I was unaware that the US had invaded any of those countries in the last 100 years, thank you for pointing it out to me. Seems kinda strange to leave all of those wars out of the history books, doesn’t it? Must be the liberal media or something, right? As a point of fact, you’ve given good examples of where the U.S. has not invaded, but has rather thrown it’s weight behind one facton or another (or failed to after promising aid-ask those poor saps at the Bay of Pigs) with unfortunate results. While I never claimed that my list was exhaustive, thanks for proving my point.
I think you’re missing the point. Every country has the right to declare war on or invade another. That’s one of the perogatives of being a nation. Holland could send it’s navy over here and shell New York City if it wanted. The hard part is that when a country wages war, it has to deal with the results (which in this case would likely be the sinking of the Dutch navy and a sudden upswing in business for Amsterdam hookers after the Marines landed)
Iran was a religious uprising where the church siezed power. Even though the people were whipped into a frenzy to oust the Shah, they were never subsiquently given a vote to determine the form the new government would take, and they don’t have free elections now.
You’ve got it wrong. I think already answerd this in this thread. See post #166. You still haven’t adressed what I said there except with sarcasm.
Are you seriously going to pretend that you are (or are you genuinely) ignorant of the U.S. invasions of
Nicaragua 1907, 1910, 1912-1933 occupation
Cuba 1912, 1917 - 1933 occupation
Haiti 1914 - 1934 occupation
and Guatemala 1954?
(You might be able to knock El Salvador off my list of invasions by ignoring our 1932 gunboats and by pretending that we were not the dominant supplier of arms, training, and special troops during the 1980s, but I would consider the mining of a neutral harbor as an act of war.)
Note that I left off three prior invasions of Nicaragua that occurred prior to your 100 year window. I also left off all the “interventions” in Panama, Honduras, Domincan Republic, ands several other locations on the grounds that they were closer to your claim of just helping the bully that we liked better.
I also left out the various “interventions” in Mexico and a couple of places where I doubt that the U.S. actively made the situation worse (although it rarely helped).
To pretend that I have made your point simply by pretending that events never occurred (or that your “100 years” began in 1980) is not a very effecrtive tactic when the history is out there for anyone to discover. As to why youi would post on the topic from a position of ignorance, I am not sure of your rationale.
Our occupations of Cuba were in accord with the Platt Amendment. Since troops went to Cuba in acordance with treaty, I don’t consider it a “military intervention” per se. After Cuba terminated the agreement, we didn’t go in anymore. Nicaragua was much the same, we interviened on behalf of the Nicaraguan President. We left when a free election was held( although it took 15 years!). Arguably, things got worse when dictators siezed power after we had gone-Batista and Somoza. Our presence prevented that from happening earlier.
Haiti: I forgot about that one. You’re right there. I thought you were talking about 1994, and that wasn’t an invasion at all.
Guatemala was the CIA, wasn’t it? That’s not exactly what I’m talking about either.
This is exactly the point on which we disagree. Evidently, I’ll have to leave it at that.
I suspect you know as little as I do about Iran. Evidently, at least according to post #5 in this thread, that’s incorrect.
What you said there is a red herring. You limit the scope of what you mean by “military intervention” and “freely elected government” to such an extent that the principle I’m discussing is no longer a principle, but a triviality. (Note that I’m saying the actions themselves are trivial, just the principle on which you rely.) Refer to part #1 of this post.
Fine, we disagree. You’re wrong, but I’m not going to argue with you about it, it’s pointless. I am curious, however. By what logic do you conclude that a soverign nation does not have the right to wage war?
I am hardly an expert on Iran, but I do know a little something about it. Read the last part of the post you linked. The real power is held by a council of mullahs, and they can do pretty much what they want. Communist countries had “elections” too, remember?
Exactly how is this widening the discussion? Recall the nature of the threat: that Saddam had WMDs, and was itching to hand them over to terrorists who would then use them on us.
It always took both parts to add up to a threat. If Saddam didn’t have WMDs, no threat. If he had them, but wasn’t about to hand them to a bunch of crazed loons who weren’t his sons, then no threat.
At any rate, the crack Bush intel-invent crew invented intel in both categories. They invented Saddam’s nuclear threat, which Bush and Cheney - especially Cheney - hyped to high heaven. (Nukes are still the only true weapon of mass destruction; bio and chem weapons are likely to kill dozens, perhaps hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. We’ve already lost the equivalent of the victims of a passel of bio/chem attacks in Iraq.) And they invented bogus connections between Saddam and terrorists. Including Zarqawi, who we probably could have offed before the war.
