Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism (Updated

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Elaborate racist theories were invented to justify colonialism and these theories were adopted enthusiastically in Washington. [11]

"We are the ruling race of the world .... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God of the civilization of the world ... He has marked us as his chosen people ... He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples." (Senator Albert Beveridge, again)

But the Filipinos didn't share the views of Senator Beveridge and his buddies.

They fought the new invaders just as they had fought the Spanish. The U.S. subjugated the Phillippines with brute force. U.S. soldiers were ordered to "Burn all and kill all, and they did. By the time the Filipinos were defeated, 600,000 had died. [12]

U.S. soldiers stand on the bones of Filipinos who died in the war.

The Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam were made into U.S. colonies in 1898. Cuba was formally given its independence, but along with it the Cubans were given the Platt Amendment, which stipulated that the U.S. Navy would operate a base in Cuba forever, that the U.S. Marines would intervene at will, and that Washington would determine Cuba's foreign and financial policies. [13]

[Uncle Sam says to a Cuban:] Now, don't say I never gave you anything.

Independence-Platt Amendment.

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During the same period, the U.S. overthrew Hawaii's Queen Lilivokalani and transformed these unspoiled Pacific islands into a U.S. Navy base surrounded by Dole and Del Monte plantations. In 1903, after Theodore Roosevelt became president, he sent gunboats to secure Panama's separation from Columbia. The Columbian government had refused Roosevelt's terms for building a canal. [14]

[Uncle Sam:] If they won't sell, I'll just take it!

Then Uncle Sam began sending his Marines everywhere.

The Marines went to China, Russia, North Africa, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. [15]

From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli...

Troops march in Siberia during the U.S. invasion of Russia, 1918.

Between 1898 and 1934, the Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times, and Columbia 4 times! [16]

In many countries, the Marines stayed on as an occupying army, sometimes for decades. When the Marines finally went home, they typically left the countries they had occupied in the hands of a friendly dictator, armed to the teeth to suppress his own people.

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Behind the Marines came legions of U.S. business executives ready not only to sell their goods but also to set up plantations, drill oil wells, and stake out mining claims. The Marines returned when called upon to enforce slave-like working conditions and put down strikes, protests, and rebellions. [17]

Standard Oil. United Fruit. Domino Sugar. Anaconda Copper.

"[I accept responsibility for] active intervention to secure for our capitalists opportunity for profitable investments." (President William Howard Taft, 1910) [18]

A reporter described what took place after U.S. troops landed in Haiti in 1915 to put down a peasant rebellion:

"American marines opened fire with machine guns from airplanes on defenseless Haitian villages, killing men, women and children in the open market places for sport." [19]

50,000 Haitians were killed. [20]

General Smedley Butler was one of the most celebrated leaders of these Marine expeditions. After he retired, he reconsidered his career, describing it as follows:

"I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service ... And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." [21]

"Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street."

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"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested."

U.S. Marine officer with the head of Silvino Herrera, one of the leaders of Augusto Sandino's rebel army, Nicaragua, 1930.

World War I was a horrific battle among the European colonial powers over how to divide up the world. When President Woodrow Wilson decided to enter the fray, he told the American people that he was sending troops to Europe to "make the world safe for democracy."

But what Wilson was really after was what he considered to be the United States' fair share of of the spoils.

Wilson's ambassador to England said rather forthrightly that the U.S. would declare war on Germany because it was... [22]

"... the only way of maintaining our present pre-eminent trade status." (Ambassador W.H. page, 1917)

For this, 130,274 U.S. soldiers were sent to their deaths. [23]

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"Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die." (General Smedley Butler, 1934)

World War I was supposed to be the "war to end all wars."

It wasn't.

During World War II, millions of young Americans signed up to fight German fascism and Japanese imperialism. But the goals of the strategic planners in Washington were far less admirable.

They had imperial ambitions of their own.

In October 1940, as German and Japanese troops were marching in Europe and Asia, a group of prominent government officials, business executives, and bankers was convened by the U.S. State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations to discuss U.S. strategy. They were concerned with maintaining an Anglo-American "sphere of influence" that included the British Empire, the Far East, and the Western hemisphere. They concluded that the country had to prepare for war and come up with ... [24]

"... an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States."

[Fatcat businessmen say:] Yes! yes! Yes!

Of course, they didn't say this publicly.

"If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world ... The interests of other peoples should be stressed ... This would have a better propaganda effect." (From a private memorandum between the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department, 1941) [25]

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A horrendous war was concluded with a horrendous event: 200,000 people were killed instantaneously when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki. Tens of thousands more died later from radiation poisoning. [26] [27]

"We pray that God might guide us to use [the Bomb] in his ways and for His purposes." (President Harry Truman, 1945)

The defeat of Japan had already been assured before the bombs were dropped. Their main purpose was to demonstrate to the world the deadly power of America's new weapon of mass destruction." [28]

World War II left the U.S. in a position of political, economic and military superiority. [29]

"We must set the pace and assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world." (Leo Welch, former Chairman of the Board, Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) 1946)

The U.S. eagerly assumed responsibility for determining the economic policies and selecting the management of what it considered to be the subsidiary companies that made up the "corporation known as the world."

