So you would prefer we fight Al Queda in your neighborhood? Because we’ve been fighting them since 9/11.
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The best defense against Al Qaeda attacking us in the US is law enforcement (FBI, Customs, Border Patrol, etc.), not the military.
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The restrictions on our freedom since 9/11 have primarily been perpetrated by our government, not by Al Qaeda. As I posted in the OP **MEBuckner **linked to, most threats to our liberty have IMO been internal (like McCarthyism and Jim Crow), not external.
No, we haven’t. We’ve been using them as an excuse to attack third parties and erode civil rights at home.
Ask the South Koreans how terrible we were to keep out the North. I have a friend who was born in Vietnam in 1974 and who’s family left as part of the Vietnamese boat people in 1975 (I could be off by a year or two) and grew up in Germany. His family has nothing but praise for American efforts in Vietnam.
The actions in Korea and Vietnam were both related to our freedom. They were at time poorly conceived and executed but that doesn’t negate the motivation. If you don’t think the Soviet Union was bent on a worldwide Red dictatorship you haven’t read up on your history.
It can also be argued that the First Gulf War was also related to our freedom, albeit more obliquely. (I’ll also admit that it was partly about the freedom to drive our cars on cheap gas.)
The U.S. has done many wrong and stupid things but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a country that has done more for human freedom than America in the last ~240 years.
What danger was there to the US from a Communist takeover of Vietnam?
When Vietnam finally fell to the Communists, what effect did it have on the rest of the World?
If Vietnam was about freedom, why did the US have to manufacture the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify its actions?
The Soviet Union might have wanted to take over the World, but it couldn’t even takeover Afghanistan.
How ‘oblique’ do you mean exactly? You think Saddam was going to invade the US? :smack:
I like Americans, but this claim needs careful examination.
It’s hard to think of a country that’s interfered in / invaded so many others without justification.
The US overthrew a democratic government in Chile with a military dictatorship that slaughtered 3,200, imprisoned and tortured 80,000 and drive 200,000 into exile.
The US has maintained a trade embargo against Cuba for 46 years - what is the point of keeping that up?
The US brought Saddam Hussein to power and Donald Rumsfeld sold him the WMDs that killed millions in the Iraq-Iran war, plus 50,000 Iraqi civilians afterwards.
Gulf War 2 was about these same WMDs, which no longer existed. Civilian casualties are hard to quantify precisely, but have been estimated at over 1,000,000.
The US is closely allied to Saudi Arabia, which has no elections, does execute*, flogs homosexuals, amputates hands and feet for robbery and violently discriminates against women**.
*Abd al-Karim Mara’i al-Naqshabandi, who was executed after being convicted of practicing witchcraft against his employer…
**a woman, victim of a gang rape, was sentenced by a Saudi court to six months in prison and 200 lashes for violating laws on segregation of the sexes, as she was in an unrelated man’s car at the time of the attack…
In Burma, a military dictatorship has detained the winner of a 1991 democratic election (she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). The US has made no effort to restore human freedom here.
Jeez, the US has supported so many murderous, freedom-suppressing assholes in its history (and overthrown so many democracies in the process) that someone could write a book about it.
Oh, wait. Somebody has. Recommended for any student of US foreign policy.
The theory at the time was “domino effect.” The feeling was that we couldn’t allow communist dictatorships to creep across borders and must be opposed. Vietnam was a result of JFK’s “oppose any foe” inaugural speech.
There are multiple reasons, some geopolitical. The easiest reason to explain is that not everybody would support a war to oppose communism in a foreign land, as this thread shows.
It couldn’t take over Afghanistan in large part because the US funded the resistance. You need look no farther than Cuba to see a successful take over by Communists who were supported by the Reds.
Obviously the US wasn’t going to be invaded but there are other ways to restrict freedom. If Hussein had been allowed to run rough-shod over the Middle-East it could have thrown the world economy into shambles without any recovery in sight until he was stopped.
Like I said, many mistakes were made and I can add a few more (e.g. Philippines) but do you honestly believe the US invaded more countries than the USSR? Really? The number of lives saved by US action in S. Korea alone is probably more than all the US atrocities you can dig up. It is very possible that if the US had somehow stayed completely neutral during WW II that all of Europe would be either Fascist or Soviet (or a combination.) Instead of a list of US atrocities (and there are plenty) give me one country that has done more for human freedom.
I totally agree but this doesn’t invalidate my premise. Every large group of people has the prerequisite assholes.
I don’t know enough about history to do the counterfactuals, but it surely seems like a lot of countries that were “saved” from communism by the US didn’t end up appreciably better off, and in many cases at least traded a better leader (though not necessarily a *good *leader) for a worse one. Afghanistan was delivered from the Soviets into the arms of…the Taliban. The Congo was delivered from Lumumba to…Mobutu Sese Seko. Iran was delivered from Mossadegh to…the Shah (leading, eventually, to the Islamic Revolution). Chile was delivered from Allende to…Pinochet. And the list goes on and on. I’m hard pressed to see how these qualify as defenses of freedom, or how they benefited the populations of these respective countries.
Again, I agree that some actions by the US possibly made things worse but I still don’t see any country that did more for human liberty. There are three countries that I can think of that were divided between a US-supported faction and Soviet-supported faction and the comparison is laughably one-sided:
Mainland China - Taiwan
N. Korea - S. Korea
W. Germany - E. Germany
You could further compare Western Europe to Eastern Europe (less apropos because different cultures make the comparison more difficult) and get a similar result. For a short period Vietnam was divided and while the US-supported regime was problematic only a Communist apologist could claim it was worse than the North.
Can you give me one country that did better than the US?
Well, but my point is you have to weigh the good done by the US against the bad. For example, West Germany had (at the time of reunification) 62 million citizens. Okay, they were free because of the US. But Iran, which had a functioning democracy, has not had one since the 50s because of the US, and so 70 million Iranians are living under the thumb of a de facto dictatorship because of the US overthrow of Iran’s democracy. When you start doing calculations like that, it is not clear to me that the US has produced a net gain in freedom for the world’s population.
Any of the countries that left other countries alone.
You’d have to show that if the Americans stayed out the situation wouldn’t have deteriorated anyway. Before the Americans stepped in a Western-leaning PM was assassinated in Iran and it’s not obvious that Iran wouldn’t have ended up with a dictatorship anyway. That’s why I think the truest comparison is to look at countries like E/W Germany and China.
So we should have left S. Korea to the Communists? Western Europe to the Fascists? Kuwait to Iraq? Are you going to argue that Irish neutrality during WW II improved human conditions more than American involvement?