Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
According to a September 1986 article in the prestigious
Harper’s Magazine
, “The amount spent by the United States in 1985 on military operations in the Third World was $137.6 billion.” These figures were compiled by the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, in Washington, D.C. That amount is more than 50 percent of the net cost of the Vietnam War—even though it was the total for only one year. Note also that this amount was only for military operations. This type of activity continues with or without the specter of communism.
This business of military and foreign aid is much more complex and much more important to the economic future of this nation than most people understand. According to R. Buckminster Fuller, who served as a consultant to the governments of many countries, including Brazil and the Soviet Union, the total cost of U.S. foreign aid from 1952 through 1979 amounted to $100 billion, in 1950 dollars.
In
Critical Path
,
6
Fuller stated (and the
New York Times
later printed substantially this same quote):
Each new year’s foreign aid bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present in the country being aided, the money [from foreign aid funds] had to be spent through those American companies. . . . Foreign aid paid for all the new factories and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of America. This became a fundamental pattern: first the 100 largest corporations, then the 200 largest corporations followed, then what Fortune calls the 500 largest corporations. . . . So the Wall Street lawyers simply moved their prime corporate operations elsewhere. . . . But the main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American government. . . . This allowed the corporations to acquire gold equities while U.S. citizens and small domestic businesses could not do so.
Anyone who wishes to learn even more about the exploitation of the less-developed countries and the control of U.S. corporations should read Walter Wriston’s book
Risk and Other Four-Letter Words.
As the retired CEO of Citicorp, Wriston knows the subject better than almost anyone else. The only problem is that the reader must understand Wriston’s point of view. This is a man who promoted and fostered sending all of our savings to these LDC under the guise of “loans.” They were strange loans indeed. Almost none of that money will ever return to the United States, and it is our savings and our pension plans—or rather, was.
Not only do we, the people of the United States, have no idea of what our personal objective and that of our country ought to be with respect to the rest of the world, but on top of that, we so frequently totally misunderstand the nations of the Third World, most of which, like Vietnam, have been created by design. . . the design of other powers. . . in recent centuries to divide ancient groups of people whose native societies are far older and far more experienced in many ways than we are.
Not long ago the United States celebrated its bicentennial. Many of these Third World social groups, such as those in Indochina, have histories that go back fifteen thousand years or more; as a people, they have survived for thousands of years on the same ground as that of their ancestors. Yet most of the national boundaries of those ancient lands, such as Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, South Korea, and Iraq, are latter-day devices, creations that divide these ancient and quite homogeneous people.
When we speak of the failure to have and to understand our national objective, we must be able to define its meaning, especially in time of war. Some of the questions most frequently asked since the termination of warfare in Vietnam have been “Why were we there? What was our objective? What did we want to do there that caused us to enter that hostile area as far back as 1945? And what kept us there until 1975?”
It was that illustrious World War II armored brigade commander, Gen. Creighton W Abrams, who asked the crucial question of President Johnson. He needed to know what this country’s strategic objective was in Indochina. With that in hand, he and his staff would have be able to draw up a proper and effective military plan to win that war. Without such a statement from the President, the best that men like Abrams and Westmoreland could do was wallow in the quagmire of indecision while counting bodies on both sides.
General Abrams knew, as did most of the senior U.S. military officers, that if he had been turned loose with the forces at his disposal he could assuredly have captured Hanoi, and all of Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the process. One of the most forceful statements of this belief has been made by the former Commander in Chief, Pacific, Adm. U.S.G. Sharp, in his book
Strategy for Defeat
.
But these men knew also that such a tactical achievement would not have brought with it victory; it would simply have caused the immediate escalation of warfare on an international scale. Any success they might have achieved on the border of China would have unleashed hordes of Chinese armed and equipped with the modern weaponry of the Soviet Union, and there could have been no victory in a land war in Asia against hordes of well-armed Chinese.
Such an eventuality would have led inevitably to a so-called conventional war of such fury that the leaders of both sides would have been forced to weight the tactical necessity of the utilization of the hydrogen bomb.
At that point, there could be no such thing as “graduated” or “limited” warfare. The very heart of the meaning of warfare is that it is, and forever must be, all-out and unrestricted in its fury. There can be no referee in warfare. Furthermore, the progress, or direction, of the course of wide-open warfare is always unpredictable.
Therefore, if General Abrams had really been turned loose by his commander in chief in the White House, it would not have been long before the President would have been forced to make the decision to use the hydrogen bomb. Would he then have used that enormous destructive power against the North Vietnamese, against the Chinese, or against the ultimate foe, the Russians? Or perhaps, against all three? The response to that decision would have been immediate. The United States would have been made the target of Soviet retaliation. In that series of decisions, which appear to be all but inevitable, lies the power to bring about the destruction of Earth.
There it is! That is the real significance underlying General Abram’s question to the President. Faced with these facts, and the dilemma they create, no President will ever again be able to order Americans to take part in an all-out, classic war. No President or his counterparts in nuclear-armed nations will be able to commit troops to battle in which the certain outcome will be global destruction.
