Razorcake Issue #19

failure to respond to the unprecedented act of terrorism against theUnited States committed by Chile’s dictatorship in September1976, when agents of that regime murdered Chilean dissidentOrlando Letelier and an American citizen with a car bomb inWashington, D.C. Orchestrating the murder was the head of Chile’ssecret police, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, who (according to CIAdocuments released in 2000) was a CIA asset, paid by that organization.9 Contreras’s boss, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, had seizedpower in a coup directed by the Nixon administration in 1973.In the wake of the D.C. bombing, the Ford administration,which included Dick Cheney as Chief of Staff, failed to take actionagainst the Chilean government for that attack on American livesand American sovereignty. In 1995, with Pinochet no longer incharge in Chile, Contreras went to prison for his various crimes,including the murder of Letelier. But his terrorism against theUnited States has attracted little interest from American politicians,least of all the Republicans who claim to be the best protectors ofour nation. Nor have Coulter or any other Republican “warriorsagainst terror” seen fit to call for an investigation into Pinochet’sinvolvement in the attack, despite the fact that Contreras maintainsthat he never took any actions without explicit orders fromPinochet himself. 10As fraudulent as any of Coulter’s claims is the pose of fakepopulism that she adopts throughout the book. With repeated referencesto brie and tuxedos, she tries to portray Democratic officeholdersas over-privileged elitists, as if the latter group didn’tinclude Ivy Leaguer Ann Coulter, and as if Republican economicpolicy had any objective besides increasing the fabulous wealth andpower of such people. Coulter’s goal in crying “treason” is to distractAmericans from the economic damage caused by Bush administrationgiveaways to the rich. Her elitism also causes her to omitkey facts about America’s wars, such as the fact that Vietnam-eradraft boards targeted working-class men, and specifically markedthem for combat infantry duty once inducted. 11 Though the draft isno more, the ranks of the military remain filled primarily withworking-class recruits, and that fact goes a long way towardexplaining the enthusiasm of well-to-do conservatives likeBush and Coulter for dubious military ventures like the currentIraq war. It’s not their people getting killed.Works Cited1. Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War tothe War on Terror (Crown Forum, 2003), 151.2. The quote comes from MacArthur’s meeting with Truman onWake Island, October 15, 1950. Transcript excerpted in ThomasG. Paterson and Dennis Merrill (eds.), Major Problems inAmerican Foreign Relations Volume II: Since 1914, FourthEdition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath & Company, 1995), 377.3. In an interview with reporter Bob Considine, MacArthuedescribedwhat he had planned to do, had he remained in command: “Theenemy’s air [power] would first have been taken out. I wouldhave dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air basesand other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria.” The nextphase of the plan called for amphibious landings behind theadvancing Chinese forces. Those troops, consisting of U.S.Marines and Tawainese regulars, would then have moved south.“It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved south to spreadbehind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt ofradioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts,trucks and planes. It is not an expensive material. It has an activelife of between 60 and 120 years.” “Text of ConsidineInterview,” New York Times, April 9, 1964, 16.4. Coulter, 128.5. Coulter, 128, 132.6. Coulter, 131.7. Thomas G. Paterson, J. Garry Clifford, Kenneth J. Hagan,American Foreign Relations: A History since 1895, FourthEdition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995),380-1.8. Coulter, 137, 138-9.9. Christopher Hitchens, “The Case Against Henry Kissinger,”Harper’s, March 2001, 52-3.10. Hitchens, 51; Hugh O’Shaugnessy, Pinochet: The Politics ofTorture (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 65.11. Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts and ItsLegacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 36-47; Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short but HappyPolitical Life of George W. Bush (New York: Random House,2000), 8–10.