Well if you knew the histories so well you would not go about stupidly extolling the virtues of the US military machine.
America, like every empire in the history of the world, has gone about deploying its military, not in the interests of real justice, but for those in insuring its own material well being and ideological position.
The things we did in South Asia, Central America and in the Middle East have been deplorable and, in many ways no less criminal, than what the Soviet regime had done, or the British Empire in the provinces, or the Conquistadores in South America before that.
In the XIX century the US military was responsible for enforcing the imperialist Monroe Doctrine (1823), which basically laid claim to trade rights over the entire Western Hemisphere and, of course, confiscated the lands of the natives from coast to coast. In fact under the ideology of Manifest Destiny, US wars of repression decimated the last of the Far West natives. Buffalo, upon which the native Americans' existence depended, their habitat, there own religion, had undergone the same fate: annihilation. The same US armed force was responsible for massacres of natives like that of Wounded Knee, which was a heinous and vile act of mass murder.
Subsequently the Monroe Doctrine was backed by the expansionist "Open Door Politics," when the Americans began to look at the Pacific islands and the imense Asian market with the same greedy eyes, that was turned upon the countries of Latin America. Open Door Politics rested upon two pillars, those of economic and military exapansion: Japan (1853-54), Commander Perry's expedition to force Japan to open its markets; Nicaragua (1853-54 and 94), military sent in defense of American interests; Argentina (1853-54), US marines arrive at Buenos Aires to protect American interests; Uraguay (1855), military sent in defense of American interests; Portugese Angola (1860); military sent in defense of American interests.
The US did likewise in Cuba during the Spanish-American war. The massacres were a linear phenomenon across the century: in Mexico (1846), Wounded Knee (1890), Cuba (1898), the awful slaughter of 4000 soldiers at Santa Mesa in the Philippines (1899). While in 1893 the US invaded the Hawaian Islands to support a provisory government under the authority of Stanford D. Bole. Robert Wilcox an anti-imperialist rebelion leader tried to liberate Hawai from the American government, however without success.
Contemporary senators, Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, and Henry Cabot Lodge fo Massachuesetts, summed up America's imperialist program rather nicely. The former stating: "America's industry and soil produces more than the American people can consume. Global commerce must and will be ours." The latter saying: The great nations are rapidly englobing all the deserted places of the earth. It is a movement for civilization and for the advancement of race."
The US government, at the same time, was successful in breaking the railroad union and was able to supress the Pullman Strike and throw Debs in prison. Yet to have suffocated the native Americans' resitance, those of the farmers and workers, wasn't enough to put an end to the economic depression that began in 1893. The bosses of American industry had, for some time, as we have seen, begun to look abroad to find new markets to exploit and new enemies against which to levy the nation's military forces to protect their interests.
A new American economic world order was thus emerging by the brute force and coercion of US bellicose power which found justifications in the thoughts of American leaders at the time such as the same Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge: "For our part we shall never renounce the mission of our race, which has been placed under the guidance of God to take care of the entire civilized world. The Philippines constitute for us a base at the threshold of the whole of Asia."
During WWII we used something called "sticky fire" at Royan, France, which burns everything in sight. During Vietnam it was called napalm. The war was already won, but the now American empire, before it was officially over, needed to test its muscles using new weapons on a defenseless population. According to a senate study on economic concentration, for every billion dollars spent during WWII, 400 million went to 10 large companies. This means that from that moment forward, for the arms industry, war itself should never be concluded. New arms need to be invented to satisfy new commissions. It has become increasingly clear that WWII was guided by economic interests more than moral and political ones. On August 6, 1945, 8:15 AM, at Hiroshima America dropped the first atomic bomb. President Truman had taken the decision to deploy the most recent American weapon on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why did we drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Truman said it was because Hiroshima was a military base. What an absurd affirmation. Of the 100,000 killed, quasi all were civilians! As the British scientist P.M.S. Blackett said in his book Fear, War and the Bomb, the use of the atom bomb was "the first large scale diplomatic operation of the Cold War against Russia," that and the fact that the US had simply invested too much money in developing it to not use it. America was overjoyed for the end of WWII, without knowing yet what the costs were. That of Hiroshima was an atrocity, we committed...stupefied civilians were roasted alive, there eyes removed from their orbits, limbs detached form their bodies, were dragged thorough the streets of their leveled houses under a radioactive fall-out. We bettered the cost effectiveness of mass extermination to an unimaginable possibility. The bomb was a warning to the Soviet Union to stay away from Japan and by now half the planet found itself under new management.
Now the military and the secret services would be deployed wherever American interests were at stake. The historian Arnold Toynbee has observed: "America was now the driving force behind a global anti-revolutionary movement in defense of its acquired interests...to sustain the rich against the poor." In China 1945-49, the US used soldiers of defeated Japan to fight Mao Tse-Tung, formerly an ally during the war against fascism. In Greece 1947-49 during the civil war, the US intervened along side of Greek neofascists to defeat the left, which had previously combated against the Germans. In the Philippines 1946-54, having returned to its old colony the US neutralized the Huk rebellion, a marxist peasant revolt lead by Luis Taruc, a former combatant of the anti-Japanese resistance. At Guatemala 1954 the CIA brought down the democratically elected government, guilty of having taken uncultivated land back from the United Fruit Company.
Later when the US supported the contras, it was responsible for the massacre of hundreds in El Salvador, to say nothing about My Lai in Vietnam. During the Cold War the superpowers were pitted against themselves and the ideologies became the driving force behind the arms race, while to conduct the campaign it was necessary a political and social repression on both sides.
More recent brutality has taken place in Iraq, where torture has been commonly practiced in the Abu Grahib prison.
I really think this patriotic culture in America of praising the armed forces for all the "righteousness" they spread around the world is a demonstration of just how stupid and ignorant many Americans are of their country's own history.
It's appalling and grotesque at once. The military, any military, is a best a necessary evil, at worst a means of oppression and imperialism. No more.
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