I'd certainly agree that the "left" that has taken over the Democratic party would see things that way. There are leftists such as RFK Jr. that wouldn't, but I think we can agree that they are generally shunned by said party.
Chris Hedges: The Unraveling of the American Empire | Consortium News
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I'd certainly agree that the "left" that has taken over the Democratic party would see things that way. There are leftists such as RFK Jr. that wouldn't, but I think we can agree that they are generally shunned by said party.
I think the U.S. was doing pretty good, up until the end of World War II. I think the old saying that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely has something to do with it. The U.S. became so powerful after the end of World War II. There's a line from one of Frank Herbert's Dune novels that I think applies here:
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Let's take a look at what happened in Grenada. Found an article on the subject from Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent.
First, Reagan's motivation:
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Reagan had come into office pledging to restore American glory and was looking for a place to flex the country's military muscle. He had sent Marines to intervene in Lebanon's civil war, but that had not provided the quick victory he wanted. He was spending a weekend at Augusta National Golf Club when, at 2:27 on the morning of Oct. 23, he was awakened and given one of the worst pieces of news he would hear as president. The Marine barracks in Beirut had been destroyed in a suicide-bomb attack, killing 241 servicemen.
There was no easy way to repair this damage, and Reagan quickly ordered U.S. troops to abandon Lebanon. But by felicitous coincidence, the attack happened at the same time that Bishop's executioners in Grenada were trying to consolidate their new regime. Reagan had ordered preparations for an invasion before leaving Washington for his golfing weekend. He gave the final go-ahead after the Beirut attack.
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Then the results:
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The invasion of Grenada was code-named Operation Urgent Fury, but it was neither urgent nor furious. It was carried out mainly to serve perceived political needs inside the United States. Geostrategic reasons were secondary. The United States subdued a nation whose entire population could have fit inside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. That this thrilled so many Americans suggests the enduring appeal of military victory, no matter how small or insignificant.
The Reagan administration never made any attempt to negotiate with Grenada's leaders or to evacuate American students peacefully. Its goal was not to resolve a tense situation but to destroy a regime that Reagan said was planning to "export terror and undermine democracy." The same approach would be used six years later in Panama, where the United States rejected a plan by the National Guard to depose the strongman, Manuel Antonio Noriega, because it wished not only to remove a leadership group but also to wipe out an entire governing system that it considered hostile.
Operation Urgent Fury was also an extreme example of asymmetric warfare. It was meant above all as a show of force, and it stunned the Central American and Caribbean left. Inside the Reagan administration, it was seen as a triumph. It gave senior officials a sense of momentum, which propelled them to intensify U.S. support for pro-U.S. regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and for Contra rebels fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
One final legacy of this invasion is what did not happen afterward. It would have been cheap and simple for the United States to turn Grenada into a model of Caribbean prosperity and thereby to suggest that being conquered by Americans is a good thing. Instead, the U.S. quickly moved on. In 2007 Grenada co-hosted the Cricket World Cup in a brand-new $40 million stadium. It was paid for by the People's Republic of China.
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Somehow, I don't think you believe that China's large influence there now would be considered a success. That's the problem with American warfare- it's mostly stick, little carrot. China seems to do its policy with the reverse idea and seems to be getting a lot better results these days.
QP!
Verified User
Let's take a look at what happened during the U.S.'s invasion of that country:
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It's been 40 years since the United States invaded the Dominican Republic, and my native country is still suffering the effects of that misguided intervention.
On April 28, 1965, 42,000 American troops invaded the Dominican Republic. By the end of the invasion, more than 3,000 Dominicans and 31 American servicemen had lost their lives. And democracy suffered another setback.
The invasion was not an aberration since the United States had been interfering in the affairs of my homeland since the turn of the century.
The people of the Dominican Republic were trying to restore Juan Bosch to the presidency. Two years before, in 1963, Bosch, the head of the Dominican Revolutionary Party and a leading writer and intellectual, had won the first free presidential election in 30 years. But his pro-Castro sentiments and the uneasiness he inspired in business sectors fueled a military coup seven months later that installed a three-man military junta.
President Lyndon Johnson sent U.S. Marines to the island to support the junta and to place Joaquin Balaguer back in power. Balaguer had succeeded Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the country with Washington's blessing for 31 years.
Trujillo used the U.S.-trained National Guard to banish, torture or kill his opponents.
