[News] An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter

Mon Apr 25 11:16:06 EDT 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175383/tomgram%3A_mccoy_and_reilly%2C_an_empire_of_failed_states/#more

Washington on the Rocks
An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter
By 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy>Alfred 
W. McCoy and <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/brettreilly>Brett Reilly

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the 
juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has 
stripped the architecture of American global 
power bare for all to see. Last November, 
WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy 
cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about 
national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on 
the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then 
just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted 
in pro-democracy protests against the region’s 
autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. 
allies whose foibles had been so conveniently 
detailed in those same diplomatic cables.

Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations 
of a U.S. world order that rested significantly 
on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal 
“subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a 
motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and 
uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger 
logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign 
policy choices over the past half-century.

Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at 
the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an 
accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or 
encouraging the assassination of the Catholic 
autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The 
answer -- and 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables?INTCMP=SRCH>thanks 
to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now 
so much clearer -- is that both were Washington’s 
chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Why, half a century later, would Washington 
betray its stated democratic principles by 
backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against 
millions of demonstrators and then, when he 
faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at 
least initially with his intelligence chief Omar 
Suleiman, a man best known for 
<http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201127114827382865.html>running 
Cairo’s torture chambers (and lending them out to 
Washington)? The answer again: because both were 
reliable subordinates who had long served 
Washington’s interests well in this key Arab state.

Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and 
Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests 
are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites 
crucial to the wielding of American power. Of 
course, all modern empires have relied on 
dependable surrogates to translate their global 
power into local control -- and for most of them, 
the moment when those elites began to stir, talk 
back, and set their own agendas was also the 
moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.

If the "velvet revolutions” that swept Eastern 
Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the 
Soviet empire, then the "jasmine revolutions" now 
spreading across the Middle East may well mark 
the beginning of the end for American global power.

Putting the Military in Charge

To understand the importance of local elites, 
look back to the Cold War’s early days when a 
desperate White House was searching for 
something, anything that could halt the seemingly 
unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as 
anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In 
December 1954, the National Security Council 
(NSC) met in the White House to stake out a 
strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist 
forces of change then sweeping the globe.

Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European 
empires that had guaranteed global order for more 
than a century were giving way to 100 new 
nations, many -- as Washington saw it -- 
susceptible to “communist subversion.” In Latin 
America, there were stirrings of leftist 
opposition to the region’s growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.

After a review of the “threats” facing the U.S. 
in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary 
George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that 
they should “stop talking so much about 
democracy” and instead “support dictatorships of 
the right if their policies are pro-American.” At 
that moment with a flash of strategic insight, 
Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that 
Humphrey was, in effect, saying, “They’re OK if they’re our s.o.b.’s.”

It was a moment to remember, for the President of 
the United States had just articulated with 
crystalline clarity the system of global dominion 
that Washington would implement for the next 50 
years -- setting aside democratic principles for 
a tough realpolitik policy of backing any 
reliable leader willing to support the U.S., 
thereby building a worldwide network of national 
(and often nationalist) leaders who would, in a 
pinch, put Washington’s needs above local ones.

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor 
military autocrats in Latin America, aristocrats 
across the Middle East, and a mixture of 
democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, 
military coups in Thailand and Iraq suddenly put 
the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces 
to be reckoned with.  It was then that the 
Eisenhower administration decided to bring 
foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further 
“training” to facilitate “the ‘management’ of the 
forces of change released by the development” of 
these emerging nations. Henceforth, Washington 
would pour military aid into the cultivation of 
the armed forces of allies and potential allies 
worldwide, while “training missions” would be 
used to create crucial ties between the U.S. 
military and the officer corps in country after 
country -- or where subordinate elites did not 
seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative leaders.

When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, 
the Central Intelligence Agency went to work, 
promoting coups that would install reliable 
military successors --replacing Iranian Prime 
Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who tried to 
nationalize his country's oil, with General 
Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 
1953; President Sukarno with General Suharto in 
Indonesia during the next decade; and of course 
President Salvador Allende with General Augusto 
Pinochet in Chile in 1973, to name just three such moments.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, 
Washington’s trust in the militaries of its 
client states would only grow.  The U.S. was, for 
example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt’s 
military annually, but investing only $250 
million a year in the country’s economic 
development. As a result, when demonstrations 
rocked the regime in Cairo last January, as the 
New York Times 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/weekinreview/20military.html>reported, 
“a 30-year investment paid off as American 
generals... and intelligence officers quietly 
called... friends they had trained with,” 
successfully urging the army’s support for a 
“peaceful transition” to, yes indeed, military rule.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, 
since the 1950s, followed the British imperial 
preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating 
allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu 
Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, 
Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, 
Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from 
Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these 
royalist regimes with military alliances, 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/21/us-congress-notified-arms-sale-saudi-arabia>U.S. 
weapons systems, CIA support for local security, 
a safe American haven for their capital, and 
special favors for their elites, including access 
to educational institutions in the U.S. or 
<http://www.bahr-ehs.eu.dodea.edu/>Department of 
Defense overseas schools for their children.