Really? Then you flunk the IQ test, history-boy. Got rid of them because he was scared of us; preserved ambiguity about it because he didn’t want to let his neighbors (especially Iran) know how weak he was.
You flunk the reading-comprehension test too: I was bringing this up, not as an example of why we shouldn’t invade (although I admit it works well for that too) but as an example of the Administration pretending a problem doesn’t even exist.
If the Administration had publicly discussed this problem ahead of time and explained their strategy for dealing with it, then it would have been a matter of whether or not one felt their strategy was credible. But they never had strategies for dealing with problems they didn’t believe in the existence of.
You sure you were a history major? Sheesh. The Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Ramadi and Samarra are “being run from Tehran”. Can I have some of what you’re smoking? There’s plenty of reason to believe that even the Shi’ite insurgents would lose a lot of street cred if they were taking orders from Iran; remember, these two countries were at war for a decade, not very long ago, with plenty of loss of life on both sides.
Damn - I really do want to know what you’re smoking! We’re killing dozens of them for every one of us that gets killed, and this is going to cause them to look on us more favorably as time goes by?
Oh yeah, the reason the press doesn’t cover Iraq’s ‘rebuilding’ is that it isn’t safe for them to leave their hotels. It makes it hard for them to go out and get the story about how great things are going in the places that are too risky for them to visit.
Ah yes, the insurgents you say are being run from Shi’ite Iran.
Whether we treat the Iraqi government as equal partners depends on who wins on Tuesday: Kerry will, Bush won’t. But the fundamental problem is that there’s little hope of a state monopoly on violence. If Al-Qaqaa is just a drop in the bucket, then there’s an essentially unlimited amount of bang floating around Iraq; any group that feels it’s coming out the loser (especially the Sunni Arabs) can be a danmed nasty sore loser. There is no strong central authority, at least not unless and until the Shi’ites defeat the Sunnis by force of arms - and possibly the Kurds too, if they can’t come to some agreement. And Sistani has repeatedly said ‘no’ to the idea of a federation-type arrangement.
I expect you to acknowledge that the war you supported wasn’t the war you would have liked to have seen, but the war that Bush was clearly going to give us: one based on lies, illusions, absurdly unrealistic assumptions, and a total absence of planning.
No, I think it was a reasonable expectation for him (well, not necessarily him personally, but Rice or Powell or someone, speaking on his behalf) to address this before the war. Fuck the warm fuzzies; this is about counting the cost before you go into battle, rather than afterwards.
:splort:
Yeah, we could have destroyed the country in order to save it. But the problem there was same as in Iraq: the insurgents weren’t easily distinguishable from the people we were supposedly there to help. And in neither situation were we willing to learn enough ahead of time to be able to distinguish one from the other on the ground, with predictable results.
And when, exactly, did Johnson get into peace talks? And how many years had we been fighting a full-fledged war over there before then?
And your point is…?
I guess the no-fly zones and the sanctions were nothing.
Yes, Saddam would still be in power. (Omigod, look, it’s a boogeyman!) And just to keep even with you, I’ll “call bullshit” on the rest. They’re a bunch of assertions with no apparent connection to the subject at hand; they’re not even worth a counterargument, because there’s no argument to counter.
Before the war, there was no evidence of any planning for the aftermath. That was the war you supported, not your fantasy war. Deal with it.
By a similar principle that says I have no Right to walk into your home and kill you if I deem it to be in my best interests. The difference as concerns individuals vs. nations is one of scale, not of principle. Red in tooth and claw, nasty and brutish, and all that…
Good. I’m glad you can admit to the trivialness of your viewpoint, inconsistent though you are in its application.
I dunno. If we get to declare that an event is not an invasion just because we encouraged our puppet to invite us in, then the U.S. owes a serious and sincere apology to the former Soviet Union for all those nasty allegations of “invasion” that we hurled at them for their intervention in Afghanistan. Otherwise, we are simply using word games to hide our hypocrisy.
Similarly, the Platt Amendment was simply the colonial imposition of our will with an intent to prevent anyone else’s interference. It was hardly a mutual agreement between peers. We pulled our troops out when FDR decided to try a different tack with “managing” Latin America and our failure to go back in had little to do with respecting Cuba’s sovereignty, per se.