Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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particular, “it hasn’t achieved what it set out to do, topple the
government of Nicaragua.” 24
As Moore observes in his defense of the legality of the Reagan policy,
such objectives are contrary to “the law of the United States” that is
“binding on both the executive and legislative branches,” not only the
general provisions of international law but also such specific constraints
as the Boland Amendment, in force until August 1985. 25 There can be
little doubt that these are and have been the objectives throughout—
though it would suffice to cause sufficient misery and destruction so as
to keep the “infectious virus” from spreading through the dread
demonstration effect. It is, however, important to stress that contempt
for law and the regular resort to violence to protect US interests are a
central theme of American history, contrary to the fantasies spun by
those bemused by a “mysterious collective amnesia.”
An accurate account was given by Major Smedley Butler, who
commanded the Marine landing in Nicaragua in 1909 and again in
1912, and also fought in Mexico and Haiti, where he ran the fraudulent
1918 election that ratified the US occupation under Marine guns and
the corvée system of slave labor, “an instrument for oppressing and
torturing the Haitian people . . . and apparently some times for no other
purpose than to provide [the Marine-imposed Haitian gendarmes] with
the excuse to beat, if not shoot them down,” as a missionary described
it. In 1931, shortly before retiring, Old Gimlet Eye Butler summarized
his career before a legionnaires convention:
I spent 33 years . . . being a high-class muscle man for Big Business,
for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism
. . . I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of
Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially
Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the