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

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
315
work, which happened to integrate quite well with other US enterprises
in defense of the Fifth Freedom, specifically, those with which we have
been primarily concerned. Meanwhile the CIA was directed to covert
operations, including “the support of terrorism around the world,” in the
words of the document that launched these operations, 67 but primarily
subversion, some of the main targets being democratic governments that
appeared to be drifting out of US control. The pattern of intervention of
earlier years expanded worldwide and intensified in scale. Throughout,
the project in which the US-SS alliance has been engaged, from early
postwar Europe to contemporary El Salvador and Nicaragua—with some
important stops in Latin America in between—has been described, when
it is noted at all, in the conventional rhetoric of containment, defense
against the Empire of Evil. A closer look shows something quite
different: additional evidence for the general thesis that the US has felt it
necessary to defend large parts of the world from “internal aggression”
by their own populations, but little support for the idea that the growth
of the US system of international security—with strategic armaments as
a crucial element—was driven by the need to defend ourselves against
the encroachments of the Great Satan.
4.5 Escalation of the Pentagon System: The Pretexts and the
Evidence
Another way to examine the plausibility of the defensive rhetoric of US
diplomacy and scholarship is to consider the moments when the regular
growth of the military system sharply escalated. There are three crucial
periods: the early 1950s, the early 60s, and today, with Reagan’s
unprecedented military build-up, extending steps initiated during the
final period of the Carter presidency. We may ask, then, what new