zaire was possible only due to loyal American support for him after 1965. In Angola, the United States together with South Africa did everything feasible to undermine the legitimate MPLA government from 1975 onwards and continued to support UNITA's war of destabilization with appalling results for the future of peace and security for the Angolan people. 8 In Indonesia not only is it necessary to recall the role played by the United States in supporting the post-1965 Suharto military regime but also its nefarious part in the 'final solution' to Indonesia's Communist problem. Estimates vary as to the numbers massacred - one CIA figure gave 250,000 deaths in a Communist party (the PKI) of 3 million members - and the CIA itself classified the slaughter of Communists in Indonesia as 'one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century' . 9 These are examples which stand out as being particularly significant in their long-term geopolitical impact, but there have been many more, as the history of the Middle East testifies. The key point here is to re-assert the historical record and perhaps recall what Edward Said wrote some years ago - that ' rarely before in human history has there been so massive an intervention of force and ideas from one culture to another as there is today from America to the rest of the world'. 10
iv) A more targetted form of intervention that is often unrecorded concerns the CIA policy of assassinations that was made illegal in 1976, only to be re-activated in the wake of September 11 by President Bush. In 1975 a Senate Committee, in its report on alleged assassinations, wrote that it did not believe that the acts of assassination it had examined represented the 'real American character'; rather they were 'aberrations'. However as William Blum shows, in his book on the US as rogue state, from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s there were over 40 recorded incidents of assassination plots, largely aimed at third world leaders. 11 In the single case of Fidel Castro, official US records published in July 1997 showed that the CIA launched at least eight attempts on the Cuban leader's life in the 1960s, including attempted shootings and bombings, lethal pills and on one notorious occasion an exploding cigar . 12 Nor should we assume that political leaders were the only targets, as was clearly shown during the Vietnam War with the launch in the early 1970s of 'Operation Phoenix' which would 'neutralize' - arrest or kill - suspected Vietcong supporters in South Vietnam. Innocent villagers were systematically arrested, tortured or killed. 13
v) The policy of assassination can be interpreted in a wider framework of disregard for international public law . The more than forty year blockade of Cuba stands as one example. This strategy has been condemned by the UN, the European Union, and the Inter-American Juridical Committee which has ruled that such a series of measures as the trade embargo against Cuba violates international law. 14 As a second example, in the case of US support for the contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s, the International Court in The Hague found the United States guilty of violating both international law and its treaty obligations to Nicaragua, and ordered Washington to stop the intervention and negotiate a reparations settlement with Nicaragua. After winning the 1990 elections, the US-backed government of President Chamorro, under pressure from Washington, withdrew the law suit, the costs of which had risen to $17 billion, and subsequently Washington forgave $260 million in loans to Nicaragua. 15 Other examples of a disregard for international law are reflected in the use of American-defined powers of extra-territorial jurisdiction, (as for example with the case of Noriega) and in a reluctance to abide by international treaty obligations. 16
vi) Not only can we point to a certain disregard for international jurisdiction but more seriously to acts of international terror. The bombing of Libya in 1986, the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, the joint US/UK bombing of Iraq after the Gulf War and the bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 are examples of the unlawful acts of the world's most powerful rogue state. But these acts are officially described as 'retaliation' for acts of terror presumed to have been committed by other countries or networks, and often Article 51 of the UN Charter is creatively interpreted to recast acts of state violence as legitimate measures taken in the exercise of the right of self-defence. 17
vii) Finally, within the United States itself, it is important to remember the activities of the US Army School of the Americas(SOA). This School was moved from Panama in 1984 to Fort Benning, Georgia , and by 1996 it had trained approximately 60,000 Latin American military and police personnel. Seven US Army training manuals used by the School between 1989 and 1991 were declassified in 1996. The manuals provided instruction on the detection and suppression of antigovernment political and military activities, and contained information indicating how the US Army trained Latin American military and police officers in a variety of interrogation techniques. As has been noted SOA graduates have led a number of military coups in Latin America, and as Blum suggests it is unlikely that the full scope of atrocities committed by the School's graduates will ever be known. 18 What has been documented is evidence of the training by the US Army of Latin American military and police personnel in the skills of institutionalized terror.
These seven facets of geopolitical intervention do not provide a complete guide but they do point to an alternative reality to the official discourse surrounding America's role in the world, past and present. They also suggest another reservoir of memory which can be used to think through other states of terror, often forgotten in a silencing of the past. The modes of intervention outlined above also draw us to the invasive effects of imperial power and to the roots of so much anger at so much injustice.
Let us now turn to another and central issue in explaining the roots of antagonism towards the West, and especially in the Arab world - the question of Palestine. In this case I want to briefly look at the historical role played by the 'junior partner' of the world's lone superpower, but at a time when Britain was itself an imperial player on the world stage.
