The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Among the waning empires that spawned this host of conflicts was the more or less informal American empire in Central America and the Caribbean. In 1952 Guatemala’s left-wing government, led by President Jacobo Arbenz, enacted Decree 900, a reform that took idle land away from some of the country’s biggest estate owners and redistributed it to poor peasants. Among the landowners dismayed by this development was the American United Fruit Company, which owned around 10 per cent of Guatemala’s prime agricultural land. In February 1953 the Arbenz government confiscated a quarter of a million acres of company land, offering in return government bonds worth just over $1 million, a twentieth of what United Fruit said the land was worth. When the Guatemalan Supreme Court struck down the reform as unconstitutional, the government fired the judges. ‘One can live without tribunals,’ one trade union leader declared, ‘but one can’t live without land.’ United Fruit had friends in high places (the future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was one of its lawyers, his brother Allen was Deputy Director of the CIA) but it did not need United Fruit’s lobbyists to convince American politicians that Arbenz’s government was a Soviet Trojan horse in America’s back yard. The US ambassador to Guatemala, James Puerifoy, summed up the official line when he said: ‘Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ In the words of a National Security Council staff member, Guatemala was to be ‘a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism’. Something similar seemed to be afoot in Iran. The answer in both cases was a CIA-sponsored coup. First in Iran in 1953, then in Guatemala the following year, Eisenhower gave the green light for regime change.

  In fact, the anti-Communist invasion launched in June 1954 was almost a fiasco. But the crisis gave the Guatemalan army its cue to seize power from Arbenz. The new military government received Washington’s official blessing from none other than Vice-President Richard Nixon. On a visit to Guatemala, Nixon alleged that the Soviet Union had sent ‘mountains and mountains of literature… attempting to change the minds of the people and warp them over to supporting international communism’. There was, he alleged, clear evidence that Arbenz’s government had been under ‘direct control from the international Communist conspiracy’. The message to Moscow was unambiguous. In the words of the American ambassador to the United Nations: ‘Stay out of this hemisphere and don’t try to start your plans and your conspiracies over here.’ Yet the reality was that the Soviets did not really need to intervene directly in Latin America, for there were Marxists in Latin America who felt they could overthrow capitalism without any need for Soviet assistance – which had, in any case, been non-existent in Guatemala. Not for the last time, a CIA covert operation had unforeseen consequences. Shortly before the military takeover, an impressionable young Argentine doctor had arrived in Guatemala. In the wake of the coup, he fled to Mexico where he met another political refugee, a flamboyant Cuban lawyer. Five years later, the doctor, Ernesto Guevara, helped the lawyer, Fidel Castro, to take over Cuba.

  The Cuban Revolution was a grave setback for the American anti-Communist strategy, undoing at a stroke the success of the Guatemalan coup. Despite repeated attempts, the CIA could not pull off the same trick in Havana. Yet the American assumption that Cuba had now become a kind of Caribbean branch office of the Soviet Communist Party was in many ways mistaken. As the Soviets later admitted, they had only limited influence over Castro. For Castro was Pinocchio, a puppet who had no strings. With scarcely any prompting from Moscow, he pursued a strategy of his own to spark off revolution right across what was coming to be called the Third World. He and Guevara sought to foment copy-cat revolutions in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti. Later, Castro sent Cuban weapons to Algeria and Cuban troops to Congo, Guinea-Bissau and Ethiopia. In 1975 Castro ordered his biggest intervention yet, sending a Cuban army to repel a South African invasion of newly independent Angola. Unbeknown to the Americans, he did so in defiance of orders from Moscow to stay out.

  Angola was typical of the kind of place where the Cold War was distinctly hot. On one side, there was the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which seized power in Luanda after independence from Portugal was finally granted in 1975; on the other, two rival guerrilla organizations, UNITA and the FNLA. And just as the majority of the troops sent to support the MPLA were Cuban rather than Russian, so UNITA derived the bulk of its military support from South Africa rather than the United States. In September 1987, when the war in Angola came to a head at Cuito Cuanavale, a remote military base in the south-east of the country not far from the Namibian border, the Angolan government forces were equipped with Soviet-made T-55 tanks and MiG fighters, but the tank crews and pilots were mainly Cuban. On the other side, the 8,000 UNITA troops were supported by around 3,000 South Africans – an infantry company from the 32nd ‘Buffalo’ battalion, a heavy artillery battery equipped with sixteen huge G-5 guns and the 61st Mechanized Battalion Group with their Ratel-90 armoured cars – assisted by the South African Air Force, which flew sorties against MPLA positions along the Lomba River.

