Ideal Illusions Part 2

For decades the national security managers had been exasperated by what they regarded as the press's one-sided focus on American atrocities and its blindness to the "terrorism" of insurgents. While the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations had eagerly spoken of the terrorist component of Vietcong tactics (such as the a.s.sa.s.sination of village leaders), their efforts had been overwhelmed by accounts of American military savagery, bombings, and a.s.sa.s.sinations carried out by both the Americans and the South Vietnamese. Washington turned out ma.s.sive studies of Vietcong terrorism, compiled detailed figures on terrorist attacks, released countless accounts of the murders of women, children, and other innocents; and still, from Washington's perspective, the media all too often described this brutality as the work of so many Robin Hoods resorting to the "weapons of the weak." Using the language of human rights to condemn "violations by non-state armed groups" offered a solution.88 Washington wanted "non-combatants" to be viewed in a new way-not as the seas in which guerrillas swam (which they often were) but as "human shields"-civilians unfairly exposed to danger, neutral innocents forced by insurgents to take sides. Viewed from this perspective, many aspects of guerrilla warfare were war crimes and thus in violation of the laws of war. Both national security managers and human rights leaders eagerly promoted this new view-which, paradoxically, allowed Washington to shape the ethics of such situations to its own advantage.

During the 1970s and 1980s, for example, the Guatemalan government was slaughtering Indian peasants considered "subversive" for collaborating with the guerrilla opposition. As a high-ranking government military advisor explained: The problem of war is not just a question of who is shooting. For each one who is shooting there are 10 working behind him. The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators. Therefore, the Indians were subversives. And how do you deal with subversion? Clearly you had to kill the Indians because they were collaborating with the subversion. And then it would be said that you were killing innocent people. But they weren't innocent. They had sold out to subversion.89 With anticommunism wearing thin as a rationale, accusing enemies of using noncombatants as hostages or p.a.w.ns was a highly useful tack, especially since it often made opposition forces and the populations from which they arose appear deeply antagonistic to one another. True, the local government might still be committing human rights atrocities-but wasn't everyone?

In this new ideological era, the national security managers saw a long-sought opportunity to turn the tide against insurgencies of all kinds by invoking what Jeane Kirkpatrick called the semantics of human rights.90 Kirkpatrick and Abrams led the way, denouncing Americas Watch and Amnesty-and various members of Congress-for failing to shine a spotlight on the crimes of guerrilla movements and insurgency groups.91 Human rights advocates "must not hesitate to condemn the mounting abuses against noncombatants," Kirkpatrick insisted; they can no longer highlight government repression "while ignoring guerrilla violence."92 Guerrillas, Kirkpatrick remarked acidly, "may ma.s.sacre half of the inhabitants of a hamlet, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night," but that is "not a violation of human rights by definition: that is a protest of a national liberation movement." She acknowledged that repressive governments often responded aggressively to the violence "created" by the guerrillas who hid among the people, but she blamed the insurgents. "The essence of their strategy [in El Salvador] is provocation: through persistent attacks which disrupt society and make ordinary life impossible, such revolutionaries challenge authority and force repressive countermeasures in the expectation that such repression will undermine the legitimacy of the regime."93 Reagan administration officials did not deny that social and political upheaval might arise from the desperation of the downtrodden. "The government headed by Ronald Reagan has not the slightest tendency to imagine that the political turmoil in Central America has no roots in social and economic problems," Kirkpatrick acknowledged. "We know the people of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica have been ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, illiterate for centuries.... We know that there existed ... neglect, unmet needs, unfulfilled hopes and that these gave rise to movement for reform and revolution. We understand, broadly speaking, how it happened."94 Washington, of course, also knew that fighting an insurgency movement entailed attacks on "noncombatants," a veritable "counterterror," as military counterinsurgency manuals have long phrased it. (When the local populace appeared to support local guerrillas, as one CIA cable observed, "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.")95 The new focus on the laws of war was part of a broader tendency in the human rights movement to make law itself the paramount means of inst.i.tutionalizing human rights. A dense network of legalese, of rules and laws of war, offered a new vocabulary of judgment and morality that provided a new "mark of legitimacy-and legitimacy has become the currency of power,"96 one legal scholar remarked. But "we should be clear," he warned, that "this bold new vocabulary beats ploughshares into swords as often as the reverse."97 For their part, the national security managers were delighted, since accusations of criminality could strip the struggles by insurgents, the mobilized poor, and the dispossessed of any claims to justice. Labeling such enemies Communists was still useful, but condemning them for violating the laws of war helped deflect public attention from the far more blatant violations of the repressive governments Washington backed.

There is little in the human rights literature of the 1980s that sheds light on why guerrillas (and their supporters) might be engaging in so many acts of violence ("war crimes"). Consider a few snippets of Americas Watch charges against the FLMN in El Salvador: It used "targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations" in the rural areas to combat army infiltration, as well as "summary executions, kidnapping, and the destruction of public and private property."98 "To avoid being press-ganged into joining the guerrilla forces, thousands joined the refugee population in Honduras or crowded into the slums around San Salvador and into displaced-persons camps."99 It was imperative that the FLMN cease sabotaging such nonmilitary targets as "public transport, commercial establishments and telephone lines" and stop using "catapult bombs" aimed at military targets because of their excessive toll on civilians. While open to some debate, all these instances could now be cited as violations of the laws of war. Though Americas Watch put vastly more weight on the crimes of the regime than on sporadic guerrilla attacks,100 to Washington it didn't matter-it was enough to be able to cite reports by groups like Americas Watch to point to the criminality of insurgencies.

In the acrimonious debates between Washington and human rights organizations over the rights of noncombatants, the notion of fighting oppression slipped further and further into the background. El Salvador's archbishop, oscar Romero, had said shortly before his a.s.sa.s.sination in 1980 that "when a dictatorship seriously violates human rights and attacks the common good of the nation, when it becomes unbearable and closes all channels of dialogue, of understanding, of rationality-when this happens, the church speaks of the legitimate right of insurrectional violence."101 Human rights groups took no position on whether conditions could ever grow so intolerable that they justified insurrectional violence.102 In the end, the gathering of more and more facts about more and more violations, though useful in many ways, provided no real insight into oppression or what to do about it. Reports doc.u.menting atrocities do not necessarily lead to an understanding of what causes uprisings, or how to weigh the justice of various kinds of direct political action, whether radical, religious, or reformist. However important the rights of noncombatants-and they are critically important-the commitment to them that was now unfolding was proving highly useful to Washington as the brutality of repressive states was increasingly countered by reports on the brutality of insurgents-however modest their brutality might be in comparison.

