I’d say that (with the exception of a few morally sound conflicts [WW2 and a couple of other conflicts] that the US has done nothing but promote its own financial and international self interests, essentially since the birth of the nation. I don’t blame the troops for this. I think that most of them are unwitting pawns. International confidence and positive favor towards the US is on a massive decline, and has been for a couple of decades. I think it’s very rare that our motives are “freedom for the world”, and I think it’s sickening that this angle is constantly used as justification. Freedom this, freedom that. Operation Enduring freedom. We’re freedom lovers, they’re freedom haters. Freedom bombs creating freedom corpses. Not that ISIS is any better, of course. We’ve been the global bullies for a long time. Sure, sometimes we help somebody, especially if we have interest at stake, but we are and always have been very aggressive, expansionist, and bully-like. I do love America. But I don’t entirely equate America entirely with the military industrial complex and oligarchical atmosphere surrounding politics. That’s part of America. A bigger part of America includes my family, my friends, great accomplishments of the country etc etc. I love the latter portion. The prior I find sickening. And in that sense, I see our Troops as victims as well.
I don't totally disagree with you guys (though I draw the line at Vortex's venomous perspective)
Where we differ is that I believe that it is the job of the USG to promote its own interests - just as it is the job of any other govt to promote the interests of its country. I don't understand how doing so can be viewed as a sin.
More fundamentally, I think you guys are underestimating the horribleness that govts around the world impose on their own people and that they do (or would, if they could) impose on other people. You only focus on the USA as the bad guy in all this because it is the biggest and most powerful.
In retrospect, the Vietnam War was a mistake and was poorly managed by the US military. But let's not kid ourselves, communism is an awful system that has killed 100s of millions of very people it was supposed to save. The "Domino Theory" certainly made sense from the perspective of the CIA in 1962. The VN communists killed a huge number of its intellectuals, teachers, business owners, successful farmers, etc. Ditto the Chicoms and, of course, Ditto the Soviets. The Chicoms and Soviets were arming and supporting the VN communists, as they have armed and supported communists all over the world.
Then there's life under Sharia in places like Iran. They still stone women to death for showing a little leg or dancing to western music. Ditto Afghanistan, ditto Saudi Arabia. There's still slave trade in Africa. There have been - and still are - civil wars in Africa where all manner of bloody mass murder happens; including routine cannibalism.
America as exceptional bad guy only makes sense if you put on some very thick rose colored glasses and willfully ignore what the rest of the world is like. Humanity is barbaric. Most people are still living under very primitive and savage systems.
Part of the challenge for your perspective, Eric, is that it does not fit into the conspiratorial line of thinking. Your perspective is simply too easy to conflate with the prevailing "official narrative" and any official narrative is immediately suspect here.
Your background would seem to give you an at least uncommon level of insight, so I find what you've said to be thought provoking.
I hate reversing myself, but since you brought up conspiracy theories, I'll jump back into the discussion.......
.......IMO, sometimes there are conspiracies, but usually not. I would say that, for example, the Iraq invasion was an example of a true conspiracy within a wider ideology driven foreign policy. The conspirators easily hijacked FP because the fundamental mindset in FP was fertile ground for the conspirators to plant their seeds. So I'm not saying that conspiracies never happen; only that, at best, conspiracies are partial explanations when they do occur.
I will repeat that, IMO, wars are not started, nor prolonged, to enrich the purveyors of weapons and ammo. Everyone here, I'm sure, understands that correlation does not equal causation. We see vultures on road kill, but that doesn't mean that the vultures caused the car to hit the poor creature that is now dead and being eaten by them. So it is with the "military industrial complex" and foreign policy.
Nor should we attribute to a crafty conspiracy what is more parsimoniously attributed to incompetence. A lot of what drives US foreign policy is ignorance and group think. The people that end up working in areas of the USG that create and implement FP are largely selected from the same schools. They have the same background. There is a lot of group think. Nails that stick out are either hammered in or pull out of the frame work. Very very few have served in the military. They have all kinds of fantasies about what the military can accomplish. They also tend to be social science types and they bring to the table the notion that, at bottom, all humans are the same and that differences that are problematic can be ameliorated through application of social science theories and techniques- in short, we can train the wogs to be Americans. Of course the wogs will WANT to be Americans because, well .....who wouldn't want to be? These people are utterly indoctrinated into the belief of America as the Shining City on the Hill. If you don't believe that, then you are one of those nails that sticks out. When these people travel to foreign lands they stay at embassies or other westernized sectors. They meet with representatives of the country who are westernized to some extent, perhaps even at the same Ivy League schools. This confirms for the FP establishment that the wogs really want to be us (I use "wog" because that is what the FP establishment thinks of foreigners who have not *yet* been westernized via social science interventions).
Of course, meanwhile, figuratively speaking, though often quite literally, out in the hills, or in the back alleys, roam bands of fierce tribesmen living as they have for hundreds of years and who have no desire to morph into Americans. These people are seen as being "on the wrong side of history" and this is when the US military is called in. "History", to the social science types, is an arrow - an arrow that flies toward "Progress" and Progress is becoming like an American (or a Brit).
The above is all it takes to create all sorts of disastrous FP and war. No conspiracy. The vultures, the profiteers, the Zionists, just hover over this ship of fools, making a living off the killing and, sometimes, as with the Iraq invasion, whispering into the captain's ear so as to impact the steering of the ship.
All of that said, Russia (more so in Soviet days) and China do the same to spread their ideologies. Wog on Wog warfare is horrible as I have mentioned up thread. Sometimes the ship of fools does some good in preventing total chaos from reigning in certain regions. I reject the notion that the wogs would be living in utopia if not for US FP. The wogs have their own ideologies and are quite capable of killing each other over them.