--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> An intriguing list of actions. I don't think US
> troops were deployed under the UN flag in many of
> these operations (if any).
Two points. First, the selection of troops for UN missions is done usually from countries within the region or that share same culture or stakes precisely to avoid the impression of imperialist intervetion.
Second, if memory I serves the US intervened on the "good" side (Naser's) in the Suez Canal crisis (I am not sure if they sent troops, though). Without the US veto, Europeans would have invaded.
As to the rest of your comments, I fully agree with ravi that US is not exceptionally evil. Other countries have more than a fair share of brutal thugs.
The problem that you the US lefties face (I liked that phrase, ravi, thank you), it that you tend to see the world in manichaen terms - as a struggle between good and evil. Most yanks do, to be sure, but you tend to reverse the signs of those polarities, and what most yanks see as a "shining city on a hill" you perceive as a snake pit of barbarism and sheer aggression, and vice versa. As a result, you have an idealized image of the so-called Third World countries
just like most mainstream US-ers have an idealized image of "America the Beautiful" that can do no wrong - and you also have a demonized image of the US as hell on earth, just like most mainstrem US-ers perceive the Third World.
The reality, as ravi aptly observed is that the Third World can be just as thuggish and imperialist as the Us, it just does not have the same capacity as the US.
But they can accomplish more than the US, even with simple means, like machetes.
Killing a million people just with machetes is much more personal than, say, releasing the payload from a B-52 cruising at a high altitude. The B-52 pilot can at least delude himself that he is just attacking military targets and minimising "collateral damage." The guys who chop off heads of four-year old children with machetes, or chop of the legs of their victims so they cannot escape and then return the next day to finish the job, have no such illusions. I also understand that despite the hell the US created in Iraq during the last two or so years, it still falls short of a million killed by the guys with machetes just in four months.
So the right way to phrase the question is not how the US intervention compares to some idealizaded peaceful resoultion that never was, but how it compares to the actions of other powers, major and minor. And quite honestly, I do not think that the US looks that bad in this company. Or phrasing it differently, the number of war criminals (convicted or not) per capita is lower in the US than in many, if not most, countries. The US may fall short of its ideal of being a shining city on a hill, but it is not a murderous hellhole either. It is neither exceptionally good, nor exceptionally bad. In fact, it is not exceptional at all.
PS. Joe Wanzala, you sound to me like a Holocaust denier. If you posted the same crap about the Nazi Holocaust as you did about the Rwandan, you would be booted out of this list and many other places.
Wojtek
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