THE FAILURE OF CERTIFICATION.

When human rights groups refused on principle to take a stand on American global policies and geopolitical questions, they chose to ignore the history of the national security establishment's standard operating procedures. Some human rights activists and members of Congress were well aware of long-standing U.S. military programs in counterinsurgency and counterterror operations, which brought military and intelligence officers from other countries to the United States for training.103 But few leaders spoke of or to this history. Thus all the newly uncovered facts about ongoing atrocities were reported with little background on decades of political warfare strategies. Human rights groups never much addressed Washington's policies, certainly not in a way that effectively discredited the rhetoric of democratization. Meanwhile, the weakness of relying on "certification" to bring the facts to light became ever more evident.

The 1976 law decreed that no aid be given to governments that were grossly violating human rights. By certifying relative improvement in a government's human rights record, however, a president could waive the proscription and authorize continued a.s.sistance. The administration was to take into account "the relevant findings of appropriate international organizations, including nongovernmental organizations ...[and] the extent of cooperation by such governments in permitting an unimpeded investigation by any such organization of alleged violations."104 The procedure was deceptively simple. American diplomatic missions around the world were to produce the initial drafts of the country reports; these were then to be coordinated by the Bureau of Human Rights and sent on to senior State Department officials. To generate the reports, members of local U.S. missions were expected to meet with human rights monitors on the ground, attend trials, visit prisons, and hold discussions with government officials. (Such a process ensured contentious and ongoing debates: Were there more political killings by the government, or by insurgents? Were death squads rogue or government operations? Were the armed forces killing innocent noncombatants or guerrilla supporters-and in what numbers?) Notably absent from the process was any requirement that ongoing Defense Department, CIA, or other covertly sanctioned programs and counterinsurgency operations with bearing on human rights be reported and a.s.sessed. There were no calls for reports on indirect or tacit American support for the training of local forces by other governments, or for accounts of "private" but officially encouraged groups (long a CIA and Pentagon specialty). There were no demands for detailed evaluations of training by U.S. military advisors, or of the counterterror aspects of counterinsurgency practices encouraged by U.S. military a.s.sistance; or for information about covert funding through governments friendly to Washington. Investigations were largely focused outward, on gathering information about other countries and contacting dissident groups that might be helpful in the future, rather than inward, on accounts by American officials about U.S. government links with groups involved in rights violations. Not surprisingly, a large number of internal government communications, a.s.sessments, directives, and accounts were completely cla.s.sified-the very ones, of course, that would have provided persuasive evidence of Washington's partic.i.p.ation in human rights atrocities. The standard claim to this day is that nothing in the available doc.u.ments reveals any pattern of military, CIA, or quasi-private involvement. The operative word is "available."

After the 1979 coup in El Salvador led to the rapidly escalating ferocity of the civil war, the United States implemented a counterinsurgency program reminiscent of its involvement in Vietnam. In the early 1980s Americas Watch, Amnesty, and the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, drawing on newspaper accounts and sources in El Salvador and the United States, provided a searing indictment of the part U.S. aid and American experts were playing in the training of Salvadoran troops.105 The result was a horrifying level of ma.s.s murder. In the rural areas, sweeps to "clean up" areas of suspected guerrilla sympathy wiped out whole peasant villages, forcing the survivors to flee, many to refugee camps. As one Amnesty researcher wrote in his own study, the evidence suggested "an intent to kill as many inhabitants as possible in targeted villages, and to kill entire families so that children would not grow up to avenge their parents."106 "It's a brilliant technique," a former marine said. "By terrorizing civilians, the army is crushing the rebellion without the need to directly confront the guerillas." "The subversives like to say that they are the fish and the people are the ocean," El Salvadoran officers told a group of visiting congressmen. "What we have done in the north is to dry up the ocean so we can catch the fish easily."107 Human rights groups well knew that there were targets in El Salvador in addition to the guerrillas. The wave of a.s.sa.s.sinations and executions was directed at any suspected collaborators or sympathizers with insurgents-indeed almost all critics of the government's repressive methods were subject to attack. Human rights reports recounted staggering carnage in the urban areas: "legal trade union members; professional, religious, and political activists; students; indeed almost anyone who might have any inclinations to promote a political settlement, and many who had no such inclinations at all."108 As human rights groups tenaciously exposed Washington's lies, the national security managers felt that they often had little choice but to keep lying about counterinsurgency "excesses" when they came to light. Thus the U.S. government denied any knowledge of who had a.s.sa.s.sinated Archbishop Romero (when the U.S. Emba.s.sy in El Salvador had cabled Washington, identifying the killers); insisted that there had been no ma.s.sacre at El Mozote in 1981 (the UN Truth Commission Report in 1993 concluded that at least two hundred victims had been slaughtered); and so on. Years after leaving his post in Honduras, where he was accused of supporting the local death squads, Amba.s.sador Nicholas Negroponte dismissed all such allegations: "Frankly, I think that some of the retrospective efforts to try and suggest that we were supportive of or condoned the actions of human rights violators is really revisionistic."109 The reality was closer to "don't ask-don't tell," author Thomas Powers has pointed out: "Officials don't ask the CIA what its counterparts are really doing, and the agency doesn't tell. Of course, everyone knows."110 Yet human rights leaders found it difficult to challenge Washington effectively on these issues. Even as they revealed fact after horrendous fact, both the slaughter of noncombatants and the American commitment continued to escalate. Human rights groups denounced Washington for failing to control the murderous excesses of the regimes it supported; they wrote of rogue operations, locally run death squads, and the utter lack of restraint by the native military commanders who ran the counterinsurgency operations. National security managers knew better. They understood that all this killing was an inherent part of counterinsurgency. They also knew that the widespread slaughter was, to a large extent, achieving its objectives-after which Washington would be able to point to the decline in the murder rate as proof that its "training" to overcome local excesses was working.111 The core issue, then, was never primarily the excesses that human rights reports tended to focus on but, rather, the very nature of counterinsurgency as political warfare and the methods of counterterror that were so unabashedly laid out in U.S. military manuals.112 On these matters human rights organizations had little to say.

