Yes, and the U.S. was convicted for this act of international terrorism by the World Court in 1986, ordered to cease its murderous attacks on the country, and to pay $17 billion in reparations. The decision of the World Court was dismissed with contempt, and the U.S. stepped up its terrorist activities. The U.S. still stands as the only country ever to be convicted in the World Court of international terrorism.
The consequences for Nicaragua were simply devastating. In addition to the terrorist attacks, which targeted schools, health centers and other “soft targets,” the U.S. imposed a blockade on the country to wreck its economy. After the initial successes of the Sandinistas in the early 1980’s, in improving health and literacy, the country had to divert its few resources into defending itself from a superpower attack. By the end of the decade, the country was in ruins, paving the way for a return of the country into U.S. control. Now Nicaragua hovers around the 2nd or 3rd poorest country in the hemisphere, which was the goal the whole time. These countries have to know their place.
Nicaragua is a case-study in U.S. imperialism. After the country was able to rid itself of its U.S. puppet dictator, it was immediately attacked for daring to do something for the poor of the country. So, while the U.S. lavished support on the blood-soaked dictator Somoza, who killed, tortured and oppressed his citizens, the U.S. attacked the Sandinistas, who, in the words of Jose Figeras, were the only regime Nicaragua ever had who did something for the poor.
A more interesting question is how a vote would be “forced”.
It is pretty clear that the warmongering Bush Administation is desparate to start a war before the mid-term elections in order to distract the American public from its abysmal performance in every measurable category of economic well being.
The Administration pushed very hard to get the Congress to vote before facing the voters, and now wants to try the same with the Security Council, whose members have no incentive to appeal to the American public. The Security Council members are probably content to wait for after the elections to watch the Bush Administration cool down, and are expecting more pressure from an “impatient” Washington in the meantime. The Administration has made as many political enemies among foreign nations as was humanly possible during the past two years with its arrogance and unilateral statements of its purely self interested intentions. Not a single bit of slack will be cut by the Security Council to aid the Administration in domestic politics, which is probably how the Russians, French and maybe Chinese view the situation. How the rest of the elected members will vote is also up in the air. Any measure authorizing/demanding action will have a better chance after the elections when the motives are viewed more sincerely. The only foreign leader who has hitched his star to Bush’s is the U.K.'s Tony Blair, none of the rest feel that they owe Bush anything. Even Vincinte Fox has begun to snub Bush after their initial honeymoon period when they each sucked up to the other to enhance their domestic legitimacy.
I think you are giving the Russians, French and Chinese more credit than they deserve. The Chinese have announced that they will not veto the U.S. resolution, and the Russians and French will go along with U.S. demands if they are given what they want. What they want is pure self-interest. They don’t care one whit about international law or human rights, or any of that stuff.
France and Russia want a piece of the pie when the U.S. carves up Iraq. They both have significant investments and contracts with Iraq, and are afraid that they will be cut out if the U.S. goes in without them. Russia also wants a pass for its monstrous crimes in Chechnya.
In the end, the great powers will come to some sort of agreement on how to carve up Iraq, and Russia will be given the go-ahead to keep on massacering Chechens. The whole situation couldn’t be more cynical or disgusting. The tens of thousands of people about to be turned into corpses simply do not play into the equation.
To put this in perspective, this site, which gives the standard figures, claims that the incremental cost of the military operations in Afghanistan were $1,481 million, with an additional $588 million for intensified U.S. surveillance, adding to a little more than $2,000 million for the military operation of bombing Afghanistan. In contrast, humanitarian aid, which is still forthcoming, will amount to around $420 million, about 1/5 of what was spent on the military campaign. Seeing as how the military operation is considered “relatively inexpensive,” the aid given to the victims of our bombing is a pittance, especially when you consider U.S. complicity in tearing the country apart.
