Once again, the hunt for one enemy is creating many more victims.
The Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million suspected communists in the mid-1960s, paving the path for a dictator, Suharto, who ruled the country for more than three decades. Newly declassified documents from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta reveal an extraordinary degree of American complicity in what remains one of the cold war’s biggest crimes. The U.S. not only ignored information that could have prevented the atrocity; it facilitated the killings by providing the Indonesian military with money, equipment and lists of communist officials.
Those shocking revelations barely registered in the U.S., at least partly It's astonishing, for instance, that it took the death of four American soldiers in an ambush in Niger early last month to alert many, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, a leading foreign policy hawk, to the presence of nearly 1,000 U.S. troops in the country. Another interventionist, Sen. John McCain, is now pressing the Pentagon for more details about a mission that costs American lives and about which even he knew nothing.because attention spans have shrunk along with the general collapse, in Washington D.C., of moral and political norms.
Yet Donald Trump's dreadful circus ought not to distract us from U.S. government policies that precede him. Many counter-terrorist campaigns have proven to be more inimical to human rights and democracy than anything Trump has unleashed. Like anti-communist misadventures of the cold war, they face little political and public oversight, even though their consequences flow right before our eyes.
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