Democratic Party critics were in a bind as well. In El Salvador as elsewhere in Central America, they opposed a victory of "Marxist guerrillas," shrinking no less than Republicans from any reduction of aid that would risk "losing" the country. "We do not want to see a guerrilla victory," New York Representative Stephen Solarz said. "But we do not want to see the United States provide a.s.sistance to a government whose security forces remain responsible for the abduction and torture of thousands of people."113 The congressional debate never broke free from the straitjacket of such positions, and presidential certification proved an ideal way to ensure that it would not. Human rights organizations could report endlessly on the crimes of the Salvadoran armed forces, but to those who wanted to turn the discussion to the more insidious operations of Washington itself, they had far less to say, and would in any case have found little support in Congress.114 Nor did anyone express much empathy for the gra.s.sroots radical forces-they were "insurgents," or worse.

The existence of death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras goes directly to the issue of the restraints that human rights organizations imposed on themselves. The question they focused on was: Are the death squads directly linked to the El Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan governments, or are they rogue operations? If the former, then the aid the United States was providing made a mockery of the certification process; if the latter, then aiding the regimes could be justified. But the far more important question was whether parts of the U.S. military, private contractors, or other foreign military and intelligence groups were advising, supporting, and in diverse ways sustaining the death squads and comparably horrendous covert counterinsurgency methods. And on this question, they wavered.

In private, many of Reagan's national security managers showed few illusions about the "murderous thugs" they were aligned with. In public, they lauded moves toward elections and praised El Salvador's efforts to control its death squads, but they knew that those squads were part of the government apparatus and that some of their personnel were on the CIA payroll. This is not to say that American officials controlled the regime or the death squads; control in such situations involves a complicated dynamic among diverse, shadowy instruments of power. But in the gloomy words of one Rand Corporation specialist, "As I was told repeatedly by U.S. military and intelligence personnel who were as clear-eyed as they were aghast, the dirty little secret shared by those determined to prevent an FLMN takeover, a group that included both the Salvadoran armed forces and the United States government-was this: the death squads worked."115 Americas Watch and Amnesty International astutely a.s.sembled details of death squad and counterterror operations into a picture that suggested they were run from the highest levels of the Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan regimes. Reagan, Abrams, and the rest insisted there was no proof of such involvement. Reagan even got so inventive as to theorize that the left wing was running the death squads so that "the right wing will be blamed for it."116 Reporters filled in some of the blanks with stories on CIA-taught techniques, computer systems for tracking dissidents, and so forth.117 In Guatemala, the Boston Globe reported, "agents of the death squads were paid, a.s.sisted, and instructed by the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA helicopters, communications equipment, and special firearms were placed at the disposal of G-2 agents while they were liquidating human rights activists, students, judges, and other inconvenient people."118 Local leaders were on the CIA payroll; the CIA (among others) was providing hit lists of subversives to the regimes; "trainers" were taking part in counterinsurgency operations; some death squads had received training in Texas. The Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights alleged in a letter to Defense Secretary d.i.c.k Cheney that the killers of six pacifist Jesuits at the Central American University in El Salvador had been trained by U.S. Special Forces as recently as three days before the a.s.sa.s.sinations.119 Human rights groups kept arguing that the death squads operated as part of the local governments; Washington kept insisting there was no proof. The problem was framed again and again in terms of rogue versus local control-neatly deflecting the larger issue of American backing.

One Amnesty report on death squad activity in Honduras pointed explicitly to U.S. funding for Battalion 3-16, the leading death squad. Members had been trained in the United States, where plans for model interrogation centers (including the layout of cells) and the role of psychological coercion had been discussed. Some prisoners had been interrogated in the presence of U.S. government agents. Amnesty cited articles in the American press that reported direct involvement in the creation and functioning of the death squads. Indeed, one of Amnesty's chief investigators wrote a devastating history (though not under Amnesty's aegis) of the police and military strategies linked to U.S. officials and advisors that "helped create the 'death squads' in the first place":120 The pool of 'A&A'[a.s.sa.s.sination and abduction] talent within the U.S. armed forces is clearly considerable, and these a.s.sets at one remove may be even more numerous and used more regularly. U.S. contract employees of Hispanic origin played a major part in the more complex of the sabotage and raiding operations in the undeclared war with Nicaragua. Termed "UCLAs," these "Unilaterally Controlled Latino a.s.sets" were disposable personnel whom the U.S. government could (and would) deny if caught out; and so they were free to use the full range of special operations skills their Special Forces trainers could impart. But this was almost a sideshow to the Special Forces training relationships with foreign military and paramilitary forces.121 By and large, though, Americas Watch preferred not to turn its investigatory powers in this direction. It could have put a spotlight on the training of torturers and death squad members, probing the chain of command all the way up through Washington's shadowy world of covert warfare. If it had done so and publicized the results, it could have almost certainly brought a body of evidence from the postWorld War II period to light, enabling it to demonstrate a vast, systemic pattern of activity.122 But it did not do so.

Instead, some human rights leaders simply decided that the administration was not involved. "Unquestionably, Washington has also tried hard to stop the murders and disappearances," Aryeh Neier wrote. "These practices are impervious to United States pressure, however."123 To argue thus did not break the rules of the game, while arguing that the United States was deeply implicated would have linked the crimes that human rights groups were uncovering to the national security establishment in a way far too likely to discomfort members of Congress, funders, and foundation supporters. Besides, what would have qualified as solid proof? The testimony of shadowy characters, reports based on backgrounders, the off-the-record comments of various observers-all this was easily dismissed.

