The United States has suffered three widely acknowledged military disasters since the end of the Second World War: in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. The American public responded to each crisis by electing new leaders with a mandate to end the wars and avoid new ones. But in each case, our new leaders failed to make the genuine recommitment to peace and diplomacy that was called for. Instead, they allayed the fears of the public by moving American war-making farther into the shadows, deploying the CIA and special operations forces in covert operations and proxy wars, sowing seeds of violence and injustice that would fester for decades and often erupt into conflict many years later.
Six months after taking office, President Eisenhower signed an armistice agreement to end the Korean War. But three weeks later, he unleashed the CIA's first covert operation, to overthrow the elected government of Iran. The nationalization of Iran's oil industry was reversed and U.S. oil companies gained a substantial share of Iran's oil production. Problem solved, right? Not exactly -- the U.S. coup and its support for the Shah's despotic rule led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and a hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy. Now the long-term breakdown of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran threatens to explode into a new American war.
A year later, the CIA followed up on its "success" in Iran by removing another elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala. The coup rescued United Fruit Company's ownership of 42% of the agricultural land in Guatemala from Arbenz's modest efforts at land reform, but the 42-year civil war that followed killed at least 250,000 people.
The U.S. defeat in Vietnam led to ten years of relative peace, in which the U.S. avoided open warfare anywhere in the world. But once again, this concealed what senior U.S. military officers have called the "disguised, quiet, media-free" approach to war in Central America and Afghanistan. Proxy forces armed with American weapons and supported by small numbers of American "advisers" once again plunged millions of people's lives into chaos.
In El Salvador and Nicaragua, the political parties the U.S. fought in the 1980s have eventually won elections and come to power anyway. And in Afghanistan, mujaheddin that the U.S. armed and supported in the 1980s produced the most dramatic act of "blowback" ever on September 11th 2001, plunging America into a decade or more of war, economic crisis and global chaos that we have yet to find our way out of.
President Obama fulfilled the U.S. commitment to withdraw from Iraq that the Maliki government wrung out of the Bush administration, and he stopped the CIA from kidnapping people and bundling them off to Guantanamo. But even after his much-vaunted "withdrawal" from Afghanistan, there will still be twice as many U.S. troops there as when he took office. And he halted the parade of men in orange jump suits stumbling off American planes into the tropical sunshine in Cuba, not by restoring the rule of law, but by ordering the extra-judicial execution of terrorism suspects -- a national policy of cold-blooded murder.
Not a week goes by without news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, but the U.S. also conducts assassinations by helicopter-borne special forces like the ones who killed Osama Bin Laden. The former head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Admiral Eric Olson, told an Aspen Institute conference that SOCOM conducts a dozen such operations every night in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The total number of night raids in Afghanistan escalated from twenty per month in early 2009 to over a thousand per month two years later, and senior officers admit that at least half of them target the wrong person or house.
Sixty thousand U.S. special operations forces now conduct assassinations, night-raids, training missions, joint operations and exercises in 120 countries around the world, twice as many as when Obama came to power, with deployments in about 70 countries at any given time.
In The Politics of Heroin, Alfred McCoy described how the CIA formed secret alliances with Nationalist Chinese generals in Burma and Thailand, Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, Afghan warlords, Haitian military officers, Manuel Noriega in Panama and Nicaraguan Contra commanders. In every case, the CIA's partners exploited their impunity as U.S. allies to become major players in the global drug trade. Now former Mexican special forces trained at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning run the Zetas drug cartel, and the new police chief installed by a U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in Afghanistan in 2011 reportedly earns $60 million a year from opium smuggling.
The current expansion of U.S. special forces to conduct covert and proxy warfare sacrifices U.S. long term interests in peace, stability and the rule of law for short-term political gain, just as when U.S. "advisers" were sent to Vietnam in the 1950s and to Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. But which of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate will become the next Vietnam or Iran or Guatemala?
Could it be India, which holds 50 joint training exercises a year with U.S. forces, the most of any country in the world, as it battles separatists in Kashmir and Assam and a "people's war" by Naxalites or Maoists in 7 other provinces?
Or what about Uganda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Djibouti or Kenya, where U.S. forces are training African Union "peacekeepers" to fight the Al-Shabab militia in Somalia? Or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic or South Sudan, where U.S. special forces have been sent to track down Joseph Kony but are suspected of planning a covert war against Sudan?
The pervasiveness and perversity of America's military madness could produce severe "blowback" from any one of the 120 countries where U.S. special forces now operate. So how will we respond when the inevitable blowback comes? Will we once again fall in line as our leaders lash out at some new enemy? Or will we know enough of our own history to look in the mirror and recognize the real source of the violence and chaos that our irresponsible leaders keep unleashing on the world?
In Reality, more about POWER:
See *my decades long reports on how the fbi/cia torture and kill dissidents globally with complete anonymity; today India and Thailand are actively using these techniques at the direction of fbi/cia/mi6/mossad.
fbi/cia methods to torture/kill w/complete anonymity
The fbi/cia now instruct intel groups OF India & Thailand how to kill or incapacitate Targets with complete anonymity.