As President Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull famously said of Trujillo: "He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch."
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Source:
40 years later, U.S. invasion still haunts Dominican Republic | The Progressive
Not quite the success story you make it out to be, unless your idea of success is the restoration of brutal dictators. I think U.S. Major General Smedley Butler said it well back in 1935:
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War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
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For those who don't know why the U.S. decided to try to kill Gaddafi, Libya's leader at the time, the U.S.'s official reason was that it was retribution for Libya's alleged involvement in the West Berlin Discoteque bombing. Problem is even countries friendly to the U.S. were saying there was no evidence for said claim:
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Almost immediately after the bombing, the American government, led by then-president Ronald Reagan, placed the blame on Libya.[5]: 77–80 However, the West German team investigating the bombing had not found any evidence of Libyan involvement, and other intelligence agencies throughout Europe also did not find evidence of Libyan involvement.[5]: 81 Nine days after the bombing, Reagan ordered airstrikes against the Libyan capital of Tripoli,[5]: 79–80 and city of Benghazi.[11][12] At least 30 soldiers and 15 civilians were killed.[2][13][14]
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Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Berlin_discotheque_bombing
Ah yes, the U.S. invasion of Panama. Let's see how that brutal "success" went:
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Twenty five years ago, before dawn on December 20, 1989, U.S. forces descended on Panama City and unleashed one of the most violent, destructive terror attacks of the century. U.S. soldiers killed more people than were killed on 9/11. They systematically burned apartment buildings and shot people indiscriminately in the streets. Dead bodies were piled on top of each other; many were burned before identification. The aggression was condemned internationally, but the message was clear: the United States military was free to do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and they would not be bound by ethics or laws.
The invasion and ensuing occupation produced gruesome scenes: “People burning to death in the incinerated dwellings, leaping from windows, running in panic through the streets, cut down in cross fire, crushed by tanks, human fragments everywhere,” writes William Blum. [1]
Years later the New York Times interviewed a survivor of the invasion, Sayira Marín, whose “hands still tremble” when she remembers the destruction of her neighborhood.
“I take pills to calm down,” Marín told the paper. “It has gotten worse in recent days. There are nights when I jump out of bed screaming. Sometimes I have dreams of murder. Ugly things.”
In the spring of 1989, a wave of revolutions had swept across the Eastern bloc. In November, the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War was over. No country was even a fraction as powerful as the United States. Rather than ushering in an era of peace and demilitarization, U.S. military planners intensified their expansion of global hegemony. They were pathological about preventing any rival to their complete military and economic domination.
U.S. government officials needed to put the world on notice. At the same time, President George H.W. Bush’s needed to shed his image as a “wimp.” So they did what any schoolyard bully would: pick out the smallest, weakest target you can find and beat him to a bloody pulp. The victim is irrelevant; the point is the impression you make on the people around you.
Panama was an easy target because the U.S. already had a large military force in 18 bases around the country. Until 1979, the occupied Panama Canal Zone had been sovereign territory of the United States. The Panama Canal was scheduled to be turned over to Panama partially in 1990 and fully in 2000. The U.S. military would be able to crush a hapless opponent and ensure control over a vital strategic asset.
Washington began disseminating propaganda about “human rights abuses” and drug trafficking by President Manuel Noriega. Most of the allegations were true, and they had all been willingly supported by the U.S. government while Noriega was a CIA asset receiving more than $100,000 per year. But when Noriega was less than enthusiastic about helping the CIA and their terrorist Contra army wage war against the civilian population in Nicaragua, things changed.
“It’s all quite predictable, as study after study shows,” Noam Chomsky writes. “A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to ‘villain’ and ‘scum’ when he commits the crime of independence.”
**
Source:
The Invasion of Panama and the Proclamation of a Lone Superpower Above the Law | truthout.org
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
That's the radical Leftist version. A more centrist one would be that the US prevented the Dominican Republic from becoming another Cuba. Since Cuba has one of the shittyist economies and is one of the most repressive countries in the Caribbean, and by comparison the Dominican Republic is doing much better, it would seem to me that that invasion worked to the Dominican Republic's benefit. Bosch would have taken the Dominican Republic down the same path Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela, much to the detriment of the whole nation.
I prefer that version to the unenlightened one the radical Left holds.
