New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

96 The New Imperialists
mass murder. After all, scholarly estimates as to the numbers killed by
the U.S. war machine during the years 1960–75 range from two to four
million. 35 This was mass slaughter carried out against largely peasant
societies by the world’s most powerful techno-military imperium.
Remarkably, Ignatieff manages to forget all of this, describing the
Vietnam debacle as a failed attempt “to sustain a democratic republic in
South Vietnam,” an appalling piece of historical revisionism that does
not even deign to mention napalm, Agent Orange, or massacres of
civilians. 36 In fact, moral repugnance over the immense suffering of the
Vietnamese people seems not to figure in Ignatieff ’s account of why
he opposed the Vietnam war; nor does any expressed concern for the
democratic rights of the peoples of Southeast Asia. 37 Instead, what
troubled Ignatieff, he reports, what led him to join the anti-war
protesters, was his conviction that “nothing could save the weak and
corrupt South Vietnamese government.” 38 The U.S. war on Vietnam was,
apparently, a noble cause corrupted, a morally defensible objective (the
creation of a democratic republic in the South) ineptly executed. The
disappearance here of the colonized – their sufferings, their aspirations,
their resistances – could scarcely be more complete. And this, cancelling
out the reality of colonized Others, is something of a leitmotif in
Ignatieff ’s defences of empire, as we have seen.
Still, it might be argued that Vietnam was an exception, an aberration.
So, let us take an example with more obvious and direct connections to
the U.S. occupation of Iraq: El Salvador. The connection here concerns
both personnel and policy. After all, a number of high-ranking U.S.
military advisors to the Iraqi government’s war against insurgents honed
their skills in the Salvadoran counter-insurgency of 1980–91, in which
the U.S.A. backed a brutal right-wing government in its civil war
against leftist rebels. The central individual at issue is James Steele, the
U.S. Military Group commander during the counter-insurgency in El
Salvador, now involved in assisting the battle against insurgents in Iraq. 39
Operating from a mission in El Salvador, Steele directed U.S. Special
Forces which trained and advised pro-government troops and paramilitary
death squads. And, as in so many cases throughout Latin
America, torture, grotesque human rights violations, and massacres of
civilians were run-of-the-mill tactics for these U.S.-backed forces. As
Amnesty International reports,