“We are a peaceful nation,” claimed Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson in an interview with Katie Couric late last year.
Carson voiced a view that is held by many in our society. Like most people around the world, we naturally like to think of ourselves as a peace loving country.
Unfortunately, the record does not bear this out. It, in fact, indicates something quite opposite: The United States has had a long and bloody history of aggression and war making.
A survey of history shows that America has either been involved in armed conflict or conducted some form of military operations during 223 years of its 240 years of existence as a nation. This is over 90 per cent of the time.
A congressional report titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2015” reveals a virtually continuous deployment of American military personnel in operations in foreign lands during the last two hundred years. Many of those instances would be considered acts of war under international law. The list does not include covert actions by the US government in various places around the globe.
Rather than being a peaceful nation, America has been on a war footing for much of its existence.
There has hardly been an American president who did not authorize some form of military activity by the United States. Even Barack Obama who won the Nobel Peace Prize has been presiding over a country at war all throughout his two term presidency.
The American government invariably invokes national security when launching a war abroad. But national security is rarely the real reason. What danger did countries like the Philippines, Honduras, Vietnam or Iraq ever presented to the American people?
Almost all America’s foreign wars have been initiated against countries who posed no direct threat to the United States. Most American wars have been acts of unprovoked aggression against sovereign nations.
One notable exception was the war with Japan which was declared after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. But even that attack was incited by the actions of the Roosevelt administration which had led the campaign to cut Japan off from its vital sources of raw materials.
Most aggressors claim that their wars are defensive. The Romans maintained that their endless wars of conquest and expansion were a form of self-protection. Hitler also believed his actions were fundamentally defensive. America is no different in this regard.
Most of the countries America invades are left broken and in ruins. America’s military interventions around the globe have caused widespread devastation, suffering and the deaths of millions of innocent people. The invasion of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century was particularly notable for the widespread atrocities and massacres carried out by American military personnel. The behavior of the invading army bordered on genocidal and claimed, by some estimates, the lives of more than ten percent of the native population. More recently, it is estimated that in Iraq over one million people have died as a result of the war and disarray that followed the US invasion.
George W. Bush used to liken America to a peaceful giant aroused to anger by the evil acts of 9/11. This view is demonstrably false. America is a giant to be sure, but not a peaceful one. Rather it is a hyper-aggressive superpower that often attacks at the smallest provocation and sometimes with no provocation at all. It leaves in its wake destruction and heaps of corpses.
The notion of America as a peace loving nation is a myth which could not be further from the truth.
If we want an example of a peace loving nation we should look at countries like Switzerland. Even though the Swiss do not particularly boast about being a peaceful nation, they have not been involved in a foreign war in more than 200 years. They have managed this even though wars and conflicts have swirled all around them. Yet the Swiss managed to stay out of it all, because they are a truly peace-focused people who prefer nonaggression and nonviolence to war and destruction.
However heinous and despicable 9/11 was, it was not an act of war by a foreign nation or government. It was an attack by a terrorist organization motivated by grievances pertaining to US foreign policy. It was a blowback for America’s many years of interference in the affairs of the Middle East.
The War on Terror will ensure that the United States will stay on a war footing indefinitely. The so-called War on Terror is a prescription for a perpetual war, because it generates the very evil it ostensibly seeks to defeat.
Whatever America may be, it is certainly not a peaceful nation. Sadly, there is no hope for it becoming one in the foreseeable future.
Originally published on 2016-02-04
About the author: Vasko Kohlmeyer is a reformed neocon. His articles have appeared in a number of newspapers, journals, and internet outlets. They include the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Times, the New York Sun, LewRockwell.com, Human Events, Frontpage Magazine, American Thinker, the Jewish Press, the Austin American-Statesman, Canada Free Press, RealClearPolitics, and Intellectual Conservative among others.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The collective West is busy showing what it thinks of Serbia’s determination to conduct an independent policy through an old-fashioned show of force.The weekend of March 27-28, thousands of vehicles from neighboring countries formed lines waiting to enter Serbia. The reason? Vaccines. For free. Lots of them, from both East and West. Sputnik V, Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, Pfizer. More than the rest of the ex-Yugoslav republics combined. And Serbia decided to open its doors to those among its former compatriots who have lost all hope that their Western-approved “democracies” would obtain them in respectable quantities any time soon.So, does this humane ...
