Quote:
Originally posted by Sir Kenyth:
Have we ever been the first to attack? Or just the first to respond?
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In the history of our country, you mean?
Well, the major incidents would include the long, hundred year conquest and virtual extermination of the Indians (the rougly hundred years following the founding of the Unites States -- actually a bit longer than that) in one shameful episode of US agression after another; the War with Mexico, in which the US helped trump up incidents in an excuse to conquer and claim half of what was then Mexico; certainly the Civil War if viewed from the point of view of the US gov't fighting to preserve a big chunk of its territory by gunpoint (We southerners find it much easier to view the War of Northern Aggression in that way
), the Spanish American war, where a mysterious explosion on the Battleship Maine in Havana, Cuba was used politically as a reason to gobble up what remained of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the Pacific (this is how we acquired the Phillipines, for example, treating it as a colony in part of our Manifest Destiny Empire, including the brutal suppression of rebellion against us by our military), and of course the long, sordid series of military interventions in Central and South America, the latest such being Panama by George Bush Sr., which if you will recall was the case of a US invasion and takeover of the country, without a single shot having been fired at us first, in your words.
We participated in the Western Domination and carving up of China, suppressed the Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion, and helped hold sway over China allied with europeans until the people became so sick of our version of western influence that they turned by their millions to the Communists and the support of the Soviet Union and drove the Westerners out.
Of course there was Vietnam, in which we killed over a million people for no particular good reason at all.
The Middle East has long been a sore point. After the great victory of World War II the US dominated the region, along with her ally Britain, who was at that point fast losing grip on her old empire to the US. We supported such ruthless, bloody, tyrants as the Shah of Iran, who suppressed his people with such extremes as torture. We armed him, supplied him, kept him in power with the assistance of the CIA, all because we could work with him for oil. The Iranian people sure took that as a first attack by the US. Can't same I blame them.
Okay, that was just a quick summary of how the US is in no position to claim that it never is the aggressor.