Foreign Policy and Good Intentions, by Otto Reich

[subsuelo]

Edited to add: Don't believe a word this jackass says

Thirty years ago the Carter administration made a number of foreign policy blunders that cost the United States dearly. In 1979 alone, four nations fell into the hands of our enemies: Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Is the Obama administration about to make a similar mistake today in Honduras?

...
Zelaya was elected democratically, but like so many Latin strongmen, once in power he ruled undemocratically. In his elected autocracy, Zelaya joined a group of famous Latin American presidents: Juan Peron (Argentina), Alberto Fujimori (Peru), Jean Bertrand Aristide (Haiti), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), among others.

Moreover, following Kirkpatrick's prediction, Zelaya had taken Honduras into an anti-American alliance, the so-called Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas, or ALBA, created by Castro and Chavez. ALBA's purpose is to oppose U.S. "hegemony" in this hemisphere by creating a cartel of undemocratic "21st Century Socialist" governments in the model of Castro's Cuba. In addition to Cuba and Venezuela, ALBA includes only Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Nicaragua, plus three energy-starved Caribbean island nations, which have been coerced into joining by Chavez's petroleum extortions ("You join, and I'll subsidize your energy; you don't and you pay world prices").

...

Is the Obama administration prepared to accept the consequences of returning an undemocratic, corrupt, and anti-American, even if elected, strongman to power in Honduras? That would put the United States clearly in the same camp as Cuba's Castro brothers, Venezuela's Chavez, and other regional delinquents.

Just this week the U.S. Congress' investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, declared Chavez's Venezuela a major source of narcotics traffic to the United States. According to Honduran press reports, since Zelaya's departure illegal narcotics flights from Venezuela to Honduras have practically ended. It is no accident that Castro and Chavez are Zelaya's main international supporters.

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Growing up, I didn't quite understand what that phrase meant. By 1979 it was clear: Terrible results can come from good intentions if we are blind to the consequences of our actions. It is not too late for President Obama to avoid imitating the Carter foreign policy.

Otto J. Reich was Ambassador to Venezuela, Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, and held other senior appointments under three U.S. presidents.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/788icmhw.asp">Weekly Standard

[Judi Lynn]

1. Otto Reich sucks so bad! What a nasty scheming little P.O.S.

http://schema-root.org.nyud.net:8090/region/americas/north_america/usa/government/officials/otto_reich/otto_reich_afp.jpg

Please take the time to scan this information on little Mr. Back-Stabbing, Dirty, Dishonest, Treacherous Troll Reich:

6/8/01

The Return of Otto Reich
Will Government Propagandist Join Bush Administration?

By Jeff Cohen

In totalitarian countries, government propaganda officers wield great power. They're authorized to use the media to stir up state-sanctioned passions and fears through the selective dissemination of information -- sometimes factual, sometimes phony.

If you think the United States has never employed propaganda officers, meet Otto Reich. He may soon be our country's chief diplomat in Latin America if the Bush administration has its way.

In March, Bush announced his intention to nominate Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. If he's officially nominated, it will be interesting to see how journalists handle Reich -- because from 1983 through 1986, it was Reich's job to handle journalists. That's when he commanded the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, whose main mission was to inflame fears about Nicaragua and its left-wing Sandinista government that had come to power by overthrowing a corrupt, U.S.-supported dictator.

By covertly disseminating intelligence leaks to journalists, Reich and the OPD sought to trump up a Nicaraguan "threat," and to sanctify the U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaragua's government as "freedom fighters." The propaganda was aimed at influencing Congress to continue to fund the Contras.

Take the scary news that Soviet MiG fighter jets were arriving in Nicaragua. With journalists citing unnamed "intelligence sources," the well-timed story surged through U.S. media on the night of Ronald Reagan's reelection. At NBC, Andrea Mitchell broke into election coverage with the story. The furor spurred a Democratic senator to discuss a possible airstrike against Nicaragua. But the story turned out to be a hoax. Several journalists later acknowledged they'd been handed the story by Reich's office.

It isn't the only erroneous story journalists link to the OPD. According to the Miami Herald, for example, Reich's office promoted the fable that Nicaragua had acquired chemical weapons from the Soviets. According to Newsweek, the OPD told reporters that high-level Sandinistas were involved in drug trafficking, but U.S. drug officials said there was no evidence for such a charge.

Reich's office worked alongside the White House National Security Council, collaborating with CIA propaganda experts, Army psychological warfare specialists and a then-obscure Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North. Declassified documents detailing OPD activities are on file and online at the National Security Archive, a DC-based nonprofit (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB40/).

