I was thinking about the embargo on Cuba for 45 years and then thought about Agent Orange and the 500,000 children born with defects in Vietnam. Thinking of children made me think of Iraq and the hundreds of thousand of children killed or maimed there since the invasion, as well as the 20% of the population displaced or dead (it’s about 5 million?).
I don’t know as much about US policy in central America under Reagan as I might, not about policy in south America before that. Or even Cambodia for that matter. Palastine, Lebanon, Afghanistan?
I guess it’s Vietnam with all those deformed children?
This is a Great Debates question, really. I think the answer might be Mexico, because it’s the Third World country closest to the U.S. (Of course, it gets some benefits from that as well.)
Or, to be really argumentative, I think that you might find that it’s the United States itself that suffers most from U.S. attentions
In terms of absolute numbers, it would have to be Vietnam. If take population into account, then Vietnam would have to compete with the various Latin American nations where CIA-backed thugs murdered hundreds of thousands of people: Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, and others. Of course suffering is not a numerical value, and no one can say how the suffering of having bombs dropped on you compares to the suffering of living under a tyrannical puppet government kept in place by the U. S. military, as in Saudi Arabia.
The entire population of Iceland is around 320,000, Agent Orange resulted in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects - according to Wiki.
You talking about mortgages and loans right - debt, not death, as in dead, and deformity from birth?
Maybe I’ve missed something, but I was under the impression that there had never been a definitive proof of Agent Orange being a birth defect causative?
How many Americans have died in our misguided military adventures over the years? Not to mention Indians, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, and whatever other horrible things our government has done to our own people.
We have to be disqualified or the US wins in a landslide.
Progressives and liberals who live in the US and have to put up with the authoritarian conservatives who live here and run various state and federal governments. Something like 40,000 die a year from lack of health care. Add that in with all the people who are malnourished because of poor social programs and low minimum wages, and you are looking at a lot of suffering. Consider the 10,000+ a day who lose their health insurance, and all the unnecessary suffering they face.
In contemporary US, I’d say we suffer the most from our own crap. As far as foreign nations, maybe Cambodia. We bombed the country and killed many. Then Pol Pot came to power because of it.
However, as a counterpoint the US was trying to hold back communism in southeast asia, and Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia only went communist after we left. So you can say we helped bring Pol Pot about, but we also tried to stop him.
Ironically, it was communist Vietnam that invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot and stopped his genocide. So a government we didn’t like or want to exist in the first place ended up stopping a genocide we sortof helped cause (but also tried to prevent at the same time).