American officials reacted with outrage to the very idea that the administration might be involved in any such activities. Abrams ridiculed the claim that U.S. officials "condone, if they do not actually partic.i.p.ate in, murder, rape, torture and mutilation." Writing in response to questions raised by the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, he complained there was "no evidence too flimsy, no charge too scurrilous, no personal attack too unfair for Mr. Lewis, if it serves the purpose of instructing readers that American policy and those who carry it out are a force for evil in the world."124 His reb.u.t.tal, as is so often the case in public national security arguments, rested on an appeal to American good intentions-"Americans know that their country does not fit his ugly description."125 On October 15, 1984, six days before the second presidential campaign debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, news accounts appeared of a CIA-written manual for the Contras, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. Its ninety pages laid out how "Armed Propaganda Teams" could build political support for the Contras through deceit, intimidation, and violence, and recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects," including "neutralizing" (i.e., a.s.sa.s.sinating) government officials. The Contras were urged "to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts." Further: "Carefully selected, planned targets-judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc.-may be removed for PSYOP [psychological operations] effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area]..."126 Americas Watch meticulously dissected the manual and cited it as "evidence that the United States directly solicited the Contras to commit war crimes"; it could "properly be described as a manual for terrorists." It could also be described-though it was not-as standard operating procedure in numerous covert U.S. counterterrorism operations.127 By and large, though, human rights groups used the existence of the manual for shock effect; and shock without follow-up can deflect attention from systemic patterns of abuses. In any case, congressional investigations quickly relegated the issue to the sidelines, concluding that "negligence, not intent to violate the law, marked the manual's history."128 In the end, the issue of the death squads points to what human rights organizations ultimately did not seek to do: convey an understanding of the methods Washington was really using and what they meant for the notion of human rights in general. In their reports there was little acknowledgment of Washington's modus operandi over the preceding half century, little sense that persuading Washington to stop trying to control indigenous processes of change was either viable or just. Nor did they take a position on whether conditions in El Salvador or elsewhere were desperate enough to justify rebellion against the government-a key issue in the concept of human rights, nowhere more so than in the American Revolution itself.

THE CASE OF NICARAGUA.

The Reagan administration's campaign against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua presents a political dynamic of a different sort-a proxy war against an established government. In national security eyes, anticommunism had long legitimized covert proxy wars. With Nicaragua, however, Washington combined overt military strategies with covert political warfare. Proxy armies run by the CIA no longer required total deniability, though many of their methods certainly did. An economic embargo designed to cripple development, a military strategy aimed at destroying both urban and rural goods, forcing up Sandinista war expenditures, and intimidating the population-these methods were to prove quite successful. As in the waging of counterinsurgency and death squad activities, all that had to be obfuscated were various aspects of Washington's involvement.

Americas Watch denounced Reagan's "deceptive and harmful use" of human rights issues to attack Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Based on a "core of fact" about the Sandinistas' "serious abuses," the administration had constructed an "edifice of innuendo and exaggeration." The group argued that the November 1984 election victory by the Sandinistas represented an important democratic advance over the previous five decades of Nicaraguan history. Whatever the government was guilty of, clearly "the most violent abuses in human rights in Nicaragua today are being committed by the Contras."129 Such findings, however, never challenged the group's self-imposed "mandate" that it "does not take a position on U.S. geopolitical strategy in Central America ... Whether or not other American interests are legitimate is not the province of Americas Watch."130 Nor would it take a stand on the general question of whether the United States ought to fund the Contras: "We opposed aid to non-governmental forces such as the 'contras' to the extent that it may be demonstrated that they engage in systematic gross violations of human rights."131 If the Contras were not committing war crimes and otherwise violating human rights, U.S. support for them would not be an issue for Americas Watch. Amnesty International agreed. Amnesty "does not take a position on questions of foreign policy," though it might address "secondary governments" who funded or provided logistical support to groups that committed human rights violations.132 This determined neutrality on the issues of invasion and proxy war suggests how great the divide was between the mainstream human rights organizations and the peace movement. It testifies as well to Washington's continuing success in turning the two currents of human rights against each other.

Human rights leaders did occasionally speculate on geopolitical matters. For example, the director of Americas Watch once suggested positing the worst-that Nicaragua had become "another Cuba," a fully Communist state; did that mean the United States should "launch a war to overthrow the government?" But wasn't that what the Russians were doing in Afghanistan? "Should we behave like them?" His conclusion was revealing. "We don't have to bully small countries that we consider obnoxious. Our side has more options. We dominate the world, not by flexing our muscles, but economically, technologically, ideologically, linguistically, and culturally."133 Waging war on countries to promote human rights was out, but the promotion of democratization and human rights was rapidly gaining favor.

Rights leaders seldom confronted American policy directly.134 Their reports raised doubts about the administration's claim that Nicaragua was arming the El Salvadoran rebels, a key rationale for its proxy war; but such skepticism did not challenge policy per se. Their mantra was "Take no sides in a conflict." Yet in Nicaragua, as Neier commented, the United States "used human rights information as an instrument of warfare"-it highlighted Sandinista abuses in order to gain public support. Thus the dilemma: "We didn't want to fall into the trap of overstating them," yet had to "make sure we didn't understate abuses, as that would make us an apologist for them."135 The executive director of Americas Watch charged that the Sandinistas "have aligned themselves with the Soviet Union; they are not democrats; they have shown no respect for freedom of expression"-charges about which many human rights activists were dubious. However, he continued, "as Amnesty International's report demonstrates, they have largely-though not entirely-avoided the worst cruelties practiced by the government that preceded them and by the governments in nearby El Salvador and Guatemala."136 The conclusion may not have been the one Washington wanted, but it could live with it well enough because the terms of the debate were exactly what it wanted.

Attacking the Contras became a safe way for congressional opponents of the proxy war to debate the issue of Nicaragua. They repeatedly challenged the legality of Reagan's undertaking-its dubious funding (temporarily cut off by the Boland Amendment), the illegal mining of the harbors, the illicit CIA involvement. As Neier argued, "there would be no war in Nicaragua except for the United States. We organized, recruited, trained, guided, financed, and supplied the contras, and we speak to the world in their behalf."137 Yet despite such arguments, Americas Watch still concluded that the Contras were non-state actors rather than components of a U.S. military operation. (In the rare instances that this standing was disputed, it was quickly dismissed as irrelevant to the focus on the rights of noncombatants.) Had it ever been acknowledged that the invasion was run almost completely by the United States, using a mercenary force armed by Washington, responsibility for the human rights atrocities would have fallen directly on the Reagan administration.

