This is US. We have done all of this.

Wow, the CIA has been really up to a lot these days.
 
Do you really believe all this? I went to the link. And some of the stuff is absolutely from someone’s fantasy world – and that’s just the stuff I know about.  Nice picture of an F model B-52 though.
 
Heck the list above looks like every single negative utterance by anyone in the state department constitutes a covert ops or subverting an election.  Would the Chinese donations to Gore be considered ‘subverting’ US elections??
 
And keeping France and Italy from going Communist in the late ’40s sounds like a very smart move by Truman (D). Especially considering what we knew of the evil that communism represented at the time (Stalin and Mao – the two greatest mass murderers in human history!!!). 
 
I have a lot of trouble with people who add DU (depleted Uranium) as something on par with chemical warfare, since the leftist DU fear inducing crap has proven to be just that.  You’ll get a bigger dose in a brick house than if you sit on a tank killed with a DU round. And cluster bombs? Next they will have machine guns as WMDs. (BTW they need to add DU to the current Libya line to be consistent)
 
And can someone explain the biological warfare we used against Sudan in 1998? Or Panama ’89, Iraq and Kuwait in ’91??? How do they define biological warfare for that matter? Is GM crops considered biological warfare?
 
And we killed a half a million people in Columbia??? 1 million in Mozambique and another million in Rwanda? Does the US get blamed for it all if someone dies from an M-16 during the fight?
 
And why isn’t the banning of DDT on the list? Its ban easily killed 2+ million PER YEAR since the ban began due to malaria deaths.  There’s one heck of an intervention in my name. Makes us go past Hitler for the #3 position of greatest mass murders in history (behind the Communist-leftist Mao and Stalin)
 
On the other hand the list, however inaccurate, does show a consistent and bi-partisan foreign policy since 1945, and Obama is quick to join the distinguished list of his predecessors.  So from that point of view this is really just a Bush 3rd term, or Clinton 5th, etc, etc.
 
A lot of the pre-1991 stuff just looks like Cold War maneuvering. Every US ‘failure” probably lines up to a Soviet ‘success’.  The Cold War was just ‘cold’ because the missiles never launched (though Kennedy (D) got us really close to it). 
 
BTW, my son got the gist of this (the fighting in the cold war) in his AP US History class. They do teach this stuff in the US schools.  And definitely in college and I would bet our leaders, newsmakers, etc also know about this (and some even believe the stuff that is fantasy – like the people at the link).  And since it’s been US policy for the past 65 years, even hapless Carter had his day, it’s not news.  We know and either don’t care or approve. The actions of the antiwar left for the past two years prove they sure don’t […]

I do not agree with Buffy’s political viewpoint, but even I think he has a point or several about the list. I certainly do not approve of all the actions taken by our government that I know about, but other than throwing a few bucks and 1 vote towards politicians who disagree with those actions, I am not sure what I am going to do about it. From an economic standpoint, war is a Keynesian solution and if the U.S suddenly became Switzerland, I am pretty sure the economy would collapse. And remember, I get banned on some liberal web sites for speaking my mind.

I was a cold war CIA warrior and agree with buffpilot that many of these actions before the 1970s when the CIA was controlled by the old Post WW II liberal establishment made the world a better place by defeating the communist alternative.

I have no doubt that the CIA and examples you cite  were instrumental in keeping Western Europe from going communist in the 1940s and 1950s.

What happened after 1980 when the old generation of leadership died-off and the right-wing, know-nothing  establishment took over the official Washington international establishment is a
different issue.

buff,      
 
Thanks for the pitch.   Minor correction:  I am more the Eisenhower brand of concern for military industrial complex’ waste fraud and abuse, which happens to use interventions as sales material for its purchasing most of the offensive weapons in the world.  

I need to figure out if your logic is not valid or merely unsound.  
 
You said:  “Since never in recorded human history has a power vacuum not created fights to fill it, I doubt the US pulling all our forces home and rolling up the welcome mat would suddemly [sic] bring about the “End of history” and a global singing of Kumbaya [sic].”      
   
Can you provide some premises which are true to substantiate why I should care if there is fighting somewhere in which a “power vacuum” had erupted.  

I have never read any of Buchanan’s books and none of his articles in the past 15 years.     
 