The Bellamy salute is the salute described by Francis Bellamy, Christian socialist minister and author, to accompany the American Pledge of Allegiance, which he had authored. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute". Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which had a similar form, and which was derived from the so-called Roman salute. This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the ...
Read the truth about "Srebrenica Massacre" in 1995.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]The Al-Qaeda-linked ‘El-Mujahedeen’ brigade of the Bosnian Muslim Army parading in downtown Zenica in central Bosnia in 1995
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Why Does America Keep “Losing” Its Wars?Below, we demonstrate that the U.S. keeps “losing” war after war.There are 3 potential reasons this might be happening: Is this chaos an intentional way to implement regime change and grab resources? Or is this a sign of the decline of the American empire … and we just can’t win a war anymore? Or do those in charge just not really give a damn about winning … and are they just focusing on one short-term goal after another?We’ll let you decide why you think this keeps happening. But if you don’t believe that the ...
Serbia organized an exhibition of cultural and historical heritage of Kosovo and Metohija in Paris, the headquarters of UNESCO, to serve as a reminder to the West of how they let it be destroyed since the 2000s.There is a lot of Serbian cultural heritage in Kosovo and Metohija. Now, Kosovo is an independent state, partially recognized by Western countries. But the world was shocked by anti-Serbian riots organized by Albanians during the Kosovo unrest in 2004. Many Serbian monuments were damaged in the chaos.Albanian extremists living in Kosovo, since the 2000s, have continued to raid and damage Serbian cultural heritage ...
The American media specializes in fake news. Indeed, since the Clinton regime the American media has produced nothing but fake news. Do you remember the illegal US bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia? Do you remember “war criminal” Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president branded “the butcher of the Balkans,” who was compared to Hitler until Hillary passed the title on to the President of Russia? Milosevic, not Bill Clinton, was arrested and placed on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. He died in prison, some say murdered, before he was cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal. http://www.globalresearch.ca/milosevic-and-the-destruction-of-yugoslavia-unpleasant-truths-no-one-wants-to-know/5540873 Do you ...
After 17 bloody years, the longest war in US history continues without relent or purpose in Afghanistan.There, a valiant, fiercely-independent people, the Pashtun (Pathan) mountain tribes, have battled the full might of the US Empire to a stalemate that has so far cost American taxpayers $4 trillion, and 2,371 dead and 20,320 wounded soldiers. No one knows how many Afghans have died. The number is kept secret.Pashtun tribesmen in the Taliban alliance and their allies are fighting to oust all foreign troops from Afghanistan and evict the western-imposed and backed puppet regime in Kabul that pretends to be the nation’s ...
It is not a secret that the American government has been supporting terrorist groups during the entire Syrian conflict. One of these days, another fact proving this statement was recorded.On September 20, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) militants with their allies launched an offensive on the Syrian Arab Army positions, north-east of Hama city, The National reported.Most likely, the attack of the militants was orchestrated by the U.S. intelligence agencies, which had provided them with the information on the locations and the military strength in the region.It is also reported that the militants' main object was the units of the Russian ...
“And you know, we have this mad guy [Kim Jong-un], I guess he’s mad, either he’s mad or he’s a genius, one or the other, but he’s actually more unstable, even than his father, …” (Donald Trump, August 2016 during election campaign)What was indelible about it [the Korean War of 1950-53] was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States’ air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. …. (Bruce ...
The full extent of the damage to international peace and security caused by the US-led Syrian strikes will take some time to become clear. But its impact on the very concept of legality in international affairs is already evident.Simply put, the most powerful county in the world and its chief satellites, the UK and France, have thrown the rule of law into the trash can. The only "law" now is the law of the jungle. There is no going back.Ironically, the attack itself was claimed by its perpetrators as enforcement of legality, not of its obliteration. For example, NATO Secretary-General ...
A strange spy affair broke out in Balkan Casablanca, aka Serbia, on Wednesday. Were NATO “advisers” and liaison personnel embedded in the Serbian army command finally caught red-handed by vigilant Serbian counter-intelligence operatives, purloining secrets? Not this time. (Something along those lines actually did happen in 2002; it was when former armed forces chief of staff Momcilo Perisic was caught on camera in a Belgrade restaurant handing over secret information for cash to CIA’s Johnny-on-the-spot, John Neighbor.) But what allegedly occurred this time was not a boring rerun of the Perisic affair, although the basic contours of the unimaginative scenario ...