We can take this even further, and consider how much the U.S. spends on its military. Next year the U.S. will spend almost $400 billion on war, most of which is planned waste, and a gift to high tech industry. If we took, say, half of all the money we waste on military spending and put that into humanitarian relief we would not only help a great many people, but reduce some of the hatred that exists toward the U.S. around the world, hence reducing the threat of further terrorist attacks. It would be a win-win situation: reduced spending on planned waste and greater security for the citizens of the country.
Well, Chumpsky, you can juggle numbers all you want, and put all kinds of spin on them if you want, and preach from your “Anti-American Imperialism” agenda about all the billions we’re spending on the War Machine but not a penny for Whatever, but the fact is that the intent of your statement was the cynical assertion that the U.S. isn’t doing much of anything for the Afghans, and the fact is that they are.
The White House puts it at $588 million worth of aid. Now, yeah, that’s considerably less than the billions spent on the War Machine, but hey, $588 mill is nothing to sneeze at.
Um, Saddam’s never been at the top of my list. The current winner is the regime in Burma - but that’s another story.
Back in the 80s (well, at least during that part of the 80s where I actually knew anything about the outside world - I was 11 in 1980), the top of my list was the regime in El Salvador. Oh, and guess what? The Salvadoran regime was “a favored friend and ally of the U.S.” Sorry to disappoint you by demonstrating independent thought.
Why doesn’t any stop before posting this argument and recognize that it is inane? Your argument is this: “The U.S. has done bad things in the past. Therefore, it is not allowed to do good things in the future.”
I hope you are never on my parole board.
Chumpsky, I know you are new here, but please don’t deign to try to give the posters of the SDMB a trite little history lesson. We know about these events, and we’ve debated these events at great length.
This is Great Debates, not Regurgitation of Facts.
Well, wouldn’t it be nice to change that? To have a foreign policy motivated by humanitarian impulses and the desire to free oppressed people and punish/prevent genocide and democide?
And, gosh Becky, a lovely place to start such a policy would be to overthrow Saddam, who has already committed genocide against the Kurds and is currently in the process of committing genocide aginst the Ma’dan, colloquially known as the “Swamp Arabs.”
As for these whacky imperialists, so what? To give an analogy, I don’t care if the police detective is motivated to catch the serial rapist because he thinks he’ll get a huge book deal. All I care about is that he catches the rapist.
“Obvious lies” doesn’t cut it here. You must present the argument made by the Bushies and evidence refuting it.
As for your alternative motivations:
Control of oil - if we wanted to “control oil,” why didn’t Kuwait become the 51st state after the Gulf War?
Regional dominance - in case you hadn’t noticed, the U.S. already has regional dominance. We have close allies and/or military bases to the north, south, and west of Iraq. It’s kinda silly to go to war to get what you’ve already got, hmm?
:sigh: Chumpsky, try to answer the question - the question was whether or not more people would have died had not the Israelis launched the Six-Day War?
And, from the public statements of the Egyptians and Syrians, the result would have been genocide - the deaths of millions of Israeli citizens had Israel been conquered.
Ya see, if you want to play a numbers game, you have to look at both sides of the equation. :rolleyes:
Welcome Noam Chumpsky! At last a liberal more cynical than I! Rejoice.
Oh, and those history lessons that “certain posters” find condescending and ask you not to give, please continue to give them, they are definitely needed. Do not pay any attention to the people whose only method of dealing with opinions that they don’t like are ad hominem attacks on the authors for being so naive. Welcome, welcome.
FWIW, I only partially agree with you on the Israel stuff.
Less people would have died if the Israelis had not launched a war of aggression in 1967. You see, if there is no war, then less people die. In addition, the people caught in the territory the Israelis conquered would not have had to live under a brutal military occupation for 35 years running. Israeli propaganda notwithstanding, there was no threat that Israel would have been conquered by the Syrians and Egyptians in 1967. That is just laughable. It was Israel that started the war. In fact, Israel itself has never been attacked–all of its wars have been wars of aggression.
So, to sum up: without a war in 1967 less people would have died than died in the 1967 war.
