http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

Our hand in the world continues to be the hand of secret combinations.

Cameron,
I haven’t given that question much thought. I am always concerned first that we as a country do no harm. If we merely withdraw support from the bad guys, we do a world of good to start with. When Clinton suggested that Suharto leave office after there was no shred of cover left for the man, he left immediately. Of course, he took 42 billion dollars with him and left in his wake greater than a million bodies… all of whom were massacred with US manufactured weapons, by US trained forces, with US media support and CIA provided targets… But, we finally withdrew support and Suharto left.

I think that we can do a world of bringing about real, meaningful change without doing violence to start with. I think that we should implement no sanctions that are against the will of the people in places like Burma for example. However, in that nation, the opposition leadership is begging the US to impose sanctions on the military dictatorship. We have implemented some sanctions, but the sanctions that would really hurt are on the oil industry over there and our oil corporations do business with the regime in Burma with impunity. In a place like Burma, we should not invade and force the military into submission as bad as they are. Pressure from all sides, including those that will hurt our own corporations, is the only way to go. If our government was an entity that adhered to some sort of moral code, this is the way we should go.

I don’t know enough about the situation in Hungary in 1956 to comment on whether or not we should have intervened or not. However, if we did not intervene, it was because it was not practical enough for our military at that time, or there was not enough value economically for our multinational corporations to intervene.

I guess that my position on intervention is that IF we were a nation guided by morals and cared for life instead of dollars, we could consider the question of when we should intervene and under what circumstances. However, right now, our attention should be focused on first doing no harm and then righting many of the wrongs we have done.

“US intervention is always aimed at gaining power for it’s secret combinations. ”

Curtis, I’d like to help you out a little bit in that comment of yours! I would put it all in caps, and put some additional emphasis into it like this:

U.S. INTERVENTION IS ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS AIMED AT GAINING POWER FOR ITS SECRET COMBINATIONS, NO EXCEPTIONS.

Curtis,

Sorry about the attribution, I jumbled the various jousting partners together. Regardless of who posted it, as the poster intimated the video explains why the US didn’t depose Saddam at that time.

I’d love your input on Hamas. I’ve written about them here, here, and here.

There may be rare situations worthy of the intervention of a benign power in this world,

Under what circumstances? And who would do the intervening?

As for Hamas, we only supported the elections as we thought Hamas would lose. After it was clear that Hamas had won, we withdrew support immediately and instigated a sort of a coup in granting financial and military support to Fatah so they could fight Hamas. Hamas was actually a great partner for peace, contrary to what the US press and government would have you believe. They stifled rocket attacks and held to a truce in spite of Israeli atrocities. When Israel killed 6 Palestinians last year though, and had obviously broken the truce in every sense of the word, Hamas retaliated and that is what we like to call Hamas, “breaking the truce.” We can talk about that on another thread if you like, but Hamas’s actions were not the reason we disrespected democracy over there.

US intervention is always aimed at gaining power for it’s secret combinations. There may be rare situations worthy of the intervention of a benign power in this world, but “benign” does not fit with the description of US intentions in any of it’s military interventions.

Agreed. I have no argument there. But when people say that our troops are doing the same thing that Saddam Hussein did, I don’t count that as supporting the troops.

That second part is a dubious argument that I try to avoid. I hope I didn’t intimate anything like that in my post. I take care *not* to string together sentences where “our troops” are “doing the same thing that Saddam Hussein did” because I don’t really think it is the most productive way to frame the problem.

It is certainly true that any modern warfare directives carried out by the trusting men and women in uniform — on either side of armed conflict — will generally result in senseless deaths, oppression of innocents, and needless, stomach-churning carnage — thus the modern instruction to ’sue for peace’!

[As an aside, I once personally listened to Hugh Nibley talk about this using the cover-up operations entrusted to his unit during WWII as context. He pointed out that even in the so-called 'Good War' against Nazi conquerors that many, many battle plans went awry -- bombings of innocent families far from the battle in a foreign countryside, for instance -- and his unit was sometimes ordered to clean up 'mistakes' to avoid damaging PR. The point he wanted to drive home was that in war all morality goes out the window. That, historically, both sides will lie, cheat, murder, and steal. That he did *not* trust official declarations of U.S. officials when it came to war and armed conflict.]

To my understanding, any foreign policy that uses armed conflict *first* and *pre-emptively* can be directly compared to the horrific directives of any past or present ‘war criminal’ because that is the essence of the ‘criminal’ element of war. Non-defensive armed conflict is — in my view — about as evil as you can get.

