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

The Race to Destruction
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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Administration changed the emphasis of the military assistance program
from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security”—meaning war against
their own populations. Given the realities of US dominance, this meant,
in effect, that “the Latin American military role was changed from
‘hemispheric defense’ to ‘internal security’,” in the words of Charles
Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal defense planning
from 1961 to 1966. 97 In the light of its consequences, this was one of
the most significant decisions of recent history, one little noted here.
This decision, Maechling notes, represented a change from toleration “of
the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct
complicity” in their crimes, to US support of “the methods of Heinrich
Himmler’s extermination squads.” The consequences, as we have seen,
were horrendous, as much of Latin America was turned into a torture
chamber under a rash of National Security States as a result, in
significant measure, of US policy initiatives. The same phenomenon is
notable in the current phase of military expansion.
Elsewhere too, the consequences of the interventionism that goes
hand-in-hand with militarization of the domestic economy have been
grim. Ruth Sivard counts up 125 or more military conflicts since World
War II, 95% in the Third World, in most cases involving foreign forces,
with “western powers accounting for 79 percent of the interventions,
communist for 6 percent.” Even if not taken too literally, such figures
should give us pause. The toll is incalculable. In Indochina alone, a
standard Western estimate is that about 500,000 were killed by the
French in their US-backed war, and one recent estimate is that deaths
from 1965 may have been 3 million or more. Add to this perhaps
170,000 killed in the previous ten years of US terror and some 1/2
million to 1 million killed during the US wars in Laos and Cambodia,
and we have perhaps 4 million or more killed, a respectable
achievement in the days before we fell victim to the “sickly inhibitions