From: thangolossus@gmail.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations

It seems that ever since the founding of the country, the United
States has been at war. It is as if Americans just could not (and
still cannot) sit still, but had to (and still have to) force
themselves on others through military action.

Often this is aimed at controlling foreign resources, thus forcing
upon others the consequences of their own capitalist avarice. At other
times the violence is spurred on by an ideology that confuses U.S.
interests with civilization and freedom. Only very rarely is
Washington out there on the side of the angels. Regardless, the bottom
line seems to be that peace has never been a deeply ingrained cultural
value for the citizens of the United States. As pertains to foreign
policy, America’s national culture is a war culture.

It is against this historical backdrop that the recent Ken Burns
18-hour-long documentary on the Vietnam War comes off as superficial.
There is a subtle suggestion that while those American leaders who
initiated and escalated the war were certainly deceptive, murderously
stubborn and even self-deluded, they were so in what they considered
to be a good cause. They wanted to stop the spread of Communism at a
time when the Cold War defined almost all of foreign policy, and if
that meant denying the Vietnamese the right of national unification,
so be it. The Burns documentary is a visual demonstration of the fact
that such a strategy could not work. Nonetheless, American leaders,
both civilian and military, could not let go.

What the Burns documentary does not tell us – and it is this that
makes the work superficial – is that none of this was new. Almost all preceding American violence abroad had been rationalized by the same
or related set of excuses that kept the Vietnam slaughter going: the Revolutionary War was about “liberty,” the genocidal wars against the Native Americans were about spreading “civilization,” the wars against Mexico and Spain were about spreading “freedom,” and once capitalism
became officially synonymous with freedom, the dozens of bloody
incursions into Central and South America also became about our
“right” to carry on “free enterprise.” As time went by, when
Washington wasn’t spreading “freedom,” it was defending it. And so it goes, round and round.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/08/americas-long-history-of-warfare/

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