The United States Foreign Policy - Report Example

of Lecturer] Essay Proposal Introduction Opinions vary broadly on the genuineness of the United s’ policies, particularly its foreign policy. Historically, the US’s foreign policy has been portrayed as one tinted with war, militarism, and unfriendliness towards its true and perceived enemies. For instance, although it was initially composed of thirteen small and vulnerable colonies at the eastern coast of the continental North America, the U.S would later expand across the entire continent in the next century. In its desire to expand, the United States of America had to conquer, exterminate, and wrest native populations such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California from Mexico in a bitter civil war. In addition to wresting these native populations and lands from Mexico, the U.S grabbed itself many overseas colonies. While it reluctantly joined the two world wars rather late, the United States has started and waged quite a number of wars single-handedly since becoming a superpower. Interestingly, some of these wars have been merely military interventions whose justification some consider ulterior and therefore uncalled for. From this war-mongering nature of the United States and its leaders (presidents), it is strange that U.S citizens and subsequent presidents consider themselves as peace-loving people and continually deceive Americans that the U.S foreign policy serves their interests. One reason the U.S citizens elected President Barrack Obama is that they thought he would be different from his predecessor George Bush who not only started the foolish and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also mismanaged these wars. It is because of Obama’s opposition to the two wars that he was endeared to the war-wary U.S citizens thus prompting his election. Unfortunately, two years into his first term in office, President Obama, who was expected to be more thoughtful on the use of U.S armed forces and the implications of crude policy tools escalated the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and even launched a new war against Libya. Because of its love for war and military interventions in countries and regions considered enemies, strategic, or of interest to it, the United States has made many enemies in the world, more so the Arab and Muslim world. In fact, the U.S foreign policy has particularly been aggressive towards the Arab world, seen to be harboring and supporting individual terrorists and terror groups such as the Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabab. This paper explores the United States’ foreign policy, which is marred with a lot of lies not only to the international community but also to its own citizens. Although the United States goes to wars or undertakes military interventions against other countries and regions in the pretext of fighting terror and dictatorial/abusive regimes, its objective in most of these interventions is to change regimes not considered friendly or not towing its lines and replace them with puppet governments that the U.S then manipulates (Mokhiber & Weissman 4). One negative effect of these wars is evident in the country’s economy, which has received a considerable beating in recent times. In fact, economy, more so the high unemployment rates, is perhaps the ground on which this year’s general election will be decided. Coupled with its war history since World War II, the US has only been waging wars and military interventions that have only made more enemies in the world and caused untold suffering and deaths in countries such as Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. In the course of these wars the U.S has abused human rights, overthrown democratic governments, and killed innocent civilians in countries such as Palestine, choosing to intervene only in economically strategic countries such as Libya. It surprises people that the U.S has decided not to intervene in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen while it only took a few weeks to intervene in Libyan civil unrest. The U.S, Wars, and Military Interventions Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher and military general and strategist once said that "All war is based on deception." Perhaps no single country has perfected this statement than the United States of America. In the U.S., it is neither new nor strange that the government may lie to its people so that they may support its policies. Particularly, the U.S government, through its foreign policy, has continually lied to its citizens whenever it wants to start a war or intervene in other sovereign states for one reason or the other. The fact that most people prefer peace to war implies that for any government to have its citizens supporting its war and other military operations, one or more lies need to be propagated to create the only way to peace is by supporting a particular war. In U.S history, cases of the government lying to its people to support war abound. For example, in the evening of 15 February 1898, USS Maine, a ship sent to protect U.S interests and property during Cuba’s revolt against Spain, was sunk in Havana Harbor. Although it was not clear what had caused the accident that killed three quarters of the crew, unreliable sources and media misrepresentation led to a popular view in the U.S that Spain was responsible for the sinking of the ship. In fact, President McKinley told U.S citizens that Spanish mine had in fact sunk the USS Maine (Mokhiber & Weissman 5). The American public, enraged by Spain’s uncalled for attacks, supported the Spanish American War. Despite the fact that the ship’s captain said that a coal bin explosion had sunk the ship, the lies that Spain was responsible were still