Difference between revisions of "List of Military Interventions of the United States"

Revision as of 06:39, 29 January 2011

United States' military actions and war crimes of violence against living persons that are unlawful under international law, from the First World War onwards. The numbers dead are rarely large for regime change; comparisons between the importance of the dead and the loss of democratic and socialist governments are unlikely to be uncontroversial, but quite likely to be thought-provoking.

War crimes are "violations of the laws or customs of war"; including but not limited to "murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps", "the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war", the killing of hostages, "the wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, and any devastation not justified by military, or civilian necessity".

Incidents in WWII involving desecration of Japanese remains is not listed, but is linked in the See Also section.

The USA engaged in 21 covert military actions designed to cause instability in governments before the end of the Cold War, all but one of them involving the Special Activities Division (SAD) and Special Operations Group (SOG) of the Central Intelligence Agency, 22 if the unrestricted attacks on civilian shipping in the Pacific between 1941 and 1945 is counted.

After the Cold War, the CIA's role changed significantly, and SAD and SOG forces were increasingly used in overt warfare, while covert regime change was more often carried out by the covert non-military divisions of the CIA, using destabilization techniques (propaganda, paid protestors, bribes, blackmail and threats of government officials, black propaganda and control of the press, etc).

One exception is the use of CIA drones in attacks on military leaders in Iraq, which was alluded to by Bob Woodward in a CBS interview^[1] Another is the ongoing, as of Feb 2011, covert assaults on Iraq by CIA squads begun by GW Bush (junior) and first reported in 2007.^[2]

• Philippines 1986
• Iraq 1992-1995
• Guatemala 1993
• Zimbabwe 2000s
• Serbia 2000
• Iran 2001-present
• Venezuela 2002
• Georgia, 2003
• Haiti 2004
• Ukraine, 2004
• Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe 2004
• Lebanon 2005
• Palestinian Authority, 2006-present
• Somalia 2006-2007
• Venezuela 2007
• Myanmar (Burma), 2007

See also

• United States of America
• Cold War covert overthrow of governments by the US
• Post-Cold War covert regime change by the US
• US military operations in the 20th and 21st centuries
• private military corporations
• Iranian coup d'état of 1953
• Wikipedia:List of war crimes

External links

• Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls
• What People Are Saying - Not the Enemy
• Data from William Blum book, "Rogue State" supplemented by casulty data from various sources
• Statistics of American Genocide and Mass Murder - R. J. Rummel
• U.S. Interventions - 1945 to the Present William Blum
• Timeline of United States military operations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Covert U.S. regime change actions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890 by Zoltan Grossman

Footnotes

• American mutilation of Japanese war dead^[31][32][33]
• Operation Gladio (Wikipedia:Operation Gladio) US intelligence sleeper cells in NATO countries and throughout Europe, established in 1948. Its role in NATO countries' affairs was primarily subversion, the Strategy of tension (WP:Sot) of False flag operations, but its connections to numerous nefarious and malign influences are many,^[34] and despite numerous investigations by European governments, it never seems to fully go away.^[35]
• Tibet, 1950-: It is this author's opinion that seeing the very positive reaction by what has normally been a thorn in the side of the US' neo-imperialism, the UN, to the Tibet issue,^[11] was what made the CIA and later the FBI aware of the potential of working both sides of the political divide with astroturf seeding of (from the CIA's perspective) "useful idiots" in human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Nothing like a solid chunk of 'thinking globally and acting locally' for example, to keep the CIA and its operatives from being further outnumbered in the field by aid workers and reporters. And of course if the middle or left can be kept busy pressuring China to reinstate a religious oligarchy (workers schlepping rice up the mountain to the monks in their temples), then so much the better.
• Angola, 1975-1980. Revolutionary war really is a messy business; left-wing historians ignore death tolls and killing civilians altogether or capitulate to the mainstream view of it being genetically linked to communism. The first step in reducing the bloodshed is understand how and why it occurs, but no. So one of the stories left to history of Angola is tales by a missionary of the godless communists strafing peasants with a helicopter gunship (no mention of how many times more than one that happened, of course). See Angola 1980s on Wikipedia. And of course it is the only story about Angola in the WP article.
• Cambodia 1980. Ronald Reagan authorized support for vestiges of the Khmer Rouge to destabilize Cambodia's government, which was strengthened by Viet Namese occupation forces. The coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, (KPNLF, under Son Sann) was led against the government that had replaced it. Both were Communist, and the Khmer Rouge was universally considered the most bloody regime of the 20th C. After 1.2 million deaths (Admittedly deaths from famine were due in part to the war. But unlike other famines used as boogeymen by many a right wing charge of genocide by socialist governments, the war was a direct result of US warmaking), more than half as many as the notorious Khmer Rouge had killed, the Vietnamese withdrew, and Cambodia's Communist regime fell eight years after the US destabilization began.^[23] The US would return to finish the next half of the plan in 1991
• Cambodia 1991. After three years, the US returned to Cambodia. Overtly, with UN support even, they overthrew the very Khmer Rouge government they had backed in 1980-1988.^[26][27] In keeping with their new stance of overt regime change, the invasion was out in the open this time. And during this honeymoon period with the rest of the world, as the conquering heroes that had ousted communism, and in a country that was synonymous with the notorious Khmer Rouge, they even got UN support to oust the very Khmer Rouge they had given arms to in 1980-1988. It took a tortuous 6 years, but 'free' elections were held in 1995, and the country was 'stable' by 1997.^[26][27]
• Iraq 1973-1975. The CIA had in 1953 toppled a democratic government to install Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the last Shah of Iran. His father had been the largest supplier of goods to prewar Nazi Germany, and the US colluded with him to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in an attempt to overthrow Iraq's Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. This started a chain of circumstances that led to the death of hundreds of Iraqis and more Kurds, on top of the deaths in the Iraq and Iran hostilities.^[36] Iran and Iraq signed a peace treaty in 1975; the CIA support was cut off. The Shah denied his useful tools the Kurds refuge in Iran, even as many were slaughtered. The U.S. decided not to press the issue with the Shah.^[15] "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work," declared Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. ^[16]