Despite the best PR efforts of Gulf Wars I & II, we don’t *really* have ’smart bombs’ that only kill ‘bad guys’. Despite astounding advances, we don’t really have ‘Mission Impossible III’ spy satellites with 24/7 live, zoomed video/audio feed of every inch of the planet. Despite the rapid language training provided, we haven’t yet developed actual ‘mind-readers’ to go kicking down neighborhood doors and interviewing potential ‘hostiles’ [who might harbor 'oppositional feelings' to the obviously gentle and helpful US occupation.] No, unfortunately, in our zeal to militarily ‘wipe out’ *all* US opposition from the face of the earth we are ordering our young men and women to do jobs that are by their very nature “messy”.

But I don’t blame the troops. My Dad says when he returned from Vietnam (where he still feels what he did was to ‘further the cause of democracy’) that there were many who would openly ’spit on returned soldiers’ [and worse]. There were still those who quietly ’supported the troops’ but they no longer felt comfortable throwing ticker tape parades due to national souring on the war. As for me personally, I may differ with him on the overall meaning of the war in which he served but I *know* that he served because he truly wanted to do the right thing. So I support and appreciate that a lot.

Ultimately though, as civilians, we can’t avoid the consequences of wrongful orders of armed conflict. As citizens — especially in a nation with free press, free elections, free speech, representative government, and all the blessings we enjoy — I feel that we bear some of the guilt and burden for what is ‘done in our name.’ As perhaps no other citizens on earth.

Our good men and women in Uniform are under orders once they volunteer. I suppose as citizens we are under a different set of orders — and most of us seem to be finding ways to shirk them.

IF we really wanted to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq and wanted to topple Saddam, what better opportunity to do so than to help the Shiites at that time?

You provided the answer to why we didn’t intervene then when you linked to the Cheney video.

Hamas is an example of the US supporting democratic elections. Which according to you we only do when it supports our interests. Yet Hamas doesn’t support our interests. So it doesn’t make sense for us to have supported those elections if we had some nefarious motive. A point which was made repeatedly at the time by opponents of President Bush.

So yes, Hamas was elected and started lobbing missiles at its neighbors. Under any normal circumstances there are diplomatic consequences for shooting missiles at neighboring countries.

So again I ask, are there any circumstances where US involvement is appropriate? Do we allow regimes like Iraq’s to continue unopposed? How about Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1938? Sudan? Rwanda?

I was not advocating helping the Shiites at that time. My policy would have been to never have supported Saddam in the first place as I like to stay true to my morals in not supporting bloodthirsty dictators. The US government, on the other hand, does not adhere to any morals. That should be clear with a cursory study of who our friends have been.

Can you not see that virtually all of our military interventions have been motivated by greed and desire for leverage in making the world a safe place for our corporations to get gain at the expense of freedom and life?

I don’t want it both ways. I want it one way. I want the US to cease to do harm in the first place. Spreading democracy to those in power in the US means supporting groups that are in line with US objectives in their land. This is why we oppose men like Morales and Chavez while they enjoy remarkable popular support in their own countries. We don’t want true democracy in those countries when they won’t bow down to what we want them to do. As I said above, our efforts to promote democracy in foreign nations now is merely cosmetic as we only uphold rulers who will uphold our will in their land and if they don’t, we force them out. Hamas is a great example of that, elected in a fair election by the people of Palestine, and immediately rejected by the US in a flagrant insult to the democratic will of the Palestinian people.

So, you think that we shifted from bad to good?

We shifted from a policy of containment to one of spreading democracy. The policy towards terrorism and terrorist-sponsoring states changed from expecting to keep them bottled up in far flung places through things like sanctions, to encouraging a change to democratic forms of government. The idea was that if it proved successful in Iraq and Afghanistan it would spread organically to other countries in the Middle East.

I support our troops, but that is not the same thing as supporting a dishonest and misguided foreign policy.

Agreed. I have no argument there. But when people say that our troops are doing the same thing that Saddam Hussein did, I don’t count that as supporting the troops.

All of these examples railing against US meddling ring hollow when the US is also held accountable for not acting to help the Iraqi uprising after the Gulf War. We cannot have it both ways.

I’ve brought up Hungary in 1956 as an example of what happened when the US chose not to intervene. Many have held us responsible for 50 years of brutal communist rule in that country. There are other examples which mirror this one.

So do we allow those things to happen, or we do act?

You said:

Please do not try to whitewash what he did.

