Military Rhetoric

2109 Words9 Pages
Virtually all first world countries would have voted against us at the U.N. on the matter of starting war with Iraq in 2003. Countries like Germany and France have been through thousands of years of armed conflict on their own soil, both on the winning and losing sides. Countries like Russia and China (who might like a few regime changes themselves) felt the situation wasn’t as clear cut and moralistic as we were made to believe. Our government’s rhetoric left them unconvinced, as Noam Chomsky explains in the sidebar. Germany, France, Turkey, Russia, Canada, to name a few—these countries acted in accordance with their citizens’ majority opinion on the matter. We as Americans seemed to attach little value to these starkly democratic votes…show more content…
(Thanks to Howard Zinn's A People’s History of the United States [2] for inspiration.) Unfortunately the vast majority of Americans are either unaware of these harmful practices or have been misled about their necessity. These are some clear examples of why we should not trust the military rhetoric: •At the top of the list, of course, is the war in Vietnam, where we fought to free people who didn’t want to be freed, much less killed, and against a country which had little chance of threatening us. •But besides that, instead of responding with outrage, we’ve bowed to our own self-interest and supplied actual money and military manpower to torturous regimes and murderers of their own citizens in such countries as the Philippines (in 1980), Nicaragua (early 80’s), El Salvador (80’s), East Timor (90’s and earlier), and Colombia (now). •For dubious or even manufactured reasons, we’ve invaded Cuba (Bay of Pigs, 1961) and Grenada (1983). •The Nixon/Kissinger government supported a brutal dictator as he overthrew a democratically-elected socialist leader, Salvador Allende, in Chile in 1973. ITT, an American telecommunications company, had an interest in keeping Chile's copper mines from being nationalized.
Open Document