Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
First of all, in terms of popularity worldwide, the U.S. is a mixed picture.\u00a0A\u00a0Gallup International poll of 65 countries, issued on 30 December 2013<\/span><\/a>, found that:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%). Respondents in Russia (54%), China (49%) and Bosnia (49%) were the most fearful of the US as a threat.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n (Some of the reasons why America is considered, by people throughout the world, to be the biggest threat to peace, will be documented below.)<\/span><\/p>\n More details in that poll were reported here<\/span><\/a>. This poll also found some marginal advantages for America in the country’s reputation as a place to live. It found that:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “The majority of people (38%) are in\u00a0fact happy to live\u00a0where they currently reside. This figure is matched by those\u00a0in the Western Europe region where\u00a038% would choose to live where they\u00a0currently live, with 36% of the UK population opting to stay in\u00a0the country and\u00a0a substantial 66% of Australia respondents answering that they would not\u00a0consider\u00a0relocating. Overall, those in the MENA [Middle East North Africa region] (47%) and Americas (46%)\u00a0regions are most likely to stay\u00a0where they currently live.\u00a0For those who would\u00a0like to move, the survey highlights that the USA (9% of respondents) is the\u00a0most desirable destination, with Canada and Australia jointly being second\u00a0choice (7%) and\u00a0Switzerland third (6%). Only 4% of the world\u2019s population\u00a0would like to live in the UK, a figure\u00a0common to other European countries\u00a0including Spain, France and Italy.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The top-scoring countries, and their scores, were shown here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n In any case, the U.S. was a rather popular place to move to on account of its being the only nation that adjoins the much poorer country of Mexico to the south, and so the U.S. has long been a popular destination from those relatively poor and violently high-crime countries, especially (besides Mexico itself) El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This does not necessarily mean that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, however.<\/span><\/p>\n That 2013 WIN\/Gallup poll (which was from the Worldwide Independent Network of Gallup International) is the only comprehensive international poll that has been made at all public regarding the cardinal question of which country is \u201cposing the greatest threat to peace\u201d in the world. The poll itself was not made available online, but was instead only summarized in a press release by WIN\/Gallup, perhaps because the answers on that particular question were so negative regarding the United States Government, which is a major financial backer of Gallup International\u2019s polling. Although a subsequent\u00a0\u201cEnd of Year Survey 2014\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0was done, it reported nothing at all on the key question of \u201cthe greatest threat to peace in the world today.\u201d Perhaps, if the U.S. Government sponsored the poll, it decided that in the year 2014, after President Obama\u2019s violent Ukrainian coup in February followed by civil war and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine<\/span><\/a>, and with other international conflicts in which the U.S. played an important part, yet another year of the U.S.\u2019s topping Russia, by over four-to-one, as being a \u201cthreat to peace\u201d in the world, would not be something that the U.S. Government would want to draw public attention to, yet again. So: they did not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another way to look at the question of whether the U.S. is a force for good in the world is to consider America\u2019s roles in the flaming civil and international wars that are going on around the world, particularly the issue of refugees (many of which refugees are now pouring into Europe, even in instances where the refugees are due to the U.S.).<\/span><\/p>\n IRAQ<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In Iraq, after America\u2019s 2003 invasion of that country and overthrow of its dictator Saddam Hussein,\u00a0wikipedia says<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that, “Roughly 40% of Iraq’s middle class is believed to have fled.[15]\u00a0[2]\u00a0[16]\u00a0Most are\u00a0fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return.[15].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n LIBYA<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In Libya, after America\u2019s 2011 bombing campaign and the resultant killing of its dictator Muammar Gaddafi,\u00a0wikipedia says<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Le Monde article of May 14, 2014 states ‘Estimates of their numbers\u00a0vary\u00a0between 600,000 and one million by the Tunisian Ministry of\u00a0Interior. If we add\u00a0those, many also settled in Egypt, they would be\u00a0nearly two million Libyans\u00a0today outside the borders of a total\u00a0population estimated at just over six million\u00a0inhabitants.’\u00a0[3].