In 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled in the case of Nicaragua v. the United States that "by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces or otherwise encouraging supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua," the United States "has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another state."138 The U.S. had "encouraged" the Contras to act "contrary to general princ.i.p.als of humanitarian law."139 The court found further that the United States attacks had violated "international law not to use force against another state."140 Not only did the Reagan administration ignore the court's findings; little of the decision made its way into congressional testimony by Americas Watch or Amnesty (or into a more general public debate). Yet these groups could have easily insisted that while such issues were outside their mandate, they nevertheless warranted investigation by a citizens commission-or an international group-to a.s.sess Washington's legal responsibility for crimes against peace and its accountability for the war crimes they themselves had been doc.u.menting. They could have warned, as they did about leaders in other countries in later years, that American leaders could face charges for violating the laws of war even under the U.S. government's official interpretation. They chose not to do so.

They ignored a further aspect of the court's ruling. In the 1940s, non-Western countries had successfully insisted on nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries as part of the UN charter-a demand reflecting their histories of colonization. When the court lambasted the various U.S. arguments as essentially proposing a "new principle" of the right of "ideological intervention," a "striking innovation" that had no basis in law,141 many human rights leaders should have had reason for pause; for Reagan's entire promotion of democratization could be seen as a form of the ideological intervention that the court was dismissing as baseless in international law. The dismaying truth, however, was that U.S. human rights leaders were coming to accept it.142 THE CO-OPTATION OF THE MOVEMENT.

The human rights groups' stand of refraining from comment on foreign policy was anything but consistent. Some leaders might have disliked the democratizing methods the United States brought to bear against the Sandinistas, but in the end they found much that was positive in the overall approach. In Chile, for example, Washington was becoming increasingly concerned that Pinochet's ruthless dictatorship was likely to give rise to a resurgent left. After 1985, the U.S. Emba.s.sy in Santiago and the National Endowment for Democracy (along with more covert ent.i.ties) sought to ensure a transfer of leadership to a political center opposed to any radical ideas; they applied pressure to achieve a "no" vote in the 1988 plebiscite Pinochet had called to legitimize his continuation in office. Washington's objective was to isolate the left, weaken the radical demands of labor groups, and, as far as possible, wean the right away from the dictatorship.143 Promotion of civil society (as opposed to community action), backing of electoral politics (as opposed to labor organizing), and support of multinational corporations were all aspects of Washington's strategy.144 Of course, it can be plausibly argued that the various democratization activities intended to weaken Pinochet were also a viable way to promote human rights-developing links with business leaders, supporting the press, labor groups, key academics, and so on.145 The actions the United States took against Pinochet, Neier later wrote-among them the National Endowment of Democracy's funneling of money to the Chilean opposition-represented Washington's acknowledgment, at least in principle, of the importance of "promoting human rights as a foreign policy goal." Reagan's (and later George H. W. Bush's) policy toward Chile, Neier continued, was a victory for human rights-an "acceptance of the view that our policy should be applied evenhandedly." This growing alliance with Washington did not involve any violation of principle, human rights leaders argued; it was a pragmatic one of sharing certain ends.146 In Nicaragua there was practically no form of democratizing that human rights leaders found unacceptable. Yet such "ideological intervention" was (and remains) a charged issue. Was funding by the National Endowment for Democracy and other American sources for a Nicaraguan paper, La Prensa, to promote calls for the overthrow of the Sandinista government, already under siege, an example of the free press in operation? Does freedom of the press extend to a paper's right to support armed, externally controlled forces (the Contras) attempting to overthrow an elected government? Human rights reports rarely delved into such questions.147 In 1975, the Senate's Church Report on CIA operations against the Allende government in Chile had pointed to the funds that flowed to El Mercurio so that the paper could spread CIA-planted rumors and propaganda,148 showing how the CIA made Allende's censorship of the paper a centerpiece in a highly orchestrated campaign to accuse him of suppressing "freedom of the press." Did human rights groups a.s.sume such standard operating procedures of ideological intervention were myths? Irrelevant? Unworthy of investigation? They simply took no position.

Yet they had not always deflected questions about the impact of hostile att.i.tudes on human rights. In its 19751976 report on Cuba, Amnesty argued that the "persistence of fear, real or imagined, of counterrevolutionary conspiracies" was "primarily responsible for the early excesses in the treatment of political prisoners. By the same token, the removal of that fear has been largely responsible for the improvements in conditions."149 There were few comparable statements about Nicaragua. Americas Watch leaders often found connections between American hostility and human rights lapses questionable: "We have no way of knowing whether the Sandinistas would be more repressive or less repressive if there were no war. Too many factors enter into the equation to make any calculation that can be defended,"150 Neier wrote. Such views fit with the prevailing media norms. A 1986 New York Times editorial, "The Sandinista Road to Stalinism," argued that the "Sandinistas ask us to believe that Congress's full support for the Nicaraguan 'contras' is forcing them to crack down further on free thought and speech. We don't believe it. The depredations of the C.I.A.-sponsored army neither justify nor explain the totalitarian trend in Managua."151 There was "no reason to swallow President Ortega's claim that the crackdown is the fault of the 'brutal aggression by North American and its internal allies.'"152 The Sandinistas, who had often cooperated with Americas Watch and Amnesty on their numerous visits, allowing monitors wide access to much of the country (in sharp contrast to what these groups encountered in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) saw it differently. In the words of one progressive Nicaraguan group, "It is impossible to discuss human rights in Nicaragua without taking a position against the war, since that is the princ.i.p.al source of human rights violations and arguably very nearly the exclusive one." The rights to work, health, education, and national independence were all being "systematically and deliberately violated by the government of the United States, which, through its contra proxies, is far and away the leading abuser of human rights in the country."153 Yet a discussion that ignored the context of the war is almost exactly what human rights groups proceeded to conduct. The electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1991, Americas Watch concluded, removed "the pretext that had given rise to the violations..."154 "Pretext" is a notable choice of words: "something that is put forward to conceal a true purpose." In the comments of various human rights leaders, there is a double standard: the Sandinistas' repressive acts reveal what they are really up to, and yet Washington's hostile acts do not reveal the truth about America. The rights to self-determination, sovereignty, cultural integrity, education, and health slide into the background, less important than the civil rights that these groups were charging the Sandinistas with violating. As usual, the first current of human rights was swamping the second.155 Reagan in his public diplomacy used words somewhat differently from his predecessors', but the script was much the same. Cuba had long provided the paradigmatic testing ground for hostile action in the Americas-embargoes, proxy warfare, a.s.sa.s.sination attempts-with each instance of reactive countermeasures singled out as one more example of Communist repression. Our hostile acts, it was claimed, forced our enemies to reveal their innermost repressive selves. And so in Nicaragua the (nationalist, revolutionary) leadership was not really driven to commit abuses by the United States; they were die-hard Marxists all along, just waiting for the chance to take the country down the one-party totalitarian path. The United States had been patient, waiting to see what direction the new regime would take. And in any case there was little the United States could do, since the fundamental reasons for abuse and repression-as in Cuba, China, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran-arose straight out of the ideology of the regime.

