For many decades U.S. foreign policy has been bi-partisan, reflecting the needs of U.S. business corporations around the world, and grounded in the myth of “entitlement” and “U.S. Exceptionalism,” the notions that the U.S. is unique in history in being the world’s ultimate savior, and therefore not bound by international law, and not subject to the constraints and realities that have confined other nations that were not the one Beacon of Liberty to save the world.
The elite people who have shaped U.S. foreign policy for many decades share those assumptions, even if they have educations from elite universities and should know better. They have been referred to as the “the best and brightest.”
But they are almost always tragically wrong.
I’m reading a book about Vietnam’s history from 1945 to 1979. The CIA was mucking around in there, interacting with rogues on all sides since the 1940s, conniving to help France keep its colony, and manipulating entry points for the U.S. to become the dominant military force.
The 1954 peace treaty that withdrew the troops temporarily into the north and into the south until a free nationwide election must occur in 1956 so the Vietnamese people could decide their nation’s future. President Eisenhower PREVENTED that election from occurring because he knew Ho Chi Minh would be elected instead of any of the crappy crooks who were running South Vietnam.
President Kennedy continued escalating the war with “advisors” who were displacing incompetent and unwilling soldiers from South Vietnam, and — as we know — President Johnson escalated massively after Kennedy. Just now I read the names of the people whose advice Johnson relied upon. These former advisors of Kennedy were referred to as “the best and brightest.” They included Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk. They all supported escalation and led the U.S. into a disastrous loss after Nixon increased the bombing and widened the war from Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia. It was unwinnable from the beginning.
Elite experts have hawkishly advised all subsequent presidents into extremely cruel, violent and unwinnable wars in Central America, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, and many, many other places — including U.S. wars underway now that the mainstream press do not report.
In each case the elite experts keep urging war, and the U.S. keeps bogging down in unwinnable wars.
Now — with Trump’s advisors still giving bad advice — Trump makes decisions that are even more stupid, cruel and counter-productive than his advisors want.
The U.S. would do much better — and would save countless millions of lives worldwide — if the U.S. government would take advice from the peace movement.
The military-industrial complex has been making fantastically huge profits for many decades now. Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? What do people’s lives matter anyway when huge huge profits are to be made by killing them?
