The U.S.: Imperialist Aggressors

Gabe writes from Canada:

An excellent piece. In fact the anti-war movement was inundated with the same imperial patriotism that afflicts the movement today, with slogans like Bring Our Boys Home, there was a similar, support the troops, oppose their actions orientation both of those who sought a full withdrawal and conservative elements that wanted to limit demands to a moratorium on bombing N. Vietnam. The Rambo origins of the myth is interesting…

I do have a disagreement with your article. I do not believe that the US military has ever been an honourable occupation, any more than the British or the French. With only two exceptions (world wars), every war America has waged has been as imperial aggressors. (Even with WWI, I would have difficulty regarding the Entente as morally superior to the Central Powers, especially considering that Britain and France had much more extensive empires than Germany.) Also, I do not regard the atrocities of the West as equivalent to the murderous response of the colonised (9-11), a distinction that is politically difficult to argue in North America, but is less so when considered from the realm of global human experience.

Certainly the United States was not obliged to involve itself in World War I. That was America’s attempt, with a military flush with cash from the first modern income tax, to compete with the European powers for global domination. We also provoked the Japanese into the Pearl Harbor attack with our military blockade, although it was for the betterment of mankind that Imperial Japan was defeated (and obviously Nazi Germany as well).

Obviously 9/11 pales compared to the scale of murder abetted by American foreign policy. Heck, America has already murdered nearly 200,000 people in retaliation for the deaths of 3,000. But yes, it is difficult to get insular and insulated Americans to see that.