The West and the Question of Palestine - geopolitical origins of an injustice
'The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world's peace'
(Arnold J Toynbee 1968, quoted in the UN Report on Palestine 1990)
On November 2 1917 the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild and conveyed a declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations. The Balfour Declaration, which was later to be included in the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, was a short statement of sixty seven words, but its impact was to be profound and lasting. In re-examining the declaration, it is worthwhile remembering the following: first that the British government 'favoured the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'; and second 'that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine', or equally the 'rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country'. 19
What I think is important to underline here is the reference made to the 'civic and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities' rather than to their political rights, which contrasts with the 'rights and political status' associated with the Jewish people. Moreover, the Palestinians and Arab peoples are not written into the declaration as such but are referred to as the 'non-Jewish communities in Palestine'. In other words, their identity as well as their political rights to self-determination as a people are not explicitly recognized. In addition, and in a revealing memo written two years later to Lord Curzon, Balfour asserted that the Allies do not propose to even consult the 'wishes of the present inhabitants of Palestine', thus contravening Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. This was explained by the fact that the powers of the day were committed to Zionism, 'be it right or wrong' since 'it is rooted in age-long traditions' and 'of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land' . 20 Perhaps the only positive aspect of this statement was that it did at least include the recognition of the existence of 700,000 Palestinian and Arab people in the land of Palestine at that time. In contrast, one of the founding slogans of the Zionist Organization was ' a land with no people for people without land', i.e. the Palestinian and Arab peoples were erased from the map of Palestine so as to help legitimize the creation a homeland for the Jewish people. Clearly, however, Balfour's candidly expressed views on the posited insignificance of the 'desires and prejudices' of 700,000 Arabs captured a form of Western prejudice that has cast a long and enduring shadow over the Middle East region. 21
Britain's League of Nations mandate over Palestine came into force in 1923 and in the period up to the Second World War, the land of Palestine witnessed a continual and sizeable immigration of Jewish settlers, especially from Germany during the rise of Nazi terror. By 1939 the Jewish population in Palestine numbered over 445,000 out of a total of about 1,500,000 - nearly 30 per cent compared to the less than 10 per cent twenty years before. Similarly, by the end of 1939, Jewish holdings of land had risen almost threefold since the start of the Mandate. Arnold Toynbee, the eminent historian who had dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate in the British Foreign Office wrote in 1968 that if Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would not have been admitted into Palestine in such large numbers. Toynbee went on to comment that, ' the reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own'. He concluded with the prescient observation, quoted above, that the Palestinian tragedy is not a local matter but a question for the world since its injustice is a threat to world peace. 22
Britain terminated its mandate over Palestine in 1948, several months before the time envisaged in the United Nations plan. As is known the creation of the State of Israel was preceded by a wave of terror against the Palestinian Arab population. The 1990 United Nations Report on Palestine concluded that the terror spread among the Palestinian population was a crucial factor for future political developments since it led to a mass exodus of refugees into neighbouring countries. The number of Palestinian refugees resulting from the hostilities was estimated to number 726,000 by the end of 1949 - half the indigenous population of Palestine. 23 The declaration establishing the State of Israel made reference to the right of the Jewish people to a 'national rebirth in its own country' , a right it was noted that had been recognized in the Balfour Declaration and reaffirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations. That claimed right went together with the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the beginnings of a process of territorial expansionism, where the twin origins of the word territory, i.e. land and terror need to be brought together.
The territorial expansionism of the Israeli state has been reflected in the 1967 war, the invasion of South Lebanon in 1982 with an estimated 17,000 civilian deaths and the continuing establishment of new and illegal Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian land. UN Resolution 242 of November 1967 which was adopted by the Security Council stipulated the 'inadmissability of the acquistion of territory by war' and called for a 'just settlement of the refugee problem'. But this resolution and many other UN resolutions have been defied by Israel for whom the United States has given unwavering support. Israel, since the end of the Second World War, has been and remains for the West, and especially the United States, a key 'strategic asset' in the geopolitical heartland of the Middle East.
Resistance to Israeli occupation in the first and second intifadas has been met by Israeli state violence. In the period 1988 to 1994 Israel interrogated on average five thousand Palestinians per year. According to official statistics, of the 83,321 Palestinians tried in military courts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1988 and 1993 only 3.2 per cent were acquitted. A majority of interrogation subjects were subjected to severe beatings, many of which involved broken bones and hospitalization. These methods were subsequently reviewed and changed into a package of measures that included beatings that left no marks, painful body positioning and sensory disorientation. 24 But there have of course been other effects. For example, one year into the second intifada starting in 2000, 706 Palestinians have been killed(about four times the number of Israeli deaths), with 30 per cent being children; 16,204 have been injured; 809 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israeli authorities; 112,900 olive trees have been uprooted from Palestinian land and as a result of Israeli closures there has been an estimated shortfall in Palestinian GNP of $1.5 billion from September 2000 to March 2001. 25
Finally, as Edward Said writes, 'equipped with the latest in American-donated fighter-bombers, helicopter gunships, tanks and missiles.....Israel has been grinding down a dispossessed people without ..any of the protective institutions of a modern state' . Israel's cruel confinement of 1.3 million people in the Gaza strip...and of nearly two million in the West Bank has 'few parallels in the annals of colonialism'. 'Even under apartheid', Said reminds the reader, F-16 jets were never used to bomb African homelands, as they are now sent against Palestinian towns and villages'. 26
Thinking about the geopolitical origins of injustice and the connections between the politics of memory and states of terror, I came across the following report which struck me as germane to the notes I have outlined above, acting as a fitting coda.
