THE ROGUE NATION
1950
The United States foments and launches the Korean War. Contrary to the popularly held falsehoods that America was in Korea to protect freedom and democracy, the war was to perpetuate already existing U.S corporate resource exploitation in the Philippines and the Korean Peninsula. U.S. political and business leaders hoped for a share of Korean gold and tungsten.
Americans Herbert Hoover, William Randolph Hearst, J. Sloat Fassett, Ogden Mills, J.B. Haggin, John Staggers and beer baron Adolph Coors had achieved controlling interests in Korean gold mines where the best prospects lay north of the thirty-eighth parallel (the division between North and South Korea).
“In a March 3, 1950, speech at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York City’s most luxurious hotel, General Robert L. Eichelberger, former commander of the Eighth Army in Japan, delivered a speech on the need to rearm Japan and the strategic importance to the U.S. military of Korean tungsten. Later, Eichelberger’s brother won a huge contract for extracting Korean tungsten, and the U.S. became the recipient of Korea’s entire annual output.”
“After the war, General MacArthur and his right-hand man, Brigadier General Courtney Whitney invested in the largest Philippine gold mine at Benguet. Whitney also drafted the Japanese Constitution.” – – – Anthony Gronowicz, The Long History of U.S. Abuses to Korea
Three million Koreans and 50,000 U.S. troops were killed to protect the interests of oligarchy and plutocracy. It is impossible to understand North Korea today without looking at history. Please take the time to read the work of Gronowicz.
Napalm bombing of village near Hanchon, North Korea 10 May 1951. Use of Napalm on villages later became infamous in Vietnam, but much more was dumped on North Korea. (Phot: AP)
Daejon, North Korean prisoners before execution
Bodo League Massacre, South Korean troops shoot prisoners near Daegu, South Korea in April 1951. (AP-National Archives-U.S. Army)
Al Gore Sr. urged massive use of nuclear weapons in North Korea
All photos from: https://popularresistance.org/the-long-history-of-us-abuses-to-korea/
1953
In an act of terrorism, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated a coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. U.S. and British corporations saw him as a threat to their plunder of Middle Eastern oil. A repressive dictator, the Shah of Iran, was installed.
1964
The United States launches a preemptive war in Vietnam based on the faulty intelligence and outright lies of the U.S. Department of Defense claiming that U.S. ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin. According to a 1971 article in the Washington Post, the war had been planned long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but the lie about what happened there was the excuse used to start the war. Fifty thousand U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese would be sacrificed to perpetuate an economic ideology.
1979
The Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah. U.S. media used the situation to foment anti-Iranian opinion and the connection of this revolution to the 1953 coup was meticulously avoided by the American press.
1980
The Iran-Iraq War began as Ronald Reagan was entering the Presidency. As stated later in news releases by National Public Radio and The Washington Post , Reagan did everything in his power to support Saddam Hussein, the brutal dictator of Iraq. This included supplying Saddam with the components needed to wage chemical and biological warfare. Corporations wanted to stop Iran from preventing their plunder of the region’s oil wealth.
1988
George H. W. Bush was elected president and initially continued support of Saddam. However the Iran-Iraq War ended the same year and Saddam was no longer of particular use to the United States. When he invaded Kuwait in the first Gulf War, Bush realized that America needed to limit the monster it had created. Iraq was driven out of Kuwait and economic sanctions were imposed on the nation with the stated goal of forcing Saddam to destroy the chemical and biological weapons America had given him.
1992
Bill Clinton is elected President and the economic sanctions on Iraq continue. The sanctions had little effect in reducing the power of Saddam, but the United Nations estimates they caused the slow and painful death of over 576,000 Iraqi children from starvation and malnutrition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbCAOdNRp_4
Here is President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madelyn Albright stating on the CBS news broadcast “60 Minutes” that the Clinton Administration felt the “price” of over 500,000 dead children was “worth it.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to mention that no children from the Albright, Clinton, or other families of the administration were part of the “price.”
2000
George W. Bush becomes president. In the same year Saddam Hussein made the fateful decision to begin selling Iraqi oil in European euros rather than American dollars. This action, not weapons of mass destruction, was the real reason Saddam had to be taken out. It was a direct threat to the supremacy of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency (see Wealth and Money XVI for explanation).
2001
The opportunity to remove Saddam came with the Saudi Arabian sponsored terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York where 2996 people were killed. Based on the total lies by the Bush Administration, Iraq was falsely implicated. United Nations inspectors found no evidence that Saddam still possessed “weapons of mass destruction” but the U.S. financial power structure was not about to let him threaten the dollar.
2003
The United States begins a preemptive war on Iraq to remove Saddam. It is estimated that over half a million innocent Iraqi citizens have died because of this illegal American invasion. In the 14 years that the U.S. has conducted the war, terrorism has greatly increased and Iraq has become a failed state.
2011
NATO, led by the United States and France, launches an illegal, preemptive “humanitarian” war on Libya. Later reports by the U.K. Parliament show the war was based on lies. British investigations show Gadhafi was not going to “massacre” civilians and Western bombing made Islamist extremism worse. The U.K. report also states the U.S. supported attack “plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.” The United States didn’t prevent a humanitarian crisis – it created one.
No individual is more responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent Libyan men, women and children than then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. According to an article in The Washington Times:
“Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.
The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.” (Please take the time to read the article)
In the end the illegal attack on Libya had nothing to do with preventing a humanitarian crisis. It was about regime change. Gadhafi was proposing a pan-African currency that would replace the U.S. dollar as the medium of exchange for African oil and the continent’s banking interests. The Libyan state owned public bank and the Libyan dinar were not going to challenge the petrodollar’s supremacy as the world’s reserve currency. (Please read article by Attorney Ellen Brown from the Public Banking Institute)
Moammar Gadhafi was eventually murdered by U.S. supported terrorists by having a bayonet rammed up his anus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU
Here is Hillary Clinton on CBS News laughing about the murder of Gadhafi. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that Clinton’s daughter Chelsea and her grandchild were not among the thousands of women and children killed in Libya. They were not among the Libyan women and children who died fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea in unsafe boats.
Today
The United States is now seeking regime change in Syria. It would be the height of naiveté to think that there are no ulterior, imperialist, corporate motives behind this effort. We are not there to “save beautiful Syrian babies.”
In the words of the late Reverend Martin Luther King, the United States is now “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” We the people of the United States are no longer represented by our corporately controlled military industrial complex. Following the path of empires gone before, America is now the world’s great rogue nation.