I haven’t done a lot of writing on our nations foreign policy, mainly because it takes a whole other set of research and I haven’t had the time, but I have been accumulating bits and pieces along the way and slowly but surely they are forming up into a set of opinions on what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong and why.
The problems with my conclusions are that they are really going to anger many of my readers, especially, I think, those of the America right or wrong, love it or leave it bent. I do take comfort in the fact that even Newt Gingrich, with whom I rarely agree, agrees with many of those conclusions, so at least I know that they carry a modicum of balance
Like any country, our country’s foreign policy is formed with the aim of protecting our borders and advancing our nations and our citizen’s (read corporations) aims. In pursuit of these goals we have, over the years, made some very good decisions and some dreadfully poor ones.
It seems that the beginning of this tale, the culmination of WWII, changed everything in the world and so pretty much anything done before that, with the possible exception of European colonization, was torn apart, and had to be rebuilt.
The end of WWII, which coincides with the beginning of the cold war was a period of great political and economic upheaval in the world in general and a time of a furious industrial surge in this country. WWII had left us as the dominant country in the world, our homeland all but untouched by the horrors of war and free to pursue our wealth building while the rest of the world was struggling to drag themselves up from the ashes of destruction.
It was during this period and partly under the guise of protecting the world from Communism that we expanded our previously isolationist, America-centric policies to include anywhere in the world that possessed some resource that we thought we might need and that we didn’t want the Soviets to get. The result of this policy was to make friends with some of the worst dictators in the world, and as the behavior of their oppressed citizens became unruly, to protect these dictators from them. It was also, as manifested by the Marshall Plan, a great tool to help the rest of the world rebuild.
Now I can already hear the isolationists and the crazed right screaming about giving away American tax dollars to help foreigners, some of whom had been our enemies. Yes, that’s what happened but those tax dollars came back to us in huge multiples in the form of trade from markets that the Marshall Plan was implicit in building.
The real problems started when we began worrying more about the Communist threat then we did about what was right and wrong with the actions of foreign leaders. This problem festered first in central and South America where the only thing a dictator needed to do to get US support; was to tell us that he’d just been on the phone to the Kremlin. Our price for this policy was the entrenchment of a group of murderous dictators who raped their countries and stole from them with both hands. Our reward was the enduring and justified hatred of the peoples we had a hand in enslaving.
Unable to learn from history we have gone on to repeat these same mistakes over and over, especially in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Our unfortunate involvements in Korea and Vietnam were a direct result our reaction to the Commie Genie, a hollow threat that eventually proved to be the victim of television much the same way the current dictators in the Middle East are becoming the victims of Facebook & Twitter. Contrary to the stances of all governments, information and transparency are the keys to democracy. Tell the people the truth, let them make their decisions based on real facts and as a group they will more often than not make the right decision. It is only when the people are fed cornucopias of lies and have no real facts to support their judgments that they will make the kinds of decisions that allowed Gorge Bush to live in the White House for two terms and subsequently allowed the current group of inept, ill-informed, unprepared Teabagger candidates to infest the halls of congress.
911 was a horrendous occurrence but our reaction to it has been ten times worse. 911 was perpetrated by a group of Muslim extremists, mostly Saudi Arabians, led by Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi, a member of one of their most prominent families. Did we react to this atrocity by grabbing up all the Saudis in the country and demanding that the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia arrest all the conspirators? No, Bush got all his Saudi friends on planes out of the country despite a proclaimed no fly policy and then he invaded Afghanistan, where according to accepted tribal tradition, a local group was offering hospitality to bin Laden. No one tried to speak to those inside Afghanistan. No one tried to persuade them to give us this admitted killer. We just invaded them. Nothing gets a person on your side like running a tank over his house.
