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Editor’s Note: Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it’s viewed as a mistake or an aberration.
In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.”
There is a dark — seldom acknowledged — thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.
This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the “war on terror” over the last decade.
The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.
Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.
But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, “low-intensity” conflict and “counter-terrorism.”
Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of “total war” — which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.
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Excellent article. Unfortunately, this nation can't get over its distraction with "bread and circuses" enough to deal with the long term problems such as our continued dependence on the Military Industrial Complex from jobs to serving in ruthless wars. This nation has been a lost soul ever since its inception based on genocide. How this nation will ever not be a lost soul remains a mystery to me. Until enough of the American people can be convinced that it was the New Deal, not war spending, that got us out of the Great Depression and that even the Great Society was marginalized by our involvement in Vietnam, I don't see any serious changes on the horizon. Bush or Obama, it doesn't matter anymore.
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