Chalmers Johnson: "The Democracy Peddlers"

[understandinglife]

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Given this history, why should we be surprised that in Baghdad, such figures as former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer III, former Ambassador John Negroponte, and present Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as a continuously changing cohort of American major-generals fresh from power-point lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, should have produced chaos and probable civil war? None of them has any qualifications at all for trying to "introduce democracy" or American-style capitalism in a highly nationalistic Muslim nation, and even if they did, they could not escape the onus of having terrorized the country through the use of unrestricted military force.

Bremer is a former assistant and employee of Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig. Negroponte was American ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85, when it had the world's largest CIA station and actively participated in the dirty war to suppress Nicaraguan democracy. Khalilzad, the most prominent official of Afghan ancestry in the Bush administration, is a member of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon pressure group that lobbied for a war of aggression against Iraq. The role of the American military in our war there has been an unmitigated disaster on every front, including the deployment of undisciplined, brutal troops at places like the Abu Ghraib prison. All the United States has achieved is to guarantee that Iraqis will hate us for years to come. The situation in Iraq today is worse than it was in Japan or Korea and comparable to our tenure in Vietnam. Perhaps it is worth reconsidering what exactly we are so intent on exporting to the world.

Chalmers Johnson is, most recently, the author of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, as well as of MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) and Japan: Who Governs? (1995) among other works. This piece originated as "remarks" presented at the East Asia panel of a workshop on "Transplanting Institutions" sponsored by the Department of Sociology of the University of California, San Diego, held on April 21, 2006. The chairman of the workshop was Professor Richard Madsen.

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As comments:

Here's how, back in 2005, described the administration's democratic urge for an electorate so restricted that it might have made Saudi Arabia look liberal:

"First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group."

Then, of course, Ayatollah Ali Sistani insisted; the Bush people caved; the Iraqis bravely turned out to vote in vast numbers; and those "purple fingers" proved just so useful on the American home front. Think of it as importing democracy. Unfortunately, the largely Shiite government elected proved awkward indeed and, via our ambassador in Baghdad, , the power of the purse and the power of the gun, "pressure" has been constantly applied to restrain and thwart them. With Iraq now in chaos and seemingly at the edge of dismemberment, democracy restricted to Baghdad's Green Zone and once again anathema to the President's top officials, it seems the perfect moment to turn to the larger subject of exporting the American "model." Let Chalmers Johnson, author of and a man with a memory, make some sense of the subject.

Yes, "a perfect moment to turn to the larger subject of exporting the American "model" is amplified even further by latest, extensive expose on Iran and why "We the People..." must stop Bush and the neoconsters from "exporting" the only things they have any expertise - death, torture, corruption, and plunder.



"One, two, three, four. We don't want your stinking war!" -- Juan Cole


Never Forget: George W. Bush willfully violated National Security to cover-up his willful launch of a war of aggression and illegal occupation of Iraq.

[DemReadingDU]

1. Good article

There is something absurd and inherently false about one country trying to impose its system of government or its economic institutions on another. Such an enterprise amounts to a dictionary definition of imperialism

[understandinglife]

2. Thank you.

Peace.