In article <bjvn72$hks$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Brian McAfee says...

Brian McAfee
 brimac6@hotmail.com

                American Interventionism, Need For A Change 

   The war is, for the most part, over.  Iraq has been liberated, the
country is in a shambles but Halliburton is on hand to rebuild. The
U.S. currently, again, playing the role of the occupying army. With
apparently overwhelming public support, why were those Pesky
demonstrators out there?  All across the U.S., in Europe, in India,
pretty much everywhere.  After all, isn't Saddam Hussen the most evil
man on earth, a blight on the planet? Well, yes he is, as are Osama
bin Laden, the Taliban, Manuel Noriega.  All bad bad men, with one
thing in common- 20 years ago we (the U.S.) armed, trained and
financed them.
   Manuel Noriega was a well paid CIA man, "our man in Panama" as it
were.  Heavily involved with cocaine trafficking, he was convicted and
imprisoned in '89 after a closed door trial, leaving a cloud over the
CIA of apparent involvement of drug smuggling and involvement in the
crack epidemic in our inner cities.
   Osama bin Laden first surfaced in Afghanistan in 1979 with the
U.S. armed trained and financed Mujahideen, a violent group of Islamic
fundamentalists.  They overthrew the Soviet supported government in
Kabul and replaced it with a number of successive theocracies
notorious for their human rights abuses and treatment of women and
girls.  They evolved into the Taliban.  The green jacket bin Laden has
been seen in since 9/11 is a U.S. military issue from the days of his
partnership with the U.S. when he was fighting against the other
"Great Satan", the Soviet Union.
 The current situation brings us to the 50 year mark of excessive
intervention that has resulted in massive bloodshed throughout the
third world.
  In 1953, the elected president of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, decided
to nationalize his country's oil supply, for the usual reasons,
infrastructure, health care, and education.  This, of course, 
outraged the U.S. and Great Britain who of course thought the oil was
theirs.  After a short time it was.  They instilled the Shah, Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi, who lived a life of indulgence for the next 25 years. 
The SAVAK, the Shah's secret police which had close ties to the CIA,
any perceived threat or demonstrations for democracy were met with
imprisonment, torture and sometimes death.  Under the guidance of the
CIA, leftists were the primary target for SAVAK and in 1979 when the
Islamists swept to power under the Ayatolla Khomeini, there was little
the Shah or SAVAK could do about it.  They fled to the U.S.
    In '54 another elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, decided it would
be a good idea to nationalize some of the unused land in Guatemala,
one of the poorest countries in the world, the land though not being
used, was claimed by United Fruit a U.S. owned company that was under
the control of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.  And, you
guessed it, the elected president had to flee.  Guatemala has been run
by a military dictatorship.   Over a hundred thousand poor and
indigenous people have been killed and our bananas are cheap.
   In the Congo in 1960 the U.S. had a problem, there was a new
political leader on the rise, and he was concerned about poverty and
justice in his country.  They had just come out of the racist and
colonial yoke.  The CIA got on it.  The next year Patrice Lumumba was
dead and the U.S. had another dictator in Mobutu.
   Indonesia in '65 was probably an exciting place to be, colorful,
politically lively, a strong left and an equally strong right and a
charismatic if somewhat bizarre president Sukarno was leading a
fledgling democracy.  Indonesia, even then, was a major oil producer. 
Of course the U.S. government was concerned and the CIA was quite
active, a little too active, they planted a story of an eminent
communist takeover and gave the right wing military a list of
"communists" that they wanted dead.  The military and Suharto
dictatorship exceeded the list by between half a million to a million
in one of the worst massacres of the 20th century.  (Sukarno having
been kicked out of the presidency in the U.S. plan and sponsored
coup).
   Ten years later the Indonesia story takes another turn.  East
Timor, the newly independent former Portuguese colony is under threat

>from Indonesia.  The U.S. gives a green light for a takeover to

Indonesia, giving them U.S. weapons and their blessing in a state
visit [Ford and Kissinger] as their plane is leaving the tarmac the
Indonesian military makes its move invading the poor island made up of
very poor Aboriginal people.  The Indonesian military being very
cruel, over time killing about 200 thousand of the island's 800
thousand inhabitants.
   A few years ago this story took another turn.  In a vote East
Timor declared its own independence.  The Indonesians violently
retreated off the island, burning and looting as they went.  The U.S.
and Australian military were present to make sure their former ally in
crime left an interesting twist to this is that prior to the U.S. and
Australian assistance to kick out the Indonesian occupiers, in a short
article in an Australian newspaper it was announced that oil and
natural gas was found off shore in East Timor territorial waters.
   From '68 to '73 according to William Shawcross, a war reporter and
author of "Sideshow", about the bombing of Cambodia the U.S. routinely
and indiscriminately bombed poor villages up and down the borders of
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  The numbers of non combatants killed are
unknown because there was no census but it is likely to be very high.
   Another tragic atrocity that few Americans know about but resulted

>from direct and violent interference in another third world democracy.

In 1970 Chile elected its first socialist president Salvador Allende.
A medical doctor, Allende's first act as president was to make it
mandatory that all school children should be given milk during the
school day as he noticed a certain vitamin deficiency among some of
the poor children which impacted their learning.  About a third of the
country lived in severe poverty and his ambition was to rectify this
and pay for the usual, infrastructure, health care, schools.  Chiles
major natural resource is copper and Allende offered the main U.S.
owned copper company, Kennecott, the current [at the time] market
price for the value of the copper mines at the time, they said no and
involved the U.S. government, chief among them Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger.  In short, the U.S. enacted an embargo, boycotts and in the
end when nothing worked out to their satisfaction a coup was
orchestrated out of Washington.  Salvador Allende was assassinated on
9/11/73.  The U.S. supported the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in
which over 3,200 were murdered by Pinochet's henchmen.  Many that were
murdered were women and about 25,000 more were imprisoned and
tortured, all civilian leftists.
   These examples of U.S. conduct and foreign policy over the past
half century are just a partial glimpse of the whole story.  Our
conduct throughout the third world up to this point has been very
anti-democratic.  Another aspect to this is a national election that
took place in Bolivia about five years ago in which only 5% of the
electorate voted, the reason for this being the people had no
influence in their own country.  The IMF and World Bank had taken
control of the nation's financing cutting funding for education,
health care and infrastructure, privatizing everything possible,
bringing foreign investors in so they could attempt to profit off the
backs of the poor.
    This has been a veritable war on the poor of the world.  A change
in attitude and conduct is needed.  A change in which mutual respect,
mutual benefit and compassion are paramount.
   Almost all of the aforementioned occurrences were preceded at home
by declaration that they were being carried out for "Democracy's" or
"freedom's" sake, none of which was true.
       Currently Japan surpasses the U.S. In humanitarian aid while
the U.S. continues to have the strongest economy in the world. A
refocus of our International ventures towards dialogue, partnerships,
mutually beneficial undertakings and alleviation of poverty would go a
long way to making the world a lot more safe and secure. The modern
world requires that our security and well being depend on the security
and well being of the rest of the world. Much of U.S. wealth and power
came from our interplay with the rest of the world. Compassion is our
greatest weapon in defence of our national security.