These campaigns against almost every nationalistic or revolutionary force the United States has confronted since the Cold War began reflected the innermost tenets of the globalist faith. Turn the accusations inside out and the beliefs of the national security managers emerge with stark clarity. Most of them never doubted that the Nicaraguan Revolution was a dangerous example. As CIA Director William Casey told Bob Woodward, "Let's make the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds sweat"156-level an embargo, commit economic sabotage, use proxy war to make government expenditures skyrocket.157 And unnerve them with the ever present possibility that the United States might invade-"perception management," as the psyops warriors called it.158 Such hostility would bring out the regime's truly repressive character, thus justifying the United States's highly interventionist policies of democratizing.

Little wonder, then, that human rights leaders sometimes wondered whether the Contras had been created to bleed Nicaragua "as an object lesson to anyone else with thoughts about establishing a leftist government in the Western Hemisphere."159 But such thoughts never led them to find a war against the social advancement and economic well-being of a nation a violation of human rights. Their obliviousness further bound them to a single current of human rights and implicated them in Washington's use of that current for its own quite different ends. So interchangeable had their approach become with Washington's political warfare strategies that some human rights leaders concluded that, with the Reagan administration, "concern with human rights appeared to have secured a permanent place in the formulation of our policy toward other nations."160 Not everyone was convinced. The Nicaraguan government established solidarity organizations worldwide; by 1988 there were more than seventy-seven sister-city relationships between Nicaraguan and American communities alone. Religious and peace organizations developed a "Pledge of Resistance," eventually signed by some seventy thousand, to engage in acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent demonstrations at the White House and the Capital in the event of an American invasion. Such defiance was anathema to many human rights leaders, some of whom openly condemned leftists for undermining the universality of human rights principles. Neier again: "Much of the left did not speak out against abuses of human rights by governments aligned with the Soviet Union, particularly in the Third World and above all in Nicaragua." He acknowledged that the movement had initially drawn most of its support from progressives opposed to the Vietnam War and outraged at U.S. complicity in the coup in Chile. Now, in failing to take a principled stand against all rights violations, what he called the left was abetting Reagan's "simplistic" claims of democratization and thus aiding "Reagan and company" in taking control of "the political capital of the human rights cause."161 Rarely has the divide between human rights leaders and activists been so stark. The leaders often reined in the activists whose ideals had been forged in the upheavals of the 1960s and whose tactics they feared were incendiary. They did so in the name of "consistently applying principles," of "not taking sides," of "taking no position on foreign policy" or on aggression or on war itself. Unfortunately, their self-imposed impartiality was a moral-sounding stance that Washington could easily live with; after all, it was an outcome of Washington's long-standing psychological-warfare strategy of turning the two currents of human rights against each other.

4.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND CHINA.

Just as the Cold War was coming to an end, China erupted as one of the most contentious and long-lasting issues in the history of human rights. On June 4, 1989, tanks rolled into Beijing's Tiananmen Square, and overnight the notion of the Chinese government as an interesting anomaly-a Communist state experimenting with economic reforms-was replaced by the image of a corrupt clique of octogenarian hard-liners clinging to power by brute force. For twenty days China dominated the nightly network news (which devoted 25 percent of its air time to the situation), and CNN came into its own, continually replaying graphic footage of the terrible events as they unfolded. Tiananmen's "G.o.ddess of liberty," a ten-meter-tall stature created during the crisis that quickly became seen in the United States as a replica of the Statue of Liberty, was constantly invoked on the air as a testament to the universality of American freedom and human rights.

In Congress, the word "barbaric" was repeated again and again. The Chinese government's acts were "barbaric," its behavior "barbaric and reactionary," its vision the "very depths of barbarism." "The civilized world is repulsed by what we have witnessed," declared Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole.1 "The tanks in Tiananmen stand as mute but moving testimony of the moral bankruptcy of a government that can maintain itself in power only by killing its own people," Senate Majority Leader George Mitch.e.l.l stated.2 Within a week, the Congressional Record had printed three thousand pages of denunciations. Almost every member of Congress spoke, most demanding that Washington act.

