Faced with this dilemma, many adopted the approach of the Shah of Iran who to tamp down the rising discontent after Mosaddeq's removal formed a cadre of secret police, the notoriously brutal and hated SAVAK. The barely-known twist to Iran's sad story is that when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power after the country's 1979 "Islamic" revolution he rehired the very thugs that the CIA trained to run SAVAK.
Less cynical "third-world" leaders, lacking the stomach to torture their own people, are forced to try and run their cash-strapped governments in an atmosphere of threats and virtual anarchy. A situation that makes their first world masters not the least bit unhappy.
The more mayhem the easier it is to steal.
As former U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan said in 2003:
“The economic dimensions of armed conflict ... should never be underestimated. [P]rivate companies operate in many conflict zones or conflict-prone countries… private enterprises and individuals are involved in the exploitation of, and trade in, lucrative natural resources, such as oil, diamonds, narcotics, timber and coltan... Governments and rebel groups alike have financed and sustained military campaigns in this way. In many situations, the chaos of conflict has enabled resources to be exploited illegally or with little regard for equity or the environment.”
A darkly ironic aside is that while the West remains largely indifferent to the human slaughter taking place in the Congo, a coalition of U.S. zoos has launched a cell-phone recycling campaign to save the country's endangered gorillas.
Clearly the purpose of these ostensibly "political" covert missions is in direct contradiction to the Western press' trumpeted refrain that they are absorbed with "spreading democracy and supporting freedom." As Seymour Hersh points out in his latest New Yorker expose on the secret war being waged against Iran, "one possible consequence of the operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene,"
So when one reads that the Iranians have executed a Balochistan journalist for supposedly committing treason, without knowing whether or not the charge is true one can say with a measure of assurance that it was meant to send a message.
The vicious consequence of this cynical conundrum is that the very places, like Balochistan and the Congo, that deserve much more coverage have become too dangerous for even the bravest reporters.
And so the victims are left to languish or be sacrificed to the interests of either side who in the meantime are quietly sharing their ill-gotten gains. All the while another forgotten people die with their anger and frustration and we're left to showily wring our hands and pretend that good comes from doing great evil.
