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Today's
Stories
February
7/8, 2004
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine in
Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide from
Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure: Our
Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan
Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
|
Weekend
Edition
February 7 / 8, 2004
CounterPunch Diary
McNamara:
the Sequel
By ALEXANDER
COCKBURN
Apparently
to McNamara's mortification, Errol Morris, whose film The Fog of War
I recently discussed here, passes over his subject's thirteen-year stint
running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom
in hand.
McNamara
brandishes his bank years as his moral redemption, and all too often
his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual,
ghastly record. No worthwhile portrayal of McNamara could possibly avoid
his performance at the World Bank, because there, within the overall
constraints of the capitalist system he served, he was his own man.
There was no LeMay, no LBJ issuing orders.
And
as his own man, McNamara amplified the blunders, corruptions and lethal
cruelties of American power as inflicted upon Vietnam to a planetary
scale. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's
excellent history of the bank, Mortgaging the Earth, published in 1994.
When
McNamara took over the bank, "development" loans (which were
already outstripped by repayments) stood at $953 million and when he
left, at $12.4 billion, which, discounting inflation, amounted to slightly
more than a sixfold increase. Just as he multiplied the troops in Vietnam,
he ballooned the bank's staff from 1,574 to 5,201. The institution's
shadow lengthened steadily over the Third World.
From
Vietnam to the planet: the language of American idealism was just the
same. McNamara blared his mission of high purpose in 1973 in Nairobi,
initiating the World Bank's crusade on poverty. "The rich and the
powerful have a moral obligation to assist the poor and the weak."
The result was disaster, draped, as in Vietnam, with obsessive secrecy,
empty claims of success and mostly successful efforts to extinguish
internal dissent.
At
McNamara's direction the bank would prepare five-year "master country
lending plans", set forth in "country programming papers".
In some cases, Rich writes, "even ministers of a nation's cabinet
could not obtain access to these documents, which in smaller, poorer
countries were viewed as international decrees on their economic fate".
Corruption
seethed. Most aid vanished into the hands of local elites, who very
often used the money to steal the resources-pasture, forest, water-of
the very poor whom the bank was professedly seeking to help.
In
Vietnam, Agent Orange and napalm. Across the Third World, the bank underwrote
"Green Revolution" technologies that the poorest peasants
couldn't afford and that drenched land in pesticides and fertilizer.
Vast infrastructural projects such as dams and kindred irrigation projects
drove the poor from their lands, from Brazil to India. It was the malign
parable of "modernization" written across the face of the
Third World, with one catastrophe after another prompted by the destruction
of traditional rural subsistence economies.
The
"appropriation of smaller farms and common areas," Rich aptly
comments, "resembled in some respects the enclosure of open lands
in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution-only this time on a global
scale, intensified by "Green Revolution agricultural technology."
As
an agent of methodical destruction, McNamara should be ranked among
the top tier earth-wreckers of all time.
Back
in 1994 (you can find the remarks on page 409 of my The Golden Age Is
in Us) I had a conversation with Noam Chomsky, in which McNamara's name
cropped up. "If you look at the modern intelligentsia over the
past century or so," Chomsky said, "they're pretty much a
managerial class, a secular priesthood. They've gone in basically two
directions. One is essentially Leninist. Leninism is the ideology of
a radical intelligentsia that says, we have the right to rule. Alternatively,
they have joined the decision-making sector of state capitalist society,
as managers in the political, economic and ideological institutions.
The ideologies are very similar. I've sometimes compared Robert McNamara
to Lenin, and you only have to change a few words for them to say virtually
the same thing."
True
enough.
"Management,"
McNamara declared in 1967, "is the gate through which social and
economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is
diffused throughout society." Substitute "party organization"
for "management" and you have Lenin. From "democratic
centralism" to bureaucratic centralism.
The
managerial ideal for McNamara was military dictatorship. McNamara threw
money at Pinochet's Chile after Allende's overthrow and at the military
dictators of Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia.
The darker the dictatorship, the more lavishly McNamara rewarded it.
He
showered money on Romania's Ceausescu-$2.36 billion between 1974 and
1982. As McNamara crowed delightedly about his "faith in the financial
morality of socialist countries", Ceausescu razed whole villages,
turned hundreds of square miles of prime farmland into open-pit mines,
polluted the air with lignite coal , and turned Romania into one vast
prison, applauded by the bank in a 1979 economic study as being a fine
advertisement for the "Importance of Centralized Economic Control".
This
same report hailed as "an essential feature of the overall manpower
policy" Ceausescu's stimulus of "an increase in birth rates".
The reality? Ceausescu forbade abortions and cut off distribution of
contraceptives. Result: tens of thousands of abandoned children dumped
in orphanages.
In
the weeks after Errol Morris's film was launched, McNamara scurried
to Washington to participate in forums on the menace of nuclear destruction
with the same self-assurance with which he'd gone to Vietnam and Cuba
to review the record.
He
and Morris turned out for a dog-and-pony show at the Zellerbach auditorium
at the University of California, Berkeley. "Condemned out of his
own mouth" indeed! If Morris had done a decent job, McNamara would
not dare to appear in any public place. It's as though Eichmann had
launched a series of lecture-circuit pillow fights with a complaisant
biographer.
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