Almost all of us grew up in an environment in which we learned that thou shalt not murder, rape, rob, probably not pay off a public official or cheat on your taxes-but not that there was anything wrong with toppling foreign governments, quashing revolutions or dropping powerful bombs on foreign people, if it served Americas national security .

Let us look at our teachers. During the bombing of Yugoslavia, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather declared: Im an American, and Im an American reporter. And yes, when theres combat involving Americans, you can criticize me if you must, damn me if you must, but Im always pulling for us to win. 21 (In the past, US journalists were quick to criticize their Soviet counterparts for speaking on behalf of the State.)

What does this mean? That hes going to support any war effort by the United States no matter the legal or moral justification? No matter the effect on democracy, freedom or self-determination? No matter the degree of horror produced? No matter anything7. Many other American journalists have similarly paraded themselves as cheerleaders in modern times in the midst of one of the Pentagons frequent marches down the warpath, serving a function more akin to stenography than journalism .22 During the Gulf War, much of the media, led by CNN, appeared to have a serious missile fetish, enough to suggest a need for counseling.

The CEO of National Public Radio, Kevin Klose, is the former head of all the major, worldwide US government broadcast propa-ganda outlets, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the anti-Castro Radio Marti, which broadcasts into Cuba from Florida. NPR, which can be thought of as the home service of the Voice of America, has never met an American war it didnt like. It was inspired to describe the war against Yugoslavia as Clintons most significant foreign policy success. 23

And the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Robert Coonrod, has a resume remarkably similar to that of Klose, from Voice of America to Radio Marti.

Is it any wonder that countless Americans-bearing psyches no less malleable than those of other members of the species-are only dimly conscious of the fact that they even have the right to be unequivocally opposed to a war effort and to question the governments real reasons for carrying it out, without thinking of themselves as (horror of horrors) unpatriotic ? Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush administration conducted three briefings a day with such telegenic figures as generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. Marlin Fitzwater later recalled that when ABC-TV interviewed a group of Kansans around a kitchen table, every answer at that table reflected one of the reasons we had given for going in. 24

In Spain, in the sixteenth century, the best minds were busy at work devising rationalizations for the cruelty its conquistadors were inflicting on the Indians of the New

World. It was decided, and commonly accepted, that the Indians were natural slaves , created by God to serve the conquistadors.

Twentieth-century America took this a step further. The best and the brightest have assured us that United States interventions-albeit rather violent at times-are not only in the natural order of things, but theyre actually for the good of the natives.

The media and the public do in fact relish catching politicians lies, but these are the small lies-lies about money, sex, drug use and other peccadillos, and the ritual doubletalk of campaignspeak. A certain Mr. A. Hitler, originally of Austria, though often castigated, actually arrived at a number of very perceptive insights into how the world worked. One of them was this:

The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely eviL.therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.25

How many Americans, after all, doubt the official rationale for dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-to obviate the need for a land invasion of Japan, thus saving thousands of American lives? However, its been known for years that the Japanese had been trying for many months to surrender and that the US had consistently ignored these overtures. The bombs were dropped, not to intimidate the Japanese, but to put the fear of the American god into the Russians, The dropping of the A-bomb, it has been said, was not the last shot of World War II, but the first shot of the Cold War.26

In 1964, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, when asked about US involvement in the overthrow of the government of Brazil, declared: Well, there is just not one iota of truth in this. Its just not so in any way, shape or form. Yet, the United States had been intimately involved in the coup, its role being literally indispensable.27

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Asia-the so-called yellow rain -and had caused thousands of deaths. So precise was Washingtons information they could state at one point that in Afghanistan 3,042 had died in 47 separate incidents. President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union for these atrocities more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The yellow rain , it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.28

These are three examples, chosen virtually at random. Numerous others could be given. But at the beginning of the 21st century do the American people really need to be reminded that governments lie, that great powers lie greater, that the worlds only superpower has the most to lie about, i.e., cover up? Do I have to descend to the banality of telling this to my readers?

Apparently so, if we are to judge by all those who swallowed the humanitarian excuse for the bombing of Yugoslavia without gagging, including many on the left.

The idea of altruism has been a recurrent feature of Americas love affair with itself. From 1918 to 1920, the United States was a major part of a Western invasion of the infant Soviet Union, an invasion that endeavored to strangle at its birth , as Winston Churchill put it, the Russian Revolution, which had effectively removed one-sixth of the worlds land surface from private capitalist investment. A nation still recovering from a horrendous world war, in extreme chaos from a fundamental social revolution, and in the throes of a famine that was to leave many millions dead, was mercilessly devastated yet further by the invaders, without any provocation.

When the smoke had cleared, the US Army Chief of Staff put out a report on the undertaking, which said: This expedition affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings...to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new

liberty. 29

Seventy years later, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was moved to tell an audience in California that the United States has so many friends in the Pacific because of our values, our economic system and our altruism .30 (This was shortly after Powell had directed the slaughter of the people of Panama.)

Author Garry Wills has commented on this American benevo-lence toward foreigners: We believe we can literally kill them with kindness, moving our guns forward in a seizure of demented charity. It is when America is in her most altruistic mood that other nations better get behind their bunkers.

What is it, then, that I mean to say here-that the US govern-ment does not care a whit about human life or human rights?

No, I mean to say that doing the right thing is not a principle of American foreign policy, not an ideal or a goal of policy in and of itself. If it happens that doing the right thing coincides with, or is irrelevant to, Washingtons overriding international ambitions, American officials have no problem walking the high moral ground. But this is rarely the case. A study of the many US interventions- summarized numerically above, and detailed in the Interventions chapter-shows clearly that the engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, nor even simple decency, but rather by the necessity to serve other masters, which can be broken down to four imperatives:

1) making the world open and hospitable for-in current terminology-globalization, particularly American-based transnational corporations

2) enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of Congress and residents of the White House