Cold War
Scrub the CIA
Contrary to popular opinion, the CIA has done valuable, even critical work for our nation. Its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helped us win World War II. And during the Cold War, someone had to counter the ruthlessness of the Soviet KGB. That kind of work is dangerous, and often messy. But early on in its existence, the CIA strayed from what it was chartered to do: gather intelligence.
The agency has had many low points. George Tenet’s WMD “slam dunk” in Iraq was just the last in a long line of criminally incompetent actions. I believe the beginning…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
World Boss History Reason #5: Dirty Tricks Around the World
Ever seen one of those pro-American bumper stickers that say, “These colors don’t run”? It makes no sense, as we’re the bullies always looking for a fight. Since World War II, the United States has played a part in at least thirty different assassinations, coups, or other insurrections. We installed autocrats like the Shah of Iran, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and Sese Seko Mobutu in the Congo. It didn’t matter to us if they oppressed their people. All we cared about was their loyalty to Uncle Sam.
The Cold War was the excuse for many of these interventions. If we didn’t install…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
World Boss: A Short History Primer - 10 MORE Reasons to be Mad as Hell
How did we get here? How did we become World Boss, an imperial instead of a democratic power? How did we become a country in which the Pentagon takes half of all our discretionary spending and major corporations dictate our foreign policy? Since past is prologue, as the old saying goes, it’s critical to examine our history and to trace how we arrived at this sorry state.
Sadly, this process of serving corporate interests ahead of our own national interests began even before the Cold War and the unprecedented military buildup that this country has seen in the last sixty years.…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #87: The Myth That World Boss Won the Cold War
Many an old general crows that being World Boss won us the Cold War. According to them, our massive military brought the Soviets to their knees. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars plan was supposedly the final blow, because the Soviets went broke trying to match it. But this is a gross exaggeration. The USSR never even considered trying to compete with us in space. By the mid-1980s, they were actually scaling back their military budgets, a well-kept secret concealed from the American public.
The truth is that Mikhail Gorbachev set the Perestroika process in motion for his country’s reconstruction. The United States actually…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #86: Weapons of War - Our Last Domestic Product
For most of our history, we didn’t have much of a weapons industry in this country. When we faced a war, domestic industries and manufacturers would simply stop making ploughshares and other peacetime goods and use their factories to produce the arms and military equipment we needed. As Eisenhower pointed out in his farewell speech, though, all of that changed after World War II. Numerous manufacturers that had switched to arms making during the war simply kept at it. And many, many more defense firms sprung up to supply our endless appetite for arms to fight the Cold War.
Worst of…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #71: The Truman Doctrine and the Birth of World Boss
In 1947, the Truman Doctrine made America’s new dominant role in the Middle East official. Following World War II, most of the world expected a Third World War to erupt between the United States and the USSR. The Truman Doctrine guaranteed that the United States would “protect” Greece and Turkey against the communists. But what the United States was really protecting in Greece and Turkey was the main route for Middle Eastern oil: over land via pipeline and then on tankers through the Mediterranean.
Why would the U.S. government pledge our military to secure a pipeline route halfway around the world? To…
August 27, 2008 | Read More
Reason #70: Meddling in the Middle East
Ever wonder why the Middle East is such a turbulent part of the world? Sorting out the reasons for the region’s troubles is as sticky as a barrel of Saudi crude. But one thing is for sure: the U.S. - with our bottomless appetite for oil - has made things worse far more often than we’ve made things better. In fact, we’ve consistently played a dangerous game of risking long term trouble for a quick, crude fix.
During World War I the Ottoman Empire, which spanned from modern day Hungary and Turkey through most of the Middle East and North Africa,…
August 27, 2008 | Read More
Reason #25: Presidential Signing Statements - The Arrogance of Unchecked Power
One of the most devious, and patently illegal, ways that Bush grabbed power from the other branches of government was by using so-called “signing statements” to ignore laws he didn’t agree with. Prior to his administration, presidents rarely penned these addendums when they believed parts of a given law impinged on their constitutional authority. But Bush issued some 800 of them, more than double the number written by every president in our history combined.
In 2005, for example, John McCain passed a bill forbidding torture. Bush signed it into law, but added a statement that effectively - and unilaterally - exempted…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
