Sunday, July 20, 2014

 Run, Run, Run, Runaway
    When the Cubans won their revolution in 1959, the American officer in charge of advising the army of dictator Batista called on Fidel Castro. He offered to set up a U.S. training mission for the new rebel army just as he had done for the departed tyrant. Why, Castro asked, would I hire those who trained the losers?
    In the last stages of that revolution, the U.S.-armed and advised Batista forces threw away their weapons and faded into the wood work. Ten years earlier, Chinese Nationalists sponsored by Washington skedaddled before the Red Chinese. In 1975, the South Vietnamese army created by the Pentagon at the cost of billions likewise collapsed.  In recent days, the Iraqi army, designed down to the last detail by the American military, took flight, top brass running fastest, when attacked by a far smaller force of Sunni fanatics known as ISIS. Left in their dust were the ruins of the decade-long, trillion dollar effort to remake Iraq as the centerpiece of the American empire’s dominance of the Middle East.
    All of these failures at arms--like the ones to come--have a common history: a dictatorship set up or succored by Washington finds its people in revolt. The U.S. moves in to crush the revolt by rebuilding the dictatorship’s military. But no matter how much training or how many shiny new weapons the Pentagon hands out, the recruits for the puppet army balk. They don’t want to kill their own people at the behest of  the foreigners propping up the dictatorship they hate. So they run away.
    It’s perfectly understandable.  How many Americans would willingly kill other Americans under orders of a foreign military?
    Washington can't deal with that reality. It believes its own propaganda that the other 95 percent of the world, with the exception of a few troublemakers, should be willing to fight and die for the American way of life in preference to their own. 
    Will our leaders ever accept that people everywhere, and not just in America, want to be ruled by their own kind? No!  If they did, the justification for U.S. “global leadership” would  collapse and a lot of rich and powerful people bent on global domination would become less rich and powerful.