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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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supported by other research. Michael Klare and Cynthia Arnson
demonstrate that “U.S. firms and agencies are providing guns,
equipment, training, and technical support to the police and paramilitary
forces most directly involved in the torture, assassination, and abuse of
civilian dissidents”; “Rather than sitting in detached judgment over
incidents of abuse occurring elsewhere [as official rhetoric would have
it], the United States stands at the supply end of a pipeline of
repressive technology that extends to many of the world’s most
authoritarian regimes.” The US is the world’s leading supplier of police
and prison hardware, the leader in “what can best be called the
international repression trade,” supplying many of the worst human
rights violators. 188
But a correlation is not a theory. An explanation is required. One
possibility is that US governments have a positive hatred of human
rights, but this seems implausible. More likely, human rights are simply
irrelevant to policy formation, in accord with Kennan’s dictum, and we
must search elsewhere for an explanation for the correlation between
state terror and US aid.
A study by Edward Herman suggests a plausible explanation. He too
investigated the relation between US aid and human rights, over a
broader range and with somewhat different measures, considering
changes in aid from the US and US-dominated international lending
agencies as the human rights climate changed. He found the same
correlation: as the human rights climate deteriorates, US aid increases.
But he also carried out a second study, asking how US aid correlates
with the investment climate (tax and profit repatriation laws, government
controls on wages and labor organizations). The conclusion is that “UScontrolled
aid has been positively related to investment climate and
inversely related to the maintenance of a democratic order and human
rights.” 189