“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Thursday, August 07, 2014

The unintended, but foreseeable, consequences of US meddling in the third world


So everyone is asking, what is the west going to do now that full-throttle ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter of ethnic and religious minorities is taking place at the hands of ISIS in Iraq? ISIS has isolated thousands of Kurds and Yazidis in the waterless mountains of Iraq with the threat of slaughter if they return.

My answer: what are we supposed to do, re-invade Iraq? It's our fault this is taking place. Such business never took place under Saddam Hussein. Sure, different atrocities took place, but on a scale that the US could live with, ignore, and still sleep nights. But no, we just had to depose Saddam, pretending it was for humanitarian reasons rather than the actual reasons; to finish what Bush '41 started and to give the American people some revenge satisfaction, even though misplaced, for 9/11.

Like it or not, Iraqis were much better off with Saddam than they've been without him. Turns out replacing a primitive, barbaric dictatorship with a sophisticated and complicated brand of democracy isn't just a simple matter of decapitating the government as neocons in the US would have us believe when they sold the idea to us.

Libya is now the Somalia of north Africa and Iraq is the Somalia of the middle east.....all thanks to the US's "R2P" doctrine.......Responsibility to Protect. Our well-meaning leaders believe that all they have to do when civilians are in trouble in some remote shit-hole is kill the government and everything will be honkey-dory. As we've seen in Libya, now Iraq, and soon Afghanistan, that is not the case.

I would support dropping pallets of food and water to these isolated people, but nothing more.


2 comments:

Isaac A. Nussbaum said...

"Our well-meaning leaders...."

You give them far more credit than I do, Ed.

Ed said...

I agree now that I read it back. Politicians are never well-meaning....they are always self-serving. They don't do anything if there isn't the prospect of personal gain from it....either financial or political.