Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

the face of uncontrolled ethnic rioting.²⁰

Rather than a race riot, William McGurn, senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, compares May 1998 in Jakarta to Kristallnacht, when in November 1938 Hitler sent Nazi thugs into the streets to attack Jewish stores and homes.²¹ One of Hitler’s intentions was to see how the rest of the world would respond, and he concluded, correctly as it turned out, that the democracies would not interfere with his genocidal plans for Europe’s Jews. Many have noted that in the weeks before the Indonesian riots, hundreds of young men trained by Kopassus were brought into Jakarta from East Timor. The theory is that Prabowo, either on his own or on orders from Suharto, organized the chaos to create an excuse for a crackdown. It was, however, Prabowo’s rival, General Wiranto, who proved to be the main beneficiary of the chaos. On May 21, Wiranto persuaded Suharto to resign in favor of his vice president, B. J. Habibie, and on May 28 he relieved General Prabowo of his command. According to Allan Nairn, during the week these events took place, General Wiranto rather than General Prabowo was observed “consulting nonstop with the U.S. Embassy.”²²

With Prabowo’s fall, the Americans started to cover their tracks. In late July, John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, finally seemed to notice the situation in Indonesia. Officials were, he now said, “watching very closely.” Franklin Kramer, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, attempted to put a spin on events by praising the Indonesian military’s “recent restraint in quelling unrest.”²³ U.S. embassy officials in Jakarta expressed “shock and anger” at Prabowo; one nonetheless insisted that “even if U.S.- trained soldiers had committed some of the murders, the United States should continue to work with the military, to maintain influence over what happens next.”²⁴ President Habibie pleaded with the White House for an invitation so he could “thank Clinton in person.”²⁵ For what, one wonders?

Secretary of Defense Cohen led the first high-ranking American delegation to visit Indonesia after Suharto’s resignation. He stated that the United States still hoped to “build upon a military relationship in the future,” and he refused to comment on accounts of atrocities committed by military men, saying only, “I do know that the Indonesian government has a number of investigations under way in terms of any abuses of human rights.” Two weeks later an Indonesian military tribunal found a first lieutenant and a second lieutenant guilty of “taking action outside of their orders” in the sniper killings of the four students, sentencing one to ten months, the other four months, in prison. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who attended an ASEAN meeting at the end of July, denounced the treatment of dissidents in China and Burma but said not a word about the rapes, murders, and disappearances of dissidents and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.

It may seem that what happened in Indonesia was another successful American-choreographed replacement of a regime that had become “unacceptable”—especially since the army in which the United States had invested so much came out in an even more powerful position in the new, soon-to-be “democratic” Indonesia (even with the last-minute replacement of Prabowo by Wiranto). But the truth of the matter was that the IMF and the U.S. Department of Defense, having helped reverse a quarter century of economic progress, had probably made it impossible for any Indonesian government to recover from the disaster.

Indonesia’s six million citizens of Chinese ancestry constituted only 3.5 percent of the population during Suharto’s regime, but it was estimated that they contributed close to three-quarters of the country’s wealth. In the wake of the riots, thousands of ethnic Chinese fled Indonesia, taking some $85 billion in capital with them. This makes it virtually certain that Indonesian banks will sooner or later have to default on their loans from overseas lenders. Equally important, in 1997 China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore were the largest investors in Indonesia, followed by Japan and South Korea. Money from overseas Chinese sources will no longer be readily forthcoming for Indonesia. Both mainland China and Taiwan denounced the riots. China also pointedly noted that it had tried to help Indonesia economically with cash, medical supplies, and a refusal to devalue its own currency in order to avoid competing with Indonesian exports. Indonesia has instead been turned into a ward of the IMF and the United States, although it is unlikely that the American public understands this or feels in any way responsible for the huge economic contraction under way there. But this is a blowback of monumental proportions.

The American government may be satisfied to see army rule in Indonesia, but the Indonesian people probably are not. The best thing that could happen to Indonesia would be for the Americans to get out of the way and let Japan assume some responsibility. Japan, like China, tried to do so in the autumn of 1997, but its efforts were blocked by the United States, which does not like rivals in providing “leadership” in Asia. Japan is nonetheless Indonesia’s main economic partner, taking 40 percent of its exports and supplying 25 percent of its imports. Japan, still the world’s second largest economy, has a huge stake in Indonesia’s return to economic viability, and it has the financial clout to spur renewed growth.

If, instead, Indonesia is allowed to stagnate, living off food handouts from the Americans, it is quite possible to predict that Islam, which until now has shown its tolerant and broad-minded face throughout most of the country, will turn militant and implacable. This, in turn, would guarantee the end of American influence (much as it did in Khomeini’s Iran) and it would greatly complicate Australia’s foreign policy. It is a direction that some in the Indonesian army would welcome, despite their close friendships with American military officers developed over the years in JCET exercises.

Even should a U.S. president and Congress one day wake up to their constitutional duties and reassert authority over the Department of Defense, that still might not bring JCET and similar programs under control. The Pentagon’s most recent route around accountability is “privatization” of its training activities. As investigative journalist Ken Silverstein has written, “With little public knowledge or debate, the government has been dispatching private companies—most of them with tight links to the Pentagon and staffed by retired armed forces personnel—to provide military and police training to America’s foreign allies.”²⁶ The companies involved are generally associated with the Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command, which has replaced the CIA’s Directorate of Operations as the main American sponsor of covert action in other countries. Nonetheless, these are privately contracted mercenaries who, by their nature, are not directly responsible to the military chain of command. In many cases, these private companies have been formed by retired special forces personnel seeking to market their military training to foreign governments, regardless of the policies of the Defense Department.

One reason privatization appeals to the Pentagon is that whatever these companies do becomes “proprietary information.” The Pentagon does not even have to classify it; and as private property, information on the activities of such companies is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Given the extreme legalism of American political culture, this is sufficient to shield such companies from public scrutiny, although it would probably not protect them from the new international criminal court. Private companies are at present training the armies of Croatia and Saudi Arabia and are active in Honduras, Peru, and many other Latin American countries. Such firms also purchase weaponry from former Soviet states for distribution to groups that the U.S. government may want to arm without being accused of doing so, such as guerrillas fighting for Bosnia and in Kosovo.

In addition to the Department of Defense’s JCET operations, both public and private, its arms sales are a vital component of stealth imperialism. By several orders of magnitude the United States maintains the world’s largest military establishment and is the world’s biggest arms exporter. According to 1995 figures released by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (whose very name is an Orwellian misnomer and which, in 1998, was absorbed by the State Department), the world spent $864 billion on military forces. Of this amount, the United States accounted for $278 billion, or 32 percent, some 3.7 times more than the then second-ranked country, Russia.²⁷ The most dramatic cuts in military spending since 1987, the all-time peak year, when $1.36 trillion worth of arms passed from manufacturers to buyers, have come from Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reports that in 1997 the U.S. share of global deliveries of major conventional weapons, worth about $740 billion, had grown to 43 percent whereas Russia’s share was 14 percent.²⁸