U.S. takes selfish stance in relations throughout world
By Daily Bruin Staff
Feb. 13, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Michael Schwartz Schwartz is a
fifth-year sociology student who can be reached at [email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Michael Schwartz
I was reading the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago and
came across an article about Colin Powell’s new approach
to foreign policy. According to the article, Powell’s
approach has been dubbed “unilateralism”
or “exceptionalism.”
The premise of the new doctrine is that the United
States can do whatever it wants because our sophisticated
democracy makes us morally and politically superior to the
rest of the world and exempts us from international norms and
treaties. We need to be given a pass on standards we hold for
others such as testing nuclear weapons or preemptive military
strikes. It’s basically a doctrine that says, “Because
it’s the United States, whatever we do is
okay.”
That day the Times also ran articles detailing our support for
South Korea’s dictator during the 1960s and CIA support for
the coup that brought Chilean dictator General Pinochet to power in
1973. General Pinochet was responsible for the murder of tens of
thousands of people during his reign of terror.
Historian Howard Zinn once said that nationalism is “a set
of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland
or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a
burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the
children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.”
It’s obvious that Colin Powell doesn’t care about
the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi human beings who have died
at the hands of U.S. bombs. In response to a question
concerning the number of Iraqis killed in the war, the
good general replied, “It’s really not a number
I’m terribly interested in.” This wouldn’t
surprise George Orwell, who once said, “The nationalist
not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his
own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even
hearing about them.”
In 1996 an Amnesty International report documented that
“throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or
child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or
“˜disappeared,’ at the hands of governments or
armed political groups. More often than not, the United States
shares the blame.”
 Illustration by JARRETT QUON/Daily Bruin It was once said
“a terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have
an air force.” It is easy to forget the horror and
destruction that is caused by war now that the media portrays
war like a video game. The number of countries that have been
bombed by the United States is incredible.
The list just since 1945 is as follows: China 1945-46,
Korea and China 1950-53Â (Korean War), Guatemala 1954,
Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-1961, Guatemala 1960, Congo 1964,
Peru 1965, Laos 1964-73, Vietnam 1961-73, Cambodia 1969-70,
Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Lebanon 1983-1984, Libya 1986,
El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Iran 1987, Panama 1989,
Iraq 1991-2001, Kuwait 1991, Somalia 1993, Bosnia 1994-1995, Sudan
1998, Afghanistan 1998, Yugoslavia 1999.
You should ask yourself why it is that we do this. Is
it really to “promote democracy and peace?” I
don’t think so. The United States is willing to kill
millions of people to protect its economic interests around
the world. It’s as simple as that. Was the gulf war about
“democracy,” or was it about oil?
Even the politicians sometimes tell the truth about what our
goals are. In 1948, George Kennan, who was the Director of
Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department said:
“We have 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but
only 6.3 percent of its population … In this situation we
cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real
task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships,
which will allow us to maintain this position of
disparity.”
Today the disproportion of wealth is even higher and we still do
everything we can do to maintain this “position of
disparity.” I would like to give a few examples of how
the United States completely violates international laws
and what that means for the people who are victimized.
First of all let’s look at Nicaragua. Under siege by
the United States and its Contra proxy army for several years,
Nicaragua filed suit in 1984 in the World Court (International
Court of Justice), the principal judicial organ of the
United Nations, located in The Hague, Netherlands, for relief
from the constant onslaught.
The Court ruled in 1986 that the United States was in violation
of international law for a host of reasons, stated that
Washington “is under a duty immediately to cease and to
refrain from all such acts (of hostility)” and “is
under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of
Nicaragua for all injury.”
Washington did not slow down its hostile acts against Nicaragua,
nor did it ever pay a penny in reparation. Elliott Abrams,
assistant secretary of state under Reagan, was instrumental in
rewriting history, even as it was happening. He was
indispensable to putting the best possible face on
the atrocities being committed daily by the Contras in
Nicaragua and other Washington allies in Central America.
“When history is written,” he declared, “the
Contras will be folk heroes.” (L.A. Weekly March 9-15,
1990).
More recently, let’s look at the bombing of Sudan in
Africa. The El-Shifa pharmaceutical plant had raised Sudanese
medicinal self-sufficiency from less than 5 percent to more
than 50 percent, while producing about 90Â percent of the drugs
used to treat the most deadly illnesses in this desperately
poor country.
But on Aug. 20, 1998, the United States saw fit to send
more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles screaming into the
plant, in an instant depriving the people of Sudan of their
achievement. Washington claimed that the plant was producing
chemical weapons.
But the United States was never able to prove any of its
assertions, while every piece of evidence and every expert
testimony that surfaced categorically contradicted the claim
about chemical weapons (“The Missiles of August”, The
New Yorker, Oct. 12, 1998.). We will never know how many
people will now die due to lack of medicine.
Madeline Albright showed this lack of empathy for human beings
in an interview on “60 Minutes.”
“We have heard that a half million children
have died,” said “60 Minutes” reporter
Lesley Stahl, speaking of U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
“I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima.
And ““Â and you know, is the price worth it?” Her
guest, in May 1996, U.N. Ambassador Albright, said, “I think
this is a very hard choice, but the price ““ we think the
price is worth it.”
Millions of human beings have been killed in the name of the
United States. Why? To secure economic domination over the rest of
the world. Think about that when the next time our president
tells us it’s time to bomb yet another country in our
name. Think about that the next time Mr. Powell talks about our
moral superiority.
