Wars of America

In My Humble Opinion
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You’ve asked how I feel, dio e morto, and I’ll tell you. For the record I was born in the USA, and I’ve lived here since. WW II happened before I was born, and I was just a kid when the big show in Korea happened. My brother served in our army of occupation 20 years later in the land of kimchi. IMHO, South Korea took about that long to benefit from being a capitalist country. Was it worth the billions it cost to occupy a faraway country for half a century? I say no.

I’ve noticed that most of the responses so far have either parroted the gov’t line, or given a knee-jerk anti-Euro shot. I want you to know we don’t all feel that way.

It took a long time for our incursion into Vietnam to ramp up to the spectacular catastrophe it was when I was in high school. We were fighting for one ruthless dictator against another for the bragging rights to a sorry piece of jungle halfway around the world. Historians still amuse themselves by arguing whether we had any good reason to intrude, whether we were a part of an assasination of one head of state to bring in one more friendly to us, and whether the war could have been ended sooner than it was. I was lucky, and I didn’t have to go. I knew men who died there. I know men who are warped forever by what they saw there. IMHO, our Vietnam misadventure was a huge mistake.

Grenada, IMHO, was entirely unnecessary. Furthermore, it was badly done. Postwar reports showed, for example, that invading troops were using sketchy travel-agent maps, and they often got lost.

Our trip to Panama to remove Noriega was, up to that point, the most expensive arrest of a drug trafficker in the history of the world.

Our trip to Afghanistan “reduced to rubble” a country that was already rubble. The top Al-Qaeda guys slipped away, and the heroin guys had plenty of time to sell off their goods. Now, just a few months later, with a new ruler “in charge,” the Taliban is quietly slipping back into power, and the Afghan heroin industry is setting new sales records. Did we win? No. We had the chance of a lifetime to cripple the world’s heroin trade, and we blew it.

The war in Iraq is still going on. It’s unclear whether the guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings will drive us out. It is clear that we attacked under false pretense. Half a thousand young Americans have died for lies. How do I feel? I don’t like it.

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Mods-- any way to reconcile this thread with its almost equally-long duplicate?

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You know damn well that they were about to invade Vermont.

I think it is great that you are a European.

Okay, it depends on the action. I don’t see how one could call the defense of S. Korea immoral or unjustified. In light of what happened in the Soviet Union & China, e.g. purges & famines that would make Hitler blush, and considering what the communist Khmer Rouge would do to Cambodia, I don’t really see why trying to defend S. Vietnam was so terribly wrong, if ill-advised. I don’t see why booting the Iraqis out of Kuwait was so terrible, and I don’t see why trying to bring stability to Haiti is a sin.

Juxtapose that with helping to create and fund the Mujahadine (sp?) and then abandoning Afghanistan, the war on drugs, and creating Fox News, America’s record can be called spotty. But that’s politics.

Hell, there are Americans who would probably like to re-animate Hitler and run him for President. Ain’t no way we’re going to agree on how to deal w/ Soviet influence, largesse, and expansion into Central America. But I’d prefer to risk some bad conflicts rather than pass by some good ones. If we had deployed troops and nipped the Rwandan genocide in the bud, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that there’d be some dumb-fucker pissing and moaning about how we killed a few civilians and bla, bla, mother-fucking bla.

That last sentence wasn’t directed at you, dio_e_morto. Whether action or inaction is the sin depends on the context, and I don’t think America’s record on false positives is as bad as you seem to portray it.

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The 44 million people in South Korea, who are currently not starving to death, might disagree.

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…or they might, considering the swelling Anti-American sentiment there.

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Let’s not start with WWI.

I will give the various invasions of Canada a pass for the moment. From 1775 to 1778, they were attempts to neutralize British forces or to encourage the former French citizens to join the rebellion and the civilians were not attacked. During the War of 1812, the British who were in what was later settled as Upper Canada and the hotheads from Virginia and Kentucky each attempted multiple invasions of the other’s lands. The few not-yet-Canadian civilians were not targets of the fighting.
Similarly, the attacks on the Barbary Coast could be legitimately compared to the invasion of Afghanistan (not to Iraq) in that we were defending our civilian commerical fleets from attacks.

