Overview of the Appalling Crimes of the Post-War US Presidents

To understand the current economic and political landscape, it is important to know the recent history. In this thought-provoking interview from 2003, Noam Chomsky goes through some of the appalling crimes of the post-war US presidents, which highlights that if the Nuremburg principles were applied, every post-war president would be indictable.

These recounts bring a relevant quote from George Orwell to mind: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953 – 1961)

• Overthrew the conservative nationalist government of in Iran with a military coup. In Iran this led to 25 years of brutal dictatorship. Finally overthrown in 1979.
• Overthrew the first and last democratic government in Guatemala by military coup and invasion. In Guatemala it led to massive atrocities for about 50 years.
• In Indonesia he conducted the major clandestine terror operation of the post war-period, up until Cuba and Nicaragua, in an effort to break up Indonesia and strip off the outer islands, where most of the resources are, and undermine what was then considered as the threat of Indonesian democracy. Indonesia was too free and open. It was allowing a political party of the poor to participate. They were gaining a lot of ground, thus Eisenhower supported and helped instigate a military rebellion in the outer islands.

John F. Kennedy (1961 – 1963)

• Invaded South Vietnam. During the Eisenhower administration they had blocked political settlement in 1954, and instituted a kind of Latin American style terror state which had killed about 60-70 000 people by the end of the Eisenhower period. This had instigated a response that Kennedy recognized that couldn’t be controlled internally, thus Kennedy invaded.
• In 1962, about a third of the bombing missions were carried out by the US Air Force in the South Vietnam by US planes with South Vietnamese insignia but US pilots.
• Kennedy authorized napalm.
• Kennedy began the use of chemical weapons to destroy food crops.
• They began programs which drove millions of people into what amounted to concentration camps.
• In the case of Cuba, it was a massive campaign of international terrorism which almost led to the destruction of the world. It led to the missile crisis.

Lyndon B. Johnson (1963 – 1969)

• Johnsen expanded the war in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) to the point where he ended up leaving about 3-4 million people dead.
• He invaded the Dominican Republic to block what looked like a potential democratic revolution there.
• He supported the Israeli occupation in its early stages.

Richard Nixon (1969 – 1974)

• Too much and too obvious to even get into in this interview.

Gerald Ford (1974 – 1977)

• Endorsed the Indonesian invasion of East Timor which became about as close to a genocide as anything in the modern period. They pretended to oppose it, but somewhat secretly supported it. Immediately after the invasion US joined the rest of the world in formally condemning it at the Security Council. But ambassador Moynihan was kind enough to explain to us in his words that his instructions were to render the United Nations utterly ineffective in any actions it might take to counter the Indonesian invasion and he says proudly that he did this with considerable success. Ambassador Moynihan further goes on to say that “in the next few months it seems that about 60 000 people were killed” and then he goes on to the next topic. This was for the first few months, and it probably went on to hundreds of thousands of people. Formally the US announced the boycott of weapons, but secretly increased the supply of weapons including counterinsurgency equipment so that the Indonesians could consummate the invasion. This is a major war crime.

Jimmy Carter (1977 – 1981)

• As the Indonesian atrocities were increasing, peaking in 1978, Carter’s flow of weapons to Indonesia increased. When Congress imposed human rights restrictions, by then there was a human right movement in Congress to block the flow of advanced weaponry to Indonesia, Carter arranged through Mondale (vice president) to get Israel to send US Skyhawks to Indonesia to enable Indonesia to complete what turned out to be near genocide, killing around a quarter of the population.
• In the Middle East, Carter had just won the Nobel Prize. His great achievement was the Camp David agreements. The Camp David agreements are presented as a diplomatic triumph for the US. In fact, they were a diplomatic catastrophe. At Camp David the United States and Israel accepted finally Egypt’s 1971 offer, which the US had rejected at the time except that now it was worse from the US-Israeli point of view because it included the Palestinians. In order to get Israel to accept Egypt’s 1971 offer, after a major war and atrocities etc., Carter raised military and other forms of aid to Israel to more than 50% of total aid worldwide. Israel used it at once (as previously proclaimed, and expected) as an opportunity to attack their northern neighbor, first in 1978 then in 1982, and to increase the integration of the occupied territories.

Ronald Reagan (1981 – 1989)

• The first president to have been condemned by the International Court of Justice for what they called the unlawful use of force, meaning international terrorism, in the war against Nicaragua.
• The Security Council endorsed it in two resolutions, both of which were vetoed by the US.
• Too much to get into in this interview.

George H. W. Bush (1989 – 1993)

• The invasion of Panama, which according to the Panamanians killed about 3 000 people. Since it’s never investigated, who knows if that’s true of not. This was done in order to kidnap a disobedient thug (Noriega) who had been supported by the US right through his worse atrocities. Noriega who was brought to Florida and tried for crimes that he had committed mostly on the CIA payroll.
• One could also go into the details of the war on Iraq. There were opportunities for diplomatic settlements which the Bush Administration refused to consider, and incidentally, the press would not report, with a single exception: the Long Island Newsday, which did report the whole throughout accurately, and it is the only newspaper throughout the country to have done so.
• The Bush administration then did attack, and the attack was carried out in a manner which is criminal under the laws of war. They attacked infrastructure. If you attack New York City and you destroy the electrical grid, the sewage systems and so on, that amounts to biological warfare, which was the nature of the attack. Then came a sanctions regime, which was mostly Clinton but began with Bush, which by conservative estimates killed hundreds of thousands of people while strengthening Saddam Hussein.

Bill Clinton (1993 – 2001)

• Sent a couple of cruise missiles to the Sudan to destroy what they knew was a pharmaceutical plant. There was no intelligence failure. According to the only estimates we have from the German ambassador and the regional director of the Near East Foundation, which does filed work in Sudan, both of them estimates several tens of thousands of deaths from one cruise missile.
• In the Middle East, Clinton began by declaring past UN resolutions, in the words of his administration, “obsolete and anachronistic” because we’re finished with that. No more international law. The comes a period called a peace process except that during the peace process Israeli settlement, which means settlement paid for by the US taxpayer and supported by US military aid and diplomacy, continually increased. The most extreme year was Clinton’s last year: the highest level of settlement, the highest since 1992. Meanwhile the territories were cantonized and broken up into small regions with infrastructure projects and new settlement. This is under military occupation, if anyone else was doing it, it would have been called a war crime.