From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri 02 May 2003 - 00:24:40 GMT
> > From: joedees@bellsouth.net
> >
> > Hokay. I would just like to point out that the US had to play dirty
> > pool with friendly dictators in order to effectively contend with
> > the Soviet
> bloc
> > in the world arena, where they were doing the same thing in spades.
> > Once their totalitarian hegemony crumbled, that unfortunate
> > necessity was removed, and our post-Soviet interventions have been
> > mainly about toppling despots and providing needed humanitarian aid.
>
> The US does build a lot of bridges around the world. But toppling
> despots is clearly not a priority. In Venezuala, the Bush
> administration appluaded and may have helped organize a coup intended
> to topple a democratically elected president. In countries throughout
> the global South democratic control over the economy is thwarted by
> US-backed IMF structural adjustment programs.
>
> > Virtuous interventions (or attempts at them in the third case, or
> > urging and support for them in the last one) since then: Bosnia,
> > Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, East Timor.
>
> The Bosnian uprising was financed and organized by a US-led coalition
> including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. It was a rerun of the
> destabilization campaign in Afghanistan, which, according to Zbigniew
> Brzezinski, was initiated six months prior to the 1979 Soviet invasion
> in an effort to draw the Soviets into a Vietnam-like quagmire. Seems
> to have worked. Also destroyed a nation. Kosovo was an excuse to
> insert NATO forces into southeastern Europe. When Milosevic showed
> that he was willing to acquiesce to all reasonable demands, NATO added
> another demand that Milosevic allow NATO occupation of all of
> Yugoslavia. His refusal provided the pretext for the bombing, which
> set off a huge wave of refugees. Within weeks the US press was
> reporting that the bombing had been in response to the refugees.
> Somalia, as everyone agrees, was a total disaster, both for Somalia
> and the US. Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party was installed following a
> 1963 US-backed coup. Hussein demonstrated his deference by asking
> permission from the US before invading Kuwait in 1990. Permission was
> granted by then-Ambassador April Glaspie, who referred to the
> situation as an internal border dispute of no interest to the US. As
> soon as the invasion took place, President Bush had his excuse to
> occupy Saudi Arabia. More importantly, he could bomb the
> infrastructure of Iraq for six weeks, thereby destroying Iraq as a
> regional power. This bombing had no effect on the subsequent ground
> war. The country was then punished for twelve years with an embargo,
> apparently to keep it in its weakened position. Minimum half a
> million dead. Haiti finally drove out its US-backed dictator,
> Duvalier, and elected Aristide. A US-backed coup removed Aristide,
> who fled, of all places, to the US, where he was informed by President
> Clinton that he couldn't go back until he'd signed a statement
> pledging to abide by IMF restrictions. Bush illegally invaded Panama
> in 1989 to oust a previously US-backed dictator who'd become
> troublesome and is now residing in a US prison. At least 2000
> Panamanians were killed in this action. East Timor was raped by the
> US-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto, who was given the green light
> to proceed with genocide by Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford in 1975.
> The US, even under Carter, supplied the money and weapons needed to
> carry out the slaughter.
>
> This is hardly a list of countries demonstrating US benevolence. If
> Mr. Dees is simply ignorant about the true effects of US foreign
> policy, he will no doubt write back to thank me for enlightening him.
> If, however, he is unconsciously propagating pathological memes, as I
> suspect, he will come back with more of the same misinformation.
> Memes that radically distort the truth in our favor serve to exploit
> our narcissistic, tribalistic tendency to see ourselves as the good
> guys. Such memes succeed where the courage to face reality fails.
>
> Ted
>
Dace is, of course, memetically filtering the distinction I made between
pre-Soviet-Bloc dissolution and post-Soviet-bloc-dissolution US policy.
