Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Secretary of Defense William Cohen attempted to intimidate delegates to the conference by threatening to withdraw American forces from the territories of those allies that did not support the United States’ proposal for limiting the international criminal court’s jurisdiction. In Washington, Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at hearings on the new international criminal court treaty urged the president and Congress to announce that it would indeed make good on Cohen’s threat—a suggestion that led some Japanese, among others, to speculate that ratifying the treaty might finally be a way to get the Americans out of their countries.

In his book Death by Government, the historian Rudolph Rummel estimates that during the twentieth century, 170 million civilians have been victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.¹ As Michael Scharf of the American Society of International Law notes, the pledge of “never again” by the two war crimes tribunals that the Allies set up in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II has in the intervening years become “again and again.”²

At Nuremberg, the United States pioneered the idea of holding governmental leaders responsible for war crimes, and it is one of the few countries that has an assistant secretary of state for human rights. Its pundits and lawmakers endlessly criticize other nations for failing to meet American standards in the treatment of human beings under their jurisdiction. No country has been more active than the United States in publicizing the idea of “human rights,” even if it has been notably silent in some cases, ignoring, implicitly condoning, or even endorsing acts of state terrorism by regimes with which it has been closely associated. (Examples would include the repression of the Kwangju rebels in South Korea in 1980; all of the right-wing death squads in Central America during the 1980s; the Shah’s repression of dissidents in Iran when he was allied with the United States; the United States’ support in bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile and its subsequent willingness to exonerate him from responsibility for the torture and killing of at least four thousand of his own citizens; and Turkey’s genocide against its Kurdish population.) The American government displays one face to its own people (and its English-speaking allies) but another in areas where the support of repressive governments seems necessary to maintain American imperial dominance. Whenever this contradiction is revealed, as at Rome, Americans try to cover it up with rhetoric about the national burden of being the “indispensable nation,” or what the Council on Foreign Relations calls the world’s “reluctant sheriff.”

Only seven months before the Rome vote, there was another moment when the nature of America’s stealth imperialism was revealed. In December 1997, in Ottawa, 123 nations pledged to ban the use, production, or shipment of antipersonnel land mines. Retired American military leaders like General Norman Schwarzkopf, commanding general of allied forces in the Gulf War, have endorsed the ban, arguing that these primitive but lethal weapons have no role in modern warfare. The Clinton administration, however, bowed to military vested interests desperate to retain land mines in the American arsenal. Among other things, it insisted that land mines were needed to protect South Korea against the “North’s overwhelming military advantage,” itself a myth. The holdouts against this agreement were Afghanistan, China, Russia (which later reversed its position), Vietnam—and the United States. An American citizen, Jody Williams of Putney, Vermont, would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in organizing nations and various lobbying groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation to work toward ending the use of this “garbage weapon”—a phrase from Robert Muller, another American and a Vietnam veteran wounded by a land mine, who set in motion the movement that resulted in the treaty.³ The Clinton administration felt so embarrassed by its vote that in May 1998 it convened its own Conference on Global Humanitarian Demining at the State Department in a public relations attempt to improve its image. Only twenty-one countries attended.

There are today between sixty million and one hundred million deployed land mines in some sixty countries around the world (at least ten million in Cambodia alone and another nine million in Angola). They cost on average about three dollars apiece to produce. They kill some twenty-six thousand people a year, primarily civilians in developing countries, and they have been responsible for the deaths of more people than all the weapons of mass destruction combined.