No, this isn’t about Donald Trump, but it sure was fun to generate this AI image.
In the last several years we have seen a poorly executed (though necessary) withdrawal from Afghanistan after twenty years and 180,000 deaths, a destructive and futile, US-equipped quagmire in Ukraine with the potential to ignite a nuclear war, a US-sponsored genocide in Palestine, and now a US-sponsored invasion of Lebanon that threatens to expand into a major regional war.
Who are we? What are we?
When one looks back to see how it all started, resisting the temptation look too closely at the legacy of constitutional slavery and Manifest Destiny, two events come to my mind: first, the poorly-named Cold War, and second, the end of the Cold War. Behind those two great events is one persistent two-headed beast: oil and gas.
In 1953, fearing for their petrol, Britain and the United States instigated a military coup d’état that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The CIA, to top it off, hired thugs to prop up their puppet, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.
A snapshot from my Bahá’í upbringing: within two years of the coup, the Shah’s army demolishes the Bahá’í Center in Tehran, making a media event of it. A couple years later, the Shah founds SAVAK, his notorious secret police force that would commence to torture and execute thousands of Iranians.
Dear fellow Americans: “your tax dollars at work.”
Years before, in 1947, war had broken out between Jewish settlers in Palestine and indigenous Palestinians. The settlers triumphed, and 750,000 Palestinians, whether Muslim or Christian, fled or were forced off the land. Amid the war, the settlers declared statehood and America co-signed the declaration. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was now officially engaged.
After the 1953 coup, Iran was restored as a client of the West, but the Shah was not popular in Iran, and neither was Israel. In 1963, hundreds of protesters were killed by the Shah’s forces. The protesters were demonstrating against the arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who was preaching against Israel, Zionism, and American hegemony, but the West was the Shah’s meal ticket. He was friendly with Israel. Khomeini had to be silenced. Khomeini had to go.
The United States made numerous attempts at regime change in the years from 1953 to 1973. They were involved in the assassination of the democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1961. They made multiple attempts on the life of Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1965. They were involved in the Chilean coup d’état in 1973.
A couple years after the anti-Western demonstrations in Iran, the United States entered the Vietnam War. That was a different era, back when Americans were drafted into war, when Americans fought with their own bodies and bombed villages from human-piloted airplanes, and American died by the tens of thousands. 58,220 to be precise, but for what?
You should have seen the other guy: a million Vietnamese, 300,000 Cambodians, and 40,000 Laotians were killed by American actions during the Vietnam War.
The Conversation: Henry Kissinger’s bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians − and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge
Win Without War: Secret War, Forgotten War: The U.S. Bombing of Laos
How could anyone not like America? Whatever could Khomeini have been complaining about? America is, after, the land of the free; that is, except for the incarcerated, and the United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world.
Soon after the United States left Vietnam, incarcerations increased across America. More and more Americans were imprisoned from 1975 to 2007, disproportionately brown.
Brennan Center for Justice: Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Disastrous War on Drugs
I was only a toddler when Israel first occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War. In 1971, the United States began to grant significant aid to Israel. A couple years later, six months after the United States left Vietnam, the October War (or “Yom Kippur War”) prompted the United States to begin gifting arms to Israel. Now equipped with American F-15s, Israel invaded Lebanon in March 1978, and then again in 1982.
Back in Iran, Anti-Western protests began in early 1978 and arose again in August. The Shah declared martial law in September and, after 2,800 civilian deaths, was in exile by January. In November, 53 Americans were taken hostage at the American embassy, and America holds a grudge to this day.
In February 1979, only four weeks after the Shah escaped Iran, the American ambassador to Kabul was assassinated. A month later, a number of Soviet advisors were executed in Herat. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan in December. American support for resistance fighters was soon to follow. American support for militants contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the implosion of the Soviet Union triggered a blind Neo-Liberal “end of history” fever in the West. In December 1994, Ukraine signed away its nuclear deterrent to the United States and Russia. What could possibly go wrong?
In February 1993, the unintended consequences of America’s destabilization of Afghanistan began to flower. Al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center. In August 1998, Al-Qaeda bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring over 4,000, and prompting the pathetic and controversial response the US christened Operation Infinite Reach.
In September 2000, Israeli politician Ariel Sharon paid a visit to the Temple Mount, provoking the Second Intifada, a conflict that would result in the deaths of 1,000 Israelis and 3,200 Palestinians. In October, Al-Qaeda militants attacked the USS Cole, killing 17 Americans. We Americans look back on this period as a peaceful time.
In 1999 and 2004, NATO underwent major expansions, and that would not be the end of that. We had the Russkies where we wanted them, theirs backs to the wall.
On 11 September 2001, Al-Qaeda struck the United States again, out of the blue, so to it was depicted. A recent report indicates that elements within the Saudi government were involved in the attack. Though I doubt that the United States was involved in the planning and execution of the 9-11 attacks, it seems reasonable to suspect that the United States was involved in protecting Saudi elements that may have been involved, and it is not implausible that the newly-inaugurated Bush Administration may have turned a cynical eye to the Al-Qaeda threat, as much as they appeared to be itching for a fight.