There is a little-known secret about the war in Indochina that illustrates how dangerous the H-bomb threat actually was. There was a day when three U.S. Air Force F-84 fighter-bombers had been put on tactical alert at the Udon Thani air base in Thailand, just across the river from Laos. At that time the Vietminh were believed to be mounting an all-out massed campaign, in conjunction with opposition Pathet Lao forces, westerly across the Plaines des Jarres from Samneua (in northeastern Laos) toward the capital of Laos. It was also suspected that the Vietminh were planning a flanking attack into Cambodia on the way to a final strike at Saigon. Thus, although the Vietminh rarely massed their forces, it was believed they had a sizable army on the move.
The three F-84 aircraft were equipped with nuclear weapons. The year was 1960; this was the first time since the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945 that these massive weapons had been readied for actual combat. Cooler heads, some shocked to the core by the very thought of such a possibility, prevailed, and the F-84s and their nuclear weapons were returned to their bases. As a result, a lower-level form of inconclusive warfare continued in Indochina for the next fifteen years.
Today this method of “no win” warfare is called the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict.” Therefore, when we discover that $137.6 billion was spent by the United States for “military operations” alone in the Third World during 1985, we must understand that it has become the objective of “low-intensity conflict” to continue the wasting of money, the pointless killing of defenseless people, and the consumption or attrition of costly war matériel to make way for the procurement of more.
“Low-intensity conflict” is a way in which the hundreds of billions of dollars of armaments produced each year can be used, destroyed, and wasted this year in order that more may be procured and used next year. It is a general rule in the military procurement business that for every dollar spent for new weapons, ten more dollars will be spent on those same weapons for their maintenance and support during their “life of type.”
7
Much of this action is motivated by a misunderstanding of the true nature of what is called a “Third World nation” or “less-developed country.” Although national sovereignty no longer exists as a fact in LDCs, and exists only partially in all other nations today, the rules of the “Game of States” require that the game be played as though sovereignty did exist. As a result, the LDCs are considered to be sovereign equals, as at the United Nations, that is, one state, one vote. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The true definition of “less-developed country” has nothing to do with politics, ideology, or military power. An LDC is a country that differs from others because it does not have the ability to produce or manufacture all of the things it needs or wants to survive, even at a relatively low level of subsistence.
As some scholars have put it, the LDCs do not have the “carrying capacity” for bare existence and real growth in modern times. Therefore, they must be “aided.” As a result, the biggest business in a less-developed country, and the sole reason for its governmental power structure, is import and export. LDCs hope that they can export enough, in dollar values, to provide the money required to make payments on the interest on their national debt, with enough left over to pay for all the things they must import.
The government of such a country is a business monopoly over its people and its territory and is motivated much less by some political ideology than by the very pragmatic aim of controlling the import-export business. In most LDCs the customs activity and border patrol are the most important elements of the governmental structure, because they enable the political leadership to maintain its monopoly and to keep an accurate and absolutely essential account of everything exported and imported by the country, as well as its value.
8
The government of an LDC makes its money by granting exclusive and monopolistic franchises to its friends, relatives, and true financial and traditional leaders of its national infrastructure, for everything from chewing gum and Coca-Cola to Cadillacs and F-16 fighter planes.
These franchise holders, the ins, are usually assured of becoming millionaires. Their franchises are obtained through contacts with select sources in the United States and other Western powers. They cover all the essentials required by the populace; there is no other way to obtain nonlocally produced goods, including foodstuffs, which must be imported. The same franchise system applies to the nation’s exports.
The outs, on the other hand, are those who have been stripped of their franchises, usually as a result of a coup d’état, in favor of the ruling group. The term “political party” and the words “communism,” “socialism,” and “democracy” rarely apply in any of these LDCs. The outs are definitely on the outside looking in and represent an ever-present danger to the ins through the possibility of a coup d’état. In most LDCs there can be no meaningful campaigns and elections. In most cases, the votes, if elections are held, are counted by the armed forces, and the armed forces are the instrument of the in power group. Such controls leave little alternative to the outs other than the coup d’état method of power transition.
In all less-developed countries, the difference between the ins and the outs has little, if anything, to do with political ideology. The scenario exploited by the major powers divided the world into “Communist” and “the West” or some other structure. As far as each LDC is concerned, the game is quite simple: “Where do they buy—that is, where are the franchise materials produced and sold—and to whom do they sell their own resources, to include physical labor?”
The supremely powerful international bankers keep the books and balances for each side. They make these transactions possible by offering the loans, issuing letters of credit, collecting huge fees for their role in each transaction, and collecting the interest on the entire package. In many LDCs the total amount of interest paid to the banks and their international financing structure amounts to more than half of the total value of dollars earned by their exports. For this reason annual payments are seldom more than the interest involved and none of the principal. This is one reason why the principal never comes back to the United States.
The long-range future of such a system can mean only one thing: the eventual default of the total amount loaned and the loss of savings that had been deposited with the network of banks involved. For example, when the Chicago-based Continental Illinois Bank failed, a major share of its $47 billion holdings had come from 2,200 other financial institutions throughout the United States. Had the U.S. government not moved to take over these massive losses, the failure of that single “money center” bank would have taken down with it the majority of those other 2,200 financial institutions.