Passing over the questionable situations of Texas and Hawaii, where citizens of the U.S. immigrated to those regions, then took them away from the original owners and handed them to the U.S., and also passing over the roughly twice as many events as the following list in which U.S. troops were used (legitimately) to defend the U.S. embassy or (illegitimately) to use a show of force to ensure American interests, but where we did not get around to shooting anyone, we still find:

1846 - provoke a war with Mexico in a blatant land grab.
1891 - “Intervene” in Chile
1891 - “Intervene” in Haiti
1894 - “Intervene” in Nicaragua
1895 - “Intervene” in Colombia (Panama)
1896 - “Intervene” in Nicaragua
1898 - provoke war with Spain in a blatant theft of empire (following which we waged a truly bloody suppression of the Philipine independence movement and also killed off a few folks in Cuba who had believed that we came to help them achieve independence)
1912 - “Intervene” in Nicaragua (occupy country until 1933)
1914 - “Intervene” in Dominican Republic
1914 - “Intervene” in Haiti (occupy country until 1934)
1916 - “Intervene” in Dominican Republic (occupy country until 1924)
1917 - “Intervene” in Cuba (occupy country until 1934)
1918 - Invade Russia with intent to decide Revolution victor
1924 - “Intervene” in Panama
1954 - Uses proxy army to overthrow Guatemalan government
1960 - “Intervene” in Vietnam to prop up separatist government in violation of 1954 peace treaty (U.S. hangs around until 1973–you may have heard of it)
1989 - “Intervene” in Panama
2003 - Invade Iraq to establish friendly government

(After 1945, the U.S. military was used less, as the CIA organized local fighters to achieve U.S. goals.)

Now, lest someone think I am buying into the OP’s little rant, I will note that the U.S. interventions pale in comparison to those of the U.K. or even France and that every major power has attempted to do much the same thing over the last couple of hundred years. (Even Belgium took a whack at it a couple of times.) It is also true that on a number of occasions that I did not list above, the U.S. was actually asked to provide security in the form of a military presence.
My point is not that the U.S. is uniquely evil in its desire to “send in the troops,” but to point out to people raised on the myth that we never send troops except to fight wars for freedom that we have a pretty long tradition of acting just like all the major powers throughout history.

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We invaded Russia in 1918? Huh? That’s the first I’ve ever heard of that.

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  • Not that any of these interventions didn’t contain an element of comedy. The Navy sent a ship to Santiago, kept the sailors cooped up onboard for six months, then sent them ashore, with the inevitable results, described in the link:

http://www.spanamwar.com/evans.htm

Said the captain of the second ship to arrive, Robley Evans:" [Schley’s] men were probably drunk on shore, properly drunk; which they did on Chilean rum paid for with good United States money." For this agressive spirit, Evans won the nickname “Fighting” Bob Evans (I wonder what they would’ve called him if brothels had figured more prominently in the conflict).

A CMoH winner in the Hatian intervention, Smedley Butler, accomplished on of the greatest “shooting off at the mouth” in US Military History, in his famous statement in this link:

http://www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm

“Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Personally, I’ve always felt that Butler’s candor is overpraised. By the time he made this statement, he was out of the Corps, dying of cancer, and pissed off at having been passed over for commandant after John Lejune’s tenure in favor of the more mallable Wendell Nevile. So he doesn’t rank with the truly suicidal shooters-off-at-the-mouths, Leonard Wood and Douglas MacArthur.

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You can bet that during the Cold War, Russian kids heard abut it.
American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918-1919

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How interesting. Thank you for the link, tomndebb.

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Quiz (and HJ) for Aesiron (and aesiron only)

Q.
Who said:
Wherever there is injustice, you will find us.
Wherever there is suffering, we’ll be there.
Wherever liberty is threatened, you will find…

a) George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
b) The U.S.M.C
c) The New Zoo Review
d) The Three Amigos

A. d, and please tell me you have heard of them… :slight_smile:

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What was your point in posting that?

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I like that we’re killing terrorists. Sorta ambivalent about being in Haiti.
Does that make me a bad person?

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Am I the only one who feels that this thread should maybe be in gd or bbq pit? This is like asking “how do you feel about the fact that black people are constantly stealing things and shooting people?”

This was a loaded question imho.

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oh, im also proud to report that I stopped beating my wife last week hehe.