Humanitarianism or Imperialism?
By: Eric Spencer
Image by: War on the Rocks
An examination of the U.S.'s so-called humanitarian interventions over the last half century.
The world's most renowned public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, has consistently made the argument that, “Almost every aggressive act by a Great Power is justified on humanitarian grounds.” If you live in the U.S. you should be especially familiar with the idea of humanitarian intervention. The official U.S. position when taking our military into a foreign conflict is almost always the same. So and so, from such and such country, is a brutal dictator who is killing his own people, and we have no choice but to send our military to stop him.
These arguments are especially effective when used on democratic societies due to the fact that many people in these societies tend to think of themselves as defenders of freedom and justice. The truth is that these “humanitarian" interventions almost never alleviate the suffering of those on the ground, and the only reason we engage in them is to protect our global hegemony.
The U.S. had a long and bloody history of humanitarian escapades in Central and South America during the Cold War. Under the guise of humanitarianism, the U.S. has issued economic sanctions, deployed its military and backed literal death squads to overthrow democratically elected governments throughout Latin America. The civilian populations of Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia bore the brunt of our “humanitarian” missions in the region.
In Guatemala during the 1970’s and 80’s the U.S. provided training, weapons and intelligence to forces that waged a brutal war on the country’s poor and indigenous populations. Amnesty International, along with many other international human rights organizations, have deemed this humanitarian effort, that killed an estimated 200,000 people and displaced a million more, a genocide.
In the 1980’s, the U.S. militarily propped-up the right-wing government in El Salvador during the country’s bloody civil war. El Salvador’s U.S. trained and funded security forces committed countless atrocities during the war that killed an estimated 75,000 civilians.
After the war, a United Nations Truth Commission found that U.S. backed forces in El Salvador were responsible for 85% of those killed, kidnapped, or tortured during the conflict. Among those killed by U.S. backed death squads was Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who had long advocated for the rights of poor El Salvadorians. Despite the realities on the ground, then President Ronald Regan said in 1981:
“We are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador.”
Although the Cold War ended in 1991 our "humanitarian" interventions continued throughout the world.
The U.S./N.A.T.O. “humanitarian” intervention in Kosovo in 1999 is, to this day, staunchly defended by many. It has been deemed “necessary” to stop the slaughter of ethnic Albanians in Serbia.
Solobodan Milosevic was committing atrocious war crimes against Kosovar Albanians, but N.A.T.O.’s bombing campaign only escalated the horrors being perpetrated on the ground. U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark warned, before the bombing of Serbia, that a U.S./N.A.T.O. attack would escalate violence against ethnic Kosovar Albanians, not alleviate it.
He was right, Serbian forces ramped up their attacks on ethnic Albanians in response to N.A.T.O.’s bombing. In addition, N.A.T.O.’s bombing of power plants and civilian infrastructure cut off power and water to hundreds of thousands, killed countless civilians, and destroyed the country’s economy.
In 2003, the U.S. began one of its most tragic “humanitarian” blunders. The mission was dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The mission sought to save the world from a brutal dictator and his “weapons of mass destruction.” Every U.S. official from then Secretary of State Collin Powell to then F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller stood before Congress and repeated the WMD lie.
Common Dreams and Salon have estimated that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion in 2003. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found and the destabilization of the region gave rise to countless jihadi terrorist groups including ISIS.
Again in 2011, a U.S. led N.A.T.O. bombing campaign was waged in order to “promote democracy” and free the people of Libya from a vicious dictator. U.S. led N.A.T.O. bombings killed around 10,000 people and toppled the government of Muammar al-Gaddafi. Libya went from the richest nation in Africa to a failed state with open air slave markets and a haven for terrorist groups including ISIS.
In 2012, the C.I.A. launched a mission code named “Operation Tinder Sycamore”. The program trained and armed what it called “moderate rebels” to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and free the Syrian people. In reality many of the “moderate rebels” the U.S. was funding during the operation turned out to be linked to Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, and other jihadi terrorist groups.
Operation Tinder Sycamore was one of the main contributing factors behind the Syrian Civil War. The U.K. based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has estimated around half of a million people have been killed in the conflict with 6.6 million displaced internally and another 5.6 million displaced around the world.
The U.S. “humanitarian” mission to free Venezuela from their democratically elected leader is still ongoing. In this case the U.S is using economic sanctions to “free” the people of Venezuela. U.N. rapporteur to Venezuela, Alfred de Zayas, was sent to investigate the facts on the ground. In Zayas’ report he said U.S. sanctions are killing many of Venezuela’s most vulnerable people and may amount to “crimes against humanity.”
According to Zayas, the sanctions are compatible with a “medieval siege” and are “illegal under the U.N. Charter.” Many news outlets have reported that U.S. sanctions have killed 40,000 Venezuelans. These sanctions have seized billions of dollars-worth of Venezuelan state assets and have blocked the delivery of tens of millions of dollars-worth of food and medical supplies.
The truth is that these interventions are imperialism not humanitarianism. The examples I’ve given here are but a small fraction of the missions that have been carried out by the U.S. in the name of humanitarianism. Each "humanitarian" action was perpetrated, not to relive suffering, not to spread freedom and democracy, but to secure U.S. economic and military dominance.
U.S. foreign policy, more times than not, thwarts democracy, it dosen't promote it. Multiple news outlets, including TruthOut.org, Mint Press News and Fair.org, have reported that the U.S. militarily supports 73% of the world's dictatorships, based on data compiled by Freedom House, and their rating system of political rights around the world.
We have killed far more in these "humanitarian" conflicts than we have saved. A new era foreign policy based on peaceful diplomacy must begin if we are ever to save the soul of our country.