How Many Muslim Countries Has the U.S. Bombed or Occupied Since 1980? Story...

[jtuck004]

...
To get a full scope of American violence in the world, it is worth asking a broader question: how many countries in the Islamic world has the U.S. bombed or occupied since 1980? That answer was provided in a recent Washington Post op-ed by the military historian and former U.S. Army Col. Andrew Bacevich:
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Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.

Bacevich’s count excludes the bombing and occupation of still other predominantly Muslim countries by key U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, carried out with crucial American support. It excludes coups against democratically elected governments, torture, and imprisonment of people with no charges. It also, of course, excludes all the other bombing and invading and occupying that the U.S. has carried out during this time period in other parts of the world, including in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as various proxy wars in Africa.
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But of all the various points to make about this group, this is always the most astounding: those same people, who love to denounce the violence of Islam as some sort of ultimate threat, live in countries whose governments unleash far more violence, bombing, invasions, and occupations than anyone else by far. That is just a fact.
...

Here.

Damn terrorists.
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There's some stuff about Obama's part in this I left out and you can ignore if you have heard enough crap the last couple days. I just thought the list was astounding, and the authors talks about people who make it their full-time hobby to keep this going.

[Recursion]

1. Including Kuwait and Bosnia is kind of silly (nt)

[jberryhill]

4. +1

The OP seems to include several instances in which the population sought to be aided is predominantly Muslim.

[Scootaloo]

10. Well...

Given that Kuwait was only invaded because the US gave Saddam a green light, and that we only intervened becuase Iraqi forces attacked Saudi positions... And our unflagging support for the slave state of Kuwait, which purged itself of its Bodoon and Palestinian populations immediately after the war... Really the whole thing could have been prevented by simply telling saddam "No, the US doesn't want you to do that" when he asked about "reclaiming the province."

I'm also not too sure how appreciative Bosniaks are of being bombed, even if we were "on their side," for that matter. I'm sure being on the ground while the bombs are falling is quite a different experience from watching nascent cable news coverage of it.

[Enthusiast]

15. +1

[L0oniX]

19. +2

[msongs]

2. "from the halls of montezuma to the shores of tripoli..." references 1805 nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. The ingrates refuse to acknowledge that we were killing their people for their own good.

Where the hell are the candy & flowers they promised us??

[Midnight Writer]

5. Sometimes u need to destroy the country to save the country

[jtuck004]

6. That would explain a lot. Whose stupid idea was that? I am going to

guess it wasn't people in the country being. "helped".

It isn't working here, either. But I digress.

[malaise]

8. +1,000

The war machine must be fed - freedom and democracy my ass.

[DeSwiss]

7. K&R

- WAR: It's what we do and it's who we are.

''The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.''

~George Orwell, 1984

''Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.''

~Robert Anton Wilson, from "Searching For Cosmic Intelligence"

''If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interests—it can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art.''

~John Whiting, The Economics of Human Energy

''Let your life be a friction to stop the machine.'' ~ Henry David Thoreau

[randome]

9. And how many atrocities have these countries committed against themselves?

How much regional instability did they precipitate before the U.S. entered? Other than Iraq, what occurred before our entry onto the scene?

Bombing campaigns are not the answer to everything. But to reflexively imply that only America is truly evil is nonsense.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Treat your body like a machine. Your mind like a castle.[/center][/font][hr]

[Scootaloo]

11. Surprisingly little, actually

Most of the chaos and bloodshed in the region is directly traceable to western - not just American - meddling and influence. From Sykes-Picot onward, the policy of first Europe and now the US has been to keep the region unstable and often violent. Instability favors dictators over democracy - dictators are more pliable and easier to buy off than democratic governments, and so long as thy have our resources, we prefer dictators, and so, we prefer instability. Violence justifies interventions which fuel our war industry, and helps prevent other nations from capitalizing in the region.

Let's take a momentary example of Syria.

Know why Syria is "the bad guy" in the US narrative? because the Assads, unlike the equally brutal and banal dictators of Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, have aligned with Russia instead of the US. Really, that's it. John Kerry watches Fateh al-Sissi slaughter six thousand Egyptians, and sentence over a thousand more in sham trials, and calls him a dear friend, but rages to the EU that Assad is the new Hitler, really?

So, Syria is the bad guy because its dictator didn't join the pro-US dictator club after the fall of the USSR. What's the US' solution? Well, a reasonable response would be to just let it be. he picked his friends, we've picked ours, that's just how international politics goes, right? well, no, US policy demands regional hegemony; align with the US or die.