  Faraway battles like these make it absurd for us to remember the Cold War fondly as a time of peace and stability. The reality is that the second half of the twentieth century was not much less violent than the first. Altogether between 1945 and 1983 around 19 or 20 million people were killed in around 100 major military conflicts. It was just the venues of violence that had changed. Instead of fighting head on, as they came so close to doing in Cuba in 1962, the superpowers now fought one another through intermediaries in what they regarded as peripheral theatres. But to those caught up in them there was nothing peripheral about these numerous hot wars. The degree of superpower sponsorship varied from case to case. Sometimes, as in Vietnam or Afghanistan, American and Soviet troops were in the front line. More often, they were behind the lines, training or supplying local armies. Sometimes, as in Africa and the Middle East, the support itself was subcontracted to other countries. Yet here, as in so many other respects during the Cold War, the United States found that it was at a fundamental disadvantage.

  When Trotsky had called for world revolution after 1917, the results had been disappointing. But when Khrushchev spoke buoyantly of ‘an era when socialism, communism and global revolution will triumph’, it was a different story. All over the Third World there were popular nationalist movements which aimed to overthrow the last vestiges of West European colonial rule and establish some form of popularly based self-government. The Soviets proved remarkably good at persuading many such movements to adopt their own political and economic model. Decolonization was the wave the Soviets rode; ‘popular liberation’ was a phrase they knew well how to use. Of course, the American political system had also been the product of a revolt against imperial rule. Yet somehow Lenin, Stalin and Mao had more appeal in the 1960s and 1970s than Washington, Jefferson and Madison. The Americanmodelofdemocracy pluscapitalism hadfarfewer takersthan the Soviet alternative of one-party rule plus socialism. This was partly because poor former colonies like Guatemala, Cuba and Angola had a large, impoverished peasantry, of the sort that had been decisive in backing the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but only a small middle class, of the sort that had made the American one. Partly it was because ambitious Third World ‘freedom fighters’ liked the opportunities the distinctly unfree Soviet system had tooffer them. Inaone-party system, the first winner takes all; there is no danger of his being asked to hand over power to some rival within just a few years. And with a planned economy, the new political rulers can acquire any economic asset they like in the name of ‘nationalization’.

  The Soviets had a further advantage. They knew better than anyone how to arm illiterate peasants with cheap, reliable and user-friendly weapons. Mikhail Kalashnikov made his first rifle in 1947 – hence the abbreviated name AK-(Automat Kalashnikov)47 – just as the pace of decolonization was quickening and superpower relations were worsening. Such weapo
ns were shipped in crate-loads to Third World countries, part of a low-profile small arms race running parallel to the headline-grabbing nuclear arms race. It was not long before the AK-47 became the Marxist guerrilla’s weapon of choice. What could the Americans do in response? Aside from simply yielding the southern hemisphere to Khrushchev and his successors, there were three possibilities. They could prop up or resuscitate the old colonial regimes that the Third World Lenins were aiming to destroy. That did not come easily to US leaders, with their deep-rooted anti-imperial assumptions, but there were places where they were willing to try it. No one complained in Washington, for example, when the British defeated the Communists in Malaya. The Americans also encouraged the British to prolong their informal sphere of influence in the smaller states of the Persian Gulf. A more appealing response was to find pro-American freedom fighters – in other words, to back democratic political parties that favoured multi-party elections, not to mention free markets. But experience in Eastern Europe and Asia immediately after the Second World War tended to suggest that true liberals were perilously weak in relatively backward societies. Fresh in the memories of all American policy-makers were the examples of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the rest, where all the non-Communist political parties had effectively been snuffed out or emasculated. And, lest these memories fade, the Soviets did not hesitate to crush outbreaks of popular dissent in their European satellites – in East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Gdańsk in 1981.

  The third option for American foreign policy was to fight dirty – as dirty, in fact, as the Soviets. In practice, Soviet victories always meant dictatorship and the repression that comes with it. For the Americans, it was therefore tempting to back anyone who showed signs of being able to beat the Soviet-backed revolutionaries, even if it meant imposing a capitalist dictatorship instead. The problem with this was that very quickly the United States found itself tainted by association with and support for regimes that were every bit as vicious as the worst Communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe or Asia. Worse, it was seldom clear beyond all reasonable doubt that the dictators backed by Washington were always the lesser evil, since the popular movements they crushed generally did not have the chance to show their true colours in power. Those left-wing leaders who were overthrown or murdered by CIA-backed regimes swiftly became martyrs not only in Soviet propaganda but also in the liberal press of the West. While experience strongly suggested that Marxists showed scant respect for human rights once in power, those who never made it to power or who held it only briefly could always be given the benefit of the doubt. Like Jekyll and Hyde, then, American foreign policy in the Cold War seemed to come in two guises: by day talking the language of freedom, democracy and the shining city on a hill; by night using dirty tricks to stymie suspected Soviet clients and to promote local ‘strongmen’ – a polite term for dictators. Nowhere was this more obvious than in what the United States regarded as its own geopolitical backyard: Central America, the birthplace of the dictum: ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a sonofabitch, so long as he’s our sonofabitch.’ This was the hard essence of what some commentators called realism.