The United States responded to the 9-11 attacks by invading Afghanistan, and the United States would remain there for twenty years and accomplish little besides the deaths of 2,000 Americans and 176,000 Afghans.
But Afghanistan wasn’t enough, the United States was frustrated about the continued survival of Saddam Hussein, and they needed an excuse to go get Saddam, so they put together a quick case, had a trusted Black man present it to the world, and promptly invaded Iraq.
The Iraq War was notorious for war crimes. Among the most notable occurred at Abu Ghraib Prison in the first year of the war. One airstrike in July 2007 featured the murder of a gathering of ten civilians, two of them journalists. This crime was immortalized when Wikileaks published leaked video footage of the crime under the title, Collateral Murder. The Trump and Biden administrations later pursued the Australian founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and ultimately managed to have him imprisoned in Britain, violating press freedom and demonstrating utter contempt for the US Constitution (which they had vowed to uphold).
4,431 Americans died in the Iraq War, but in the course of eight years, American servicemen killed an estimated half-million Iraqis and threw the region into chaos.
It was simply a matter of serving one’s country with duty and honor. That in mind, perhaps a young American should study his history before he decides to set out on that particular road to glory.
9-11 gave the United States license to attack a variety of entities on antiterrorism grounds. Iraq has not been the only illegitimate target. In December 2006, the US collaborated with Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia. Though the invasion was a tactical success, Ethiopia could not hold their ground and were out of Somalia by early 2009. Since then, the United States has continued to attack Somali militants and citizens mostly from the air, typically with drones, though the US does have troops deployed in Somalia (Trump pulled them out but Biden put them back in).
In December 2008, while all this peacekeeping was going on, America’s Israeli forces killed 1,400 Palestinians.
In 2011, as Palestinian deaths just weren’t newsworthy, the operation in Afghanistan was getting boring and the operation in Iraq was getting expensive, the United States began looking for another region to throw into chaos, so we ordered NATO to bomb Libya, though Libya was clearly none of NATO’s business. We helped rebels hunt down Gaddafi, destroyed the equilibrium of Saharan Africa, and initiated a flood of refugees into Europe. A job well done for President Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Hype Prize.
Syria was next in line for “the Arab Spring.” Bashar al-Assad suppressed protests, and the United States gave support to the rebels, striving again to destabilize the Arab world in the name of democracy. Under great pressure, Al-Assad treated the protesters like an existential threat, showing no more regard for civilian life than America itself, but no Peace Prize for Bashar.
Chaos in Iraq was metastasizing. By 2014, Islamic militants were organizing in northern Iraq and taking territory. In a post-Saddam void, they styled themselves “the Islamic State,” or ISIS. The war had ended in 2011, but was the war really over?
Oh, and by the way. You might not have noticed that Israel killed 2,400 Palestinians during an operation in summer 2014.
ISIS expanded throughout northern Iraq and into Syria, terrorizing populations wherever they roamed. The United States stepped in, attacking ISIS and then, with Donald Trump at the helm, attacking Syria. The Islamic State was defeated in 2019, though it could arise at any time in a great range of places. At last count, 2,500 American soldiers remain deployed in Iraq. 900 remain in eastern Syria.
U.S. troops will leave some bases in Iraq under deal to end mission fighting Islamic State (PBS, 27 Sep 2024)
In total, about 40,000 American troops are stationed in the “Middle East” … that is, if one does not count the IDF as a branch of the American military.
Council on Foreign Relations: U.S. Troops in the Middle East: Mapping the Military Presence
Always the neutral arbiter, America is using its foothold in Syria to smuggle Syrian oil to Israel. While Israel lives off of American aid, Israel sells arms to Azerbaijan for its war against Armenia.
On December 6, 2017, the United States officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel. Over the following two years, Palestinians protested, and over 200 of the protesters were killed by Israeli sniper fire. America moved its embassy to Jerusalem and also moved to exclude Palestine from further negotiations. We averted our eyes while we swept Palestine under the rug. Inconveniently, Palestine couldn’t breathe under the rug, panic ensued, and we now find ourselves murdering Palestinian woman and children by the truckload.
That’s right: I said we. Do you think someone else is making this happen?
Dear fellow Americans, we talk a lot about democracy. To whatever extent we live in a democracy, we have met the enemy.
… and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government...
Martin Luther King, Jr., 4 April 1967
I neglected to mention the NATO bombings in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars (1995 & 1999). These were important mileposts as they mark NATO's expansion into aggressive action in the post-Soviet period. The latter case (Operation Allied Force) was more deadly and more controversial, with a death toll of 1,200 and questionable targets such as the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (which the US says was a mistake but probably wasn't).
Thanks for all the effort you've put into this extensive list. I had the most amazing history teacher in high school who enlightened fairly well us up to that point--the mid 1970s. Nowadays I look to Prof. Jeffrey Sacs, among others, for reasonably clear insights. Perhaps you have other suggestions?