Here are a few such ways which many in India and Thailand (et al) are now discovering:
Synthetically Produced Kidney Stone Created By Chemical Combination In the Person Of The Target:
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/part16-updatefor.html
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/end.2007.9854
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/letterformthemed.html
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/hightechassau.html
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/tooth14.html
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/tracking.html#finger
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/mystory.html
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/non-consensual.html
http://sosbeevfbi.ning.com/forum/topics/fbicia-methods-to-torture-and
Torture and forced suicide:
http://www.boell.org/downloads/Lingis_on_torture.pdf
"kill yourself" message:
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/hatemailpartsix.html
Viral Infection:
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/letterformthemed.html
*
http://barbarahartwellvscia.blogspot.com/2012/03/must-prosecute-fbicia-assassins-for.html
The rest of the argument is consistent and reasonable: it can't be denied that sending military forces to operate overseas is inevitably going to engender some hostility in those places.
Harry Truman sent thousands of US forces to Korea (50,000 are still there). Dwight D. Eisenhower ended this war with an armistice; but, he left a large force behind, as well as unleashing the CIA to engage in the overthrow of Iran's legally elected President, as well as igniting a decades-long civil war in Guatemala (by toppling its legal government), killing 250,00 people. This started a long line of illegal interventions that are still going on today.
Georges Santayana, a 1930's-era Spanish writer, coined the phrase "Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it". Unfortunately, politicians (and political Generals and Admirals) fall into this category; their HUBRIS blinds them to reality.
Shouldn't we have a golden rule foreign policy? Where we do not do anything to another country we wouldn't want done to our own? Let's ask a few questions along these lines?
Do we want foreign troops stationed in the US?
Do we want to allow foreign drones to patrol our skies?
Do we want foreign governments meddling in our elections?
Do we want foreign (or our) troops doing night time raids on suspected drug dealers?
If some trans-national group creates an attack on some foreign government from the US, do we want the foreign government to invade and overthrow the US after the trans-national group has moved to another country?
We need to return to the golden rule foreign policy we used to have.
Vietnam, Laos, Panama, the Caribbic, Iraq, Afghanistan and soon Iran !
Isn't it politicians who use our military to interfere in foreign countries (admittedly at the behest of corporations who might lose their assets to nationalization in other countries)? Since when can a corporation tell the military what to do?
Through lobbying, sponsorship, revolving door appointments, politicians and generals either are or become corporate board members. Corporate representatives write the laws Congressional millionaires pass, and "advise" on the policies of government. Corporate leaders and politicians do not operate in a vacuum. They are often one and the same.
The military isn't the only way "enemies" are created. Check out Dow, Monsanto and India, United Fruit and Nicaragua, Goldman Sachs and Greece, Halliburton and the privatization of Iraq.
I wish your comment was meant to be sarcastic.
But I think it wasn’t.
Instead of being dazzled by the efficiency of the killing,
and praising that as enhancing an unexamined "national security",
you might best open your eyes to the alleged rationale and actual consequences.
It’s not just the so-called “collateral damage” murders, nor the flouting of the US Constitution, international laws and norms, nor the alliances with and support of despots and drug lords, nor the blowback, nor the misdirected economy and empowerment of a self-serving elite,
it is also the banal moral depravity that he whole sordid business entails.
"When I become President, I will seek a pact of agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity, and a freedom from disquieting oppressive thoughts . We as a Nation, have placed upon the nations of Islam, an unfair injustice,which is WHY my wife disrespects the Flag, and she and I have attended several flag burning ceremonies in the past."
"Of course now, I have found myself about to become the President of the United States and I have put my hatred aside. I will use my power to bring CHANGE to this Nation, and offer the people a new path. My wife and I look forward to becoming our Country's First black Family. Indeed, CHANGE is about to overwhelm the United States of America."
It reversed the invasion of the South by the Stalinist North, thereby liberating South Korea (which had been invaded), which was the reason for the Korean War. Then it defended South Korea for 50 years while it turned into a thriving liberal democracy, a tech capital, and the 4th largest economy in Asia (as opposed to the North which is.....well bananas).
The Korean war was hardly a disaster.
Korea was a colony of Imperial Japan, after defeating Japan in WW2 the Southern half was occupied by US troops and the Northern Half by Soviet troops. Stalin installed Kim il Sung in the North. Following the turnover of trusteeship in South Korea to the Republic of Korea in 1948, Stalin supported an invasion of the now US allied RoK by Kim Il Sung's DPRK. The UN responded by voting on intervention on behalf of South Korea to prevent the invasion. In short order the DPRK army (North Korea) was driven back to the Chinese boarder, when Mao intervened on their behalf with a million and a half Chinese forces to assist the 200k North korean and 30k Soviet forces on the DPRK side. This influx lead to an armistice along the previous boarders (with slightly more gained by South Korea), that has existed since. Following the UN/PRC-DPRK armistice the US set on defending the RoK from further DPRK invasion till now, and as I said in that time the RoK would also successfully (not easily, I dont mean to imply that) become a mature economically stable democratic and generally respectable republic, while the country they were almost completely invaded by continued to become even more of a crazy Orwellian nightmare.
didn't know Korea attacked the US." Well, that might explain why we werent at war "with Korea", for starters there wasnt a nation called Korea to be at war with. There was a US allied RoK and a Soviet/China supported DPRK. The DPRK invaded the RoK, and the UN intervened on the RoK's side
The democratically elected government does not represent the will of the people any more. The media are playing cheerleaders for Obama's saber rattling against Iran. We don't want more wars, but we are voiceless.
Imperialism gone amok. This will be the downfall of the country.