While the US supported Saddam before the Soviet bloc disintegrated,
to provide a counterbalance to a Soviet-bloc-friendly Iran, that support
vanished when Saddam turned his gaze southwards. The comments of
US ambassador Glaspie were intentionally misinterpreted; Glaspie
thought that the intended action was to be economic, or at the very
most to close down the supposed slant-drilling wells. Iraq had another
reason to invade Kuwait, also; annexation of that country would mean
that Saddam did not have to pay a 12 billion dollar debt owed to them
due to loans taken out to finance the Iran-Iraq war. In fact, subsequent
the embargo was not a US embargo, but a UN embargo, and they
wanted it to continue while weapons inspectors continued to be
deceived and the military and Saddam's palaces continued to grow at
the Iraqi peoples' expense, as he outfitted his 50+ palaces with
fountain-fed Olympic + sized pools and still received propoganda
benefit from his people dying from drinking tainted water. The coalition
no-fly zones saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kurds and
Shiites; Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands more before it was
instituted. As far as the US wanting to occupy Saudi Arabia, US troops
were invited in as a counterweight to the threat posed by Saddam. The
Saudis chose the US over Bin Laden's 5000 or so Mujaheddin, whose
jihad would've been rolled up in short order by Saddam's tank divisions
- a slight that festered in Bin Laden like bitter gall, and eventually led to
his 9/11 sponsorship. Now that the Iraqi threat no longer exists, the US
military is pulling out of saudi arabia, and being welcomed in with open
arms by Qatar which paradoxically is not only the home base of the al
Jazeera News Agency, but also the only country besides Saudi Arabia
to be officially Wahhabist.
While the US was willing to allow Indonesia to repress the Catholics on
east Timor during the Cold war in return for that government tilting to
the US rather than the USSR, that situation drastically changed once
the USSR was no more. In Venezuela, the US stayed out of the
dispute, but counseled the Venezuelan government that nationalization
of their oil industry, a plan of the leftist regime there, was not an
eventuality which the US favored.
The US did indeed support the Afghan rebels against the occupying
Soviets to give them a taste of Vietnam quagmedicine, and made a vast
mistake in walking away from that liberated satellite and leaving it to the
fundamentalist Muslim rebels rather than instituting democratic reforms.
The US has subsequently suffered horrific blowback from that terrible
miscalculation, as the Taliban largely consolidated the country, and
invited Bin Laden and his Al Quaeda back in when he was expelled
from the Sudan. The US will not walk away from Afghanistan again,
and will not walk away from Iraq.
Milosevic was attempting to consolidate a Greater Russian Orthodox
Catholic Serbia, but Roman Catholic Croatia and their strongman
Tudjman would have none of it. Bosnia was multiethnic and the groups
got along well until Milosevic decided to back Karadzic and Mladic in
their attempts to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of non-Serbs. The real
uprising was the uprising of the ethnically cleansing Bosnian Serbs,
backed by Serbia; funds began flowing in to the Bosnian Muslims in
response to this. Killing fields hold buried tens of thousands, rape was
widely used bu the Bosnian Serbs as an instrument of war against
Muslim women, and the first concentration camps in Europe since Nazi
Germany were built and filled with Bosnian Muslims, and yet the
European community did nothing. The only way to dismantle those
death camps and to prevent others from being built, and to stop new
killing fields from being sown with more ethnically-cleansed bodies, was
for someone - in this case, NATO - to occupy the terrain.
In Somalia, Aidid was using the starvation of the Somali people as a
political weapon, and continued to do so until he was shot by a member
of a rival warlord's gang, and subsequently died.
When Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign was thwarted in Bosnia,
he attempted it in Kosovo. Once again he was thwarted, and he is now
up in front of a war crimes tribunal in the Hague on genocide charges -
exactly where his henchmen Karazic and Mladic will also end up when
they are apprehended.
As far as Haiti goes, the US got rid of Duvalier's dictatorship only to see
Aristide try to institute another one. It is tough going there getting
people to accept the outcome of elections without shooting their
political opposition.
And, as I said before, Noriega was turning Panama into Cocaine
Transshipment Central; it was less a country than a Central American
mafia-esque thugocracy before the kingpin was removed.
Of course, I'm quite sure that Dace's mind is made up, and he will
refuse to be confused by facts. It seems that every position of his is
held with an emotional, irrational and quasi-religious fervour; those who
remember his interminable foisting of Sheldrake's quack pseudoscience
onto this list will see the same faux-omniscient attitude displayed in his
present post here.
>
>
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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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