What non-corrupt dictators should we be supporting? How about when we went into stop North Korea when it was attacked? How about when we helped supported the Afghan rebels when the Russians invaded.? How about that time we helped England and France with thier little german problem? How about how we support the people of Taiwan and keep the Chinese from invading? How about how we helped Japan and Germany get back on thier feet after WWII? How about all the chairitable donations we make even to countries were they hate us? Yeah the USA really is terrible.
Since none of the incidents and countries you list here have any thing remotely related to the human rights abusing dictators and corrupt governments I listed, I would say you've built yourself a lot of straw men here to play with.
You have little insight that the vast majority of that financial aid to foreign countries is given for things our government perceives as directly benefiting us, mainly military aid often to prop up a government that abuses human rights in its country.
How about you look at the history of our involvement in Pinochet's tyranny in Chile, Nicaragua's Somoza, The Dominican Republic's Trujillo, Haiti's succession of tyrants, Argentina's military government responsible for thousands and thousands of "the disappeared", El Salvador's and Guatemala's tyrannical governments, the Vietnamese government we supported during the war, the Shaw of Iran, and Indonesia's Suharto. That should give you a well rounded sampling of the kind of activities I am talking about.
But don't waste your time trying to claim these were fights to stop the communist dominoes from falling. Revolutionaries only turned to communism after we stood on the side of corporate assets and profits over a fair deal and human rights.
While a corporation clearly has the right to make a profit and protect its assets, the typical corporate pattern was to make a deal with a corrupt dictator for the countries' resources, then those corporations would claim no responsibility for how the poor in those countries were treated.
So when labor leaders trying to unionize workers were murdered, heck, that was good for business. And should those workers take any action, just call it a communist uprising, ignore the fact that the people were desperate and had few other options and were grossly mistreated, call in the US government to provide military aid to the dictator, and there you go.
The "red scare" may or may not have been legit. But, the shortsighted decisions to back brutal dictators was not the only option. And this is where the misinformed US public gets it wrong. A better option would have been to promote a fair deal for workers, a fair price paid for the resources so that some of the profits could be directed back into the countries' infrastructure, and refusal to allow terrorist tactics to be used against millions of people. Had we done that, we would have had millions more middle class citizens all over the world driving a healthy world economy. We would have had to deal with limited resources and more pollution earlier on, but we wouldn't have had nearly as much war and terrorism.
The reason we never paid attention to human rights abuses was due to who had the power and who had the government's ear. Why should a corporation worry about poverty stricken populations? That was up to the countries' governments.
Henry Kissinger is an example of how one ignores such horrendous events and sleeps well at night. Kissinger is the poster child but hardly unique in the US government in the last century. I present the following as an example, not as some comprehensive evidence.
Human Rights Watch, 2002 - Argentina
In August, Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba sent a letter rogatory to the State Department requesting a deposition by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to aid the judge's investigation of Operation Condor. In addition, French judge Roger Le Loire requested Kissinger's cooperation with judicial inquiries into the "disappearance" in Argentina of French nationals. Although de-classified documents showed that Kissinger was informed about Operation Condor, he did not contribute any information to the French or Argentine courts. The Washington Times on August 1 quoted an unnamed White House source as saying that the courts' demands were "unjust and ridiculous."
Spanish judge seeks Kissinger
MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger could be called as a witness to an investigation into alleged human rights crimes committed by former South American military dictatorships.
According to a copy of a court order obtained by CNN, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon issued an order on Wednesday.
The order asks British authorities to permit the questioning of Kissinger in London, where he is due to attend a conference on April 24....
Garzon is believed to want to question Kissinger over his alleged involvement in "Operation Condor," a scheme by former military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to persecute and eliminate their opponents during the 1970s and 1980s.
Why the law wants a word with Kissinger
He won the Nobel Peace Prize and his name was once a byword for diplomacy. But Henry Kissinger may yet be called to account for the murder and mayhem the US orchestrated in the 1970s, writes Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens wrote a book on the subject of Kissinger's contributions to a number of atrocities.
