United States Foreign Policy Exposed

[seemslikeadream]

By Rosemarie Jackowski
Saturday, August 07, 2004

For the past 50-plus years, the foreign policy of the United States, has taken the U.S. military around the globe, exploiting one nation after another. This creeping imperialism is causing concern all around the world. Author Chalmers Johnson states that the U.S. has 6,000 bases in 130 countries. What the U.S. cannot get with bribes and indecent maneuvers in the UN, it gets with bombs. An updated list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since WW 2, as compiled by historian William Blum follows: China (1945-46), Korea (1950-53), China (1950-53), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), Guatemala (1960), Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Guatemala (1967-69), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-2004), Sudan (1998), Afghanistan (1998-2003), Yugoslavia (1999). This is only a partial list. It does not contain the countries, such as Colombia, where the secret U.S. army of mercenaries is doing the bombing. It does not list locations that were bombed and contaminated as testing sites, such as Vieques.

Which country will be next? Will it be Korea or Cuba, France or Finland? No one knows, and no one is safe until U.S. foreign policy is changed. In studying the William Blum list of bombed countries, it becomes apparent that countries with a brown-eyed population are at increased risk. If you are not frightened yet, you have not been paying attention to recent world history. During the March 13, 2002 White House press conference, President Bush stated that all options were on the table. This comment, by President Bush, came just days after the Pentagon’s Revised Nuclear Posture Review was leaked to the Los Angles Times. In it, the Pentagon named seven countries that were potential targets of a U.S. NUCLEAR strike. Still not frightened? You better check out what happened to the people of Diego Garcia, when the U.S. military decided that it wanted their island as a military base.

For all of the people around the world, who are waiting for the citizens of the United States to stop this 50-year long killing and bombing spree, I have bad news. Most U.S. citizens know more about their favorite sports teams than they do about foreign policy. Do not look to them for help. Somehow, along the way, something happened to the U.S. national conscience. When the Pentagon used the dehumanizing term, “collateral damage,” to refer to the slaughter of civilians, not one member of the press ever spoke up and said, “No, not collateral damage. Those are human beings”. Even worse, the press adopted and repeated, without question, the language of the Pentagon. U.S. citizens never got to see the face of the little Iraqi girl, killed by a U.S. cluster bomb. The press is so deeply embedded in the government, that the Truth no longer exists.


Rosemarie Jackowski lives in Bennington, Vt. She was arrrested in a peaceful protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003 and is currently awaiting trial with the possibility of a prison sentence. She can be reached at [e-mail].

http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/jackowski08072004/

[DerekG]

1. *The* essential book on U.S. foreign policy post-1945

Reading the earlier edition of Blum's expose was a kind of transfiguration for me; I cast aside the role of yellow-dog Democrat and faced the chilling prospect that I was living in Nazi Germany. "American Holocaust," indeed.

Warning: This book will quickly change your opinion of Clinton.

[Eloriel]

7. It's not clear what book you're referring to

Could you simply cite the title and author's full name? Thanks.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. The truth is what the Dear Leader says it is.

The press is so deeply embedded in the government, that the Truth no longer exists.

Snip from Brainwashing America by Dr. Norman Livergood:

The way in which the Bush junta is conducting itself is an interesting brainwashing technique in itself: Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and the others continually commit OUTRAGES but don't excuse them, explain them, or invite reflection on these affronts to morality and sanity. In fact, when some timid media voice criticizes the Bush junta, the person is demonized as questioning behavior which is beyond reproach.

Americans are being brainwashed to ask only the questions the Bushites allow and they are programmed to see everything the Bush junta does as unquestionably correct. The brainwashing has gone so far that Americans no longer see what has happened to our country.

Brianwashing America

[alfredo]

3. the more I hear about our foreign policy I wonder why it has taken

so long for someone to declare a Jihad against us.

[DerekG]

4. You're not kidding...

While we're on the subject of bad karma: didn't the overthrow of Allende (in Chile) occur on September 11?

[Disturbed]

5. Most Americans view America...

the way that they wish America would be not the way it is. "The People's History of America" by Howard Zinn should be required reading in all High Schools.

[alfredo]

6. Yes

I am not sure if that was planned, or coincidence.

[struggle4progress]

8. The Last September 11

by Ariel Dorfman

<snip>
During the last 28 years, Tuesday, Sept. 11, has been a date of mourning, for me and millions of others, ever since that day in 1973 when Chile lost its democracy in a military coup, that day when death irrevocably entered our lives and changed us forever. And now, almost three decades later, the malignant gods of random history have wanted to impose upon another country that dreadful date, again a Tuesday, once again an 11th of September filled with death.
<snip>

The resemblance I am evoking goes well beyond a facile and superficial comparison – for instance, that both in Chile in 1973 and in the States today, terror descended from the sky to destroy the symbols of national identity, the Palace of the Presidents in Santiago, the icons of financial and military power in New York and Washington. No, what I recognize is something deeper, a parallel suffering, a similar pain, a commensurate disorientation echoing what we lived through in Chile as of that September 11th. It’s most extraordinary incarnation – I still cannot believe what I am witnessing – is that on the screen I see hundreds of relatives wandering the streets of New York, clutching the photos of their sons, fathers, wives, lovers, daughters, begging for information, asking if they are alive or dead, the whole United States forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those beloved men and women who are missing. And I also recognize and repeat that sensation of extreme unreality that invariably accompanies great disasters caused by human iniquity, so much more difficult to cope with than natural catastrophes. Over and over again I hear phrases that remind me of what people like me would mutter to themselves during the 1973 military coup and the days that followed: “This cannot be happening to us. This sort of excessive violence happens to other people and not to us, we have only known this form of destruction through movies and books and remote photographs. If it’s a nightmare, why can’t we can’t awaken from it?” And words reiterated unceasingly, twenty eight years ago and now again in the year 2001: “We have lost our innocence. The world will never be the same.”
<snip>

The terrorists have wanted to single out and isolate the United States as a satanic state. The rest of the planet, including many nations and men and women who have been the object of American arrogance and intervention reject – as I categorically do – this demonization. It is enough to see the almost unanimous outpouring of grief of most of the world, the offers of help, the expressions of solidarity, the determination to claim the dead of this mass murder as our dead.

It remains to be seen if this compassion shown to the mightiest power on this planet will be reciprocated. It is still not clear if the United States – a country formed in great measure by those who have themselves escaped vast catastrophes, famines, dictatorships, persecution – it is far from certain that the men and women of this nation so full of hope and tolerance, will be able to feel that same empathy towards the other outcast members of our species, we will find out in the days and years to come if the new Americans forged in pain and resurrection are ready and open and willing to participate in the arduous process of repairing our shared, our damaged humanity. Creating, all of us together, a world in which we need never again lament not one more, not even one more terrifying September 11th.

http://www.duke.edu/web/forums/dorfman.html

[indepat]

9. When the good guys bomb others in an undeclared war, it is not terrorism,

for the good guys wear the white hats. Terrorism is committed by the bad guys who wear the black hats, to wit: when the good guys drop the bombs, it is good; when bad guys drop the bombs, it is an evil act of terrorism. By golly, I'm beginning to get it.