What U.S. foreign interventions do you feel were justified?

WWII.
The first few months in Afghanistan.

Maybe WWI and Iraq War I.

Yeah. WW2.

WW2, sure.

Probably helping get Iraq out of Kuwait when it was attacked.

Possibly the US intervention in Grenada in 1983, although that’s a maybe.

Viet Nam was a huge mistake.

Kuwait, and perhaps Korea.

A vote for WWII here as well.

WWII wasn’t an intervention. Pearl Harbor forced the issue.

WW I was a truly stupid mistake for EVERYONE involved.

@stanleybmanly But the US got involved very late. Should it have stayed away?

Sure, a few (some with stupid names). Going backwards:

Operation Ocean Shield
Operation Uphold Democracy
Bosnian War (I worked in Bosnia after the war)
Gulf War
Invasion of Panama
Invasion of Grenada (although I ridiculed it at the time)
Then, we have to go back all the way to WW2

I agree with the Monroe Doctrine. I agree with Wilsonianism (although Wilson was an asshole). I mostly agree with the Truman Doctrine insofar as I agree with the neoconservative concept that it is up to the USA to counter enemy geopolitical expansion. This goes back to Nazi expansion but expanded to Stalinism (although I disagree with how neoconservativism was finally enacted in the 21st century—they blew their shot).

I feel that the US has a unique responsibility to protect the world and be a force for good. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and most Presidents have blown it.

In terms of WW1 and WW2, the US was almost criminal in their non-involvement. The USA let millions die by our inaction and is a blight on our history. If the USA had gotten involved earlier in each war millions would have been saved.

For every “justified foreign intervention” that the US has been involved in, there are scores more that didn’t happen. Bosnia reminded me that we are selective, about whom we help. Genocide is only occasionally a path to war, for the US. I’m not saying that I wish we intervened, in every case. That’s not realistic. But we don’t help “shit hole” countries, with their affairs…

Famine usually garners some hand outs. But those hand outs, are controlled by lots of corrupt, and evil people.

The US’s selective war mongering, exposes it’s transparent motivation for war. Greed. They seem to have a pattern of getting involved, when there is something to be manipulated, for gain. It’s portrayed, as helping the needy. Many, many, many brave people have fought under false pretences. Greed knows no bounds. Greed disguises itself, as a champion of the weak. Greed is a sneaky bastard. It uses victims of circumstance, and well intended young people to line the pockets of the wealthy. The war machine, that the US is, is a tool for the elite. We don’t have the world’s most powerful military, for altruistic reasons. Or defense. If anyone doesn’t get that, they’ve been had…

Between the CIA, and our politicians, we have committed some of history’s most vile acts… Billions have been negatively affected, or worse. Who knows what this world could be without greed. I doubt we’ll ever know….

@Call Me Jay I think we should have stayed out of the war, but Wilson thought it vital that we contribute to the senseless slaughter in order to have leverage in shaping whatever world followed. Of course it’s easy to see the folly and criticize after the event, but as wars go, it was almost certainly the most senseless and enormous waste of human life in the history of the world, and the vengeance inflicted on Germany at at the insistence of the French was as stupid as the war itself.

Other than a couple of exceptions, it appears that the most people here are struggling to list many U.S. foreign interventions that they believe were justified.

Note: to clarify the scope of my question – I didn’t mean direct military interventions (as in troops). Rather, I mean the whole spectrum of interventions, like the CIA coups, providing arms, funding of military forces during conflict, etc.

Considering the large number of U.S. interventions and the relatively small number of interventions that you find justifiable, do you feel that the U.S. is a dangerous state?

Another military example comes to mind – the NATO campaigns in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

US interventions since the Second World War have almost all been terrible mistakes. Some, such as the carpet bombing of rural Laos and Cambodia amounted to crimes against humanity. I don’t think the US had much option after 9/11 but to invade Afghanistan but 17 years later I wonder what the US is doing there.

The CIA has helped several military dictatorships get into power in South America and elsewhere to no good purpose. I think the US is well intentioned and believes its many interventions are justified on ideological grounds but with greater understanding or the benefit of hindsight they just seem destabilising and senseless.

@flutherother: “I think the US is well intentioned and believes its many interventions are justified on ideological grounds but with greater understanding or the benefit of hindsight they just seem destabilising and senseless.”

What would lead you to believe the US is “well intentioned”?

I didn’t struggle.

@Rarebear: “I didn’t struggle.”

