[Chris Alger]

What I mean is that for several decades, and with no end of the trend in sight, the U.S. has a long record of initiating and supporting unjustifiable wars of aggression. It that it is allowed to get away with this conduct in large part by the knee-jerk response of self-styled "patriots," characterized not so much for their understanding or respect for American values and institutions but by their willingness to take any pretext for official violence at face value and to denounce as unpatriotic those who do not. For example:

1. Vietnam. By 1954, the political question of whether and how Vietnam would become independent had been resolved through an international consensus decreeing national elections. Alone among the nations of the world, the U.S. defied this consensus and installed an unpopular pro-U.S. regime in the South. It then spends 20 years in a futile attempt, largely through mass violence, to keep it in ostensible power, despite its continuous failure to obtain popular support or even territorial continuity.

So-called "patriots" claimed, and still claim, that this regime was a bulwark against falling dominoes and the butchering and enslavement of South Vietnam. The upshot was almost indescribable devastation (without reparations), 2-4 million killed, Vietnam in 1975 on the basically the same political footing it would have had in 1956, no falling dominoes, no post war massacres, and the patriots ultimately buying the wares of "communist slaves" from Walmart, whose merchandise is largely made in “Red China.” In the meantime, the same group would denounce similar Soviet efforts to prop up a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan as an outrageous example of imperialist aggression.

2. Timor. In 1975, a year after being given independence by Portugal, Indonesian armed forces invade East Timor, massacring thousands and annexing it (in 1976) as a "27th province," apparently in a bid to obtain Timor's oil resources. The invading forces are almost exclusively armed by the U.S., whose President and Secretary of State greenlight the invasion while visiting Indonesia the day before it occurred. It takes another 20 years for the Timorese to obtain their independence, during which some 200,000 are killed by the Indonesian military and security forces. In this case, because the U.S. government didn't need to engineer consent for massive intervention, the popular media hardly mentioned the war and the patriots have never even heard of it. The U.S. director of the CIA at the time, George Bush, would later be hailed by the patriots for his scathing denunciation of Iraq's aggression against Kuwait ("this-will-not-stand"), which they consider to be a characteristic case of American idealism and hatred of foreign aggression.

3. Central America. By the late 1970's, popular groups variously based on Christian, ethnic and Marxist ideologies threaten the governments of Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, three of the most corrupt and violent regimes in the world. In Nicaragua, they actually win. The characteristically savage response of the U.S. includes trying to subvert Nicaragua through boycott and terror and arming extreme forces of violence repression of El Salvador and Guatemala (here largely through Israel and other proxies, because Guatemala's record is so abysmal than not even the U.S. can overtly support it). This includes the creation, funding and arming of the largest state-sponsored terrorist group in the world, the notorious "contras," whose record of avoiding military targets is mirrored by their zeal for attacking defenseless schools, villages, buses, cooperatives and the like. Throughout this episode, the U.S. stridently denounces all efforts and international mediation and compromise.

The so-called "patriots" contend that the enemies of these regimes amount to Soviet proxies, despite all evidence to the contrary. Every manner of barbarism thus being justified, 200,000 to 400,000 people are killed, the overwhelming majority at the hands of U.S.-backed forces. Public focus in the U.S. largely ends after military stalemate, a White House scandal and a the election of a U.S.-backed candidate in Nicaragua forces a political compromise.

4. Iraq. After abetting Saddam's rise to power and his aggression against Iran, the U.S. spearheads the ruin of Iraq through bombing and sanctions after Saddam invades Kuwait, showing his wherewithal as his own bastard instead of ours. The result is some half million premature child deaths, a price the (liberal) Sec. of State publicly acknowledges is "worth it." After a wholly unrelated terror attack by residents of a different U.S.-supported Arabic dictatorship, the U.S. launches a propaganda campaign claiming that Iraq is an unacceptable Arab dictatorship, "tied to terrorism," and has secretly been rebuilding a WMD program, contrary to pre-9/11 official assessments. At this time Iraq had no record of employing or training terrorists, no WMD, no effective navy or air force, an overall military force reduced by 2/3's it size from 1990 and not even the ability to occupy much more than half the territory within its own borders. Despite this undeniable reality, it is generally reiterated throughout the U.S. mainstream press that the U.S. has been "forced" to invade, a premise that virtually the whole world rejects. Although this is again accompanied by evidence of remarkable spuriousness and caught-in-the-act lying, this time on a scale previously thought to be unimaginable, the "patriots" energetically swallow it all.

As a result, at least 30,000 Iraqis die violently with tens of thousands more either already dead or in the pipeline, more than were killed by Saddam during his last decade in power. Two years after "mission accomplished," the U.S. has no success for over a year either in reducing the incidence violent death or the number of insurgents (as admitted by U.S. military officials on the scene). The most terrorized country in the world, whose largely illiterate population is governed by clerics is hailed by patriots as an exemplar of democracy and a bastion of the "war against terror," despite the escalating incidence of terror outside Iraq, much of it resulting from the U.S. invasion.