But this didn't go over too well in many nations that considered themselves to be sovereign countries.

FUERA YANKIS!

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Boy, I never read about any of that stuff in here!

(AMERICA, Land of Freedom)

Chapter 2: The "Cold War" and the Exploits of the Self-Proclaimed "World Policeman"

Go ahead--make my day!

The United States, however, had to contend with the Soviet Union, which had also emerged from the Second World War as a world power. For the next 45 years, the world was caught up in a global turf battle between the "two superpowers." The U.S. was always much stronger than its Soviet adversary, but both countries maintained huge military forces to defend and expand their own "spheres of influence." The contention between the two powers was called the "Cold War" because they never directly engaged each other in battle. But the "Cold War" was marked by plenty of violence in other countries. Typically, the two superpowers lined up on opposite sides of every conflict.

For its part, the U.S. moved to expand its own "sphere of influence" beyond the Americas and the Pacific to include much of the old British, French and Japanese colonial empires in Asia and Africa. In doing so, it had to deal with local aspirations that did not always accord with American plans. To put down insubordination, disorder and disloyalty in its sphere, the new "majority stockholder" also appointed itself the "world policeman." During the Cold War, Washington intervened militarily in foreign countries more than 200 times. [30]

Don't mess with the U.S.A., buster!

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Korea, 1950-1953.

After World War II, the ambitious plans of the U.S. State Department for Asia and the Pacific were upset completely by revolutions and anti-colonial wars from China to Malaysia. A major confrontation developed in Korea. Washington decided to intervene directly to show that Western military technology could defeat any Asian army.

We'll show these #@%$!

U.S. warships, bombers, and artillery reduced much of Korea to rubble. Over 4,500,000 Koreans died; three out of four were civilians. 54,000 U.S. soldiers returned home in coffins. But the U.S. military, for all of its technological superiority, did not prevail. After 3 years of intense warfare, a cease-fire was negotiated. Korea is still divided and some 40,000 U.S. troops remain in Southern Korea to this day. [31]

Waiting for another war.

Dominican Republic, 1965.

After a U.S. backed military coup, Dominicans rose up to demand the reinstatement of the overthrown president (who they had elected in a popular vote). Washington, however, was determined to keep its men in power, no matter who the Dominicans voted for. 22,000 U.S. troops were sent to suppress the uprising. 3,000 people were gunned down in the streets of Santo Domingo. [32]

YANKEES GO HOME

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Vietnam, 1964-1973

For ten years the U.S. assaulted Vietnam with all the deadly force the Pentagon could muster, trying to preserve a corrupt South Vietnamese regime, which had been inherited from the French colonial empire. The U.S. may have used more firepower in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) than had been used by all sides in all previous wars in human history.

Sometimes you have to destroy a country to save it.

U.S. warplanes dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam.

That's the equivalent of one 350-pound bomb per person!

Despite the ferocity of the assault on Vietnam, the U.S. was ultimately defeated by a lightly armed but determined peasant army. [33]

400,000 tons of napalm were rained down on the tiny country. Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides were used to destroy millions of acres of farmland and forests. Villages were burned to the ground and their residents massacred. Altogether, two million people died in the Indochina War, most of them civilians killed by U.S. bombs and bullets. Almost 60,000 U.S. soldiers were killed and 300,000 wounded.

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Lebanon, 1982-1983

After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the U.S. Marines intervened directly in the Lebanese Civil War, taking the side of Israel and the right-wing Falange militia.

Which had just massacred 2000 Palestinian civilians.

U.S. Marines marching into Beirut, 1983.

241 Marines paid for this intervention with their lives when their barracks were blown up by a truck bomb. [34]

Grenada, 1983

About 110,000 people live on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

About the same number that live in Peoria, Illinois.

But, according to Ronald Reagan, Grenada represented a threat to U.S. security. So he ordered the Pentagon to seize the island and install a new government more to his liking. [35]

"A lovely piece of real estate." (Secretary of State George Schultz, 1983) [36]

[George Schultz says:] I'm a Bechtel man and a Pentagon fan.

Libya, 1986

Washington loved King Idris, the Libyan monarch who happily turned over his country's oil reserves to Standard Oil for next to nothing. It hates Col. Qadhafi, who threw the King out. In 1986, Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb the Libyan capital, Tripoli, claiming that Qadhafi was responsible for a bomb attack at a German disco that killed two U.S. soldiers. It's unlikely that very many of the hundreds of Libyans killed or injured on the U.S. bombing raid knew anything about the German bombing.

The nerve of those terrorists--bombing those poor people! [37]