For nearly fifteen years China had been called the "great human rights exception"-a nation that enjoyed "an inexplicable immunity" from human rights criticism.3 Of course, for national security managers the reasons seemed obvious enough. Ever since the Nixon administration, U.S. policy had been guided mainly by security concerns that saw China as an important counterweight to the Soviet Union. Although both presidents Carter and Reagan spoke out about human rights violations in other Communist countries, toward China they maintained a pointed silence. Instead, they emphasized Beijing's strategic importance and the gradual improvements its new market-oriented reforms were yielding-an approach most famously evident in Reagan's reference to "so-called Communist China."4 Only after the Chinese Communist Party itself spoke openly for the first time in 1978 about the ma.s.sive rights violations during the Cultural Revolution did the State Department issue its first full report on human rights conditions there.5 But why did human rights groups follow Washington in largely avoiding human rights issues as they related to China? Their leaders have offered a number of reasons.6 The "paucity of information" and the difficulty of gathering accurate statistics made hard data scarce. Journalists, often a source for information on rights violations elsewhere, feared expulsion. Human rights advocates conceded that some of their reports were inadequate. For example, a 1985 report from the Asia Watch section of the Fund for Free Expression, focusing largely on China's economic and social advancements, devoted only a single sentence to the suppression of political rights.7 Moreover, Chinese Americans, unlike refugees from the USSR and Eastern Europe, never const.i.tuted much of a pressure group; few wanted to "embarra.s.s the PRC" and risk impeding normalization and their ability to travel to China. Since Washington had no diplomatic, commercial, or foreign a.s.sistance leverage to exert over Beijing, human rights advocates in Congress also remained subdued; as even one conservative congressman said bluntly, once economic reforms had made "the Chinese seem increasingly 'ours,' their lack of human rights is not an issue."8 Far more than Amnesty, American human rights groups believed, like the Cold War anticommunists before them, that their work required not just U.S. pressure on a recalcitrant government but access to dissidents and local activists as well. The latter were urging reform within the bounds of socialism; they showed little interest in cooperating with Western human rights groups to publicize abuses they were exposing themselves, and so those groups by and large held back.

Still, the situation was changing by the mid-1980s. As Human Rights Watch pointed out, increasing economic contacts meant a developing potential both to positively influence China and to pressure it. Chinese students had started coming to the West. Tibet was attracting more attention, and in 1985 impetus for the formation of Asia Watch came from an aide to the Dalai Lama.9 The increasing prominence of a "Tibet lobby," worldwide protests against Chinese actions in Tibet in 1987, and statements by the Dalai Lama all attracted congressional interest. Finally, in 1988, just a year before Tiananmen, the Soros Open Fund Society (the precursor of the Open Society Inst.i.tute founded in 1993) became active in Beijing. But the events of Tiananmen put an abrupt halt to these gradual changes, and soon there was bitter acrimony between human rights organizations and the Bush administration over how to handle China.

CHINA IN WASHINGTON'S GRAND STRATEGY Contrary to all the claims of human rights scholars and advocates, China was never really the great "human rights exception." There as elsewhere human rights organizations broadly followed in the wake of Washington's global strategy-a hidden history that once again reveals just how tied into U.S. national security concerns the evolution of human rights att.i.tudes has been. An overview of Washington's grand strategy toward China since 1949 shows this process at work and what was really at stake in it.

From 1949 on, Washington's policy of isolating China went hand in hand with its strategies for a new economic and political order in Asia. China might have been contained (as British, Indian, and j.a.panese leaders, among others, had advocated) by promoting a realpolitik balance of power system in Asia. But containment was not enough to accomplish Washington's global strategy. China had to be isolated, in order to prevent other Asian and European nations from recognizing it or having any economic and cultural contacts with it, or negotiating over such issues as China's entrance into the UN and the future status of Taiwan.10 Washington's policy, in short, was about far more than just containing the Chinese Revolution; its far greater goal was to integrate the rest of Asia into an America-centered world.

In Europe, a line denoting containment of the Soviet sphere could be drawn across a region that was relatively stable in military, economic, and ideological terms. But until the mid-1960s the new Asian order was still weak and highly vulnerable; traditional colonial trade patterns were altering very slowly. j.a.pan had not yet been tightly drawn into an America-centered global economic system, and though the traditional economic ties between China and non-Communist East Asia had largely been broken, the United States feared they could still be mended, with devastating consequences for its Asian policies.

Washington's approach to China was thus very different from its policy toward the Kremlin. By the late 1940s, containment without isolation had come to be largely accepted as the best way to deal with the Soviet Union. In the months after Stalin's death in March 1953, the Eisenhower administration began a debate over expanding contact with the USSR, which the new Soviet leadership eagerly sought. Repeated discussions weighed the pros and cons of cultural exchange and of negotiation, their urgency fueled in part by increasing concern over the Soviet Union's new nuclear capability.11 Without those interactions, it is hard to see how the emerging bipolar world could have come to be quite so compatible with the key interests of the two great powers.

But for decades American policy toward China was far harsher. The United States monitored in great detail the contacts of overseas Chinese-its own citizens and those of other nations-with China. American diplomats noted who went to China and why, and what they did and said upon their return. Even in internal discussions, government officials rarely suggested that drawing Chinese leaders into diplomatic talks would serve any purpose other than the negative one of legitimizing them. The vaguest nods in that direction were attacked as undermining Taiwan, to which the Nationalist Chinese under Jiang Jieshi had fled in 1949 after the triumph of the Chinese Revolution.

Cultural exchanges were forbidden. Few business contacts were permitted either, especially compared with the checkered but persistent relations between American businesses and the Soviet Union after November 1917. Businesses suspected of dealing with the PRC were carefully monitored and financial transactions in Hong Kong reported in detail by the Treasury Department as part of the ongoing American embargo against trade with China. The United States allowed no journalist to enter China until Edgar Snow went in 1959. Nor did any literary image of China ever match the way the Soviet Union, in John le Carre's novels, challenged the West in a deadly game with intricate rules. The Chinese seemed to be beyond such games, beyond rules. Hence Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's refusal to shake Zhou Enlai's hand at the Geneva Conference in 1954; it was a minimal civility that had not been denied even the Soviets.

