“GREETED AS LIBERATORS”….Another tidbit today from Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace. First, here is Dick Cheney on March 16:
I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
And here is Max on Woodrow Wilson’s 1914 invasion of Mexico:
Wilson had counted on a peaceful occupation; he assumed that the Mexican people?”the submerged 85 per cent of the people of that Republic who are now struggling toward liberty”?would welcome American intervention to topple their dictator. This view turned out to be dangerously naive.
So, um, how did it turn out?
What did this seven-month occupation accomplish? It did nothing to stop the delivery of arms to the Huerista regime….The occupation also did nothing to resolve the incident at Tampico that started the whole affair….Instead [there was] anti-gringo rioting. The anti-American reaction was not limited to Mexico; the events of 1914 stirred up rioting across Latin America.
Still, he says Wilson was satisfied because the intervention “more or less achieved its purpose.”
And what purpose did that turn out to be? To install democracy? No, the end result was the replacement of a brutal thug with a less brutal but just as anti-democratic “First Chief of the Constitutionalist Movement.” I sure hope the parallels with Iraq stop there.