Since you don’t hang out here over weekends I want to share this little ditty about empire:    

empire needs to collect rent    
US GDP in NATO is 40%    
US HW in NATO is 95%    
no cash no lease    
empire should cease     
  
One of the problems Ike and the more liberal generals, as well as George Kennan, felt was fighting everywhere and all places would sap US strength should a real adversary arise.  That is the case today US DoD consuming more in real dollars the past 7 years than in 1968 at the height of the cold war with 500,000 troops engaged supported by more bombing than the ETO in WW II, in Vietnam.     
   
Hang around, I will have some comments about firing Mac Arthur on the 60th anniversary of the happy event 12 April.    
 
I thought you were English major, as well as a buff pilot.  
   
ilsm will not […]

As the author of the post on RoundTree7, I feel I must bring up some points. The actions listed do not have any kind of judgement attached. It’s listing overt and covert actions that ARE part of US history.

Just listing the actions is not making a liberal or propaganda statement at all. The terms success or failure is only meant to indicate the end results of that action.

During the cold war, the prevailing policy in the Superpower game was Us vs Them. Every country was forced to choose a side. If the country didn’t chose the US then that country probably could expect interference in their elections or government because that was a possible gain for the other side. 

I stand by the list. The references that I used are at the end of the post along with several others. We HAVE had a hand in a large number of the governments in the world since the end of WW11. This is US history, like it or not.

If the action was necessary or needed in the big picture of US interests, that judgement was not made. Again, it is only a list of actions throughout the years. If you feel that this list makes the US look bad, well…. don’t shoot the messenger.

shorter Sammy:  Our leaders only killed for sport.  Except when they didn’t.  

National interest, is empire.  

See Smedley Butler link.

ilsm,

Not an English major and most times just type into the comments box. For longer posts I use Word to correct the mispellings. That’s why I never comment on someone’s grammer or spelling – its really not that important as long as the message is clear. I regularly spell ‘the’ as ‘teh’ when typing fast.  Undergratuate was in BS Astronomical Eng, MS in Aerspace Eng and another MS in Operations Analysis (Applied Mathematics). Why I give cactus so much grief about his 1-D  analysis.

You may not have read anything ever written by or about Buchanan, but you sound just like him.  Your preffered policy’s would fall almost perfectly inline with his.

BTW, when are you going to spring your anti-corruption effort? Or are you waiting for a ‘R’ President like the anti-war left?

Islam will chnage

Waiting for the next annual GAO report on major weapon systems waste fraud and abuse.

Otherwise I am just working until I get tired.

Why you do not see me here most days.

Applied math?  Why don’t you pay better attention to your premises?

Hey, buff.  

You are a bit young, Castro took over, and was in power before the Bay of Pigs.  And Cuba’s cancer treatment for women’s colon cancer has the highest survival rate in the world.

Who was tossed from Cuba aside from US crime lords?

The Navy just christened a new San Antonio class landing ship dock (LPD-24) USS Arlington.  
 
It is for saving people at environemntal disaster in the brown waters.  
 
Whoodanode the US won’t feed poor kids but builds half billion dollar boats for storm and tsunami relief.  
 
What could your B-52 do in that mission?  But those new Boeing super tankers can bring is rice……

Ah, here’s sammy, pretending he can read minds – again.  sammy knows that krell is an anti-american goon, because sammy…ooooo…he just KNOWS it!!!!  Like many of the things sammy writes, his comment here is pure partisan nonsense.

if only those poor nationalists could have had the good sense not to live on top of resources we wanted for ourselves and especially our corporations.  

I meant that question in the obvious context of Libya.  Why will the Libyan people be better off at the end of our guns than Gaddafi’s?  Even if ours=NATOs?

The last 8 years of Afghanistan and Iraq make that a serious question.

Thanks for posting this.  I read Blum’s book “Killing Hope;” this list helps catalog the evidence.

Also worth pointing out for younger people that it’s not as if the US was acting in a vaccuum. Often (though far from always) the interventions were a response to prior Soviet interventions. We were, of course, far too quick to assume that any popular movement must be Communist inspired. We also (then as now) were too willing to act in the best interests of our biggest corporations, even against more general American interests. But to assume it was all and always evil, always victimized and never liberated is as mistaken as the more common assumption that it was always heroic Captain America coming to the rescue of the little guy.