In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/weekinreview/30cooper.html>summed 
up this record thusly:  “For 60 years, the United 
States pursued stability at the expense of 
democracy
 in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

How It Used to Work

America is by no means the first hegemon to build 
its global power on the gossamer threads of 
personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled 
the waves (as America would later rule the 
skies), but when it came to the ground, like 
empires past it needed local allies who could 
serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, 
volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could 
a small island nation of just 40 million with an 
army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of 
some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
[]
 From 1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal 
colonies through an extraordinary array of local 
allies -- from Fiji island chiefs and Malay 
sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. 
Simultaneously, through subordinate elites 
Britain reigned over an even larger “informal 
empire” that encompassed emperors (from Beijing 
to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and 
presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its 
peak in 1880, Britain's informal empire in Latin 
America, the Middle East, and China was larger, 
in population, than its formal colonial holdings 
in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, 
encompassing nearly half of humanity, rested on 
these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local elites.

Following four centuries of relentless imperial 
expansion, however, Europe’s five major overseas 
empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a 
quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 
and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, 
and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and 
Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more 
than half of today’s sovereign states. In 
searching for an explanation for this sudden, 
sweeping change, most scholars agree with British 
imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously 
argued that “when colonial rulers had run out of 
indigenous collaborators,” their power began to fade.

During the Cold War that coincided with this era 
of rapid decolonization, the world’s two 
superpowers turned to the same methods regularly 
using their espionage agencies to manipulate the 
leaders of newly independent states.  The Soviet 
Union’s KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in 
East Germany and the Securitate in Romania 
enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet 
satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged 
the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third 
World.  Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the 
loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators 
on four continents, 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/post/174824/chalmers_johnson_agency_of_rogues>employing 
coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control 
and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.

In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the 
loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter 
indeed.  Many of them were driven by conflicting 
loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, 
which meant that they had to be monitored 
closely.  So critical were these subordinate 
elites, and so troublesome were their 
insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly 
launched risky covert operations to bring them to 
heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.

Given the rise of its system of global control in 
a post-World War II age of independence, 
Washington had little choice but to work not 
simply with surrogates or puppets, but with 
allies who -- admittedly from weaker positions -- 
still sought to maximize what they saw as their 
nations’ interests (as well as their own). Even 
at the height of American global power in the 
1950s, when its dominance was relatively 
unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard 
bargaining with the likes of the Philippines’ 
Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman 
Rhee, and South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.

In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, 
General Park Chung Hee, then president, bartered 
troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of U.S. 
development dollars, which helped spark the 
country's economic "miracle." In the process, 
Washington paid up, but got what it most wanted: 
50,000 of those tough Korean troops as 
guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.

Post-Cold War World

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending 
the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite 
states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal 
Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the 
sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the 
“victor” and soon to be the “sole superpower” on 
planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.

Over the next two decades, globalization fostered 
a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, 
New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as 
a denationalized system of corporate power 
reduced the dependency of developing economies on 
any single state, however imperial.  With its 
capacity for controlling elites receding, 
Washington has faced ideological competition from 
Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory 
regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising 
tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.

As U.S. power and influence declined, 
Washington’s attempts to control its subordinate 
elites began to fail, often spectacularly -- 
including its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo 
Chavez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, 
to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia 
from Russia’s orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis 
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian 
elections. Where a CIA coup or covert cash once 
sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush 
administration needed a massive invasion to 
topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam 
Hussein.  Even then, it found its plans for 
subsequent regime change in Syria and Iran 
blocked when these states instead aided a 
devastating insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.

Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of 
dollars in foreign aid, Washington has found it 
nearly impossible to control the Afghan president 
it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who 
memorably 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/12/AR2010121203747.html>summed 
up his fractious relationship with Washington to 
American envoys this way: “If you're looking for 
a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If 
you're looking for a partner, yes.”

Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing 
those thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that 
offer uncensored insights into Washington’s 
weakening control over the system of surrogate 
power that it had built up for 50 years. In 
reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf 
Benn of Haaretz 
<http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/wikileaks-cables-tell-the-story-of-an-empire-in-decline-1.328145>could 
see “the fall of the American empire, the decline 
of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint 
of its military and economic supremacy.” No 
longer, he added, are “American ambassadors

received in world capitals as ‘high 
commissioners'... [instead they are] tired 
bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening 
wearily to their hosts' talking points, never 
reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state.”

Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a 
State Department struggling to manage an unruly 
global system of increasingly insubordinate 
elites by any means possible -- via intrigue to 
collect needed information and intelligence, 
friendly acts meant to coax compliance, threats 
to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in 
misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, 
for instance, the State Department 
<http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/04/09STATE37561.html>instructed 
its embassies worldwide to play imperial police 
by collecting comprehensive data on local 
leaders, including “email addresses, telephone 
and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, 
DNA, and iris scans.” Showing its need, like some 
colonial governor, for incriminating information 
on the locals, the State Department also 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wikileaks-files/8331622/SNF-BAHRAIN-EMERGENT-PRINCES-NASIR-AND-KHALID.html>pressed 
its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging 
in an Islamic society, about the kingdom’s crown 
princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory 
information on either prince? Does either prince 
drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?"

With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, 
U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for 
dominance by 
<http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/01/10ANKARA87.html>dismissing 
“the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the 
Middle East and Balkans,” or by knowing the 
weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably 
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s 
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336783/WikiLeaks-Colonel-Gaddafis-phobias-flamenco-dancing-voluptuous-blonde-nurse.html>“voluptuous 
blonde” nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali 
Zardari’s morbid fear of military coups, or 
Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud’s 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html>$52 
million in stolen funds.

As its influence declines, however, Washington is 
finding many of its chosen local allies either 
increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, 
particularly in the strategic Middle East. In 
mid-2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to 
Tunisia 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/217138>reported 
that “President Ben Ali
 and his regime have lost 
touch with the Tunisian people,” relying “on the 
police for control,” while “corruption in the 
inner circle is growing” and “the risks to the 
regime's long-term stability are increasing.” 
Even so, the U.S. envoy could only recommend that 
Washington “dial back the public criticism” and 
instead rely only on “frequent high-level private 
candor” -- a policy that failed to produce any 
reforms before demonstrations toppled the regime just 18 months later.

Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in 
Cairo 
<http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/12/08CAIRO2543.html>feared 
that “Egyptian democracy and human rights 
efforts... are being suffocated.” However, as the 
embassy admitted, “we would not like to 
contemplate complications for U.S. regional 
interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be 
seriously weakened.” When Mubarak visited 
Washington a few months later, the Embassy 
<http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/05/09CAIRO874.html>urged 
the White House “to restore the sense of warmth 
that has traditionally characterized the 
U.S.-Egyptian partnership.” And so in June 2009, 
just 18 months before the Egyptian president’s 
downfall, President Obama 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/06/090602_obama_transcript.shtml>hailed 
this useful dictator as “a stalwart ally... a 
force for stability and good in the region."

As the crisis in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unfolded, 
respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/middleeast/27opposition.html>complained 
bitterly that Washington was pushing “the whole 
Arab world into radicalization with this inept 
policy of supporting repression.” After 40 years 
of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/opinion/09friedman.html>said, 
“a collection of failed states that add nothing 
to humanity or science” because “people were 
taught not to think or to act, and were 
consistently given an inferior education.”

Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping 
away an empire, the decline of a great power is 
often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In 
addition to the two American wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan winding down to something not so far 
short of defeat, the nation’s capital is now 
writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm 
is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime 
allies are forging economic and even military 
ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now 
add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.

For more than 50 years, Washington has been 
served well by a system of global power based on 
subordinate elites. That system once facilitated 
the extension of American influence worldwide 
with a surprising efficiency and (relatively 
speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, 
those loyal allies increasingly look like an 
empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no 
mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a 
century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison, a 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175327/alfred_mccoy_taking_down_america>TomDispatch 
regular, and author most recently of the 
award-winning book, 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Policing 
America’s Empire: The United States, the 
Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance 
State. He has also convened the 
<http://history.wisc.edu/goldberg/us_empire_project.htm>“Empires 
in Transition” project, a global working group of 
140 historians from universities on four 
continents. The results of their first meetings 
were published as 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299231046/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Colonial 
Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern 
American State, and the findings from their 
latest conference, at Barcelona last June, will 
appear next year as Endless Empires: Spain’s 
Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, and America’s Decline. 
To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast 
audio interview in which McCoy discusses why 
Washington is likely to cling disastrously to 
empire in the midst of decline, click 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2011/04/suborninations.html>here, 
or download it to your iPod 
<http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=j0SS4Al/iVI&subid=&offerid=146261.1&type=10&tmpid=5573&RD_PARM1=http%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Ftomcast-from-tomdispatch-com%2Fid357095817>here.

Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at 
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is 
studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.

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