ver the last few weeks, mainstream journalism appears to have come to a consensus that the grievances of Islamic terrorists have little to do with U.S. foreign policy, that instead terrorism is aimed at bringing down freedom, democracy, and this fuzzy concept we refer to as "the American way of life".
I was just contemplating in my own snobbish way the difficult question of what this obscure concept might mean to "the average American", when this sign posted at the entrance to a Mobil gas station replaced my confusion with this remarkably concise treatise: "God Bless America. 2 donuts 99 cents". What advertising genius! But then I realized the true profundity of this statement ran far deeper than its advertisement, and that perhaps our Founding Father should have included it in our Declaration of Independence, if they had had donuts back then.
What I cherish about the American way of life is not the fact that I get to sequester myself in a small cubbyhole every four years to contemplate the relative merits of the latest Bush and the latest Gore, and ultimately throw my decision into a bottomless (poorly-counted) pile of equally limited decisions. It is that I can drive my car wherever I want, and buy donuts at an insignificant price relative to my income. Moreover, the person who had created that sign seemed to understand my consumerist yearnings, and was even prepared to satiate them in the name of our mutual American heritage.
Yet too often, when we pontificate on the freedom we cherish as Americans, we focus solely on social and political freedoms, while ignoring the economic freedoms from which the love of our country truly stems. Since the onset of The Cold War, the rhetoric has been that we are "privileged" to be Americans, and that therefore we must be willing to fight to defend our privilege, that only by fighting can we hope to bring the gospel of "American values" to foreign lands. The stated goal of such "freedom fighting" is often to liberate people from oppressive regimes that deny them suffrage. Rarely is economic freedom the stated goal.
By “economic freedom”, I don’t mean a Randian right to amass infinite wealth at the cost of others. Rather, I am referring to the most essential, yet most oft neglected, of human rights: the right to freedom from extreme poverty, or, as some put it, the right to have one’s basic needs satisfied.
Unfortunately, even liberal human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch make no reference in their charters to any human right to basic education, nourishment, or health service; instead, they define human rights violations almost exclusively in terms of the freedoms of speech, dissent, and suffrage. Some nations are routinely vilified for failing to provide the right to dissent, while other nations, whose property structures effectively deny people the right to eat, the right to education, and the right to health care, are never accused of violating human rights law.
In America, the need for governmental protection of economic freedoms is less acute. The cartoons of the Reagan era, which falsely depicted welfare recipients purchasing brand new Cadillacs with their monthly stipends still pervade our collective psyche.
Our affluent society tends to accept the conservative view that those who are unable to ensure for themselves the "right to eat" and the "right to medical service" simply did not try hard enough. However, this model simply cannot be applied to lesser developed nations in which there is no meritocracy; in many such countries, if one is born poor, there is no hope of finding an honest living. Thus it is essential to realize that if we truly wish to bring our "American values" to lesser developed countries, we must consider economic freedoms alongside, or even before, political and social freedoms.
Our approach to Latin American nations has always stressed political freedoms, justifying the focus of American aid on militarization, presumably in the interest of establishing national stability. Yet every military regime in South America that the United States supports seems to gear itself towards defending the interests of an elite ruling class. The latest militarization of Colombia clearly follows this trend, focusing anti-drug efforts on dropping chemical weapons on the cocoa crops of small farmers rather than removing elite metropolitan drug lords.
The most disturbing example is U.S. policy towards Cuba. Despite 50 years of U.S. sanctions, which prevented U.S. export of food and medicine to Cuba, Cuba remains the only country in all of Latin America in which all citizens are guaranteed adequate food, education, and health service. The Cuban health care system focuses high importance on getting adequate basic care to all its citizens; the success of this policy is statistically apparent: Cuba has consistently recorded the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America, (.72% in ’98) scoring even better than many American cities. Cuba’s life expectancy of 76 years is the highest in the region. The doctor to patient ratio is by far the best in the world. (1 doctor to 300 patients: six times better than the U.K.) Cuba’s focus on basic health care has not excluded the prospect of medical research: the country recently developed a new vaccination for meningitis B.
Yet the Cuban medical system has its critics. Some journalists among the Cuban immigrant lobby have called the system “wage slavery”, because a Cuban doctor only reaps about 10% of the profit of his or her labor. The rest goes back into the system to train more doctors. This view fails to take into account that most Cuban doctors would never have had the opportunity to receive their excellent training if the profits of their labor were not continually reinvested back into Cuba’s medical infrastructure.
The tragic side to Cuba’s health care system is that U.S. sanctions imposed since ’61 have deprived it of crucial medical resources. The U.S. Amendment to the Helms-Burton Act of ’95 even attempted to internationalize sanctions on Cuba, however no other country was willing to participate, limiting the measure’s effectiveness. Nevertheless, since the fall of Cuba’s primary supplier of medicine, the Soviet Union, there has been a dire shortage of AIDS and cancer medicine in Cuba. For instance, the inaccessibility of medicine to treat breast cancer has caused the number of Cuban women who die of breast cancer per year to skyrocket, totalling thousands of unnecessary deaths. U.S. patents on the medicine makes it illegal for other nations to produce the drugs, making all drugs patented in the United States after ’85 inaccessible to Cuba. In ’97, there was a Congressional motion to allow U.S. export of essential food and medicine to Cuba (H.R. ’51), but the bill seems to have been lost or forgotten somewhere in the Congressional pipeline.
Like any sanctions policy, the goal of U.S. sanctions is to cause the people of Cuba economic hardship so that they will rise up to overthrow their government, and attain the political freedom that America’s humanitarian lobby views as the most fundamental human right. However, our lack of concern for the thousands who die every year, casualties of the means to our political ends, belies our lack of understanding of the significance of economic freedom to people of lesser developed nations. One might argue that we’re thinking in the long-term interests of the Cuban people, but the collapse of communist Yugoslavia didn’t exactly benefit the Serbian, Albanian, and other Yugoslavian peoples. A peaceful nation turned quickly into a bloodbath.
By the conception of economic freedoms that emphasizes basic needs, Cuba could be considered one of the most liberated nations in all of Latin America. Yet human rights groups ignore this great accomplishment, instead calling attentio
n to the nation’s several hundred political prisoners; yet the persuasiveness of this point is severely limited considering the one thousand unidentified, but doubtlessly all Muslim, political prisoner the U.S. has recently taken into custody without charge. Maybe the removal of political freedoms is justified in time of national crisis. However, it is unfair to assume that Cuba has never faced such crises. C.I.A. attempts to assassinate Castro, or stage coups in Cuba, the most notorious of which was the Bay of Pigs Incident, are well documented.
Incidentally, Cuba remains the only Latin American nation on the U.S.’s short list of "terrorist states" (alongside Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and North Korea). If Cuba is a terrorist state, why not also call nations like Colombia, or Guatemala, which sponsor far more political violence, "terrorist states"? The problem is, doing so might make it harder to get funding of these military regimes through Congress.
If there is anything about U.S. foreign policy that can be said to encourage terrorism, it is the lack of consideration for this notion of "economic freedom". U.S. focus on establishing political and social freedoms in foreign lands not only ignores the main cause of suffering in nations like Afghanistan, but it can also easily be construed by radicals as "imposing Western culture" upon their society, creating a fundamentalist backlash that ends up actually reducing social freedoms. The Taliban is a case in point.
Only when people have sufficient economic freedom will they seek the political and social freedoms we enjoy as Americans. However, as long as economic freedom is denied, heinous attempts to overthrow the global power structure through guerilla warfare and terrorism will be the only real freedom fighting we shall see.