That is very curious, in light of the fact that many of the very same people who were propping up the Death Squad Democracy in El Salvador are now running the Bush White House. You have such luminaries as Otto Reich as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, former head of the Office of Public Diplomacy under Reagan/Bush, in charge of spreading lies about Nicaragua and El Salvador. You have John Negraponte as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., former ambassador to Honduras under Reagan/Bush, actually the Honduran proconsul, deeply involved in running the Contra terrorist war out of Honduras. You have Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, all heavily involved in the various terrorist activities of Reagan/Bush.
It depends on what you mean by “the U.S.” If by “the U.S.” you mean Otto Reich, John Negraponte, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, then we should be very skeptical. Given the massive amounts of blood dripping from their hands, it is unlikely that they have undergone a conversion. On the contrary, they seem to get ever more bold with their desires to dominate the world.
My apologies if it seemed like I was preaching. But, I did not see any mention of these facts in this thread.
It is very important, I think, to put the current situation in a historical context. While the U.S. mass media ignores the past history of U.S. imperialism, the rest of the world is well aware of it. When we try to understand what is going on, we need to look at what has happened to create the situation we are currently in. Thus, the past imperialism of the U.S. should be at the forefront of any discussion about an invasion of another country.
I am amazed that anybody can believe that an invasion of Iraq has anything whatsoever to do with “humanitarian impulses.” That just blows me away. In fact, it is inconceivable that current plans have anything to do with humanitarian impulses.
Sanctions have killed betwen 500,000 and 1.5 million people. The U.S. has been illegally bombing Iraq for the last decade while it imposes its illegal “no fly zones.” And, actually, these zones are not really “no fly.” They are “no Iraqi fly zones.” Turkey, for example, has been allowed to fly its attack helicopters into Iraq to kill Kurds. And, all through the 1990’s, Turkey was aided in their massacres of Kurds with U.S. military and diplomatic support. Clearly, the U.S. leadership doesn’t give a damn about the Kurds.
You seem to think that imperialism is just some mistaken implementation of a policy that could be beneficial. If only we can be “humanitarian” in our imperialism, then everything will be OK? This is a severe misunderstanding of imperialism, which is not just a mistaken policy. It is an entire system of domination and control, of which wars and aggression are just one manifestation. If you care about the welfare of the oppressed, you must oppose the single greatest factor in their oppression: western imperialism.
Annexation requires certain conditions that the U.S. is loathe to abide by. For one thing, if Kuwait became a state, Kuwaitis would have to be granted the rights of U.S. citizens, with votes and all that. This puts too much control of the resources into the hands of the people of the country. As Henry Kissinger remarked, “oil is too important to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” The system of neocolonial dependency that the U.S. inherited from the U.K., and “improved” upon is a much more profitable one. They get to control the region, without having to worry about any unpleasantness like human rights.
As for this being, in large part, about control of oil, this cannot be seriously in doubt. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, maybe the first. Iraq has so far been out of the grasp of U.S. control. Given that the U.S. already controls Saudi Arabia, control of Iraq would give it an overwhelming domination over the world’s energy supplies.
Also, the situation in Saudi Arabia is looking more shaky than ever. The U.S. might lose control over the country in the next few years. Control of Iraq would provide (at least in the fantasies of Rumsfeld, Pearle and Bush) a guarantee of U.S. domination.
In some respects, this planned invasion seems like an act of desparation for the U.S. empire. The U.S. has lost all credibility in the eyes of the Third World, and its position of domination could be lost in many countries over the next decade or so. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the family dictatorships under the thumb of Washington, could be lost to internal revolutions. The solution hit upon by U.S. imperialism is to play to its strength, which is war. Ideologically, the U.S. has no influence, but it can always win on the battlefield. As it sees the potential for its colonial dependencies to slip through its grip, it will seek to tighten the grip by waging perpetual war.
There is another possibility. We should get out of the empire business. We should encourage democracy instead of squashing it wherever it arises. We should withdraw our troops from around the world, and apologize to all the people we have oppressed, and to the families of people we have killed. It is not too late for the U.S. to change, but very soon it will be. With the Bushite policy of waging limitless war to dominate the world, we will eventually lose our empire. We will have more 911’s as our empire collapses, and the hatred spawned by such massacres as we have perpetrated in Iraq comes back to bite us.