In a March 13, 1985 "Eyes Only" memo to Pat Buchanan, then-White House Communications Director, the OPD bragged about the recent results of its "White Propaganda" operation in support of the Contras. The OPD said it helped write an anti-Sandinista column for the Wall Street Journal that ran two days earlier; assisted in a "positive piece" on the Contras by Fred Francis that aired the night before on NBC; wrote op-eds for the Washington Post and New York Times that would run with the bylines of Contra leaders; arranged an extensive media tour for a Contra leader "through a cut-out" (to hide the OPD's role); and prepared to leak a State Department cable that would embarrass the Sandinistas: "Do not be surprised if this cable somehow hits the evening news."

The memo said that the Wall Street Journal column, "Nicaragua is Armed for Trouble," was written by an OPD "consultant," but cautioned that "officially, this office had no role in its preparation." Weeks later, after the Journal published a news report on Nicaragua that Reich disliked, the OPD chief wrote an angry letter-to-the editor touting the "Armed for Trouble" column and complaining that the news report was "an echo of Sandinista propaganda." It was an audacious charge since Reich himself was "echoing" propaganda his office had covertly boasted to have assisted in.

Besides media manipulation through planted stories and leaks, there was also cajoling and bullying of journalists. Reich visited CBS in April 1984 to complain at length about its Central America coverage. In a memo to President Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz described the meeting as an example of "what the Office of Public Diplomacy has been doing to help improve the quality of information the American people are receiving. It has been repeated dozens of times over the past few months."

Six months later, Reich met with a dozen National Public Radio reporters and editors about their allegedly biased Nicaragua coverage. According to NPR Foreign Affairs correspondent Bill Buzenberg, "Reich bragged that he had made similar visits to other unnamed newspapers and major television networks...Reich said he had gotten others to change some of their reporters in the field." Buzenberg told me in a 1987 interview that he viewed the OPD chief's comments as a "calculated attempt to intimidate."

Reich had little tolerance for independent-minded reporters. In the summer of 1985, his office helped circulate a specious story suggesting that U.S. reporters received sexual favors from Sandinista-provided prostitutes in return for favorable coverage. "It isn't only women," Reich told New York magazine; for gay journalists, they'd procure men.

The OPD viewed many in the media as allies to be rewarded, particularly on the weekend pundit shows. According to a Feb. 1985 OPD memo, certain correspondents on the McLaughlin, Brinkley and Agronsky programs had "open invitations for personal briefings."

After Reich had left to become ambassador to Venezuela, the OPD was shut down in 1987, in the wake of a U.S. comptroller general's report which concluded that Reich's office had "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities." According to the Miami Herald, a "senior U.S. official" described the OPD as "a vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory." But the population targeted was not an enemy -- it was the U.S. public

A confrontation is brewing on Capitol Hill over Otto Reich. He is supported by the Cuban-American lobby, which is so powerful with the Bush White House that Reich reportedly got the nod for the assistant secretary state job over a career foreign service officer favored by Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Cuban-born Reich, now a corporate lobbyist, helped draft the Helms-Burton Act tightening the embargo of Cuba.

Reich is opposed by Democratic senators who remember his exploits at the OPD. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) commented in March that Reich's "office may have been the genesis of acts of propaganda not just prohibited in this country, but which reflect a kind of carelessness about the truth."

A key player to watch in any confirmation battle will be the press corps itself. What will be the reaction of journalists who were manipulated by leaks from his office? Or of the newspapers that may have run op-ed columns unaware that his office was behind them?

