@wmwcjr,
wmwcjr wrote:This is the rationale for supporting death squads and instructing military personnel from Central and South America in the fine art of torture. Wow! Apparently, supporting bloody dictators like Pinochet and others does not present a moral problem to you at all. "The end justifies the means."
Have you ever considered the possibility that the policy of installing and supporting right-wing dictators may turn out to be counterproductive in the long run? I guess the excesses of Batista in Cuba (another U.S.-supported dictator) had nothing to do with Castro coming to power.
It was a bad situation. We had to do something to prevent the Communists from destroying us.
Yes, supporting brutal dictators was bad. But being destroyed by the Communists would have been even worse.
wmwcjr wrote:In 1953 the U.S. deposed a democratically elected leader and installed a dictator known as the Shah. The result? As a result, the world now has to deal with an "Islamic Republic" that has one of the worst records of human rights violations in the world. Even your hero Ron Paul, the darling of the John Birch Society, agrees that the U.S. was wrong to install the Shah in Iran.
The US didn't install the Shah in Iran. We did play a role in the coup, but it was a small role.
The overthrow of Iran's democracy was mostly done by the same clerics who later overthrew the Shah and who rule Iran today. The coup mainly came from inside Iran, not from outsiders.
Even among outside supporters, the US role in the coup was small. Most outside support for the coup came from the British, who were justifiably outraged that Mossadegh was stealing their oil.
wmwcjr wrote:Please study some history. The U.S. was meddling in Latin America before the Communists came to power in Russia. So, please stop with the "resisting Communism" line. If there had never been a Communist threat, we still would have been messing around in Latin American to promote "business interests."
Our ancestors did a lot of bad things in their day. But that doesn't mean that we were not honestly trying to prevent Communism from destroying us.
Note that when the Cold War ended, we dropped our support for all those horrible dictators. And despite the yapping of that little Chihuahua in Venezuela, we stopped opposing Left-wing governments in Latin America. We've also done nothing to enforce the Monroe Doctrine lately. China has made many business deals with Latin American states in recent years, and we haven't had a single objection.
wmwcjr wrote:Baldimo, if you had been born in the U.S.S.R. in, say, 1950, I have no doubt you would have been a "good" little Communist and would have supported the various interventions in the satellite countries to keep them from straying to "capitalism." You're no better.
I disagree that there was moral equivalence between Communism and the Free World.
Communism was ultimately a horrible dictatorship that ruthlessly suppressed dissident viewpoints. The Free World was, well,
free.