Our empire will end one way or another. It can end either in a burning and smashing up of the world, or we can end it peacefully and try to coexist with others in a more democratic and just world.
Without delving any deeper into this quicksand-like thread, I’d like to point out that this is simply erroneous. You hurt your own stance by taking such a ahistorical view of things. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 is the most glaring example ( Arab surprise attack ). But most of the Arab-Israeli conflicts have been at least equivocal. While you can argue motivation, it is a fact that Arab forces appeared to have been aiming to stamp Israel out in 1948 and the evidence for a pending attack in 1967 seemed threatening enough, as far as I can make out. Even the invasion of Lebanon had a source of provocation, in the form of cross-border raids and rocket attacks.
I’m no Israeli apologist, in fact I am highly critical of a number of tactics and political stances taken by the Israeli government at various times and I’m definitely no fan of the current government. But let’s not be ridiculous - This is not a black & white issue. There is plenty of blame to be shared by all.
That was not an attack on Israel proper. It was an attack on Eqyptian territory being occupied by Israel. Israel itself has never been attacked since 1948.
That last part is simply not true. The PLO had, in fact, honored a cease-fire for over a year, despite Israeli provocations. The Lebanon invasion didn’t even have a credible pretext.
As for the motivations, I mean, you can argue all day about who wants what, and there has certainly been plenty of talk of destroying Israel. The fact is, though, that Israel is by far the dominant military power in the region, and has been for several decades. Israel itself has never been attacked, and has never been seriously threatened since 1948.
Of course, you are correct that there is plenty of blame to go around. However, relatively, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are as clear violations of international law as you are likely to find. Just as clear are the continuing violations of every international norm in these occupied territories. Since this is a major source of conflict in the Middle East, it is imperative that Israel withdraw from these territories.
Pardon my hijack. I’m enjoying Chumpsky’s contributions a GREAT deal, cheering section is on their feet. But…
Fewer.
I forget the proper way to explain this, but I can wing it!
Less refers to a quanitity of one single thing (less juice, less blood, less land, less honor), fewer refers to a lesser number of many things (Fewer people, fewer dollars, fewer zits, fewer books)
less traffic/fewer cars
less blood/fewer blood cells
less worry/fewer concerns
less education/fewer books, teachers, classes
less food/fewer meals
Sorry… I’ve just been seeing it alot lately. Hadda say something.
Don’t care about those :“You should not discuss this or that, we have gone through it already”. It is just a way to be against free speech! And to try to keep the discussion without a proper frame.
The US citizens should speak of world affairs reflecting to the thoughts around the world. So does everybody else do, with a few exeptions, but they are in situations like they are; Turkey, Israel, former South Africa, etc.
Naturally it is their freedom to keep monologues, but we come to situations where the people there are asking: “Why are they hating us so much?”
Btw. Some Afhan minister (or what-ever) wrote that they do not have food enough a few days ago. I can not find the site. Has anyone a clue?
When e.g. EU is “helping”, the half or more of the sum stays in EU, because they count all the costs, including the administration.
If You want stories about this, just whistle.
Most of the help is just bull-shit. USA helping Mexicans. Yes they are, and at the same time they are selling subvented farming products to Mexico.
Result: The Mexican farmers can’t compete with the US food and they become even poorer.
After that, it is showed: "See even the poor Mexican farmers are against “free trade”.
So if we think: “Bomb first, pay later”. (Help later). It is total bullshitism, when we have a chance to put the inspectors to Iraq and see how Saddam and Baath will react on that.
Just unify the world, and even a dictator such as Saddam will not think twice before doing something foolish.
The question remanis: Is it time for France to call the Bushist bluff on an Iraq resolution?
Let us not forget to thank December for the original post!
It’s oil! It’s oil! It’s oil!
It’s oil!
It’s oil!
It’s oil!
It’s oil!
among other things.
