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The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World
MAY 13, 2016
by LUCIANA BOHNE
Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of Americas battle for world domination in the 21st century.
If not stopped, it will be a short century.
Since 1945, Americas Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free Worlds Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earths people. In the 19th century, America exterminated another kind of red menace, writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (Indian reservations), in the name of civilizing the savages. By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grabinternal imperialism was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.
If not stopped, it will be a short century.
Since 1945, Americas Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free Worlds Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earths people. In the 19th century, America exterminated another kind of red menace, writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (Indian reservations), in the name of civilizing the savages. By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grabinternal imperialism was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.
As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.
So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent genocide; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rainin Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.
Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (the Arab coalition) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?
$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pactsTTP, TTIP, etc.that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called Washington Consensus.
So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent genocide; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rainin Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.
Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (the Arab coalition) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?
$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pactsTTP, TTIP, etc.that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called Washington Consensus.
In this scenario, no potential presidential candidateeven establishment-party dissenterwho does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan Washington Consensus and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the international wrong or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle imperialism, elections will be a sleepwalkers exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.
Full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/the-great-leap-backward-americas-illegal-wars-on-the-world/
Again, I realize many countries are complicit in all of this, including my own. The horror needs to stop.
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The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World (Original Post)
polly7
May 2016
OP
and there's Bernie voting to pay for all these weapons and wars, year after year after year nt
msongs
May 2016
#1
msongs
(67,496 posts)1. and there's Bernie voting to pay for all these weapons and wars, year after year after year nt
Jude the Obscure
(50 posts)2. He supports the troops
But I want the wars billed to the oligarchs if they want to have one.
CanadaexPat
(496 posts)5. But voting against what started all of this and opposing
escalations.
RKP5637
(67,112 posts)3. Big profits $$$$$$'s in the war machine. Pathetic. Killing, maiming and destruction are big
money makes for those on the take. The US is not alone in this, but collectively, often humans totally suck as a species IMO.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)6. The USA has been captured by the Neo-Cons.
They didn't have good intentions when they stole the 2000 election. 9/11 was our Reichstag fire.
CanadaexPat
(496 posts)4. To me this is the number one issue in The USA.
I don't see how we have the right to complain about domestic issues when we're dropping bombs on people in multiple countries.