For some time the criminal activities of the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (ISIS) seemed to have faded into the shadows. It seemed that this organization in the near future will be broken tie with due to the “heroic” American bombing. However, the ISIS like a fabulous hydra, who immediately has a new head grown in place of a severed one, revived and made further impressive gains.The capture of ancient Palmyra in Syria and the important city Ramadi, the main city of the Sunni province Anbar, located by the way just 100 kilometres far from Baghdad, made the world’s media and ...
It is now openly discussed even in mainstream media the fact that Turkey has been intimately involved in fomenting and supporting the war on Syria, with its ultimate goal of the overthrow of the Syrian government and its replacement by a compliant proxy aligned with Turkish President Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood. That this is no longer a ‘conspiracy theory’ but a conspiracy fact not only vindicates my analysis over the last four years, but it also brings to the fore the nefarious role of a NATO member in stoking a brutal and bloody war for its own ends.Beyond just ...
Unfathomable as that may appear, yes, it was quite possible for the second-ranking slaughterhouse in Europe in recent memory to have slipped off the radar screen. Even such a renowned authority as Professor Gideon Greif is having an exceptionally difficult time of it in trying to put it back on.Precisely because it has not been the theme of any Hollywood spectaculars, Jasenovac does not attract any school excursions and textbooks are largely silent about it. Some background information on Jasenovac therefore seems like a good place to start.The Jasenovac death camp (1941 – 1945) is inextricably bound up with the ...
True, the majority of investors are Americans who bore a relation to the “democratization” of Yugoslavia that was carried out at the end of the 90s of the last century. Among them is the former commander of NATO forces in Kosovo retired general Wesley Clark, who is determined to invest more than 5.5 billion dollars in the former Yugoslav republic. Experts say that Washington’s strategy could be characterized by the following slogan: “Conquer and plunder”.His closest supporters say that Wesley Clark is a great strategist. He wrote the book “Winning Modern Wars” that was published in 2001. In his fundamental ...
The crimes committed by the US against the people of Korea in the course of the Korean War but also in its aftermath are unprecedented in modern history.“We Killed Off – What – Twenty Percent of the Population. We Burned Down every Town in North Korea…”The above quotation is from General Curtis Lemay, who coordinated the bombing campaign (1950-53)Who is a Threat to Global Security? The US or the DPRK?The public perception of the entire population of North Korea is that the US is a threat to their national security.During the Korean War, the DPRK lost more than 25% of ...
The present-day Republic of Turkey is a legal successor state of the former Ottoman Empire (Sultanate). The Republic was founded and proclaimed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on October 29th, 1923 as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the lost WWI. A republican Turkey originally was based on the following six principles:Republicanism – Republic instead of a monarchical sultanate.Nationalism - An aggressive anti-minority policy within the state especially against the Kurds.Populism – It was attended in the atmosphere of the absence of a multiparty democracy to gather as much as popular support for the one-party political system.Statism ...
The painful issue of using the Russian language in Latvia appears on the agenda once again. Ethnic Russians “knock at the doors” of international organizations trying to defend their rights to speak and get an education in their native language. Their hope for understanding in Latvia is melting every day.It has become known that the Russian Community in Latvia sent a letter to the Council of Europe about the violation of human rights. The message addressed to Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland also calls for a request from the Venice Commission to amend the two Latvian language laws which were adopted by ...
I will not dwell either on the prehistory nor early history of the region of Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet) in this article.The Montenegrins and medieval SerbiaIt used to pass from one state to the other, until Stephan Nemanja (1166−1196), a nobleman from Zeta (present-day Montenegro), founded the state of Serbia, whose center very soon later became exactly in today’s KosMet. First a Byzantine vassal dukedom, Serbia became soon an independent state, to become an empire under the rule of Stephan Dušan (1331−1355), the first Emperor of Serbia.[1]Serbia’s Nemanjić’s dynasty ended with Dušan’s son, Uroš, disintegrating into many feudal possessions.[2] In the epic ...
Unfortunately, the record does not bear this out. It, in fact, indicates something quite opposite: The United States has had a long and bloody history of aggression and war making.
George W. Bush used to liken America to a peaceful giant aroused to anger by the evil acts of 9/11. This view is demonstrably false. America is a giant to be sure, but not a peaceful one. Rather it is a hyper-aggressive superpower that often attacks at the smallest provocation and sometimes with no provocation at all. It leaves in its wake destruction and heaps of corpses.
