Thursday, November 9, 2023

The United States - A Nation Built on a Foundation of Conflict

While Washington loves to point the finger at Russia for its current military operations in Ukraine, the United States itself is on the sending end of munitions to a wide variety of nations around the world.  Let's look at America's military activities around the world since its inception followed by a list of American-led wars since World War II followed by atally of bombs that it has dropped since military activities began in Afghanistan in 2001 at the beginning of the endless and unresolved War on Terror.

 

Here is a complete list of United States military and clandestine operations in foreign countries from 1798 to 2004 as compiled by Global Policy:

 







 

In an April 2021 paper entitled "Severe Humanitarian Disasters Caused by US Aggressive Wars against Foreign Countries", the China Society for Human Rights provides a list of wars that have been waged by the United States after World War II.  Here is a list of all wars and interventions in foreign nations (often touted as being humanitarian interventions or operations necessary to protect local civilians from brutal regimes) waged by the United States since the end of World War II:






Here is a complete list of the major wars and the cost in human terms:

 


Now, let's look at some detailed information from the conflicts since 2007 in the early stages of the War on Terror.  Thanks to the U.S. Air Force's Central more-or-less monthly Airpower Summary data releases, the latest of which looks like this:

 



...we have a complete count of how many bombs the United States military and its allies have dropped as shown on this table from Progressive with other nations including Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine and Somalia:

 

 

Over the period between 2001 and 2021, a total of 377,055 bombs and missiles have been dropped for an average of 46 strikes per day.  Note that this count does not include drones which have killed thousands of civilians under strikes authorized by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

  

The United States has increasingly become a warrior nation since the end of World War II as Washington fought what it determined was an existential conventional war against the spread of Soviet-style communism followed by a war against a foe, a decentralized and diverse group of what the American ruling class determined were terrorists, that didn't play the war game using traditional rules of combat.  With the current threat of a multipolar world and the unceasing efforts to convince us all that everything that Russia or China does is a threat to "our way of life" and the influence of the American military-intelligence-industrial complex on the government, it looks like the United States will continue to build on its foundation of conflict for the foreseeable future.


1 comment:

  1. You forgot the Indian Wars, which lasted from about 1607 to 1918, and which established the US.

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