\u201d\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n On 15 April 2015, the Christian Science Monitor<\/i> bannered,\u00a0“How the fall of Qaddafi gave rise to Europe’s migrant crisis (+video),\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported that:<\/span><\/p>\n “Libya’s chaos has once more made it a major way station for Africans seeking\u00a0a better life, as the European Union grapples with the morality of cutting back\u00a0on patrols to rescue migrants. The argument for doing less is that increasing\u00a0the risk of crossing the Mediterranean would save lives. Word that there was\u00a0no safety net would filter back to people, many of them fleeing persecution,\u00a0and they’d stop coming.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n “‘We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the\u00a0Mediterranean,’ British Foreign Office Minister Joyce Anelay said last year.\u00a0Rescues have \u00a0‘an unintended \u2018pull factor,’ encouraging more migrants to\u00a0attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and\u00a0unnecessary deaths,’ she argued.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n It clearly hasn’t worked out that way.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n SYRIA<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In Syria, after the U.S. bombing there, which resulted from the campaign by America and its Islamist-backing dictatorial allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia to overthrow the dictator there, Bashar al-Assad,\u00a0wikipedia says<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “To escape the violence, more than three and a half million Syrian refugees\u00a0have fled the country to neighboring\u00a0Turkey,[31][32]\u00a0Lebanon,\u00a0Jordan,[33]\u00a0and\u00a0Iraq\u00a0[34]\u00a0while thousands also ended up in more distant countries of the\u00a0Caucasus, the\u00a0Persian Gulf\u00a0and\u00a0North Africa. As of February 2015,\u00a0Turkey\u00a0has become the world’s biggest refugee hosting country with 1.7 million\u00a0Syrian\u00a0refugees and had spent more than US$6 billion on direct\u00a0assistance to\u00a0refugees.[35][36].\u201d<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another wikipedia article<\/a><\/span>\u00a0says:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “As of March 2015, Al-Jazeera estimates 10.9 million Syrians, or almost\u00a0half the population, have been displaced.[612] 3.8 million have been\u00a0made refugees.[612][613] As of 2013, 1 in 3 of Syrian refugees (about\u00a0667,000 people) sought safety in tiny Lebanon (normally 4.8 million\u00a0population).[614] Others have fled to Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq. Turkey\u00a0has accepted +1.000.000 (2014) Syrian refugees, half of whom are spread\u00a0around a cities and dozen camps placed under the direct authority of the\u00a0Turkish Government. Satellite images confirmed that the first Syrian\u00a0camps appeared in Turkey in July 2011, shortly after the towns of Deraa,\u00a0Homs, and Hama were besieged.[615] In September 2014, the UN stated\u00a0that the number of Syrian refugees had exceeded 3 million.[616]”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n UKRAINE<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In Ukraine, after the\u00a0February 2014 U.S. coup there overthrowing the democratically elected but corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych<\/span><\/a>, wikipedia, being a site that is constantly edited by the U.S. CIA which participated in that coup, has no article on the refugee crisis there, but the Irving-Kristol-founded far-right magazine National Interest<\/i> said, with noteworthy honesty in its 4 February 2015 issue, under the headline\u00a0\u201cThe Great Exodus: Ukraine\u2019s Refugees Flee to Russia,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for\u00a0Refugees, as of December 2014, upwards of 430,000 Ukrainians had\u00a0applied for refugee status or other forms of legal residency in Russia.\u00a0The refugees who come unofficially, i.e. not registering with the FMS,\u00a0make it difficult to count the total number of Ukrainian refugees in the\u00a0country, however.\u201d<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And, in addition, around another half-million refugees are estimated to have fled to elsewhere inside Ukraine itself. Furthermore, according to German intelligence,\u00a0as reported in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung<\/i>,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on 2 August 2014, about half-way through the Ukrainian conflict thus far, the official figure of deaths from the civil war, 5,000, was then estimated to be ten times too low: it was more like 50,000 deaths, almost all of them civilians who had lived in the area that the U.S.-backed regime has been bombing. They\u2019re officially called \u2019terrorists\u2019 for having lived in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90+% for Yanukovych, the man whom Obama overthrew<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n CONCLUSION<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n By a rough estimate, at least tens of millions of people in the MENA and eastern European regions are refugees from U.S. and U.S.-backed invasions; and this doesn\u2019t count anything in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other nations that have not even been mentioned here. (And the U.S. is taking in almost no refugees from any of the countries that are mentioned here. Instead, other nations do.)