When Tony Blair recently visited Gaza, a Guardian reporter came across a 65-year resident of the refugee camp known as "Beach Camp" because of its proximity to the Mediterranean seashore. "What more does Blair want from us? asked the 65-year old Ahmad, putting down the pipe he was smoking to emphasize his dismay, "It's because of his predecessor, Balfour, that we live like this today". 27 It would be difficult to find a more poignant example of the significance of a politics of memory rooted in such a deep and legitimate sense of injustice.
Invasive Power and the Rising Tide of Fury
In contemporary Washington, belligerence and bellicosity are the order of the day. The devastating attacks on the symbols of America's financial and military power have unleashed a new force for vengeance and a desire for an unending war on terror . In a world where one power is globally pre-eminent, Bill Clinton's 'indispensable nation' , a nation that has believed since the nineteenth century in its 'manifest destiny' to take its purportedly superior way of life to all corners of the globe, there are also other worlds of the dispossessed, of the disrespected and of the colonized. Also inside 'America' as elsewhere there are those worlds inhabited by citizens who believe in global justice, equality and respect for difference, cultural and political. But the long-term effects of the invasive power of the Occident and especially of the 'colossus of the North' , have been to open up a sea of antagonism within which many currents ebb and flow. Acts of terror need to be treated as criminal acts to be responded to within the parameters of international law and justice, rather than being elevated into acts of war. The geopolitical impact of September 11 2001 may be taken as a moment to rethink a wider range of intersections among power, terror and memory. In re-examining the illegitimacy and historical duplicity of invasive power, and calling for action to redress the injustices past and present of such invasiveness, we can more effectively keep open the crucial pathways for cross-cultural dialogue and critical understanding. In the world in which we all move, such pathways are needed more urgently than ever before.
NOTES
1 Francis Fukuyama, We Remain at the End of History, The Independent , 11-10-01, p.5. For a comment on Berlusconi, see The Guardian , 3-10-01, p.18 and for some critical remarks on the colonial connection see Rana Kabbani, The Guardian , 9-10-01, p.24.
2 For two recent texts on 'rogue states' , see William Blum, Rogue State - a guide to the world's only
superpower, Common Courage Press, Maine, 2000 and Noam Chomsky, Rogue States, Pluto Press, London, 2000.
3 For a recent and thorough historical analysis of US foreign policy in the Americas, see Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
4 See Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988, pp72-77.
5 For a full account of the background to CIA operations in Guatemala, see Nick Cullather, Secret History, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999.
6 See Frank Niess, A Hemisphere to Itself , Zed Books, London, 1990.
7 For example in the case of the 1964 military coup in Brazil, the United States provided up to $1.5 billion in financial support during the regime's first four years - see Gabriel Kolko op cit p. 159
8 See Victoria Brittain, Death of Dignity, Pluto Press , London, 1998.
9 Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects, Pluto Press, London, 1996 p 195.
10 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London 1993, p.387. On the Middle East see Kolko op cit pp 69-91 and Joe Stork, Oil, Islam and Israel: US policy and Democratic Change in the Middle East in Jochen Hippler, (Ed), The Democratisation of Disempowerment, Pluto Press, London, 1995, pp153-172.
11 Blum 2000 op cit pp38-42.
12 The Guardian , 1-11-97, p.14.
13 See Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, p.103.
14 See Chomsky 2000, op cit , p.2.
15 See Robert H Holden and Eric Zolov (Eds) Latin America and the United States: a documentary history, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2000, pp300-301.
16 As argued in the American Journal of International Law , 92, 1998, and quoted in Chomsky 2000 op cit p 216.
17 And Article 51 of the UN Charter is referred to in Article 5 of the NATO Treaty which stipulates that an armed attack against one or more of the parties to the treaty shall be considered an 'attack against them all', and that if such an attack occurs action can be taken, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area - see http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm‡ Art05.
18 See Blum 2000 op cit pp62-63 and Holden and Zolov 2000 op cit pp313-316.
19 See The United Nations, The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988, 1990, New York, p.8.
20 United Nations 1990, op cit pp25-26.
21 For the now classic study of Orientalist visions of the Middle East, see Edward Said Orientalism
Penguin Books, 1978.
22 See United Nations 1990 op cit p 72 and p 42 for the figures on population and land.
23 United Nations 1990 op cit p.135.
24 For these statistics based on Human Rights Watch information see James Ron, Varying Methods of State Violence, International Organization , 51, 2, Spring 1997, pp275-276.
25 The information is from a variety of sources including the World Bank, the UN and the Palestine Red Crescent Society - see Palestine News, October-December 2001, London, p.4.
26 Edward Said, A People in Need of Leadership, New Left Review, 11, September/October 2001, pp27-28.
27 The Guardian , 2-11-01, p.3.