Just-war pacifism, Syria, and U.S.foreign policy: A realistic assessment of U.S. foreign policy since World War II would speak, for example, not of the Niebuhrian “irony” involved in the exercise of U.S. power, but rather of our persistent use of violence in pursuit of “the national interest”—what Martin Luther King Jr. soberly described during the Vietnam era as “the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” Realism demands that we pay close attention to the sheer power interests, often cloaked in idealistic rhetoric, underlying the Pentagon’s estimated nine hundred military bases and installations in every corner of the globe, our staggering military budgets, and events such as Washington’s installation of dictators in countries like Greece, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran in the 1950s; its overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Chile and Brazil in the 1960s; its relentless “pacification” campaign in Indochina and “secret” carpet-bombing of Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and ’70s; its “green light” for Indonesia’s genocidal invasion and occupation of Catholic-majority East Timor in the ’70s; its sponsoring of right-wing death squads in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador to prop up corrupt oligarchies (even as they murdered priests and nuns calling for justice for the poor) from the ’50s through the ’80s; its channeling of billions of dollars of military aid to Turkey and Colombia as they escalated atrocities against their own populations in the ’90s; and the invasions, renditions, torture, and assassinations of our new surveillance state in the “war on terror” since 2001. Read it all...
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 17:53:06 +0000
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