So, along comes this Arab Spring thing - We opposed it in Egypt. We armed Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia against it. We may have even helped fight agaisnt it first-hand in Iraq, when it rolled by. But in Syria? Oh boy, we suddenly supported the shit out of it! But... not the protestors in Damascus. No, we supported the shit out of an extremist armed insurgency - if they targeted a western state we would call them 'terrorists', but they were going to be killing Muslims who were citizens of a state aligned with Russia, so we called 'em "freedom fighters" (remember how much Obama admires Reagan?)

Why? Were these guys going to bring freedom and liberty to Syria? Usher in a new era of peace ,stability, and democracy? No, of course not, they would simply replace a pro-Russian dictator with a pro-American dictator. Either that or they would fail and Syria would be in shambles... which would still deny Russia its foothold in the middle east.

We opted to destroy Syria because, if we can't have it, no one will.

[randome]

12. Peace is always more profitable than war. Ask any businessman.

We don't gain anything by having dictators in place. No one is trying to 'usher' in anything, right now we're trying to stop ISIS' rampage across the landscape. We could sit back and let them do what they want but do you really think the region would miraculously stabilize on its own then?

Yeah, politics and diplomacy make strange bedfellows. What's going on in Egypt is troubling but Syria is engaged in an outright civil war right now. I think from the strategic thinkers, it's a different ballgame. I don't think we're engaged there simply because Putin doesn't like Obama.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers, it's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

[Bigmack]

16. Peace more profitable...? Really..?

Tell Lockheed, Boeing, KBR, Bechtel....

http://www.alternet.org/story/41083/the_10_most_brazen_war_profiteers

You said: "We could sit back and let them do what they want but do you really think the region would miraculously stabilize on its own then?"

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have proven conclusively that we can't "stabilize" a region. We just pissed away $6 Trillion and 7,000 American lives... and hundreds of thousands of innocents there... to prove we can't stabilize shit!

This country has yet to "stabilize" anyplace. Wait... I take that back.... Europe after WWII... the Marshall Plan.

[Scootaloo]

17. I think you missed my point

Yes, peace is more profitable than war (except for the arms industry, of course) but the purpose of instigating and fueling these wars isn't to make a profit, but to keep other nations from being able to. It effectively puts the nation in question "on ice," forcing it into a sort of geopolitical stasis for the duration.

And yes, we actually DO gain a lot by dictators. That's why, around the world, the United States has ALWAYS favored dictators. Not just the US of course, but being Americans, we're most familiar with our own puppets.

You ee, a dictator is one guy. You just have to deal with that one guy to get the trade deals you want. To get the resources you want. To have him point his military at who you want. One guy is easy to bribe or if need be, muscle around. Compare to a democracy. Democracies are surprisingly resistant to such foreign meddling, because (ideally) everything that comes down the pipe is open for discussion by a legislative council, debate by the populace, and settlement by a judiciary. It's much harder to scrape th wealth out of a nation that has a functioning democracy than one that operates under a dictatorship.

The point on Syria is, there wouldn't be a civil war there, were it not for US involvement to make it so. We wanted Assad to fall and die like Ghaddafi (this turned out so well for Libya, yes?) and so we armed, funded, and trained the crazy people over there to do that. What started out as a minor insurgency that could have been put down handily enough, became with US aid and arms, a civil war that has to date killed over six hundred thousand and counting, and is spilling into Iraq and Turkey, and will eventually hit Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel.

It has less to do with Putin than you might think, but everything to do with the fact that Assad was aligned with a power other than the United States, or a power that is in turn so aligned.

Would the region miraculously stabilize? Not now. Not after nearly a century of meddling, alteration, mapmaking, warring, and interference from the west. Our impact is comparable to the Mongol invasion by Hulegu, in how destructive it's been. The Crusades were nothing, compared to the chaos we've dropped into the region. Barring the emergence of some very canny leaders and popular organization, the region's going to take at least a hundred and fifty years to stabilize, even if we pull out all western meddling.

[CrawlingChaos]

13. Excellent post - thank you! (nt)

[Enthusiast]

14. It's a crusade!

[jtuck004]

18. Exactly...we have a long tradition to uphold...still fighting Texans, too

[Enthusiast]

20. How cute!

[jtuck004]

21. That's the stuff some of us were raised on. <G> n/t