And that is what the long lists tell us about ourselves.  We continuously elect government representatives that manage to continue to carry out global relations that do us all little good.  We could have bought oil from Iraq for a lot less money than the wars are costing.  Our leaders are, and have always been, looking for a way to gain an economic advantage over the world and we see more recently that they are willing to throw us all under the bus in their efforts.  All too often those efforts have proved to be ineffective or self defeating and war, or some semblence of aggression, has been the Plan B response.  Did we lose China after WW II?  Or, did we just turn a blind eye to the inadequacies of its ruling class once the Japanese were out of the way?  Revolution is bred in the midst of misery.  Mao was no worse to the mass of the Chinese population as Castro was no worse, probably better, than Batista to the Cuban masses. 

Jack’s key phrase: “at least the Cuban people who did not leave…”  And we might add, who were not put into prison, were not killed outright, or died trying to escape, etc. may be better off than their grand parents depending on what we use to measure.

Why do you say Mao was no worse than his predecessor? 

I hate to tell the person who compiled the list but even if an assasination of Zhou would have been successful in 1955 it in no way would have altered the PRC regime. 

I guess that is the misunderstanding Yerom.  I very rarely, if ever use the word exceptional when discussing any country.  I will use the word when discribing an event or experience (an action), but not as a discription of a thing like a country.  Nope, a country/nation just is. 

Expressing pride is something I reserve for people on a personal level. 

Both pride and exceptional are to dependent on the one using them to be accepted broadly.

Wow Jack,

I never figured you for an apologist for mass murderers.  Mao was easily the greatest mass murderer in teh history of the human race and yet you wave that off like it was just breaking a few eggs to make an omelet….

I have no argument with you that Batista was bad but he was just replaced with another tyrant who slaughtered his people with glee.  Castro easily more evil than Batista and has kept Cubans living under tyranny ever since.

But that OK with you…says a lot about you.

Islam will change

Dan,

“use the word exceptional when discussing any country.”

Can you please explain why so many people live their entire lives begging to come here? Can you explain why the free world and it’s allies look to and expect America to take the lead in every crisis? Can you explain how America became the most powerfull and wealthiest nation the planet has ever seen?

I’m sure it is all because we are just like any other country isn’t it?

You think that Reagan saying “Tear down this wall” was the cause of East Germany collapsing? I would give David Hasselholf about the same amount of credit. The reason East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc collapsed is because the system was broke. Reagan perhaps hasten the inevitability by maybe a couple of weeks.

Too much of popular knowledge about Red China comes from the John Birch Society, Red Scares, blaming Truman for losing China and Mc Carthyism.

During the “civil war”, Mao and the communists were far more popular than the “nationalists”.  That is how they went through the nationalists like a hot knife.  The peasant essentially rebelled as the communists moved against the nationalists.

Zhou said it was like fish swimming in the sea of the people, while the nationalists were not fish.

In the end Mao may have been nuts, but in 1949 he was preferred to Chiang.

George Marshall went over to help and came back broken and dismayed.  Chiang had no popular support and would not listen to US advisors.

The usual gang of dissemblers reply to their own political bias than to the words written on the page.  No, I did not say that Mao, nor Castro for that matter, was a good and kindly man.  He was viscious in the extreme.   He was tyrannical.  He was murderous.  And he was a product of the political system in China in his day.  As noted, misery begets conflict and struggle between those who suffer and those who promote that suffering.  And from the midst of such conflicts come the most treacherous of actors, of which Mao was apparently one of the most cunnning and iron fisted.  The short sighted neglect to recognise the conditions which give rise to such evil behavior in spite of the repeated instances of misery followed by struggle and control throughout history.   Our own government has too often taken the side of tyrants in order to gain a political or economic advantage only to have to react to the upheavals that follow from the protracted reigns of those autocratic regimes we often have sought to support.

“Evil meddling? or constructive meddling?”

Neither. Just American politics.

It’s remarkable that when it comes to the UN, conservatives poo-poo words as meaningless, but when those words come from the lips of St. Ronnie, they have the power of 1000 suns.

Joe Jackson had it down almost 20 years ago in his song Evil Empire

“There’s a country that’s great and wide
It’s got the biggest of everything
Try to attack it and you can’t hide
Don’t say that you haven’t been warned

You can’t hide in a gunmans mask
Or kill innocent folks and run
But if you’re good at it they might ask
Come on over to the other side

There’s a country that’s tired of war
There’s a country that’s scared inside
But the bank is open and you can draw
For guns to fight in their backyard…”

And of course the chorus has been ringing in my ears since I first heard this song:  “I could go on but what’s the use – you can’t fight them with songs – But think of this as just – another tiny blow against the empire – another blow against the Evil Empire…”

Well its been almost a day and still Krell and DB have yet to answer even one of my questions poised in my first post.

