Iran.
Events in Iran in the early 1950s showed the weakness of the British, who could no longer control Iran. The election of a nationalist government in Iran, the National Front Party, a very democratic movement led by Mohammed Mosaddegh, was a turning point. The first thing Mosaddegh did when he was elected in Iran was nationalize the oil. He said Iranian oil is not going to remain under the control of the British. And at that point the United States decided to back the British, so the CIA and British intelligence organized the toppling of the Mosaddegh regime, bringing the shah back, who had fled, to Iran, and mobilizing religious people. All the demonstrations in Tehran against Mosaddegh were organized in the mosques. And with the shah in power, and all other political parties banned, torture used regularly as a weapon, the only space that could be used was the mosque.
The toppling of Mosaddegh in 1953 in Iran was part of a wider pattern. In Latin America, all attempts by South American nationalist leaders, such as Arbenz in Guatemala, to break away from Washington’s embrace, from US corporations, to defend their own countries, to favor poor people, was seen as a communist outrage. The US response was to use any means available to topple them, get rid of them. We have to do virtually anything, including fighting wars, to preserve US power in these domains. And if it means linking up with the worst elements in South America, or Iran, or Asia, we will do it. We have one enemy, communism, and everything we use against that enemy is justified. This was also the period of the Vietnam War, the most striking manifestation of that impulse. It is important to remember about the Vietnam War that it escalated soon after a big American victory in Indonesia, when they organized a coup in 1965 that wiped out one million communists, ousting the independent nationalist leader Sukarno and imposing the brutal dictator Suharto. Time magazine openly said this is a big, big victory for the United States—and it was.
But the Vietnam War produced its own contradictions. This was a war without end, and a war fought by conscripts, and that conscript army represented what the United States was in the 1960s. A revolt within the army began to erupt when Black and white GIs said, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” We ain’t gonna fight in Vietnam. The Pentagon was defeated. They knew they could no longer persecute this war because they had lost the confidence of their own soldiers. The antiwar movement was very important. I would never begrudge that. But the spreading of the revolt inside the ranks of the US Army, the GIs against the war, I thought was absolutely fundamental. And there is no other event quite like that in the history of the United States, or in the history of most other nations. You have to go back to the First World War and the Russian Revolution, which happened in part because the soldiers threw down their guns and revolted. The big demonstration by GIs outside the Pentagon was quite incredible. These are soldiers in uniform on their crutches with their medals, some of the most decorated soldiers in US history, saying, we don’t want to win this war, and we don’t want you to prosecute this war. Unheard of. And that showed the best face of the United States. And whenever I argue with religious fundamentalists, I say basically you guys have no idea what the United States is because this is a country whose leaders are largely frightened of its own people and no one else. So you have to understand what the American citizens are, what motivates them, how they think. They brought the Vietnam War to a halt—obviously helped by the Vietnamese—which is why I think they will never have a conscript army again. That they have understood. We can’t fight wars with conscript armies.
What was the relationship between Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Movement? Was that why he was seen as such a threat to the United States?
Well, the United States, as we’ve been discussing, believed the world was black and white. They never thought there could be gray, a leadership that was neither communist nor pro-US. The Indian government, which started Non-Alignment under Nehru, Tito in Yugoslavia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Sukarno in Indonesia, who all said, look, we don’t want to be part of the Cold War. You know, we’re not communists, but we don’t agree with what you’re doing. And a rational government in the United States would have said it’s not such a bad thing to have some space between us and the communists, to have a general third way of people trying to promote their own path. But, no, the hysteria of that period was such that anyone who said we’re not on their side, but we’re not on your side either, was treated as an enemy. So they toppled government after government. In Indonesia, Sukarno was seen as an enemy because he would hop on a plane and go and see the Chinese. He would talk to the Vietnamese. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam. So he had to be toppled.
Suharto, as we know, was working very closely with the United States, and began to prepare a coup d’état. In the preparation of a coup d’état they usually have a provocation. Some event happens, which is seen as a provocation, and then the military strikes. They organized that pretext in Indonesia, and the military struck. They were totally prepared. Sukarno was put under house arrest. The entire Communist Party leadership was arrested. They had lists. Vigilantes were set up, mainly Islamist fundamentalist vigilantes, who went from house to house on the beautiful island of Bali, saying, that’s a communist family living in that house, bring them out, kill the women.
There were lists provided by—
—The CIA and the local intelligence. One of the things the CIA used to do in every country, as Philip Agee informed us, was to prepare lists of the subversives, the communists, the guerrillas. Often they compiled these names by grabbing people and torturing them. In Iraq, they worked with people inside the Baath Party, such as Saddam Hussein, who supplied them with the lists of communists to wipe out, which Hussein did. Similar lists were provided to Suharto.
Many of the people killed in Indonesia in 1965 were Chinese, am I right?
And many of the poorest—
Was there a racial component to this?
Well, after the victory of the Chinese Revolution, many of the local Chinese were very sympathetic to the revolution, and that made them sympathetic to the Indonesian Communist Party. So in Jakarta, and places where you had a large Chinese population, even in Vietnam; by the way, in Saigon, the United States utilized this fact to encourage xenophobia toward Chinese minorities. They’d say, we are defending South Vietnamese interests against the Chinese who live in Cholon, or we are defending the Indonesian interests against these wicked evil foreign Chinese. But the main objective was to wipe out the Indonesian Communist Party as a political force. This was the largest Communist Party in the world outside the official communist countries. And Indonesia was the largest Muslim country in the world. When they wiped the party out, they created a big political vacuum.
One million people were killed?
One million people.
Men, women, children?
Men, women, children. And the descriptions of that are horrendous—
Across the whole country?
Across the whole country, in villages, including this idyllic island of Bali, where communists were quite strong. I’ve read the most horrendous descriptions of these massacres. The men who were killed were disemboweled, and their genitals were hung out on display in certain areas to create fear. There were descriptions of the rivers running red with blood for days, packed with corpses.