<\/span><\/p>\n Americans are taught that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, but all dictatorial regimes say pretty much the same thing; so, what Americans are taught doesn\u2019t mean anything. (Not even if it might have been true in the past; perhaps before 1953, when the first major U.S. imperialist coup was imposed, in Iran.) Outside the United States, America now has a profoundly different reputation than it used to have. The current U.S. President, who has done so much to warrant that reputation of an invading lying dictatorial regime, doesn\u2019t share that different opinion, which the rest of the world holds about the U.S. To the contrary, he insists upon an outdated Statue-of-Liberty omage of today\u2019s United States: he told graduating West Point cadets, on 28 May 2014, shortly after the\u00a0massacre that his allies did to pro-Russian pamphleteers in Odessa Ukraine on 2 May of that year, which burnt them alive:<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n “America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding\u00a0inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around\u00a0the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are\u00a0kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is\u00a0America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is\u00a0and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century\u00a0passed and it will be true for the century to come.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n “But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity,\u00a0but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9\/11, just how technology\u00a0and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of\u00a0individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm. Russia\u2019s aggression\u00a0toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China\u2019s\u00a0economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India,\u00a0rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in\u00a0global forums. And even as developing nations embrace democracy and\u00a0market economies, 24-hour news and social media makes it impossible to\u00a0ignore the continuation of sectarian conflicts and failing states and popular\u00a0uprisings that might have received only passing notice a generation ago.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n It is worth pointing out here that if the U.S. is \u201cthe one indispensable nation,\u201d as Obama claims, then all other nations are \u201cdispensable.\u201d They notice that, even if Americans don\u2019t. (And there\u2019s not much coverage in the U.S. press of the hostile import of that often-repeated phrase by our President.) Not many foreigners will be favorably impressed by such arrogance. They will, instead, consider it to be singularly undeserved and unwarranted. And, apparently, they already do. Even if the American President doesn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s also worth noting that, until America\u2019s actions in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, they all were nations friendly toward Russia<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n PS: The sweet-talking pro-Wall-Street \u2018Democratic\u2019 President Obama is now finally repelling even Democrats in Congress, where almost all of his support comes from Republicans. On April 23rd,<\/span><\/a> the U.S. Senate\u2019s leading progressive, the Democrat Sherrod Brown, said, of President Obama\u2019s attempts to ram through Congress mega-corporate international trade deals, which will extend even deeper the international-corporate race to the bottom on wages, consumer protections, and the environment:<\/span><\/p>\n “I think if you could get my colleagues to be honest, on the Democratic side, with you — and I think you can mostly — they will say they’ve been talked to, approached, lobbied and maybe cajoled by more cabinet members on this issue than any issue since Barack Obama’s been president.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Obama cares more about this issue than he does about anything except, perhaps, destroying Russia. As he closes his Presidency, he is doing like did Bill Clinton (the man who started expanding NATO right up to Russia\u2019s borders) at the end of his Presidency: giving away the house and everything, to the international corporate elite. But why are congressional Democrats waiting so late to call Obama on this, which he had evidenced, though not with such bare knuckles, even before he stepped inside the White House, specifically by trying to swing deals with Republicans on 16 January 2009. (Actually, when he appointed people like Timothy Geithner, Eric Holder, and Larry Summers, right after being elected in 2008, there was already strong reason to suspect him.) Why are congressional Democrats such slow learners, taking nearly seven years fo know what they should have recognized even back then \u2013 that he\u2019s actually just a closeted Republican, a conservative Manchurian Candidate, a Trojan Horse from the CIA<\/span><\/a>? (Also see here<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n ———-<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse First of all, in terms of popularity worldwide, the U.S. is a mixed picture.\u00a0A\u00a0Gallup International poll of 65 countries, issued on 30 December 2013, found that:\u00a0 \u201cThe US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":137489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,27,32,96,535,34,38,67,882,59,524,754,92,51,523,49,76,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-147049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-bush","12":"tag-cia","13":"tag-cover-up","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-iran","16":"tag-iraq","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-libya","19":"tag-military","20":"tag-russia","21":"tag-syria","22":"tag-terrorism","23":"tag-torture","24":"tag-ukraine","25":"tag-usa-news","26":"tag-warfare","27":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}