Friend, you are misrepresenting what I have been saying here all along. I have not “whitewashed” anything Saddam did. To the contrary, I have agreed with you wholeheartedly that he was a pretty bad guy. There is no doubt about it. One cannot deny that he killed a whole lot of people in Iraq unjustly. As you admit, he was entirely supported in all of this by the USA. I freely recognize that he was one of the worst of the worst. No whitewashing here… unlike the way the US whitewashed all of his atrocities prior to 2003.

And what he did would have continued had the US not intervened. Those prisons would have remained, those mass graves never uncovered and instead added to.

I don’t entirely agree with you there. Most of his atrocities were done in the early 90s or 80s and there was not much of that going on in the second half of the 90s and at the turn of the century. Surely he did not have a change of heart or anything, but it appears that most of the mass executions were done about a decade before we sent in the calvary.

As for US actions to support Saddam during the Cold War, I again reiterate the fact that US foreign policy made a dramatic shift in response to 9/11.

So, you think that we shifted from bad to good? A major part our accusation against Saddam was his treatment of the Kurds. We seem to care very much about the fate of the Kurds right? That is something which changed after 9/11 you would say right? Try again. Since the 80s at least, the Turkish government has undertaken a systematic genocidal campaign against it’s Kurds, killing 37,000 Kurds and using Napalm to wipe out 3,000 Kurdish villages, completely wiping them off the map. As you recall they even attacked Iraqi Kurds in 2007 with the help of the US. Well, guess what? Did we invade Turkey to help the Kurds? No, we have supplied them with increased numbers of weapons so they can continue their repression of Kurds. We can’t invade them because they are our “strategic ally” in the region. Sounds sort of like the pre-9/11 strategy you claim we have disowned doesn’t it?

The only real change that has occurred since about the turn of the century is a cosmetic change. We supported iron-fisted dictators during the 20th century in support of “stability.” Actually, “stability” is what our secret combinations like to call the condition wherein they control events in other countries so that multi-national corporations can rob those nations without having to fear a popular uprising (which would be bad for the bottom line). We loved our dictators from Saddam to Somosa to Pinochet to Suharto to the Shah of Iran etc. They worked really good for “stability.” However, this model began to become unsustainable as information became more readily available and we began to be horrified here in the USA when we found out that babies were being bayonetted in Guatemala because the United Fruit Co. didn’t like the government there in the 50s and lobbied the US government to overthrow the Guatemalan government and replace it with a military dictatorship. No, the US populace wouldn’t sit still for this kind of stuff any more so a new approach was needed. That’s when we came up with this new idea of supporting a sort of top-down democracy where there is only the barest skeleton framework of democracy so that we can be thrilled about spreading freedom here in the west, but not have to deal with the effects of true democracy since that would hurt the bottom line of our beloved corporations. Therefore, we do what we do now through the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID and the International Republican Institute and the CIA in infusing cash into opposition groups and providing a favorable atmosphere in which our type of candidate could win.

Allende of Chile won in 1972 despite overwhelming cash flow from the USA to his opposition. The Sandinistas lost in the late 80s when the US threatened a complete shutdown of aid to Nicaragua unless our candidate. Having their walking instructions, the Nicaraguans voted the US backed candidate so they could survive and in the US we were ecstatic over the freedom to vote in Nicaragua. We upheld Haiti opposition to Aristide earlier this decade after 9/11. We send large amounts of money to Venezuelan and Bolivian opposition groups currently.

We were furious when Palestinians voted Hamas to power in 2006 and Hillary Clinton said we were foolish to push for democracy there at that time. We were as pissed as heck when Turkey voted to not let the US use it’s land for attacks on Iraq in 2003, saying that the government in Turkey was, “weak.” We supported the “democratically elected” Sakaashvili in his aggression against Georgian civilians after US money helped secure his victory in elections. Wouldn’t you be upset if other nations were infusing money into our elections and political debate? When China was caught doing that there was an uproar in the US.

No, I think the changes are purely cosmetic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMdbDDWIM10

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

A little research into this ‘think tank’ will reveal alot of eventual high ranking ‘Bush’ appointees. ‘Architects’ of the current Iraq war one might say.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/63216/april-27-2006/bill-kristol

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bush_administration:_Project_for_the_New_American_Century

And, no doubt, this has been a messy, embarrassing part of the world for the U.S. for a long time now. Like, for example, the now famous video of Rumsfeild meeting with Saddam:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTldYbqlJc8

Our nation had alot to do with Iraq for a lomg time. I’m sure eveyone remembers the Iran/ Contra affair from Reagans administration. And alot more:

The West were supplying Iraq with chemicals:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DE5DE1F3DF932A15751C1A9649C8B63

And intel:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq61.pdf

“All of us have heard this term ‘preventive war’ since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time, if we believe for one second that nuclear fission and fusion, that type of weapon, would be used in such a war—what is a preventive war? I would say a preventive war, if the words mean anything, is to wage some sort of quick police action in order that you might avoid a terrific cataclysm of destruction later. A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn’t preventive war; that is war. I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.”

