Terrorism is okay as long as they are on Our side

[mr.radon]

to those who believe the US doesn't sponsor terrorism, I suggest reading a history of South America before coming to that conclusion, and taking special note of the School of the Americas of Fort Benning, Georgia.

 

"Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians."

There’s another correlation, I think all these guys graduated from kindergarten too...Hum?

Hitler had a few close calls getting off'ed I bet there are a lot of dead people who wish his lights went out a lot sooner then 1945.

When is it expedient to get rid of a monster? When does the cost out-weigh the benefit?

Maybe the USA is stepping back and taking a different approach. Look at the recent happenings in Venezuela.

[Off_White]

Sometimes people just explode. Natural causes.

[scott_harpell]

I don't have any evidence. What would motivate the president of Panama to make such a move that would be locally so unpopular? If you smell a dead fish, do you have to actually see the dead fish to know that it is there?

 

Mabe you just need a shower.

[whirlwind]

the funny thing is that when castro dies his brother is likly to take his place and he is a bigger tyrant than castro

also if the US hadn't put a trade embargo on cuba the cuban people would be in a much better situation.

people also forget that the people Castro overthrew where worse than castro himself. Castro refused to allow the us to influence cuban politics, in other words castro belived in comunisum and the US feared comunism, and still does, so we closed off the boarders with the trade embargo trying to force castro to undo the comunistic style goverment. personally i give castro some props for not allowing the us to influence cuba, but i don't agree with much else that he has done, i do however think its time to end the embargo on cuba and open up travel and trade there.

but thats just my 2 cents

[JayB]

Four Cuban terrorists were pardoned and released on orders of the outgoing Panamanian president and sent to Florida. These men were caught with 33 lbs of high explosive, planning to assassinate Fidel Castrol at a Latin American summit meeting in 2000. The Bush Administration denied that it pressured President Moscoso to make the pardon. These four men are all killers. One of them was involved in a car bombing on US soil that killed South American diplomate.

 

I guess it's okay to pardon these terrorists because they are against someone we don't like. They are OUR terrorists and therefore good terrorists. It should score points with the Cuban expatriates in Miami. Bush could sure use their support.

 

Yahoo News Story

 

Brian:

 

I know that pop nihilism has become all the rage these days, as the tendency amongst the leftists of the world to equate Moqtada Al-Sadr with the French resistance has shown - but do you really believer that all political violence can be evaluated apart from the context in which it occurs and the ends which it is dedicated to furthering?

 

By this logic the assasination attempt on Hitler by his officers in an effort to end his reign and the assasination of Lincoln are morally equivalent to one another. If you accept that all assasination attempts - be they against Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or FDR, Churchill, or Sadat are all equally illegitimate - then I suppose that your stance at least has a theoretical cohesiveness going for it, but it would be a bit much to claim that it makes sense in any functional moral framework. I can see how one could equate all political violence while operating in the theoretical ether - but on the ground - any moral framework that fails to distinguish between violence based on the means, ends, and targets runs the risk of conflating an assasination attempt on Pol Pot with the 9/11 attacks falls far short of anything resembling seriousness or legitimacy.

 

As in the case of the death penalty, the Left seems to have a hard time distinquishing between acts that are physically equivalent and morally equivalent -and I think that

[astrov]

to those who believe the US doesn't sponsor terrorism, I suggest reading a history of South America before coming to that conclusion, and taking special note of the School of the Americas of Fort Benning, Georgia.

 

"Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians."

There’s another correlation, I think all these guys graduated from kindergarten too...Hum?

Hitler had a few close calls getting off'ed I bet there are a lot of dead people who wish his lights went out a lot sooner then 1945.

When is it expedient to get rid of a monster? When does the cost out-weigh the benefit?

Maybe the USA is stepping back and taking a different approach. Look at the recent happenings in Venezuela.

 

Maybe the USA is violating international law, i.e. The Geneva Conventions, in which we agreed not to assasinate leaders of other nations.

 

And another point you're confused on is that we have created the monsters that need "offing". And sure, it would be expedient to get rid of them.

 

And I am not sure what you mean by Venezuela. If you mean, democracy in action, free from CIA interference, I agree, it's a miracle.

[JayB]

Jim, I'm curious. Give me an example of #1 and don't make it sound like "#2." Thanks. I agree with you on #3 but 'tis easier said than done. #3 is basically isolationism, which is, as you know, a dead concept in today's global socio-economic world.

 

Older example -Chile. Salvador Allende was democratically elected. The US was worried about the Socialist wave spreading in South America and provided financing, funding, and intellegence for a coup. Allende was killed and Pinochet was put in place, we turned a blind eye to his death squads over the next 20 years. Similar situations in El Salvador and Guatemela.

 

Recent past: We backed Sadaam until he didn't listen to orders anymore. Did we sqawk when he was using poison gas against the Kurds or Iranians? No - because he was serving a purpose. He held together a fractionious country, was a counter point to Iran's fundamental government, and sold oil to us.

