US Intervention: Success or Failure?

The US frequently intervenes in foreign countries. This can the take form of supporting one group or leader over another, providing financial aid to one faction, imposing sanctions, sponsoring or actually engaging in a coup, engaging in covert action, spreading propaganda, or actually invading and occupying a country. We should be able, therefore, to look at the history of US foreign intervention and determine whether this has been largely a success or a failure.

Note that for the purposes of this article, I will generally be defining success or failure in terms of the United States own goals and objectives. Success does not necessarily mean the outcome was good or moral, only that the outcome corresponded to US interests. It should also be made clear that just because the US publicly states that a given goal is their aim, we should not assume that is their true aim, we need to look at the broader context. The purpose here is to determine whether US foreign intervention has been productive, from their own point of view.

Let's start with the Vietnam war. This began as a fight for independence from France, which started the First Indochina War from 1946 to 1954, which ended with the artificial partition of the country into two states. The US feared the country would be united under communist rule, so it intervened to support the leadership in the South. This would lead to a long war from 1959 to 1975 in which millions of South Asians would be killed. In the end, the US was defeated, withdrew, and the country was united under communist rule.

Today, of course, the US trades with Vietnam and many Americans visit the country. The entire war accomplished nothing, except for millions of deaths, and doesn't appear to have been needed in any event. Of course, for the Vietnamese, the war never really ended. The use of chemical warfare agents, such as Agent Orange, has left much of the countryside toxic, and many babies continue to be born stillborn or deformed as a result.

In Iran, after the second world war, the country had a popular and democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddeq. When he tried to nationalize the oil industry, however, he was removed in a US/British coup and replaced by the Shah, who ruled as a brutal dictator, and who used secret police and death squads. During the rule of the Shah, at US urging, almost all political opposition was suppressed. The only group that managed to survive as an opposition force was the Islamists. This explains why when the people finally got fed up with the Shah, they rose up within the context of the Islamic movement to stage their revolution. There were no liberals, democrats, communists or nationalists left to lead the fight.

The result of the US coup, then, was a strengthening of the Islamist movement around the world, and a general distrust of the US and enmity towards it in the middle east. The current relationship between Iran and the US is a direct result of previous US actions. Why should they be surprised when Iranians react strongly to US attempts to interfere in their country?

In Iraq, the US provided support and weapons to Saddam Hussein after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and supported their invasion of Iran, which led to a bloody eight year war. The US blocked UN resolutions condemning Iraq, and even supplied them with chemical weapons. Only after the Iraq invasion of Kuwait did the US turn against Iraq, which led to the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions that resulted in roughly a million deaths, half of them children. In 2003, the US used 9/11 and fictional weapons of mass destructive as a pretext to invade the country, resulting in perhaps another million deaths, millions of people displaced, and the widespread destruction of infrastructure. As a result of all this, Iran has now become one of the main powers in the region.

In the case of North Korea, the US has imposed crippling sanctions and tried to isolate the country as much as possible. The result is that the country has developed nuclear weapons, which they see as the only possible method of resisting US attack or invasion. Indeed, of the three countries originally listed as part of the "Axis of Evil", one has been invaded and occupied, and one is being threatened with attack. But the US is not threatening any attack against North Korea, and the reason appears clear.

The US has had an embargo in place against Cuba for almost 50 years. Yet there has been no change in government in Cuba, and despite their poverty and isolation, they have managed to achieve one of the highest standards of living in Latin America, and one of the best health care systems. Again, the policy has gained the US nothing but ill will, which has especially been growing in recent years in the region.

The War in Afghanistan appears to be another Vietnam in the making. After almost 10 years, the Taliban are as strong as ever, and are in control of large parts of the country. Many European countries (and Canada) are due to pull out their troops soon. Even the US, despite the new troops, has talked about beginning a withdrawal by 2011. The Taliban and other resistance groups are clearly going to wait out the West, and will almost certainly regain power in the end.

During this war, the relationship with Pakistan has also been badly damaged. The US has propped up a military dictator and used unmanned drones to bomb and kill many innocent civilians (violating Pakistani sovereignty in the process). They are fighting a war against a group of people many Pakistanis share a common ethnicity and history with. Correspondingly, most Pakistanis now view the US as their greatest threat, and the current government, which is supporting US interests, has the support of less than ten percent of the people. As a result, it is very likely the next government of Pakistan will break with the US and look toward their own interests instead.

Of course, many of the coups and wars the US has engaged in since the second world war are rightly viewed as morally repugnant or criminal, but even when you look at things from the point of view of US interests, these interventions don't appear to have resulted in any gain, and in some cases they have greatly harmed US interests. In some cases, even though wars may have been lost, a lot of money may still have been made, but I don't think this makes up for strategic loses. Much of the world now views the US as a potential threat, if not an outright enemy, and this is largely a result of prior US actions, and its current military deployment around the world.

Obviously, the US remains a very powerful and influential nation, and it often get what it wants from many countries. I am not arguing that the US is impotent, only that it is not all-powerful, and many US interventions have failed or backfired. As US debt grows, and its military becomes stretched, US influence and power are set to wane. Further US interventions appear more likely to accelerate this process, rather than slowing it down.