What will it take to stop our government from covertly overthrowing other governments? [View all]

[yurbud]

Within my lifetime, we have made two great strides reducing our government's violence toward other countries: eliminating the draft, which makes it harder and more expensive to put a lot of troops into a conflict, and just recently, preventing direct intervention in Syria.

While not dropping bombs or putting boots on the ground in Syria was a major victory, it hasn't stopped our government from backing rebels, including the same kind of religious extremists we claim to be fighting in the War on Terror.

Our government is also backing right wing violence in Venezuela and the Ukraine.

While these actions may not result in the loss of the lives of any of our troops, the damage to the people in the targeted countries, and therefore the potential blowback for average Americans and our foreign policy is incalculable.

Sixty years later, we are still dealing with the negative effects of overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran, and it took Chile and other South American countries decades to quietly and carefully pry the fingers of the blood-thirsty but business friendly dictators we installed.

You would think 9/11 would have been the wake up call to Americans that destroying other countries and installing puppet governments to make them obey Wall Street, banks, and oil companies can have fatal consequences.

In the Ukraine, our government is baiting a former superpower, who may not be a match for us in conventional weapons, but does still have quite a few nukes.

Russia ended the Cold War and gave up communism and the thanks Washington seems to be giving them is doing everything possible to reignite a Cold War with Russia, to dismember it piece by piece, and starve them of income by taking away their oil an gas exporting business.

If our government's long term strategy for Russia works or to the extent it already has worked, don't you think that will have consequences at least as severe as our meddling in Iran?

What will it take to stop these proxy wars and astroturf revolutions that will come back to bite us on the ass?