[scooter]

Originally Posted by Mustang Man

Great analysis, just geneuily curious but what makes Putin & Assad evil?

I'll bite. Before I answer, I want to say something up front: I love my country. I have fought for it for almost 20 years and would do anything to defend it, physically or morally. Right or wrong, the United States is my country and I will unhesitatingly put its interests ahead of anyone and everyone else. Got it? Ok.

There is no such thing as right and wrong, good or evil, when it comes to international relations. Syria evil, America good? Let's put that in perspective.

The United States, after breaking away from Britain, took advantage of financial ruin in France and bought their entire North America holdings for pennies on the dollar. As we started advancing west, we made treaties with the native tribes there. When that was inconvenient, we sent the Army in and uprooted every single tribe. We sent them on a death march west, until they were out of our hair. We sent settlers to northern Mexico against their stern warning, then decided it was ours. After the settlers fought off the Mexicans, they joined the US proper. When Mexico had the audacity to protest this, we declared war on Mexico, invaded, conquered them, then took half of their country from them by force. It's ours now, thanks. We're currently mad that there are so many Mexicans in this part of the country.

We got distracted fighting among ourselves for a while, which we finally solved by waging unrestricted war against civilians in their part of our country in order to terrorize them until they quit. We then sent the Army west with the deliberate policy of exterminating the entire native population. We gave the surviving remnants the worst land we could find and told them to stay there. Occasionally they got uppity, and we sent in guys with guns to punish them for objecting. We decided that we liked that big chain of islands in the middle of the pacific (Hawaii), so we invaded and took for ourselves. The ruling queen could go piss off. Ours.

We ran out of new land to settle and got anxious, so we decided to manufacture a war with Spain. We easily beat them, and took all of their remaining overseas territories because we could. We put troops in the Philippines to claim it, and they decided they wanted their own country instead of being ruled by us. The nerve of those people... so we brutally crushed their revolt over a multi-year counterinsurgency and made sure they knew who was boss. We wanted to sell heroin to China to make money, but they didn't want us to do that exactly. So we did the only rational thing and invaded China. When the Boxers revolted against the white imperialists, we responded violently. A couple of guys got Medals of Honor, for saving the good white folk who had settled there against the irrationally hostile yellow man.

When the Russian revolution broke out, we invaded Russia to try to stop the Bolsheviks. Being America, we did it less than half ass and didn't accomplish anything, other than ensuring that the Russians would remember us with something less than fondness. A little bit later a bunch of countries in the Central America were unhappy that our fruit companies were trying to run the show down there, so they instituted a policy of deciding what companies could do what and how with their natural resources. Fuck that, right? So we sent in the Marines all over the place to put in new governments that would let us take their bananas at cut rates and sell them for profit.

We got sucked into World War 2, mostly because we decided we didn't like the Japanese (who were screwing with our economic interests) and started cutting off their fuel supply. They kind of needed gas, so they attacked us. When things got really tough during the war, we decided that firebombing dense population centers with no military value would be a great way to terrorize the enemy, so we did that. When it got even tougher, we nuked two cities with no military value just to terrorize the Japanese by slaughtering old men, women, and children by incinerating their whole city. Surrender or we keep doing it. Problem solved. Then we put our enemy’s leaders on trial for killing civilians and hung them.

We had an awesome opportunity at this point, seeing as the entire developed world was in ashes and we were left standing. We deliberately created a world designed specifically for our benefit. Our enemies? Yeah, we ensured they remained weak by writing their constitutions ourselves, and permanently stationed garrisons in their country. Great Britain, France, and Belgium were happy for our help during the war, so they won’t mind if we keep our troops in their countries, right? To help. The Russians were busy creating a defensive alliance so they wouldn’t get invaded AGAIN, so we decided to tell our friends they were joining OUR alliance, which would be under our command and not theirs. We made sure everyone adopted our economic system and free trade, so our still standing economy could sell them stuff. We kept our big navy and had international laws written that guaranteed freedom of the seas, which benefited us over all other nations. We put carrier battle groups and Marines in every quadrant of the world to ensure our stuff we were selling got to where it needed to go. This worked so well we paid off most of our 100% GDP debt in record time, then kept making us into the richest country on earth. We created international governing bodies (stationed in the US) which gave us and our docile allies a veto over anyone else’s military actions for any reason. We had international finance rules put in place that ensured the dollar became the world’s reserve currency. We built thousands of nuclear weapons so we could incinerate people’s cities if needed, then told everyone else that they couldn’t have any. We made this a non-negotiable world policy. Except for our allies. They could have some too, as long as they didn’t make too many and stayed in our military alliance we made them join.

When non-allies started making these nukes too, we said they were dangerous and started demonizing them. When those Russian guys kept trying to spread a different economic system that would benefit them, we invaded Vietnam and Korea to make sure they stayed open for us to sell them stuff. In Vietnam we regularly burned down villages and fired munitions off randomly because we didn’t really know where the enemy was. A lot of civilians got killed, but that’s ok. We started having the CIA overthrow democratically elected governments and installing ruthless dictators who liked us better, even if they did torture and kill their own people, just so the Russians wouldn’t get a leg up on us.

Continued.....