  In their last days in power in Guatemala, the Communists had resorted to mass arrests, torture and executions. Now the tables were turned. With American encouragement, a list was compiled of 72,000 suspected Communist sympathizers. Yet, just as the Soviets had found in Cuba, the Americans were soon reminded that Central (and South) American puppets came with few strings attached. By the mid-1960s, paramilitary death squads like the Mano Blanca (White Hand) were roaming the Guatemalan streets and countryside, engaging in what the US State Department admitted were kidnappings, torture and summary executions. Soon the Americans had to admit that, in the words of Thomas L. Hughes, the ‘counter-insurgency’ was ‘running wild’. CIA agent John Longan was sent in to bring the situation under control. But his Operation Cleanup was anything but clean. Between March 2 and 5, 1966, more than thirty leftist leaders, among them the former trade union leader Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, were arrested and taken to the Guatemalan military’s headquarters at Matamaros. There they were tortured and killed. The Guatemalan military then put their bodies in sacks and dropped them out of a plane into the Pacific. The CIA memo outlining the operation stated simply: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ That was what the CIA meant by a cleanup: a dirty war that left no incriminating fingerprints. Operation Cleanup introduced what was to become the signature tactic of proxy Cold War violence in Latin America, the ‘disappearance’ of opponents. Over the next thirty years more than 40,000 people would disappear in Guatemala. It was the same story in other military regimes in the region – in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile. Los Desaparacidos became a euphemism for those murdered by the military. With good reason, Viron Vaky, second-in-command of the US embassy in Guatemala, lamented the ‘tarnishing’ of America’s image in the region.

  Yet who exactly was being made to disappear? As far as the CIA was concerned, the answer was simply Communist sympathizers, potential revolutionaries whom Moscow might already have recruited to its side in the Cold War. In reality, however, the social conflicts that bedevilled the Third World throughout the Cold War were often as much ethnic conflicts as they were ideological. In this respect, the Third World’s War had much in common with the War of the World; it was the old violence in new premises. Just as the Cold War in Angola was essentially a tribal battle for power between the primarily Kimbundo MPLA and the mainly Ovimbundu UNITA, so too in Guatemala the struggle between government and ‘subversion’ had a distinctly ethnic character. Guatemalan society was hierarchically ordered, with the relatively well-off Ladino descendants of conquistadors and their native concubines at the top, and the land-hungry indigenous peoples at the bottom. The proxy war that the CIA was underwriting in Guatemala was therefore not so much a war between capitalists and communists as a war between Ladino latifundista and Mayan peasants. Accused of sympathizing with the communist Guerrilla Army of the Poor, Mayan tribes like the Ixil and Kekchí were subjected not only to wholesale massacres but also to forced relocation and incarceration in ‘strategic hamlets’. Hundreds of villages identified as ‘red’ were literally obliterated; their inhabitants tortured, raped and murdered; their homes destroyed and the surrounding forests burned. When the civil war was finally brought to an end in the 1990s, the total death toll had reached around 200,000. Because so many of the victims were Mayan, the Guatemalan military was deemed by the UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed an act of genocide.

  The truth about the Cold War, then, is that in most of the southern hemisphere the United States did almost as little for freedom as the Soviet Union did for liberation. American policy involved not only the defence of West European democracies like Italy, France and West Germany, which there is no doubt the Soviets tried their level best to subvert; it also meant the maintenance of dictatorships in countries like Guatemala where Communism–sometimes real, sometimes imagined – was fought by means of the mass slaughter of civilians. This meant that the supposed ‘long peace’ of the Cold War was on offer only to American and Soviet citizens and those in immediate proximity to them in the northern hemisphere. For a large proportion of the world’s citizens, there was no such peace. There was only the reality of a Third World War, a war that involved almost as much ethnic conflict as the First and Second World Wars before it. It was a war that by the late 1960s the United States showed every sign of losing.

  NIXON IN CHINA

  When Richard Nixon was inaugurated as President on January 20, 1969, it was becoming hard for Americans to feel optimistic about the Cold War. Their much vaunted capitalist system, which Nixon himself had proudly showcased in Moscow ten years earlier, was faltering. Inflation was rising but, contrary to the Keynesian economic rules of the 1960s, unemployment was refusing to come down. Imports were growing faster than exports; meanwhile,
foreigners were rapidly losing their fondness for the dollar, making it harder to finance the resulting deficits. American society itself seemed to be fragmenting. There were race riots in the inner cities and demonstrations in the universities; young fought old, black fought white, redneck fought hippy, student fought cop. Race was one of the main bones of contention. During the 1960s, an alliance of educated African-Americans and white liberals had waged a successful campaign to overthrow the system of racial segregation still operating in the states of the South. As late as 1967, for example, sixteen states still had laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. It was only with a Supreme Court judgment, in Loving v. Virginia, that legal prohibitions on interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional throughout the United States, though Tennessee did not formally repeal the relevant article of its constitution until March 1978 and Mississippi only in December 1987. The political effects of these struggles were in fact more profound than their social effects, for racial integration advanced relatively slowly even when permitted. Nixon won the 1968 election mainly because the Democratic vote was split over the civil rights issue, with nearly ten million voters (13.5 per cent of the total) backing the racist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, and his American Independent Party.