Discounting a few minor periods of isolationism, the United States has pursued a nonstop program of frightful militarized aggression around the world from the moment of its inception. Fundamentally based on the global European expansion of the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries and with an institutionalized guiding principle of entitlement often supported by delusions of manifest destiny (too shameful to put into words) the resolute vector of US foreign policy has been the pursuit of dominance over global resources.
Do not forget that during the nineteenth century, the US military- at the behest of the nation,s burgeoning European population and as directed by their elected civilian leaders- promulgated ruthless decades of war against the Native American tribes. This tremendous land grab led to the accretion of hundreds of thousands of square miles of prime temperate territory from sea to shining sea.
In addition, 19th century American private & naval control of the Atlantic Triangle trade in agricultural resources, slaves, and manufactured products led to the rise of a bourgeois elite awash in wealth, not to mention a present day awash in lingering racial inequalities, poverty, and intractable national guilt.
Twentieth century American militarized expansionism on a global stage can be said to have started in 1898 with the armed annexation of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. A steady slate of sometimes vicious US military backed coup d,etats around the world ensued, including the establishment of puppet regimes in various banana Republics in the Americas.
US public disgust of the horrors of senseless mechanized warfare during WWI (essentially a major European conflict) led to an exhausted interwar isolationist period.
WWII ushered in the end of the European & Japanese superpowers, to be replaced by the American and Russian versions. Proxy wars ensued all over the globe as these two nations vied for economic control, ideological domination, natural resource control, and control over human and intellectual resources. Nationalist and rebel movements in the failed European colonies became the battlefield surrogates in this cold, cold conflict. American and Russian arms and direct military training via thousands of both nations, military personnel spread to the most remote reaches of human occupation.
These proxy wars and their progeny have raged for fifty years, with many lingering hotspots still smoldering. American and Russian automatic weapons and landmines kill thousands world-wide every year. Many brutal conflicts in Africa became entrenched long-term quagmires as the opposing factions exploited the munificent supplies of arms pouring into these countries.
Meantime, the US and Russia embarked on a string of toe-to-toe belligerent military adventures- in Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Collateral destabilizing spillover to adjacent nations has created some of the worst conflicts as witnessed in the destruction of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.
Post WWII, in the Middle East the CIA staged complex coups in Iran in the forties, involving the Shah, and in the fifties, forged a strong military security pact with the Saudis. These tactics were part of an attempt to wrest control of this region from the Iranians, British, and Russians to secure hegemony over the world,s major energy reserves.
For a long time, Americans have enjoyed a grossly improper percentage of global resource consumption and have taken an incredible ride. The rising Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Third World economies are going to continue to consume an ever rapidly increasing slice of the pie. American control over, and exploitation of, global resources is waning. Maybe we are also learning that the cost of open ended multi-year military operations is devastating to our national economy, and to our individual household economies.
American military policy during the Bush years has been an unmitigated disaster. Jingoistic in the extreme, the policy is so short sighted as to be laughable, if it were not really happening. I hate being lied to by our government in order to justify American military aggression.
Approximately 90,000 documented civilian deaths in Iraq since this war began. These are men, women, and children, families in fact- not so different from our own.
What we have required our military to do in Iraq is immoral and is not right.