That's for sure. A little history on the Al-Qaida name:
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Fascinatingly, the acclaimed biography of Bin Laden by Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, hardly mentions the name al-Qaida. Written before September 11, it does so only to emphasise that al-Qaida is the wrong name altogether: "A lot of money is being spent on a rapidly expanding web of Islamist charities and social services, including the recently maligned al-Qaida. Bin Laden's first charity, al-Qaida, never amounted to more than a loose umbrella framework for supporting like-minded individuals and their causes. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, al-Qaida has been portrayed in the west as a cohesive terrorist organisation, but it is not."
There's no doubt that the name came to prominence in part because America needed to conceptualise its enemy. This is certainly what Bodansky thinks now. "In the aftermath of September 11," he says, "both governments and the media in the west had to identify an entity we should hate and fight against."
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Source:
What is the origin of the name al-Qaida? | The Guardian
Straight from the web page of George W. Bush's archives page eh? 2 of the 6 bullet points there are from 1985 or earlier. As to the claim that Saddam tried to assassinate George W. Bush's father, there's strong evidence that the story was fabricated:
So, Did Saddam Hussein Try to Kill Bush's Dad? | Common Dreams
As to Abu Nidal, you might want to do a little questioning as to who he really worked for:
Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, 'was a US spy' | independent.co.uk
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
Doesn't change a world of what I said...
IBDaMann
Well-known member
It's stupid to post articles by Chris Hedges. He is an ardent Marxist who HATES the US and constantly seeks to undermine the US military. As a stunt, he got arrested by the Iraqi Republican Guard in order to appear "rebellious" and so the New York Times made Hedges the Chief Middle East correspondent or something like that. He is a greatly confused Marxist who is a communist that calls himself a socialist anarchist (a contradiction in terms). He never has anything intelligent to say, he just spews HATE for the US.
Phoenyx, you should have just posted that you read another article by Chris Hedges in which he froths at the mouth due to his HATRED for the US, and that's all you would have had to write. Everything in that article is dishonest hyperbole that provides no information.
I'm going to presume that you are a US HATER as well, because only someone who HATES the US would find any medicinal value in that article.
anonymoose
Classical Liberal
He’s come right out and said it. NBD. That’s his right.
He’s got some pretty warped ideas regarding NATO. He actually believes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a defensive move for protection from NATO’s inevitable invasion of Russia directed by the U.S.
Edit: I doubt he actually believes that. He just says it.
IBDaMann
Well-known member
Chris Hedges is loony and paranoid. He believes that defense contractors are the legislative branch of the United States, not Congress. He believes that Russia's only desire since the Iron Curtain fell has been to form a security alliance with the US, but that the US wouldn't have it, being only interested in creating enemies and wars lest the US defense contractors lose their legislative powers to expand the US war machine.
anonymoose
Classical Liberal
So is phoenyx. He tries to come across as thoughtful but he quotes the likes of Hedges, Scott Ritter and a couple of western pro Russian propagandists.
I used to try to have meaningful conversations with him but it’s not really possible.
IBDaMann
Well-known member
I wouldn't go that far. I think the American MIC is powerful, but it's focus isn't on making the world safer, but rather making their industry more profitable. That, in turn, can be helped by selectively making the world -less- safe and above all persuading countries to spend large on their weaponry. U.S. Congress has been on board for quite some time and the Ukraine war gave them yet another pretext to spend large on them.
Some people care when large media companies, frequently persuaded by government agencies, start censoring its users because they're not following the narrative favoured by parties such as the military industrial complex.
Youtube did it. The question is why. Various parties have recently sued google, the parent company of Google on their censorship:
Journalists take on Google/Youtube Censorship: Claim Violation of 1st Amendment Due to Blatant Government Coercion & Big Tech Partnership | sarahwestall.com
Former Marine Intelligence Officer and Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter wrote an article on his recent deplatforming from Youtube as well:
YouTube, Censorship, and the American Way of Life | scottritterextra.com
QP!
Verified User
100% republicans fault.
At time of accident when shock value is high they are all for 'safety regulations being brought up to date'. As soon as any legislation can come to the floor, they have got their money from big Rail and other corporate interests and gut any and all safety related regulations that would increase costs and impact profits.
So we see trains going faster and with substantially more cars (increase profit), while at the same time on breaks that have not had any real regulation upgrade since the 1950-1960 ish time frame when we have newer break technology that could eliminate most of these crashes.