Third World Models for the Bush Regime

Akrasia

People concerned with the plight of people in poor countries often object to US
interventions in the third world. They object not only to the military
interventions, the bombings, and the support for reactionary elites that
characterizes first world treatment of the poor countries, but also to the
imposition of economic and political models - the imposition, for example, of
International Monetary Fund restructuring that destroys the social sectors of an
economy and turns poor countries into 'debt-repayment machines' that have no
hope of development and no end in sight. These kinds of objections could be
unfair to third world regimes, however, because they deny that influence can go
in the other direction. The Bush regime (and others among the rich and powerful
countries, notably Canada) seems to have patterned itself on various third world
regimes.

Uganda in the Congo as the model for the Iraq invasion

Many liberal critics of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq make an analogy
to the US invasion and destruction of Vietnam decades before. Africa scholar
John F. Clark uses the Vietnam analogy to make a different point (1). He argues
that Uganda, intervening in the Congo in 1998, had no clear goal or strategy and
consequently has gotten sucked into a 'quagmire' that is corrupting, isolating,
and ultimately weakening the Ugandan regime, just as occurred with the United
States in Vietnam. He is careful to point out the differences, however: Uganda
has a direct border with the Congo, unlike the US with Vietnam, and hence has a
greater stake in what happens there. Uganda is a small, weak, African state and
not the global superpower. Clark's analogy is flawed in other ways. Vietnam
was not a 'quagmire', and the United States knew what it was doing when it got
involved there: it was destroying what Noam Chomsky calls 'the threat of a good
example', teaching a lesson to third world liberation movements that to take an
independent path meant destruction. And, as Chomsky argues, the US succeeded in
teaching that lesson.

Uganda had no such motives in its intervention in the Congo. That is why the US
invasion of Iraq is a better analogy. Uganda did make the argument that
invading the Congo was necessary for its security, to prevent cross-border
raiding (which was, unlike the threat of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq,
real). But Uganda's intervention did not make Uganda any more secure. Uganda's
regime had a lot of international good will, for example from the IMF and World
Bank who admired its neoliberalism. It dissipated a lot of that good will in
its invasion of the Congo, however.

Uganda did, and does, earn a lot of money from plundering the Congo. Clark
says: "The extraction and export of Congolese natural resources, including
timber, coffee, gold, diamonds, and other commodities, via Uganda has in some
regards had a salutary effect on Uganda's national economy." (pg. 152)
Meanwhile, the plunder is corrupting the Ugandan army and regime: "At the petty
level, soldiers in Uganda's troubled regions often conspire with local rebels to
steal money and property from local residents. On a grander scale, senior
officers, most notoriously the president's own brother, Salim Saleh, profit by
selling (often defective) arms to the government at inflated prices." (pg. 153)
Uganda's regime has handed out Congo's resources as patronage to build loyalty.
It has also used the invasion to drastically increase its defense budget.

Since the invasion of the Congo by Rwanda and Uganda, followed by Angola,
Zimbabwe, and Namibia, occurred some five years before the US invasion of Iraq,
it is quite plausible that the Bush regime modeled its invasion and plunder of
Iraq after Uganda's actions in the Congo. The similarities are quite striking,
and the effects on the invaders are likely to be similar. Clark warns: "Those
who are posted to the war zones will inevitably become imbued with a culture of
violence and corruption, which civil war and occupation inevitably breed,
instead of learning the economic skills of an honest civilian life... the levels
of repression and corruption in [the] government have escalated, while [the]
citizens have a diminished sense of their president's respect for the rule of
law. Even the putative goal of improving the country's internal security
situation has not been realized...

"All that remains is the inevitable withdrawal in defeat and the full
manifestation of the negative consequences." (pg. 161)

The Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) as the model for the
Republican Party

The current regime of Mexico is one of President Vicente Fox's 'Partido de
Accion Nacional' (PAN). PAN defeated the PRI, the 'Institutional Revolutionary
Party', that ruled over Mexico for over 70 years, in elections in 2000. The PRI
used a variety of tactics and tricks to maintain its 70 year dictatorship in
Mexico. These included bribery, corruption, repression, and the outright theft
of an election (gasp!) in 1988. The opposition ('Partido de la Revolucion
Democratica', PRD) almost certainly won that election, but the PRI claimed
'computer failure' and annulled the results. The PRD, afraid of repression,
decided not to mobilize its supporters to defend its victory.

Robert Kuttner has made an analogy between the Republican Party in the United
States and the PRI (2). A series of changes brought by Republicans to
legislative procedures in the Congress and the Senate have centralized power and
reduced the possibilities for hearings and amendments. Democrats and
Republicans have colluded in creating 'safe seats', where most incumbent seats
are difficult to contest, resulting in a 'nearly frozen House that is
structurally tilted Republican.' Voting machines are manufactured by companies
with ties to the Republican party, and the 2000 election in the US showed that
there are many ways voters can be harrassed and prevented from voting. New
legislation has made that kind of harrassment even more likely. The Republicans
have access to far more money. And the courts are now under Republican control:
"if George W. Bush is re-elected, a Republican president will have controlled
judicial appointments for 20 of the 28 years from 1981 to 2008".

The United States record of sending military advisors to Latin American
countries to train them in fighting rebellions and social movements is well
known. But, reviewing the record of the PRI and the current actions of the
Republican party, who can doubt that the PRI has sent its advisors to the Bush
team to show them how to create a single-party dictatorship? (3)

The Syrian Police as the Model for Canada-US Security Cooperation

Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian, was arrested while traveling through the United
States, probably (the details are unknown) because the Canadian intelligence
services provided the US intelligence services with 'information' that Arar was
'linked' to 'terrorism'. The United States proceeded to deport Arar to Syria,
where he was jailed and tortured for ten months. Under torture, the Syrian
police elicited a 'confession' from Arar that he was in fact 'connected with
al-Qaeda'. A reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, Juliet O'Neill, wrote an article
on November 8 quoting a Canadian intelligence source saying that Arar had
'confessed' to being a 'terrorist'. On January 21, 2004, Canadian police raided
O'Neill's house and office, seizing documents for an investigation as to whether
she breached Canada's new Security of Information Act, an act that makes it
illegal to communicate leaked secret documents.

The police probably also wanted to find out who O'Neill's source was, since the
Canadian security services don't answer to the government - the Canadian
government has been trying to find out from US authorities how they got the
'tip' on Arar in the first place, with little success. Canada's new (and
unelected) Prime Minister, Paul Martin, commented on this incident from the
Davos World Economic Forum: "We are not a police state and we have no intention
of being a police state and there is a balance between how does one protect the
nation's security and what are the steps taken." Arar, for his part, launched a
lawsuit against the United States today, seeking damages, the clearing of his
name, and assurances that no one in his situation will be treated similarly. (4)

Also in Canada last month (on December 8, 2003), civil liberties lawyer Rocco
Galati stopped taking high profile 'terrorism' cases after receiving what he
took to be a 'credible threat' which he believed came from Canadian or US
intelligence services. At a press conference, he played the tape from his
answering machine, which warned him that if he didn't stop representing
'terrorists', he would be 'a dead wop'. Galati found that the Canadian police
refused him any protection, and as a result felt compelled to stop taking the
cases he had handled. "We now live in Colombia," he said, "because the rule of
law is meaningless. It means that lawyers cannot represent anyone even in what
you profess to be a democracy here in Canada."

Agent Smith

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