hoping that US troops would put an end to the chaos which threatened their highly expensive investments. There was also the Pentagons ongoing need to sell itself to those in Congress who were trying to cut the military budget in the post-Cold War world. Humanitarian actions and (unnecessary) amphibious landings by US Marines on the beach in the glare of TV cameras were thought to be good selling points. Washington designed the operation in such a way that the show would be run by the US military and not the United Nations, under whose aegis it supposedly fell.

In any event, by the time the Marines landed, the worst of the famine was over. It had peaked months before.62

Iraq, 1990s

Mental hospitals and prisons are filled with people who claim to have heard voices telling them to kill certain people, often people theyve never met before, people whove never done them any harm, or threatened any harm.

American soldiers went to the Middle East to kill the same kind of people after hearing a voice command them: the voice of George Bush.

Relentless bombing for more than 40 days and nights, against one of the most advanced nations in the Middle East, devastating its ancient and modern capital city; 177 million pounds of bombs falling on the people of Iraq, the most concentrated aerial onslaught in the history of the world to that time; depleted uranium weapons incinerating people, causing cancers and sundry congenital problems; blowing up chemical and biological weapon and oil facilities, a ter-rible poisoning of the atmosphere; burying soldiers alive, deliberately; the infrastructure destroyed, with dreadful effects on health; sanctions continued into the 21st century, multiplying the health problems; more than a million children dead from all of these factors, even more adults. UNICEF, in an August 1999 report, stated that in southern and central Iraq, the death rate for children under five had more than doubled in the years of the sanctions.

Until the present day, the US and Great Britain have continued to launch missiles against the burned-out ash called Iraq, as their planes fly over the country on virtually a daily basis, the authority for which Washington and London derive from each other. In the first eight months of 1999, the two countries flew some 10,000 sorties over Iraq, unleashing more than 1,000 bombs and missiles on more than 400 targets, killing or wounding many hundreds of people. Said US Brig. General William Looney, a director of this operation:

If they turn on their radars were going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace.. .We dictate the way they live and talk. And thats whats great about America right now. Its a good thing, especially when theres a lot of oil out there we need.63

It can be said that the United States has inflicted more vindictive punishment and ostracism upon Iraq than upon Germany or Japan after World War II.

Noam Chomsky has written: Its been a leading, driving doctrine of US foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price.

This may have been Iraqs crime, not that they invaded Kuwait in 1990, an invasion encouraged by the United States and provoked by Washingtons close ally, Kuwait, itself; an invasion that gave the US all the pretext it needed to take action. Iraqs invasion was, after all, no more than Indonesia had done to East Timor, with Washingtons blessing.

Peru, 1990s-present

For more than a decade the US has provided Peru with an unending stream of military advisers and trainers, Navy Seals and Green Berets, all manner of arms and equipment, surveillance flights, radar stations in the Andes, whatever-all to one of the most dictatorial and repressive regimes in the Western Hemisphere, condemned by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch/Americas and State Department Human Rights reports for its medieval prisons, routine torture and other human-rights violations, led by an autocrat named Alberto Fujimori.

For what purpose has this support been rendered? The official Washington explanation is to fight drugs. But whereas four air force officers, including one of Fujimoris personal military pilots, were arrested after 383 pounds of cocaine were found on their military plane; whereas on four separate occasions cocaine was seized from navy ships, totaling 220 pounds;64 whereas Fujimoris closest adviser, Vladimir Montesino, has a history of being a drug kingpin, and formerly a lawyer for drug traffickers; 65 whereas Montesino, who has long been on the CIA payroll, runs the intelligence service, which also has its hands deep into the drug cookie jar and was publicly condemned by the US Senate in 1999 for its corruption;66 and whereas the military is known to have tipped off drug traffickers to DEA raids and physically protected the traffickers cocaine caches from seizure by the police67...what can Washington possibly be thinking?

Theyre thinking of the usual: helping the government suppress guerrilla movements is the main priority. In 1997, Fujimori ordered the summary execution of 14 leftists, most of them very young, who had taken over the Japanese ambassadors home to press for human rights and economic improvements, and tried to surrender peacefully before being shot in cold blood. The commandos who carried out the raid received training and sophisticated technological help from the United States for their operation, including overflights of the RU-38A airplane, which can photograph a building and gauge the thickness of its walls, amongst a host of other details crucial to planning the raid.68

The United States did not aid in the execution of these young people because of drug trafficking.

Mexico, 1990s-present

The Mexican government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy...[and] will need to consider carefully whether or not to allow opposition victories if fairly won at the ballot box. Thus reads a 1995 memorandum from Riordan Roett, a consultant on Latin Americas emerging markets, working for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.69

He was speaking of the movement of indigenous people in Mexico who were, and still are, demanding their economic and political rights and their autonomy. These desires, however, conflict with the needs of NAFTA and other components of the globalized economy, which want the Zapatistas out of certain areas-or at least not claiming ownA ership to the land-for various reasons, oil and other natural resources being amongst them, as well as the decidedly bad example being set for other Mexican and Central American peasants. NAFTAs plans call for the subsistence agriculture long practiced by the indigenous people to be modernized ; i.e., to produce high-profit export crops, such as rubber and lumber.70

In the name of fighting drugs, the United States has poured hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid and training into Mexico, bringing in the usual complement of American police agents, Army advisers, CIA operatives and Special Forces.71 And all in support of a remarkably corrupt government, military, paramilitary and police, many of whom are involved in drug trafficking themselves, carry out massacres and regularly engage in torture and other viola-tions of human rights.72 The Zapatistas claim that US and Argentine advisers have been providing training to the paramilitaries, the main force behind this newest dirty war , so terribly familiar to Latin America.73

The American military aid has included sophisticated surveillance technology to track the Zapatistas in forests and hills, and hundreds of helicopters, which have been used to attack communities with machine guns, rockets and bombs. Such US aid and training is, still, commonplace in the Third World. In an excellent series on the subject in 1998, the Washington Post pointed out that:

[Even] where armed domestic opposition is negligible or nonexistent, U.S. forces are teaching armies how to track down opponents, surprise them in helicopter attacks, kill them with more proficiency, or, in some cases, how to lead house-to-house raids in close quarters combat designed for cities.74

Much of the military aid to Mexico has been in violation of congressional laws banning military assistance to foreign security units guilty of human-rights violations.75