Holbrooke: Long-time operative for US imperialism

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Richard Holbrooke: Long-time operative for US imperialism
By Patrick Martin
15 December 2010

There is no reason to pull any punches in regard to Richard C. Holbrooke, the
long-time US diplomat who died Monday night in Washington. He was a bully and a
liar for the most rapacious and militaristic power in the world, a man steeped
in the commission and cover-up of bloody crimes. He devoted his life to
defending the worldwide interests of American corporations and banks, and became
personally wealthy as a consequence.

The obligatory tributes pouring in from the US political establishment—from
President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill
Clinton, the editorial page of the Washington Post, and politicians and pundits
galore—amount to a self-indictment of the character and “morality” of these
gentlemen and ladies. As for the bouquets from foreign leaders, from British
Prime Minister David Cameron to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, it is a mafia
tradition to send flowers to the funeral.

As far as the Washington press corps was concerned, Holbrooke’s was a death in
the family. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen blogged about a recent
encounter with this “extraordinary man,” when Holbrooke visited Cohen’s
beachfront home last summer. Judy Woodruff of PBS and Al Hunt of Bloomberg News
visited the dying envoy in the hospital.

The gushing by the press reveals an important feature of American political
life—the incestuous relations between Wall Street, the Washington power
structure and leading circles in the media, cemented by vast sums of money.
Holbrooke personified this relationship, shuttling back and forth between
investment banking and the State Department, squiring Diane Sawyer about
Manhattan and then marrying Kati Marton, the ex-wife of ABC anchorman Peter
Jennings.

While the obituaries and tributes gave first place to Holbrooke’s role in the
Balkan crisis of the 1990s, where he brokered the Dayton Accord that ended open
warfare in Bosnia, this was only one of the many episodes in a career that
spanned nearly 50 years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

A junior foreign service officer in the early stages of the Vietnam War,
Holbrooke rose rapidly to leading positions, and served in every Democratic
administration since John F. Kennedy’s. He had close connections with the
Republican foreign policy establishment as well, including Henry Kissinger and
Holbrooke’s colleague from Vietnam, John Negroponte, US ambassador to the United
Nations under George W. Bush.

Born in 1941 of Jewish parents who emigrated from Germany and Poland in the
1930s, Holbrooke was a high school classmate and friend of David Rusk, the son
of Kennedy’s hawkish secretary of state, Dean Rusk. This connection led him to
join the Foreign Service after graduating from Brown University. He took a year
of foreign language instruction, and went to Vietnam.

Mass murder in Vietnam

Holbrooke was stationed in the Mekong Delta as a 22-year-old civil affairs
officer in charge of an entire province with 600,000 people. He was one of the
cabal of young, energetic and ruthless operatives, dubbed “The Best and the
Brightest” by author David Halberstam, who spearheaded the American effort in
Vietnam.

His initial position was as a field officer for the US Agency for International
Development, which placed US officials as overlords in Vietnamese villages and
towns, supervising the operations of the stooge government of South Vietnam. The
US had established this puppet regime in an effort to thwart the Vietnamese
nationalist movement that defeated the French colonialists in the first Vietnam
War, between 1946 and 1954.

By 1959, local nationalist guerrillas in the south had formed the National
Liberation Front (NLF), seeking to overthrow the US-backed dictatorship of Ngo
Dinh Diem and reunify the country under the leadership of the Viet Minh, which
ruled the northern half of the country. As the fighting escalated, US troops
were deployed, initially as “advisers.”

Holbrooke was an operative in the protracted effort to break the connection
between the insurgents and the peasantry, which included, in a long series of
failures, locating US officials in villages (the Pacification Program), removing
the population from their villages to larger aggregations (“strategic hamlets”),
and the systematic assassination of suspected NLF cadres (the Phoenix Program).

More than 20,000 Vietnamese were tortured and executed in the last-named
campaign, one of the great unpunished war crimes of the twentieth century. Those
educated in this school for mass murder included a who’s who of later top US
diplomats, most of them in Democratic administrations. These included Holbrooke,
Negroponte, future Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, future
Clinton Defense Secretary Les Aspin, Frank Wisner, a future top State Department
official in both the Carter and Clinton administrations, and Peter Tarnoff,
Clinton’s deputy secretary of state.

Holbrooke moved up quickly from field officer to become a staff assistant at the
US Embassy in Saigon, and then in 1966 joined the White House staff of President
Lyndon Johnson, working for Robert Komer, known as “Blowtorch Bob” for his role
as chief of the Phoenix Program. Later he moved to the State Department, working
as part of the team that drafted the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of
US-Vietnam relations leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg.

After Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, Holbrooke served
briefly on the State Department delegation at the Paris Peace Talks, then as
head of Peace Corps operations in Morocco, before beginning his second career in
investment banking. He worked for Credit Suisse, eventually becoming a vice
president. From then on, he alternated between the State Department and Wall
Street, depending on the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Holbrooke and Pol Pot

The press obituaries are silent about the next stage in Holbrooke’s diplomatic
career, his four years in the Carter administration, from 1977 to 1981, as
assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs. In that capacity, he was the
point man for US foreign policy in a region in turmoil after the shattering
defeat of the United States in Vietnam, which had weakened pro-US dictatorships
in South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia.

In each of these countries, the Carter administration pursued a policy of
propping up the regimes while urging concessions to popular aspirations in order
to fend off further revolts. In pursuit of this policy, Washington cultivated
“dissident” elements within the local ruling elite, like Benigno Aquino in the
Philippines and Kim Dae Jung in South Korea, in some cases intervening to block
their execution. The fruits of this policy included agreements negotiated by
Holbrooke to extend US basing rights in the Philippines for another five years
and to continue US aid to the Indonesian military despite ongoing atrocities in
East Timor.

Continuing the rapprochement with the Beijing Stalinist regime begun by Nixon
and Kissinger, Carter withdrew official recognition of the Kuomintang regime in
Taiwan in 1978 and gave full recognition to the Peoples Republic of China in
1979. This culminated in the tacit US support for China in its reactionary war
of aggression launched against Vietnam towards the end of 1979.

Holbrooke played a key role in one of the foulest policies of Washington during
this period—its support to the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, which
had murdered more than one million people, some 20 percent of the country’s
population. The US backing came into the open after the Vietnamese invaded
Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge in December 1978. Author Elizabeth Becker
described the US policy in her 1986 book, When the War Was Over, Cambodia and
the Khmer Rouge Revolution:

“First and foremost the Vietnamese occupation had to be punished. Propelled by
the United States and China, the most severe international sanctions to date
were levied against Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia. By the summer of
1979, the Carter administration had begun a successful campaign to convince
other nations as well as charities, international aid organizations, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to end aid to Vietnam as well as
Cambodia. Holbrooke and his deputy Robert B. Oakley led the fight” (op. cit., p.
446).

The press account and official statements praising Holbrooke for supposedly
“saving lives” in the Balkans make no mention of his role in defending the
genocidal Khmer Rouge.

Out of office again in 1981, Holbrooke returned to Wall Street, and with great
success. He formed an investment advisory firm, Public Strategies, and
ultimately sold it for millions to Lehman Brothers, where he became a managing
director.

He took time out from these labors to intervene in at least one diplomatic
dispute, when an article appeared in Foreign Policy magazine that mildly
criticized the record of his crony, John Negroponte, who was ambassador to
Honduras during the period when the Reagan administration used the country as
the staging area for its “contra” terrorist war against Nicaragua. Holbrooke
wrote an angry letter to the magazine, defending Negroponte as “a career foreign
service officer who has served with great distinction under every Secretary of
State since Dean Rusk.”

The Yugoslav civil war

The bulk of the official praise for Holbrooke stems from his role in the Balkans
in the 1990s. After the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Holbrooke was
disappointed in his hopes for high office, offered only the position of US
ambassador to the reunified Germany. In 1994, he returned to Washington as
assistant secretary of state for European affairs, and focused his efforts on
the civil war that erupted in the former Yugoslavia.

The war itself was the byproduct of imperialist intrigues in the Balkans.
Germany, flexing its muscles after reunification, recognized both Slovenia and
Croatia as soon as they broke away from the federal republic. Both countries
were formerly under German domination in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Croatia
had been an allied vassal state of the Nazis during World War II.

The US, after initially backing the federal government in Belgrade, sought
influence in the next republic to secede, Bosnia. The Bosnian Serbs, transformed
overnight into a minority in the new country, took up arms and a series of
atrocities followed, which became known as “ethnic cleansing,” as Serb, Muslim
and Croat nationalist forces vied for control of contested territory.

The Clinton administration intervened in 1995 with bombing attacks on the Serbs
and forced the leaders of Croatia, Bosnia and the remnant of the federal
government, now reduced to the rump of Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro, to attend
talks at an air force base outside of Dayton, Ohio. Holbrooke headed the US
delegation and bullied Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian President
Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic into a “peace” agreement.
The Dayton Accords effectively partitioned Bosnia into two parts, one
Muslim-Croat, the other Serb, with the Serbs reduced to minority status and
barred from unifying with neighboring Serbia.

In the course of those talks, Holbrooke freely invoked the threat of renewed US
military action as well as economic sanctions against Serbia. He later told an
interviewer, “The Balkans is an area of very tough, tribal mountain people. And
you have to deal with it in an appropriate manner.”

What Holbrooke considered “appropriate” was laid out in his subsequent book
celebrating his own achievements at Dayton, in which he boasted about the US
backing for the 1995 Croatian offensive in the Krajina, a Serb-populated region
of the country. This led to the largest single episode of “ethnic cleansing” of
the Yugoslav civil war, with more than 250,000 Serbs driven from their homes and
across the border into Bosnia or Serbia.

