I do not worship the ground our military walks on

[Lydia Leftcoast]

261. No military response was necessary to any of those situations

Grenada was getting uppity, wanting to process its own fruit and spice crops instead of exporting raw materials and then having to re-import things like orange juice and nutmeg made from its own crops. They wanted to develop their own tourist industry, which was what the airport was for.

Reagan LIED when he said that the Cubans were building the airport so that the Russians could have a base near the U.S. Grenada wanted an airport capable of handling jumbo jets full of tourists, something that many other Caribbean islands have.

The U.S. intervened in Guatemala in 1954, overthrowing a democratically elected president whose "crime" was to annoy the United Fruit Company. After that, Guatemala suffered through more than 30 years of dictatorial thugs.

Later, when rebels in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua began rebelling against the horrible human rights abuses and economic injustices in those countries (basically, they were right-wing libertarian paradises: almost no regulations on the private sector or public services), the U.S. screeched "Communism!" and intervened on the side of the dictatorial thugs in Guatemala and El Salvador. I have spoken with someone who was one of the American "advisers," and he was so full of remorse for what he had done that he could barely talk about it. When the Nicaraguan rebels succeeded in overthrowing their dictatorial thugs, the U.S. did everything it could to thwart them and make sure that their revolution failed.

The U.S. and Britain (another country that has more military might than sense at times) overthrew Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran in the 1950s and put the Shah on the throne. Most people don't know that the Shah was no long-standing traditional dynastic figure but the son of some army officer who had proclaimed himself Shah. But the Shah played nice with the oil companies, while Mossadegh wanted to nationalize them, so the hell with what the Iranian people wanted.

We're supposed to be all delighted that the U.S. overthrew the Taliban, but guess where the Taliban came from. They're one faction of the anti-Soviet forces that the U.S. armed and trained beginning to fight the homegrown Marxists in the summer of 1979, before the Russians even arrived. The Soviet advance into Afghanistan in December 1979 was no invasion; the revolutionary government actually invited them in to suppress the rebels who were fighting for the "freedom" to keep women and girls veiled and illiterate against attempts to legislate compulsory education and women's rights.

After the Russians left in 1989, the various factions of the Afghan rebels fought for control of the country. The CIA favored the Taliban, because they were the best disciplined faction.

I suggest you do a little reading, especially Jonathan Kwitny's book Endless Enemies. Kwitny was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, but he was appalled at the utter stupidity of American interventions.

U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Middle East are not something to be proud of. They are something to be ashamed of.