wrote on news reports and various commissions that reported on the
aftermath. I was in the military about 12 years earlier, leaving the CAF in
1982. I don't know what the number of Somali casualties were. I don't think
anyone did. The problem is that not only did you have those being killed by
the chaos and the civil war, but you also had an ongoing famine, and
deliberate massacres by Aideed and other warlords.
As for imperialism, most European and "technically advanced" countries,
incl. Russia, and the US were imperialistic up until the 1920's or so. Then
many of these countries began to divest, or were forced to divest themselves
of their colonies.
My own opinion is that the writer presented an very biased and one sided
view. If anything I think the US was more likely to engage in cultural and
economic imperialism far more than actual imperialistic conquest. On the web
page you site, most of those writings on the US were before 1930.
By and large, the US, with a few notable exceptions, did not engage in the
deliberate acts of terrorism that the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge
systematically engaged in. If you read the writings of Mao, Lenin and
Trotsky (the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1922 is a real eye opener on
atrocity - again on both sides), such actions to "behead the serpent of the
bourgeois" was mandated. This meant that physicians, teachers, village
headmen and civil servants etc would be killed in very ugly ways. It also
served to further cement the solidarity of those doing the killings. A prime
example is the cases of cannibalism during the Chinese cultural revolution.
I did not say that US military intervention was always humanitarian. If you
read the history of the US and China from the 1890's through to the second
world war or the US colonization of the Philippines after the
Spanish-American War, its plainly obvious that it isn't. More recently
however there has been a significant humanitarian component to the US
becoming involved in local or regional conflicts, when this country finally
gets off its butt and acts.
larry
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