peddled. Investigators would later concur with the captain since no mines were found in the ship or around the accident scene. The picture below shows the wreckage of the USS Maine at the Havana Harbor. The other case in which a U.S president and governement lied to its people to support war was during the Vietnam War. In this case, President Lyndon Johnson fabricated lies bout the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans to fight in Vietnam. An inexperienced sonar man wrote a report of torpedoes in the waters of the Gulf to provoke the Congress into escalating the war with Vietnam. It is thus an inescapable historical reality that successive U.S governments and leaders have consistently lied to the people to goad them into supporting wars that they would otherwise have rejected. Not quite far away is the case of the Iraqi War. Questions have been raised whether President Bush’s government and his associates lied to Congress and U.S people to start the Iraqi War. Since the start of the war, a lot of information discrediting the war has come to the surface although it became obvious rather early that the U.S government and her allies such as the Great Britain had lied to the receive sympathy and public support for the war in Iraq. With its associates, the U.S government managed to convince the public that there were mobile biological weapons laboratories used to make WMD in Iraq. It did not however escape keen Americans that these allegations were proffered after the government failed to provide evidence for real laboratories. Below is an example of the photos shown by the mainstream media in the U.S as proof of the existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories. Later, these trailers were identified as hydrogen gas generators for use in weather balloons. It is after this revelation that the story of the mobile laboratories fell apart. One recent instance in which the U.S government’s foreign policy lied to its citizens is thus the war in Iraq and Libya. Although the Iraqi war was supposedly started to find and destroy the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that President Saddam Hussein allegedly had, the real reason for the war was regime change (Mokhiber & Weissman 15). In the case of the war in Libya, people were made to believe that only the Libyan rebels and the Europeans would hold most of the guns and do most of the fighting. However, as it turned out, it is the U.S machinery, weapons, and personnel such as the CIA operatives, and U.S military forces that were to actually finish the job in Libya. Further, the U.S claim that it was preventing Muammar Gaddafi from slaughtering thousands of innocent Libyans did not stand informal scrutiny, let alone a thorough scrutiny. Despite the fact that Gaddafi might have been a brutal leader, his forces only targeted rebels and did not deliberately attack or massacre innocent civilians in the cities he captured during the uprising. In fact, Gaddafi’s vengeance and attacks were on those who threatened his rule and not innocent onlookers. As a matter of fact, evidence that Gaddafi’s atrocities in Libya would stain the world’s conscience as Obama said, did not exist anywhere. Why the U.S Favors War and Military Interventions Although peoples’ opinions may vary on the successes or failures of these wars and military interventions, people are unanimous in asking why these situations keep occurring. That is, why do quite different presidents keep engaging in the same acts of war? It hurts that a U.S citizen sick of war in 2008 watched another war escalate in 2009 and a third one being launched in 2011. There are several reasons that shape the United States’ foreign policy, which seems to love and favor war and military incursions into other regions and countries. The first reason is that the U.S is powerful and able to execute such wars given its powerful military against minor targets such as Libya. Compared to such developing countries, the U.S has better and more war planes, smarter bombs, better trained personnel, and more efficient cruise missiles (Mokhiber & Weissman 9). Thus, the whole world, not only Libya and Iraq, is an easy target for the United States. Hence, whenever an issue the U.S considers thorny arises, the temptation to respond with military action is quite unbearable. U.S oil policy is the other element of its foreign policy that makes it highly likely for it to go to unnecessary wars in the Middle East and North Africa, regions that produce a sizeable fraction of world’s oil and other sources of energy. Of particular interest with regards to U.S’s foreign and oil policy was the Libyan conflict, which many people believe was either about oil or for oil. There are several key problems that taint U.S’s foreign and oil policies, making the peddling of lies about the convenience of war such an easy option whenever its interests are threatened or not addressed. First, the U.S oil policy aims at total control of all oil access. In fact, this is the cornerstone of U.S-Middle East policy. That about 10% of the oil used in the U.S comes from the oil from the Persian Gulf also prompts the U.S to resort to war and military incursions given its reliance on imported Middle Eastern oil is rather high. This overreliance on imported oil has in fact led to the dual containment of Iran and Iraq by the U.S., supported by broader military engagement policy, which is core to United States’ strategy to ensure the Middle Eastern oil flows to its reserves. Thus, to ensure that Iran and Iraq do not threaten US’s oil supply from other Gulf States; the U.S has a foreign policy of dual containment for Iran and Iraq. The government thus had to lie to its citizens that Saddam Hussein (Iraq) was hiding WMD and that Iran is enriching its nuclear for war