To be sure, anti-Americanism will never disappear. Nor will America's enemies go away. But strong anti-American currents will increasingly coexist with equally strong international demands for the United States to play a larger role in world affairs.The United States currently occupies at least two nations. We have military garrisons in almost every nation on earth. We have just suborned--through naïveté or malice; it has yet to be seen--the assassination of a major Pakistani politician and are desperately propping up its current strongman. We claim the right to go to war with China should it attempt to reassert control over a nominally democratic breakaway province, although, to be sure, we are also locked in a economic pas-de-deux with the mainland government, which holds gads of our currency in reserves, a delicately tenable situation for both nations. We are dictating, or attempting to dictate, to Iran what technologies and weapons it may or may not possess. We incessantly comment on Russia's "backtracking" from "democracy." We support paramilitaries throughout the Latin American world as part of a bogus effort to eradicate cocaine. We have secret prisons throughout the world. We give billions of dollars a year to Israel, and we claim that we will bring "peace" to Israel and Palestine. Africa is a vast, plagued sop to our national conscience.
-Moisés Naím in la WaPo
How much more fucking involved can we possibly get, huh?
3 comments:
well, we don't have a base yet in Lebanon but we're working on it. also, AfricaCOM is just getting rolling because god knows we haven't done enough for our little brown/black brothers there yet. so you see there's plenty more meddling/murdering yet to get up to.
How much more fucking involved can we possibly get, huh?
In 1940 the US population was about 132 million. In WWII we had 16 million men in arms. That was about 1/4 of the male population of the US.
We could raise a much bigger army, if we only had the guts to reintroduce conscription. Let's say, 1/10 of the nation in arms -- something like that. So, an army of roughly 30m men and women. Given that we have some 200000 in Iraq (counting a lot of the merc and other support as men that ought to be a part of the US Army!), we can estimate that we should be able to have Iraq-level interventions in at least 15 countries simultaneously. Of course this would require higher taxes on everyone else to pay for it all, like in WWII with 95% marginal rates, but that's the price of freedom!
We should invade Russia and prove Napoleon and Hitler were pussies.
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