Quote:
Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
... 30 years ago, the US and ITT took out Allende. Now we can't even pick off a fool like Chavez.* We need to quit wasting our soldiers lives by making them work as a police force and start giving the CIA carte blanche to do what they were created to do.
That we made assassination technically illegal as part of some obscene do-goodery legislation demonstrates why a lot of people, and most politicians, shouldn't be allowed to vote.
* Yes, I recognize Chavez is not really a threat, because we can hurt him economically a lot more than he can hurt us, but I use the botched coup against him as an example of our incompetence in this area.
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I wouldn't take out Chavez for additional reasons. First, he is democratically elected, and far from mistreating his people (contrast Saddam, Castro, Khaddafi, and our history of U.S. supported hacks and petty despots such as Aquino, Saddam, the Taliban, the Sauds, etc.). He has so much oil money that he doesn't need to.
Second, he is very popular in latin America and our previous ham-fisted attempts to put in our own latin petty despots (Peron, Noriega, anyone in Colombia, the Dirty War, the Docs, Batista, the Contras, etc.) have all backfired, with the result being that the entire continent distrusts us so much that they fought for years the efforts to preserve millions of acres of Patagonia by the eco-fascist couple who founded North Face and Benetton (I think) because they thought it was a U.S. CIA plot to seize the land. We have no credibility in this region.
This is the problem with my support of better intelligence - our intelligence agencies have a shitty track record in this field. Maybe with the downfall of the Eastern Bloc, they could focus better on anything other than their former mantra of "Must. Oppose. Soviet Union. Regardless," but I'm not sure. We simply often don't understand the culture and mindset of these other cultures and, accordingly, fail to handle these things appropriately. Hence, I also remain fairly anti-interventionist, not because I think things are wrong elsewhere, but because our track record on effecting positive change through our military and clandestine efforts (where we have been the protagonist/aggresssor) in the last century has been so dismal.
LessinIguazu