If senators don't adequately raise questions about Otto Reich's history as a media manipulator, one would hope that journalists will.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2446

~~~~~~~~~
But we shouldn't blow smoke up his backside: after all, this man does have his faults, just like anyone else. He's not perfect.

[Downwinder]

2. We are in bad shape.

We can count as our "enemies" most all of the people in the world. Shouldn't that tell us something. Actually I've been all over South America and have felt welcomed not hated, and certainly not in the camp of an enemy. Actually having a rifle aimed at me during the troubles in Argentina was not welcoming, but those were not the people. Otto should go see a Doctor for his paranoia.

[IndianaGreen]

3. A Cuban with a German name.

No doubt there is a nazi past in there somewhere.

[Downwinder]

4. Cuban Catholic mother and an Austrian-Jewish father. n/t

[struggle4progress]

5. This article exhibits the usual wingnut rhetorical tactics and so merits careful examination --

though an attempt at rebuttal would be a waste of energy

This first point is that the article has no definite thesis and it presents essentially no fact-based analysis. What it does, instead, is to compile a collection of vague accusations and innuendo, and finally presents something like a conclusion, which bears no real connection to most of what the author has said. This means that "arguing" with the author is pointless, because the author has never said anything distinctly enough to enable anyone to dispute it: rather, a number of accusations are implied -- and since the reader must infer the author's meaning, in order to disagree with it, the automatic rejoinder will always be that the reader is exhibiting his/her own ideological prejudices, rather than addressing the supposed argument of the author. This set-up is rather typical of wingnut rhetoric in the last quarter century

Rather than being bolted together by logic, the glue that holds this piece together is an attack on Jimmy Carter, who has been out of office for nearly thirty years now. Several of the major foreign-policy idiocies of the Reagan era -- Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan -- are laid at Carter's feet. Of course, the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua were directed against tyrants whom US conservatives had long supported; and Grenada's Gairy (whom Bishop's movemovement overthrew in 1979) was a particular favorite of Nixon, yet another conservative rather indifferent to the human rights and well-being of people outside the US. The US foreign policy establishment had also become interested in the possibility of turning Afghanbistan into "the USSR's Vietnam" and engaged in considerable covert activity in the late 1970's with that aim in view

Reich then adopts the standard "We, the victims" approach, saying For the next decade, while working to reverse Carter's ineptitude, the United States paid a high price in lives, treasure and prestige. In Iran, Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree Nicaragua, the United States is still paying a price. It is difficult to imagine that anyone who impartially examined US behavior in Central America -- including El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras -- could reach the conclusion that the US was a victim here or somehow suffered more than the hundreds of thousands of local people who became casualities of Reagan's wars, but such disregard for the facts is to be expected from Reich. One can doubt Reagan had any coherent policy towards Iran: on the one hand, that Administration whitewashed Saddam Hussein, in order to arm him against Iran; on the other hand, the same Administration armed Iran in a series of curious moves, which no doubt extended well beyond what is public knowledge. Reich then lauds Jeane Kirkpatrick's nasty 1979 piece, which formed the theoretical background for Reagan's policy of slaughtering Central American peasants and for opposing opponents of South Africa's apartheid government

All of this, Reich pretends, casts light on the Honduran crisis. But -- although he sprinkles the text with further references to Carter, and dumps Zelaya's name into a longer list (Peron, Fujimori, Aristide, Chavez, Morales, Correa, Ortega) of "famous Latin American presidents" -- he still does not produce anything like a coherent factual argument. Perhaps this is what conservatives really mean when they boast that they "name names": they mean they string together some proper nouns (such as "Peron" or "Fujimori" or "Aristide" or "Morales") referring to people with very different histories, views, and methods -- and then pause in triumphant self-satisfaction at the recital. Reich's vague accusations fly furiously, essentially devoid of content: Zelaya is "undemocratic, corrupt, and anti-American" and whoever supports him is kin to "Cuba's Castro brothers" or Chavez or "other regional delinquents"

The piece, of course, plays to minds stuck in an out-of-date Cold War worldview: the unstated by constant hypothesis is something like "If Obama doesn't support the Honduran coup, it's because he's an anti-American communist sympathizer like Jimmy Carter, who failed to support our good buddies, the Shah and Somoza." But Reich's rhetoric, of course, does not stoop to such an explicit statement: he simply hopes the thought will appear naturally in his readers' minds. Twenty five years ago, that might have worked; today, two decades after the collapse of the USSR, perhaps the old boogie-man will resonate only with an ever-dwindling population of former Cold Warrior

[subsuelo]

6. I noticed how often the "undemocratic" lie is made

In fact it's beyond making accusations... instead the whole piece is filled with assumptions and suggestions that Latin America is becoming littered with authoritarian, "undemocratic" dictators, of course the argument being that we better not let it continue.

Another right-wing play on the ignorance most Americans are trapped in. Trapped in corporate-run propaganda on the radio, television, newspapers, movies, books, journals and magazines such as the one the piece was written for. The ultimate goal for Reich and his fellow propagandists is to protect U.S. business interests, which are threatened by the democratic institutions propping up all over the place in Latin America. We can see, then, that Reich himself is the one that is in the end undemocratic. The Weekly Standard is an embarrassment to honest, intelligent discourse in the west.

[scarletwoman]

7. Good grief. Why isn't this man in prison as an aider and abettor of murderers?

How long is this right wing asshole going to be allowed to leave his slime trail across Latin America?

sw