From here: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=9977

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood. Write soon again.

From here: http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/american-authors/19th-century/abraham-lincoln/the-writings-of-abraham-lincoln-02/ebook-page-18.asp

Sounds like Lincoln knew what he was talking about, if you look at the position we are in today.

AP article in the DesNews discussing civilian deaths in the years following the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Good people in our nation volunteer for military service instituted to protect and defend U.S. liberty. They try their best in the missions assigned them overseas. I support our troops, but that is not the same thing as supporting a dishonest and misguided foreign policy. In fact, in this case, I believe supporting our troops means getting involved as a citizen to call for an end to sending them to Iraq, Afghnistan, . . . and now Pakistan, and maybe Iran . . . and so on.

President Hinckley commented in October conference 2001 that after meeting with the President and being told that we were going to hunt down *the terrorists* that:

Those of us who are American citizens stand solidly with the president of our nation. The terrible forces of evil must be confronted and held accountable for their actions. This is not a matter of Christian against Muslim. I am pleased that food is being dropped to the hungry people of a targeted nation. We value our Muslim neighbors across the world and hope that those who live by the tenets of their faith will not suffer. I ask particularly that our own people do not become a party in any way to the persecution of the innocent. Rather, let us be friendly and helpful, protective and supportive. It is the terrorist organizations that must be ferreted out and brought down.

I find that quote instructive because I feel that too many Americans (LDS or not) have, indeed, bought into the hateful invective spewed on many news programs wherein the already overly ambiguous “war on terror” is unambiguously defined as ‘re-shaping’ the midEast into a region that is more ‘westernized’ and ‘palatable’ to US interests. All Muslim thought is mis-represented and denounced as ‘incompatible’ with our worldview. We are told that ‘collateral damage’ is necessary and that it is in everyone’s best interest for the American Empire to ’serve and protect’ that region even if only the puppet beaurucrats support that idea. Thus, the permanent bases in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and now huge permanent bases in Pakistan.

Later, upon the invasion of Iraq, — where he repeated that U.S. government officials were telling him the actions were directly related to hunting down the terrorist groups — he cautioned further against the evils of Empire.

Defense is just, Imperial rule is not.

We know now that we depended on ‘bad intelligence’ for the assertions that the Iraqi invasion had anything to do with hunting down “those responsible for the planning” of the 9/11 attacks. We deposed Saddam (after setting him in place), checked for WMD that we didn’t want in the hands of future terrorists (that either didn’t exist or got spirited away before the invasion) and *then we stayed with Imperial rule*

The “Project for a New American Century” believers that were the architects of our current foreign policy asked Congress for permission to attack *7 countries* when they entered Afghanistan. The idea was to “re-shape” the entire region. Soon, despite his contrary claims to religious leaders like President Hinckley, Bush claimed that *he didn’t even care if those responsible for 9/11 — ie Osama — were ever caught — he finally got the picture that the war effort wasn’t about true defense and justice. It was more like the expansionist, preventative revenge Hitler and Hirohito advocated. [Sorry for the blatant (and predictable) Hitler meme, but the card is already on the table . . . let's call a spade, a spade]

Attacking and taking over other nations to prevent potential attacks on your own nation is Un-American. It is Un-Christian. If you’re LDS then it goes against both ancient doctrine (as Connor points out here) and current doctrine (as I understand President Hinckley’s, Faust’s and many other recent Conference talks.)

It behooves us to ‘clamor for peace’, true defense, and true justice. Let me repeat Hinckley’s plea:

“I ask particularly that our own people do not become a party in any way to the persecution of the innocent.”

[ 100,000+ dead civilians in Iraq alone since our foreign policy is so off-balance . . . this doesn't take into account the [literally] millions of ‘persecuted innocents’ who have been injured, maimed, seen family members mistakenly killed, those living as refugees fleeing our various ‘theatres of war’, etc. ]

Like we did with Abu Ghraib?

http://hub.witness.org/fr/node/4973

“I again reiterate the fact that US foreign policy made a dramatic shift in response to 9/11.”

Sorry Cameron, 9/11 was an inside job, and Saddam was our ally and asset until we decided to use him for our “dramatic shift in foreign policy.”