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Now We Know What “Collateral Damage” Is

In the late 1980s, Daniel Elsberg, the man who revealed the lies behind the U.S. government’s justifications for the Vietnam war, spoke to my class on Central America. We had been discussing the atrocities against their own citizens committed by the militaries of El Salvador and Guatemala and by the Contra Army operating in Nicaragua, all of them trained, equipped, and advised by the U.S. military and the C.I.A. Elsberg got a thoughtful look on his face, and said that he had been in the State Department covert arm in Saigon in 1964, when the Indonesian Army had taken over Indonesia from Sukarno and proceeded to slaughter all the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. The low figure is 500,000, but most of those familiar with this catastrophe put the number somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million. The Indonesian Army had been trained, equipped, and advised by the United States.

Elsberg said that it had taken him 18 years and the knowledge he gained researching the Pentagon Papers to realize that such actions were the substance of the U.S. government’s foreign policy.

My own experiences in Venezuela during the civil war of the early sixties and the knowledge I have gained as an academic compel me to agree with Elsberg, and to question why this is U.S. policy. The answer is distressingly simple. In extending our economic system of ruthless “free enterprise,” which amounts to freedom for the rich and powerful to do what they want to make a profit, millions of people in the Third World have lost their nonmonetary means of support (land in most cases) and been plunged into poverty and misery. When they resist, the U.S. client militaries, such as the ones already mentioned, do their best to exterminate all opposition to either the economic system forced upon them or to the client governments that are also forced upon them in the name of democracy and freedom.

In the Middle East, our own army fought a war against Iraq in which thousands of Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait were slaughtered by American planes. This might have been the fortunes of war, but the tens of thousands of civilians slaughtered as “collateral damage,” at the time and since then in the continuing air war, have not been forgotten by those who live there, no matter which side they are on. If you add in the number of children who have died because of the destruction of water and sanitation systems, people have good reason to feel the United States has gone far beyond what might be reasonable in a war.

In Palestine, Israel is widely seen as a client state of the United States, and the theft of Arab lands, the wars won, the refugee camps, and the deaths of so many there are all seen as simply an extension of U.S. foreign policy. It may be that the United States does not control Israel in these matters, but since our government is a staunch and unfailing backer of Israel and the Israeli armed forces, this distinction tends to be lost on the Palestinians.

President Bush called the catastrophes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon an attack upon democracy, freedom, and our way of life. It was not. It was a reaction to U.S. policies that have created misery and denied democracy and freedom to so many people all over the world. It was also a heinous crime by evil people who had clearly decided that the end justifies the means, and that simple human decency and morality have no place in world affairs.

The wonder is that such attacks have not occurred before. Most people, very much including the working people of the United States and of the Third World, are too decent to commit them. I wish this were true of our leaders. Declaring war may be politically popular in the United States, but in the Third World it just sounds like more of the same.

William S. Stewart, Department of Political Science