 

Current: Rather than put together a government in Afganastan that includes local coalitions, we choose a government that was put together by Wolfiwitz back in D.C., and contains folks that haven't lived there for 20 years. Harmet Karzi was picked for one reason, he was previously an employee of Unacal, which was pushing for the hugh gas pipeline that will go through Afganistan.

 

Or you could pick our annual $3 Billion that goes to Israel, including major military hardware, which they use to control the Palestians. You can researh thru Amnesty Internation for Israel's track record.

 

My bottom line is this - we'er a county of great folks (mostly) with quite a bit of weath. Can't we put that weath to use at home and abroad in ways that will benefit more people, and will be less intrusive than military spending. I think the answer is yes.

 

And I don't mean isolationism. I mean no imperialism. You can be engaged in the world without depending on military or violent solutions as the standard approach.

 

The principal objection I have to your characterization is that it completely ignores the geopolitical realities which animated the decision making and fails to address the alternatives which reality presented at the time.

 

Any serious attempt to understand the history of the 20th century and evaluate the morality actions that took place within it has to account for the fundamental struggle that occured between the free world and totalitarianism - principally the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Can anyone seriously deny that the fundamental political objective for the United states during the latter half of the 20th century was eliminating Soviet totalitarianism in all of its manifestations about the globe, or that the US failed to devote sufficient resources to this task?

 

Take a look at the sphere in which we concentrated the bulk of our resources - the Soviet Union and its satellite states - and claim that the people who reside their are less free as a result of our efforts, or that our fundamental objective was to deny them democracy. Feel free to travel to Poland or Moscow or what used to be East Germany and lecture them about how they have less political freedom as a result of American initiative - and that they should restore the systems that collapsed under the pressure orchestrated by the United States. Good luck. Ditto for Japan and Germany - both had some fine democracies going on until we came along and ruined everything.

 

And as far as the Middle East is concerned - I am certain that scrupulously declining to take sides in the Iran/Iraq war would have led to the establishment of a Democratic Eden all across the region - because that's what the Iranians were fighting for - as evinced by the political system they established in their own state. And as far as Saddam is concerned, once we were on his team we should have backed him in the end just to be consistent - I mean we shamefully turned our backs on Stalin after we jointly eliminated the common threat posed by Nazism, "they were our friends as long as it suited us and then..." - so its doubly outrageous this time around . Certainly the correct stance would have been to have let him run roughsod all over the Arabian Pinensula - because its not the ends that your policy is serving that matters - its consistent alliances irrespective of the consequences for humanity that determine the morality of any foreign policy decision.

 

As far as the 3 billion that goes to Israel - as compared to the 1-2 billion annually that goes to Egypt - every dollar is obviously directed towards thwarting democracy - because if there's one undemocratic state in the entire Middle East - it's definitely Israel. Meanwhile the Palestinians used their limited mandate to set up a model state, equal if not superior to the oases of democracy established by their ideological brethren in Syria, Algeria, Libya, et al.

 

And speaking of ideological brethren - I am sure that if we stopped meddling in their affairs the Islamists could finally set about establishing democracies without our interference in their affairs. I mean - the Saudis certainly have their faults, but if we would stop our anti-democratic interference and let the Islamists overwhelm the current regimes I am cerain that they would establish liberal democracies that would turn Sweden green with envy immediately - because that's what they have been campaigning for all along. They mainstream press and Fox may have even deluded you into thinking otherwise, but actually they have been waging jihad in order to finally legalize gay marriage and modify the Sharia to provide insitutional support for freedom of expression throughout the Arab world.

 

Wow - that was a fun rant.

 

I think that you are a reasonable guy who only wants what's best for the world, but taking a Michael Moorian approach to history and excising a tidbit here and a tidbit there and turning the full scope of American initiative into a bizzare collage of anti-democratic intrigue is neither accurate nor an effective means of bringing that about.

 

If anything - I think that the greatest risk in the years ahead is not that the US will intervene too forcefully in the world's affairs, but that the citizenry will have grown weary under the weight of such specious critiques and decide to withdraw from the world entirely - consequences be damned. If the average citizen sees that the US can't intervene in *&^%ing Somalia or $#@ing Kosovo without being denounced and accused of aquisitiveness, and imperialism - it's probably best to leave the world to its own devices so that the protesters can finally face the consequences of their rhetoric .

 

Sudan and Rwanda are exhibit A IMO - and if history is any guide - there will be plenty more catastrophes that will occur in between gulf that exists between the global Left's self-righteous posturing and it's ability to act in support of its ideals - as in, again - Sundan. The EU has 2-3 million troops engaged in nothing more serious than securing the cappucino stand down the street while the outrages in Sudan continue...

[rbw1966]

Hello- I have been to this SOA in person. Have you?

 

Yup. Temporary duty assignment.

 

Sometimes the ends justfy the means. While history may not always view those actions in a favorable context, sometimes action is necessary and no amount of handwringing will help.