Punt and run as predicted.

Islam will change

“And yes not taking out Chavez was a failure as the people of Venezuela are finding out.” buff

And just what would that prove other than our country’s inclination to stick our noses into every other country’s business?   How do you have the audacity to suggest that kind of international interference in the governments of other countries?  What would be your response to some other country sending an agent to “‘take out” one of our high level elected officials like the President?  Where do you get the unmitigated gall to suggest that some how other people would be better off with some other choice of leadership and that this country should make that decision for them?  Your asinine questions don’t require, nor deserve, an answer.

How do you know what the people of Venezuela are “finding out”?  At last count Chavez took 60% of the votes in 2006.  What you think of his domestic policies is less than irrelevant.   The people in Venezuela expressed their thoughts at their ballot boxes.  Look up “ugly American” in the encyclopedia and see if your picture is there as a best example of ignorant belligerency.

I’ve never heard of anyone describing a 20 year civil war as the CCP going thru the Nationalists like a “hot knife”.  You better study history of the CCP during the 1930’s.  I don’t think the CCP would have had a Long March, the Zunyi conference and the purge of Bo Gu, Otto Braun and the Moscow 28 or Yanan if they were going thru the Nationalists like a hot knife. 
Zhou’s quote wasn’t about electoral politics, it was about guerilla war.  Here’s another quote of the era which is even more famous:  “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.”  It’s a wonder how popular you can be with the masses when you live by that dictum. 
By the way, Mao was far from nuts. 

China has had a sad history of its people being subjugated under one tyrant or another.  That is not a unique historical record, but there it stands.   Mao was yet another over lord in a long line that preceded him.  By the end of WW II the Japanese were forced out after ravaging the country.  Mao was involved in civil war in China from the late 1920s onward until his forces took control after defeating the Kuomintang around 1949.   That’s the perspective for his dictatorial leadership that followed, a life time of civil war.   That he was ruthless is hardly surprising.  That he accepted no compromise with his own political vision would be expected.  Had the US not armed Chiang Kai-shek’s forces Truman  might have had better influence on the Communist government.  it’s not as though the US hasn’t sided with other tyrants before and since Mao’s dominance.  In a half century of fighting to keep power a great many people died.  That’s been the unfortunate history of China.  They now seem to have found a more peaceful means of taking over the world.   We’ll be complaining about this new form of domination soon enough.

My main point is that we, the US, too often chooses its allies with a limited view of the wider world and our own best interests.  Unintended consequences are often the result.  We support bad people and act as though it’s a surprise when they do even worse things.  We support the enemies of factions that later take control and often do bad things.  The result of tyrannical rule is the same, bad things come from bad people and bad people generally win in a fight for survival.  We need to be a bit more clear sighted when we take sides in the battles around the globe.

Oh I get it.  His B Movie career gave him the chops to portray a sincerely clueless fascist.  It’s the sincerity that gets you guys all worked up.  Good to know even if I don’t have the wingnut sincerity detecting decoder ring.

 (Hey does that thing work on Mitt Rommney?  Gingrich?  Where is the 2012 challenger who speaks from the heart as you put it?  No rush you can get back to me on this one….)

Deng…………………

What?!?!?!?

Jack,

So let me get this striaght….your defending Chavez on the basis that the United States is the villan here?

Voting Machine Fraud
“Despite having no election experience, the tiny company rocketed from obscurity in 2004 after it was awarded a $100 million contract by the Chávez-dominated National Electoral Council to replace Venezuela’s electronic voting machines for the recall vote.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/03/forget_dubai_worry_about_smart.html

“When the council announced the deal, it disingenuously described Smartmatic as a Florida company, though Smartmatic’s main operations were in Caracas and the firm had incorporated only a small office in Boca Raton. It then emerged that Smartmatic’s ”partner” in the deal, Bizta Corp., also directed by Anzola and Mugica, was partly owned by the Venezuelan government through a series of intermediary shell corporations. Venezuela initially denied its investment but eventually sold its stake.”

“CIA cybersecurity expert Steve Stigall testified at a US Election Assistance Commission hearing held last month in Orlando, FL that the government of President Hugo Chavez rigged the outcome of the August 2004 presidential referendum. Electronic voting machines like those used in US elections have likely been tampered with during elections in other countries including Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine.”