purposes rather than energy. The U.S foreign policy is thus primarily aimed at ensuring that oil from the Gulf region does not flow into enemy hands as this would not only impact negatively on the U.S economy but would also empower hostile or rival countries. By controlling the Gulf region, the U.S also manages to exert influence and control over the European region, which depends more on Gulf oil than the U.S itself. Besides being too dependent on oil, the United States’ foreign policy places little if any emphasis on developing energy alternatives. Further, the dual containment policy on Iran and Iraq is not only expensive but also unnecessary, inappropriate, and does not protect oil and other sources of energy. In its quest to control oil wells and trade, the U.S’s foreign policy has ignored the country’s responsibilities to curb human rights violations, arms spending, or political repression. Additionally, the U.S foreign policy towards oil and the Middle East has no plans to reverse its destructive trend. The War against Terror The war against terror is the other area in which the U.S government has consistently lied to its citizens. First, the public was deceived on the cost of the war in Iraq, which the government estimated to be $50-$60 billion, all to be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. However, this never turned out to be the case as the war cost much more than this amount. In fact, the then White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired for estimating the cost of the Iraq war at $200 billion. Now in its twelfth year, the war against terror seems to head nowhere in particular and many people do not understand what it really is about. In fact, it is believed that to expand its list of Arab and Muslim enemies, the United States must continue to fuel the war on terror, which is the only way by which the government can instill fear in its citizens and justify the police state. It is this police state that the U.S citizens are promised to protect them from terrorists. As a matter of fact, the citizens are made to forget that it is the government that has discarded all their civil liberties and human rights in the name of fighting terror. Thus, while creating terrorist and enemy states around the world, the U.S foreign policy lies to its citizens that they need protection from terrorists. To create terrorists, the U.S government not only wrecks Arab and Muslim states, governments, and infrastructures but also kills their civilians in large numbers. Further, by U.S-sponsored coups, overthrown governments are replaced by puppet regimes, which are further used to instill fear, murder and persecute innocent citizens, today’s Pakistan being a good example in this regard. The neoconservative U.S government has also not informed its citizens on the domination objective of the 9/11 terror war plan, which fits with U.S’s ruling oligarchies’ goals. Although President Eisenhower warned of the military and security-related profits of war at the expense of the general wellbeing of society, the American supremacy interests, which are equally good for the oil industry and U.S’s control over other world resources, has propelled the U.S policy makers to support war and military intervention at the slightest opportunity (Mokhiber & Weissman 15). But the conditioning to which the government propaganda machines have placed U.S citizens prevents them from realizing the deceptions. In fact, many U.S citizens have been made to believe that the government and its policies are the most morally upright and the best in the world. Indeed, the government propagandists lie to its citizens that its foreign policies are quite good and help others elsewhere in the world through aid to marginalized and malnourished regions. These beliefs and delusion exist among U.S citizens despite the apparent reports and headlines, which display U.S’s interferences in and bullying of almost every country on earth. Conclusion Since historical times, the U.S government, through its foreign policy has lied to its citizens on quite a number of issues, particularly war and the fight against terror. The Middle East and North African states such as Libya are a few of the cases in which the U.S government has misled the people to welcome wars and military engagements that would otherwise have been outright rejected. It eludes many U.S citizens that the government’s foreign policy is to either buy off or overthrow democratic and non-democratic governments elsewhere in the world to represent U.S interest at the expense of their own peoples’ interests. That is, much as a government may need to represent the interest of its own people, the U.S government ensures that its interests are equally important. An example is the case of Honduras in which the Honduran government and president thought their mandate was to the people of Honduras. In fact, an American banana magnate was the main brain behind the coup against the Honduran government. Honduras thus merely adds to the long list of countries such as Hawaii, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile whose governments have at one time been overthrown by the U.S government. In the case of Honduras, since the U.S government trains and supplies the Honduran military with weapons and materials, it was rather easy to organize and execute the coup. The situation is almost similar in Pakistan where the Pakistani government is coerced by the U.S government to wage war against its people and tribal regions the U.S considers friendly to AL-Qaeda and the Taliban. Work Cited Mokhiber, R., and Weissman, R. Overthrow; A Hallmark of U.S. Foreign Policy, 2006. Finalcall.com News. Retrieved on July 20, 2012 from http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2703.shtml Read More