Bush/Cheney sold us the big lie, weapons of mass destruction, and we invaded Iraq, a country with a very nasty dictator who had once, like many dictators, been our friend, but had then ticked off Bush’s father by trying to grab the oil in Kuwait away from us. The people of Iraq were really happy to get rid of Saddam until we started running our tanks across their front lawns and then they started to get a bit peeved. All we had to do was kill Saddam and his loony family and leave and we would have had the undying loyalty of the Iraqi people but this country never knows how to leave well enough alone so we stuck around and got another Middle Eastern country to hate us.
Meanwhile all this hatred we were engendering wasn’t free. Hate costs money; $2.5 trillion so far, between the two wars, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied them and the Homeland Security measures instituted to keep us from filing our nails on planes.
Where did this money come from? We borrowed it. We have spent money on wars before but never since we borrowed a couple of hundred thousand francs from the French to pay for the Revolutionary War, have we borrowed money to pay for a war. We always pay for wars by raising taxes. Why? Because it always worked. It still would have if Bush/Cheney had exercised even a modicum of intelligence. But Bush thought he was smarter than anyone else, a sure sign of being dumber than a post, so he didn’t tax his rich friends, he cut their taxes and dumped the country into a huge deficit hole. Spending on the wars has accounted for a 25% increase in our debt since 2001. The tax cuts have more than doubled that.
Higher spending and lower taxes, accompanied by the lowering of financial regulation by the Bush/Cheney clan have brought the country to its knees. And it didn’t help us make friend one around the world.
See, that’s the problem, Americans have to learn that you don’t make friends by invading countries. We proved that when we threw the Brits out of ours. We proved it when we invaded the Philippines during the Spanish American war and then forgot to get out. We proved it when we invaded Korea and then Vietnam under the excuse of keeping them free from Communism and they hated us for it.
I think we did exactly the right thing in Lybia and that we should do just that in any Middle Eastern countries that format revolt. Help the rebels, if they are being oppressed, regardless of who is in power and take our chances with whoever takes over the country. I say this because there is one proven given. If we invade, actually put troops on the ground, the people of those countries will, for sure, hate us, and we will deserve it. No one wants a foreigner with a gun standing next to the spot where a tank crushed their house.
I know our government and the Pentagon are all bent out of shape about the threat posed by the Muslim religious right and it’s a viable worry but I think if we look to the current history of communication around the world we will see that maintaining religious control in the Arab world is becoming more and more of a problem for the clerics who are trying to make it work.
The religious right has held sway in many Muslim countries for a long time simply because of the fact that they were all living in the tenth century. This is no longer true as has been seen in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen & Bahrain. The Internet is making people all around the world aware of what they are missing when they support leaders who keep them in submission and prevent them from bettering their station in life. Examples of this go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union (it was TV that time) and continue with the changes currently taking place in Myanmar.
We need to stop being the world’s policeman and start being the worlds Samaritan. Yes there are still places where we should stick our nose, places like Somalia, but only for humanitarian purposes. The only reason we should be using armed forces now, is to protect caregivers in those parts of the world where caregivers are needed and exposed to danger. CARE workers and Doctors Without Borders workers in Somalia must be protected, whether the government in that country likes it or not. The rule must be, that if a country accepts caregivers, they must also accept protection for those caregivers. The UN protectors are all but useless and Mercenary outfits are almost as bad as the Janjaweed bandits who are terrorizing the population and those who are trying to help them, so yes, we should have very specialized troops in small numbers in those places.
What shouldn’t be done now is putting troops down in any more countries for political reasons. I see where Newt Gingrich is calling for the US to stop Iran from supplying arms to insurgents who kill Americans in Iraq & Afghanistan. Rather than invading Iran to stop them from supplying insurgents, how about getting the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan so the insurgents have no one to shoot at. If those same Iraqis had invaded this country and stayed this long we’d be trying to kill them too, just like they’re trying to kill us. It just works that way.
Obama wants to reduce the US military force in Iraq to 3000. That’s dumb. All that does is give the militants a small, indefensible target to shoot at. We have to get them all out. Leave no targets, leave no American’s that we have to defend or mourn and almost as important remove the need to spend tax dollars on Iraq or any place else, when we desperately need those tax dollars right here in the US.