The US government publicly pretended to oppose the offensive, but Holbrooke and
the US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, conveyed a different sentiment
when they met with Croatian President Tudjman. Holbrooke wrote: “Tudjman wanted
clarification of the American position. He bluntly asked for my personal views.
I indicated my general support for the offensive, but delayed a more detailed
exchange for a second meeting so that I could discuss it with my colleagues and
Washington.

“Galbraith and I met with Tudjman alone again on September 17… I told Tudjman
the offensive had great value to the negotiations. It would be much easier to
retain at the table what had been won on the battlefield than to get the Serbs
to give up territory they had controlled for several years.”

Later, when another US official protested that this violated US policy,
Holbrooke’s top aide, Robert Frasure, passed a note to Holbrooke. It read:
“Dick: We ‘hired’ these people to be our junkyard dogs because we were
desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But this is no time to get
squeamish about things.” Holbrooke proudly reproduced the note in his memoir as
a good example of American toughness.

While the Dayton Accords were counted a relative success for American diplomacy,
Holbrooke’s reputation nonetheless came under a more or less public cloud, and
he was labeled a bully and a braggart. He also failed to achieve his personal
goal of being named secretary of state to succeed Warren Christopher in 1997,
with Clinton picking Madeleine Albright instead.

Holbrooke went back to Wall Street, but returned to reprise his role as a US
enforcer in the Balkans, traveling to Belgrade as a special presidential envoy
to deliver the final US warning to Slobodan Milosevic in March 1999, before the
Clinton administration began its two-month bombing campaign against Serbia,
which ultimately compelled the Serbian military to withdraw from Kosovo.

Clinton then named Holbrooke to succeed Bill Richardson as US ambassador to the
United Nations, a cabinet position that was the highest office he was to attain.
In that capacity, one of his first actions was to engineer an extension of the
US-backed economic sanctions against Iraq, which in the course of the 12 years
between the end of the first Gulf War (1991) and the invasion ordered by George
W. Bush (2003) caused the death of a half million Iraqi children.

>From Wall Street to Obama

Following the 2000 election, Holbrooke again returned to Wall Street, where,
among other lucrative positions, he became a director of the huge financial and
insurance conglomerate AIG. In the course of a decade AIG became the largest
single issuer of derivatives and played a colossal role in the financial crash
of 2008. Holbrooke also reportedly received below-market mortgage loans from
Countrywide Financial, the leading mortgage lender, designated as a “friend of
Angelo” by the company’s chairman, Angelo Mozilo.

Holbrooke left the board of AIG in July 2008, two months before the collapse, to
prepare his return to government with the incoming Democratic administration.
Having signed on as the top foreign policy adviser to the campaign of Hillary
Clinton, expecting to be named her secretary of state, Holbrooke had bet on the
wrong horse. But when Barack Obama picked Clinton to head the State Department,
she offered him the lesser post of special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There was some internal resistance to this selection, with Vice President Joseph
Biden telling Obama, “He’s the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met,”
according the Bob Woodward book Obama’s Wars. Afghan President Karzai clashed
with him repeatedly and at one point refused to meet with him. By most accounts,
Holbrooke looked on the US enterprise with a jaundiced eye, openly comparing it
to Vietnam in an interview with George Packer of the New Yorker.

He was still, however, quite able to perform one of the most essential functions
of a US diplomat—barefaced, shameless lying. Thus, after multiple press and
eyewitness accounts of US cross-border raids into the tribal territories of
Pakistan, he declared publicly in July, “People think that the US has troops in
Pakistan. Well, we don’t.”

Holbrooke died an unrepentant advocate of American imperialism. At a conference
in Washington September 29, 2010, sponsored by the Office of the Historian of
the State Department, Holbrooke defended the war in Vietnam with his
characteristic combination of arrogance and self-righteousness. “Our cause—there
was nothing wrong with our cause in Vietnam,” he said, in response to a direct
question. “But sometimes, even the world’s greatest power can’t achieve its
goal. And on that basis, I think you have to evaluate policy.”

The fulsome praise for this “statesman” from Obama and from Bill and Hillary
demonstrates the reactionary role of the Democratic Party. Obama was elected in
large measure because he successfully appealed to the antiwar sentiments of the
American people, particularly in relation to the war in Iraq. But the Democratic
Party, like the Republican, is an instrument of the US financial aristocracy,
and thus unshakably committed to the defense of American imperialism.

There are dozens of articles on the World Socialist Web Site which reference
Holbrooke’s role in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as well as the Wall
Street financial crisis. To cite only a few:

April 15, 1999: The US and ethnic cleansing—the case of Croatia

September 28, 1999: Clinton administration blocks easing of sanctions against Iraq

March 24, 2005: Top insurance company mired in allegations of accounting fraud

January 24, 2009: Obama’s new foreign policy team prepares escalated
bloodletting in Afghanistan and Pakistan

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/holb-d15.shtml

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