“A statistical study done by two Venezuelan scientists, Maria M. Febres Cordero and Bernardo Marquez, has determined that Hugo Chavez alleged victory in the recall referendum of 2004 was unlikely. The report, which has been peer reviewed by the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and the International Statistical Review, has been published.”

http://vcrisis.com/index.php?content=letters/200702221623

“the studies show that since 2003, Mr. Chavez has added 4.4 million favorable names to the voter list and “migrated” 2.6 million unfavorable voters to places where it was difficult or impossible for them to vote.”

Jack,

“Basically their internal political business is no business of ours other than as a potential ally or trading partner.”

Nope. In “Hugo Chavez and the War Against America: The Threat Closer to Home”, by Douglas E. Schoen and Michael Rowan it is detailed how Chavez is supporting organizatons like FARC and Hezbollah, with the expressed purpose of undermining the United States, all with Oil Money. His most dear allies are our most pressing National Security Threats. His closest realtionships personal and economic with international leaders are China, Iran, Russia, Syria, Lybia, North Korea, Cuba, Bolivia, Zimbabwe and Belarus. What do you have to say about a Communist Dictator who has teamed up with every single one of America’s enemies, and publically proclaims his intentions to undermine the United States? Don’t bother…I think I know the answer.

This statement, “whose people were subjugated under the former government and maybe they are no better or worse off with the Chavez regime,” is completely false.

When he nationalized the Oil Industry, he stole money, trade secrets and equipment from every American Company who were there, and that would be almost every American Company that has anything to do with Oil Exploration, Drilling, Transportation.

Chavez is developing a nuclear program for Venezuela while aiding Iran’s pursuit of Nuclear Weapons

Chavez has single handedly driven up Oil Prices. OPEC was created by Venezuela, and when Chavez came to power he was in a unique position to fullfill his life long time dream of using Venezuelan Oil as a political weapon….which he most certainly has done. His threat on an embargo if any action were taken against Iran, alone justifies his removal. 

http://www.homelandsecurityus.net/countries/venezuela/venezuela%20n%20korea.htm

The guy who took over when Mao faded away.

And the reason that Truman, LeMay and Bomber Harris were not war criminals……………..  
 
The US and Brits won.

Buff,

This is rich discussing which mass murderers are worse, from a guy who flew around hundreds of kilotons of nulcear bombs.    
   
Did the PRP include convincing you that Mao and Stalin were mass murderers so you would not hesitate to drop your H bombs on “countervalue targets?

Yerom, 

Very dull theater, don’t you agree?

Putting liberals on the spot to defend mass murderers.

A nuclear warrior, B-52 pilot, telling some college kid guiding future students and their parents at a Michigan college why he would nuke Russia and China because those countries are linked to long dead mass murderers.

A retired Army artillery officer with a campaign ribbon from the first Gulf War cataloging with links all the mass murder done in the past hundred odd years.  And the nuclear warrior pointing out his estimates are low!

Very small theater looking at the theater played 60 years ago this month by the China Lobby played with Truman using Mac Arthur.

“No substitute for victory”.  China is the axis fo the communist threat etc, etc, etc………….

What is Chavez compared to Mao and the Red Hordes?

Where is Mac Arthur?  Why cannot the US find a Henry Luce to rage against the dangerous horde?

I agree about the KMT military effort.  I also agree t

Do you think it’s possible that Chavez is creating a mini-Chavez?   Have the SuperFriends been notified?

Courtesy Naked Capitalism this post really explains Libya:  http://warisacrime.org/content/our-billion-dollar-turd-sandwich

As Yves Smith noted, the first billion is just a down payment.  Supersize this!

ilsm,

Hey, Its the liberals who ARE defending mass murderes. No one put them up to it.  Good for them to actually applaud the killers they support, truth in advertising.

Otherwise your comments are getting incoherent (again).

What would you call someone wearing a Mao shirt other than an idiot?

Islam will change

ilsm – “A retired Army artillery officer with a campaign ribbon from the first Gulf War cataloging with links all the mass murder done in the past hundred odd years.”

How do you come up with this stuff?  I was never in the Field Artillery and I wasn’t in the Gulf war. 

ilsm – “Putting liberals on the spot to defend mass murderers.”

No one made Jack or anyone else say anything.  Jack dug his own hole.  And he appears to be digging more holes. 

Buff
Has it occured to you that no one takes your critique seriously enough to bother addressing it?  If you had made a valid point and some still disagreed with it those that did would argue against your point.  No one seems to see what there is that’s worth arguing about.  That’s the flaw in a flawed position.  It fails to provoke a reply.