Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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these orders.
Half a century earlier, we were compelled to take a third of Mexico in
self-defense against Mexican aggression (initiated deep inside Mexico) in
what General Ulysses S. Grant described as “the most unjust war ever
waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” while the New York press
explained that “the Mexicans are aboriginal Indians and they must share
the destiny of their race.” The editor of Scientific American lauded the
expansion into Mexico as a triumph of American “mechanical genius”:
“We hold the keys of the Atlantic on the east and the Pacific on the far
distant west. Our navies sweep the Gulf of Mexico and our armies
occupy the land of the ancient Aztecs . . . Every American must feel a
glow of enthusiasm in his heart as he thinks of his country’s greatness,
her might and her power.” The genocidal assaults against the native
population were in defense against England and Spain. As in Central
America, T. D. Allman comments, “the definition of the aggressors as
that we have attacked them.” 8
The Evil Empire changes; the basic reasons and the credibility of the
excuses do not.
If we are not defending ourselves from one or another Evil Empire,
then we are acting in self-defense against “internal aggression,” as Adlai
Stevenson explained at the United Nations in 1964 with reference to
South Vietnam, echoing McKinley, at the time when the US was
desperately blocking attempts by our South Vietnamese enemies (who at
the time included not only the Viet Cong but also the military-civilian
leadership of the US client regime) to achieve neutralization and political
settlement while the US planned its escalation of the war to block these
nefarious schemes. Stevenson compared our defense against internal
aggression in South Vietnam to the murderous counterinsurgency
campaign in Greece in 1947, an operation that Reagan’s Latin America
adviser Roger Fontaine argued should be a model for our Central