Re: U.S. Flees Yemen
Hardly amounted to a coup? They took out the elected prime minister and executed him and some of his top advisers. A general hand picked by the US CIA as was to take over as PM based on a plan created by the CIA which utilized the Iranian military. By what definition is that not a coup?
You are misstating the facts. Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister who was ousted, was sentenced to three years in prison. After that, he lived under house arrest.
So an invasion by the USSR and a coup orchestrated by the US both led to a takeover by Islamic radicals.
Again, you misstate the facts. Members of Jamiat-e-Islami, an Islamist party, had tried to overthrow the Afghan government in 1975, more than four years before the Soviet Union ever set foot there. And for more than a year and a half before the first Soviet troops came in at the end of 1979, Islamists had been reacting violently to radical reforms undertaken by the communist government that had been established under Taraki, Amin, and Karmal.
Are you saying that he was right? Seems that a sustantial threat did exist and the jihadist threat is pretty real in Iraq.
The jihadist threat exists there now exactly because the U.S. did not leave a residual peacekeeping force of 15-20,000 as our military experts recommended. Six or seven years ago, President Bush and his advisers considered Iraq reasonably well pacified. So did President Obama--in fact when he was elected he tried to take credit for how stable the situation in Iraq had become. Of course a residual American force would not have been perfectly safe, just as U.S. forces in Iraq right now are not perfectly safe. But our military analysts did not think it would be exposed to unacceptable risks. The residual U.S. force in Korea was not entirely safe, either, with a substantial part of it deployed along the demilitarized zone right across from strong and hostile North Korean forces. And some U.S. forces were killed in incidents there over the years.
Sure, they would of overthrown regimes, go against democratic majorities or whatever else it took. We are dealing with the results their heavy handed actions to this day. There's a reason we aren't very popular in the arab world and in latin America...
Foreign affairs are not a popularity contest, and I am not interested in which people in which country like the U.S. I also do not think the U.S. has to apologize for anything it did to win the Cold War. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan all faced the problem of containing a Soviet Union determined to expand its malevolent influence all around the world. That often required them to support political figures who were unsavory and very far from our ideal, not because they liked or admired these men, or because their nations had democratic rule, but because the alternative was to risk having those nations come under Soviet control.
It's easy to say in hindsight what the U.S. should have done here or there--how we should always have supported sweetness and light and popular choice, instead of trying to impose our will on other countries--but the presidents who had to make foreign policy decisions were dealing with an extremely powerful and often aggressive adversary with a lot of nuclear weapons aimed at this country. I'm sure, for example, someone might argue that it was not our business if Cuba chose to become a communist nation, and that had a perfect right, if it wanted, to let the Soviet Union build nuclear missile bases there in 1962. But as President Kennedy knew, the U.S. could not let that happen, because if it had, it would have invited war with the Soviets in Europe or someplace else.