Post War America 1945-1971. Howard Boone's Zinn
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American P-47 Thunderbolts flown by American pilots, invaded Guatemala from Honduras, and put into power Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who at one time had received military training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The Guatemalan intervention was a violation of the United Nations Charter, which in Article 2, Section 4, says: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. …” According to the 1968 edition of the Manual of International Law, sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “an indirect involvement of a government in an armed venture outside its territory constitutes a use of force and is governed by the same law as is applicable to open hostilities directed against another state.” When an attempt was made to put the Guatemalan invasion on the agenda of the UN Security Council, the United States delegate to the UN, Eisenhower appointee Henry Cabot Lodge, who was then president of the Security Council, kept it off, arguing that it was an internal affair and not within the jurisdiction of the UN.
The rationale for the Guatemalan invasion was supplied by President Eisenhower. “There was a time,” he said, “when we had a very desperate situation, or we thought it was at least, in Central America, and we had to get rid of a Communist government that had taken over.” But the government the United States got rid of was the most democratic Guatemala had ever had. Communist influence in it was small—only four of the fifty-six seats in Congress were held by Communists, and no member of the presidential cabinet was a Communist—and throughout the country no more than four thousand persons, in a population of three and a half million, were Communists. Communists did hold important posts in the land-reform and education programs. It may be, however, that what really irked the United States was not communism but the actions of the government of Jacobo Arbenz against the United Fruit Company and American oil interests. In one region of Guatemala, Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by United Fruit; he offered compensation for the unused land, but the company turned it down, terming the offer “unacceptable.” Meanwhile, Arbenz began action to expropriate 173,000 acres of the company’s land in another area.
The ten years of reformist government in Guatemala that preceded the American intervention were described as follows by Ronald Schneider in his study Communism in Guatemala, 1944–1954:
While Guatemalans in general had enjoyed more freedom during the 1944–54 period than ever before, the working class had particular reason to feel loyal to the revolutionary regime. For the first time in Guatemalan history labor enjoyed the right to organize freely, bargain collectively and strike. Never before had they felt free to speak out openly and voice their feelings without restraint, much less be confident of gaining a sympathetic hearing from the government. The lower classes enjoyed the novelty of living in a new atmosphere, officially fostered, in which they were treated with a measure of respect and dignity.
Castillo Armas arrived in late June in American Ambassador John Peurifoy’s embassy plane to take over the government; the next day Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said the situation was “being cured by the Guatemalans themselves.”
Castillo Armas received ninety million dollars of aid from the United States in the next two years, compared with six hundred thousand dollars given to Guatemala in the previous decade. He returned the land to United Fruit, and abolished the tax on interest and dividends to foreign investors. He jailed thousands of political critics, eliminated the secret ballot, ruled by decree, and, after three years in power, was assassinated. It would be hard to find a more clear-cut example of where liberal rhetoric about “the rule of law,” “opposing aggression,” and “stopping communism” concealed the reality, in which the protection of corporate profits and a “sphere of influence” made an absurdity of the liberal promise.
And in 1961 Guatemala itself was used as a base for an American-planned invasion of a real Communist country: Cuba.
C. Lebanon, 1958
Guatemala was not an exception; the policy of armed American intervention abroad was maintained by the Eisenhower administration. On July 14, 1958, thirty-five hundred marines landed in Lebanon. Thousands more followed. The year before, Eisenhower had secured from Congress a joint resolution giving the president authority to use armed force “to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.” This proposition became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine. In broaching it to congressional leaders on New Year’s Day, 1957, Eisenhower said: “The existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia.”
Though the authorization to use armed force against communistic armed aggression would not seem to pertain to internal political strife, the doctrine was used to put down political agitation in Lebanon. Lebanon was the one country in the Middle East which, after the doctrine went into effect, specifically agreed with the United States to accept economic and military aid—and further assistance in case of attack by “international communism.”
In his 1952 election campaign, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun had received the effective assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. Early in 1958, Egypt and Syria, and tiny Yemen, banded together as the clearly anti-Western United Arab Republic, with Egypt’s dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser as its head. The creation of the U.A.R. stimulated anti-Chamoun, anti-American activity in Lebanon, and some arms were smuggled into the country from Egypt. Rioting broke out, American arms were airlifted to Chamoun’s army, and an incipient civil war appeared to be under way. Chamoun then asked for American troops; Eisenhower, invoking his new doctrine, dispatched within the next few days seven thousand marines to the former French mandate, a force equal to the size of the entire Lebanese army.
Communist strength in Lebanon was meager, and it remained an insignificant factor throughout those critical days. Yet in explaining his unilateral action, Eisenhower compared the Mideast situation to Communist threats in Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, Korea, and Indochina. Here, again, the liberal rhetoric was at work: armed intervention was justified as “stopping communism,” whereas the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Lebanon was to protect one of America’s most vital economic interests: oil.
The “vacuum” Eisenhower had told congressmen the United States must fill had been created by the postwar withdrawal of British power from the eastern Mediterranean. In 1955 America had secured the signatures of Great Britain, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey to the Baghdad Pact, which was designed to stem Egyptian and Soviet influence in the Mideast. The pact, however, had not done much to curb the growing influence of either. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and appeared to be stronger than ever after surviving the abortive British-French-Israeli armed counterattack. The formation of the U.A.R. and the sudden overthrow of King Faisal’s feudal regime in Iraq in July, 1958, posed the greatest threat yet to the western power’s rich oil supply. The United States was far less concerned with propping up a questionable democratic government in Beirut than with seeing to it that Mideast oil sources remained available. The coup in Iraq led immediately to the presence of American marines in Lebanon—and British paratroopers in Jordan.
Eisenhower sent Robert Murphy, a veteran State Department diplomat, to negotiate with the various factions in Lebanon. He arranged for a successor to Chamoun—General Fuad Chebab—who was acceptable to the Lebanese Parliament. With Chebab’s “election,” fighting in the country died down, and the American marines were withdrawn. Lebanon was a minor intervention as U.S. interventions go, but it was evidence that Republicans would never lag behind Democrats in asserting American power anywhere in the world.
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