Many Western histories and human rights accounts of China argue that Beijing was at least as hostile to Washington. The reasons given are varied: the inflexibility of the repressive Communists; the reinforcement of Communist dogma by American intervention in the Chinese civil war after 1945; resentment over centuries-long humiliation at the hands of the West; lack of experience in dealing with other states as equals; China's pride-which is to say, its xenophobic nationalism; the very nature of the Communist system, which was said to require a demonic enemy to promote domestic revolutionary goals, and so on. Whatever one makes of these arguments, they all tend to ignore the obvious: that Beijing would have responded to recognition by Washington, that it would have taken its seat in the UN had it not been blocked, that it would have willingly traded goods (on however limited a basis), possibly with the United States, certainly with some of its allies.12 President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles believed they were holding the line against China to gain time-not just for animosity between the Soviet Union and China to grow, but also for a new Asian system of power to emerge that China would ultimately have to conform to. Eisenhower and Dulles often spoke in private of the long-term likelihood of a split between China and the Soviet Union; the pivotal question for them was whether the West could stand firm and wait for a new Asian order for as long as twenty-five years. If the Sino-Soviet split came too early, the situation in Asia might even deteriorate. To focus only on the way they intensified military pressure on China as a means of provoking a split, therefore, is largely to ignore Washington's underlying strategic concern. Isolating China and developing the rest of Asia-economically, politically, and militarily-were always inextricably bound.

In later years American officials and human rights leaders liked to say that China had isolated itself, but the real story is that by the mid-1960s China's isolation from a rapidly developing Asia no longer fully served U.S. strategic objectives.13 Washington's tactics were starting to change in these years. In a widely heralded 1967 article for Foreign Affairs, Richard Nixon noted that "taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion people to live in angry isolation." In reality, he was echoing the Johnson administration when he argued that "a policy of restraint, of reward, of a creative counter pressure designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility" could pull China "back into the world community."14 Washington well understood what this policy would require. From the Eisenhower administration on, its argument had been that the American market was a vehicle for shaping economic relations with the South, and particularly for encouraging select allies-j.a.pan, Taiwan, South Korea-to develop and integrate their economic systems with the United States and thereby reap the rewards of the global marketplace. The Western business corporation, skilled in combining capital, technological know-how, organization, and management, was the ideal inst.i.tution for drawing these nations into the global economic order.15 Even the Soviet Union was a candidate. A year earlier, Kennedy's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, had echoed widely shared sentiments when he stated that "peaceful trade between the United States and the USSR would tend on the whole to mold the Soviet Union in the Western image."16 All this was possible because, as one governmental task force on development phrased it, the United States was the only genuinely "universalist" power available to order the planet.17 In the long run, these hoped-for changes could apply just as fully to China. William Bundy suggested in a 1966 memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "A chance to begin developing an export market in the U.S. would have the most attraction for the Chinese Communists, and we could expect them sooner or later to test our willingness to accept their goods."18 A ma.s.sive interdepartment government study of the same year echoed the idea: if the United States were to lift its trade embargo, "the greatest gain to China would be in its opportunity to earn dollars by selling in the rich US market ...[and this change] could contribute substantially to Peking's ability to import grain and industrial equipment."19 It could have further political implications as well: "Once engaged in selling to profitable U.S. markets, even via third countries, Communist China would be less free to act in ways which might threaten to cut off that source of scarce foreign exchange. As a result, China might gradually acquire a practical interest in developing and maintaining a measure of detente."20 "Opening" involved several steps, the first of which was Nixon's triangular diplomacy with China and the USSR. That pointed toward the second step, itself prefigured in the integration of j.a.pan and other Asian economies into the global marketplace. As the Pentagon's draft study for postCold War policy put it, Washington's visible victory had been the triumph over Communism and the Soviet Union, but the "less visible one, the integration of Germany and j.a.pan into a U.S.-led system of collective security," was what had truly consolidated the "leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order."21 No new rivals now stood in the way, and Washington would prevent any potential compet.i.tors "from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." The United States-as balancer, manipulator, preeminent military power-would be the ultimate adjudicator of power relations and developments in every region of the globe. That included China's incorporation into the global market.

CHINA AT THE END OF THE COLD WAR.

If Tiananmen had erupted a number of years later, Washington's response might have been to punish Beijing far more than it chose to, even to push for regime change. But in 1989 the events in China appeared largely as a distraction from a more pressing and volatile geopolitical issue: Mikhail Gorbachev's call for an end to the Cold War. His push for new policies in Europe was an audacious challenge to President George H. W. Bush, who warned that the United States seemed to be "losing the battle ... over influencing the direction of Europe."22 With Eastern Europe breaking free of Russian control, the overwhelming preoccupation was increasingly: Whither Germany and, thus, whither Europe? The future of East Germany and the question of whether reunification would take place inside or outside NATO emerged as the main battleground on which the continuation of American preeminence would be decided. Washington's closest European allies, Great Britain and France, opposed a reunified Germany;23 Bush advocated for a reunified Germany within NATO, since an independent Germany outside NATO might lead to an independent Europe, a more multipolar future, and thus an abortive end to Washington's four-decades-long effort to fashion a world order of its own making. By the mid-1990s these issues were significantly under control. As Paul Wolfowitz observed much later, globalization "refers primarily to the increasing interconnectedness of the world economy [and] occurs within the context of the global dominance of American economic and political ideas, accompanied by the spread of American ma.s.s culture"; unipolarity describes the same phenomenon.24 But in 1989, as one NSC staffer explained, "The whole world was flying down, straining every resource we had.... We had no interest in pushing China over the edge."25 The reshaping of Europe and the breakup of the USSR brought too much volatility to Washington's global agenda to risk further instability in China. Tiananmen briefly made national security managers nervous that China might become a focal point for discontented nations; Beijing could then seek to position itself as the leader of the world's poorer states in opposition to an American-European-j.a.panese-led coalition defending the status quo.26 These considerations lay partly behind President Bush's wariness of pushing the hard-liners too far. His hard-liners did not include Deng Xiaoping but other leaders who might be tempted to pursue a more autonomous economic development plan. This "China at the crossroads" argument echoed throughout the 1990s-China as a nation poised between inward-looking nationalism and outward-looking economic integration.27 Tiananmen provoked an outpouring of outrage in the West, rousing human rights leaders to challenge Bush's China policies. He was fiercely attacked for supporting the "b.l.o.o.d.y Butchers of Beijing," as Bill Clinton put it. But for the national security managers, once the immediate Tiananmen crisis pa.s.sed and the Chinese government consolidated its power, the question again became how to handle China. In a still-globalizing world, China needed to be tied down in an intricate web of integration, a web not spun by the world's one superpower alone but made up of countless tin