Fair enough. But you did only come up with five. So, I ask – considering the large number of U.S. interventions and the relatively small number of interventions that you find justifiable, do you feel that the U.S. is a dangerous state?

@thisismyusername dangerous state? it can be and often has been through misguided policies and actions often contradicting the lofty goals announced.

@thisismyusername . Yes. Well. It can be. I started a thread, not long ago, about the US being sanctioned over Trump’s nuclear threats. We should have been sanctioned over the second war in Iraq too…

Do I feel the United States is a dangerous State? I certainly hope so.

^You know. That’s an interesting view. That perception, wouldn’t be bad, in some aspects…

@thisismyusername The US isn’t an aggressor that wishes harm to other countries. The US believes that it can be opposed to a ruling regime while supporting the people who live under it. There is often a moral component to American military action, or at least it is billed that way, but the outcomes of intervention can be devastating to thousands and even millions of people.

@flutherother: “The US isn’t an aggressor that wishes harm to other countries. The US believes that it can be opposed to a ruling regime while supporting the people who live under it. There is often a moral component to American military action, or at least it is billed that way,”

(my emphasis)

Of course it is sold to the population this way. But if the US has been involved in overthrowing democratically-elected governments and invading countries for its entire existence, what possible evidence do you have that it “isn’t an aggressor that wishes harm to other countries”?

@flutherother

Of course the US doesn’t wish to harm other countries, but we don’t intervene out of altruism. We have our motivations and they’re never about the welfare of the people. It’s always about some resource or strategic asset we wish to control.

@Darth_Algar You may be right, but sometimes there is a moral component to US military interventions. Getting rid of Saddam or Gaddafi for example or discouraging the use of chemical weapons by Syria. There may be other reasons for getting involved but moral issues can be very compelling. Each case has to be looked at on its merits and sometimes intervention will be the right thing to do but at other times it might only seem the right thing to do.

The US isn’t an aggressor that wishes harm to other countries.

Not remotely true. The invasion of Iraq was unprovoked. It was a goal of neo-cons before 9/11 and they used 9/11 and fabricated WMD claims to sell it.

The idea that it was a humanitarian campaign to remove a dictator is laughable.

That’s just the biggest and most disastrous example. There are many more.

@flutherother

Citing Saddam doesn’t really help your case. We backed him in the 1980’s, even though we knew then that he was a brutal dictator. We backed him nevertheless because he was at war (a war in which he was the aggressor) with a country we didn’t like. He only became our bad guy once he’d outlived his usefulness to us.

And, dictator though he may have been, he was, nevertheless, a stabilizing force in that region. And if you were an Iraqi living under Saddamn you at least knew where the lines were, what lines lines you shouldn’t cross, and could go about your daily life without fear of being killed. And you could could count on having a stable, functioning power grid.

That place went straight to hell after we decided to rush in and play the “good guys”. The Iraqi people are much worse off because of our “moral” intervention.

You’ll notice that the United States is rather picky when it comes to selecting just WHICH brutal dictators qualify for our righteous justice. It appears that those atop an ocean of oil are guaranteed rather swift accommodation.

@Darth_Algar That’s my point! We went in there as the “good guys” freeing ordinary Iraqis from a brutal dictatorship. The intentions were good but the consequences catastrophic. The invasion was all muscle, maybe some heart but no brain at all. Remember Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment? He really thought it was all over. No thought had been given to what would happen after Saddam was removed from power.

If we had gone in as aggressors and taken over the country it might have been better for most Iraqis. At least we could have provided law and order, saved the museums from being looted and prevented some Iraqis from having power drills run through their foreheads in a sectarian war.

If the intentions were truly good then there would have been no need to manufacture a cause for invasion.

@flutherother: ”@Darth_Algar That’s my point! We went in there as the “good guys” freeing ordinary Iraqis from a brutal dictatorship.”

But if the U.S. has never had a problem with supporting brutal dictators, why should we take this seriously in this case?

@flutherother – Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the largest global protests to a war before it happened took place. I was involved in the anti-war protests here in Boston, and they were huge.

This was a clear to the world what was going on, but we couldn’t stop it.

There had to be a legal justification. The UN Charter doesn’t allow one country to invade another unless in self-defence. There had to be a military threat. That’s why we were told Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I think there was hope that a new and democratic Iraq would emerge following the overthrow of Saddam but this too it seems was nothing but a delusion.

As you may recall the Iraqi invasion was carried out over the objections of the UN. Besides, the UN is toothless in and of itself.